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I have all of my best ideas while driving or in the shower and I start all my best projects around two or three in the morning. Granted, “best” is really up for debate here, since most of those ideas are just poop or dick jokes and the projects are just Google image searched images with transparent Helvetica slapped over them in Photoshop. THEY MAKE ME LAUGH ALRIGHT? I am my most important audience, for now and forever.
So, I was in the shower a couple of weeks ago thinking about Jesse Eisenberg, like I do, and I was like, DAMN, that kid’s like… a RAPSCALLION or some shit. Because he is! Google that face and tell me it doesn’t scream old-timey adjectives at you! If you can, you are LYING.
And so it kind of began with this dumb shit:
SCAMP, guys. Jesse Eisenberg is a SCAMP. He is ruined for me forever in the BEST WAY because I cannot look at him without thinking something Old Timey. RASCAL! RAPSCALLION! He’s like the sort of handsy son of a really wealthy southern oil baron guy who is charming and good looking and also RICH who is at least a little hesitant about groping you against your will, so he doesn’t really seem like a bad guy, just like maybe he had a drink or two too many and got REAL FRIENDLY so you just brush it off and giggle and say shit like, “Oh, dear, I had heard those rumors that you were QUITE the rapscallion and I do believe they’re true!” but really it sounds sort of sexy and delightful. And then he gropes you under your petticoats in a hallway. Something like that. OR WHATEVER.
I think this Old Timey Thing applies to Donald Glover too, but I have a harder time looking at pictures of him because they are like lightning directly to my genitals. SO ATTRACTIVE. I can’t deal with it. I just can’t.
But anyway, that dumb shit rapidly escalates into this dumb shit:
Kittens are a point of no return, right? I mean, really. There is no coming back from slapping text over the top of adorable kittens. There just isn’t. And then it just turns into transcribing your dumb tweets on pictures snagged from NASA and it’s over. It’s just all over.
SO: sometimes when I am having those brilliant thoughts late at night, my brain says, “YO BITCH SUBMIT SOME OF YOUR WRITING YO” and because it’s two in the fucking morning, I am like, “YEAH ALRIIIIIGHT.” And whatever, I’m hitting 50/50 acceptance to rejection at this point (because I don’t write almost ever unless it’s for fun, which means I have nothing to submit, which is a great excuse not to put yourself out there. FOOLPROOF.) so I don’t really care about the process. I come across a place that seems like they might take me, I submit, no big.
SO ANYWAY. I was reading a submission to the lit mag I work on at school and she mentioned another lit mag that I was unfamiliar with (This happens a lot. Generally, if someone mentions one, I haven’t heard of it.) so I checked it out, saw they had a nice selection of flash fiction and threw something their way. I logged it in my little submissions file (anal retentive, what what!) and put it in my calendar (redundancy!) and went about watching BBC comedies (Miranda) and forgot about it.
Guys, I am pretty sure I won the speed award for rejection turnaround tonight. Seriously. One hour and four minutes. ONE HOUR AND FOUR MINUTES. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. I submitted the story AFTER MIDNIGHT and had a rejection shortly after one. THAT IS SOME EFFICIENT LIT MAGGING.
Holy shit. I didn’t even have time to worry! I didn’t even have time to obsess and then forget about it entirely, which is my usual submission coping mechanism. And let me tell you, this was a much more awesome way to get rejected. I know the longer someone keeps your work, the closer you are to getting in. And that’s great! But instant gratification is always SO SATISFYING and it turns out it actually kind of applies to rejection!
I know part of my cavalier attitude is because I just didn’t care too much, you know? I have extremely low expectations when it comes to anything having to do with my writing (greeting cards and hilarious poop twitters aside) but there was something about that rapid response — like ripping off a band-aid maybe — that I don’t think I will soon forget.
Aaaaaaanyway, it turns out this is all just a long way to say that if you don’t remember Bonsai Kitties, you have not been on the internet long enough.
PS: For the like… two of you who read this BLAHG, would cutting my insanely long and stupid posts be helpful or irritating? I HATE cut posts because I read everything on GReader and am also incredibly lazy, but I am down to do whatevah whatevah because I live to serve, guys. I live to serve.
Christmas is over! And I am bummed.
I am not 100% bummed. I mean, I love Christmas. I’m an atheist that loves Santa and all things Christmas (except Jesus, obviously) and spent most of my adolescence wishing I was Jewish, so I am a big fan of the winter holidays. But Christmas was basically a bust this year.
I ate some food and got some presents and had some good times, but I never felt the wintery-Christmas-sparkle and then BAM it was over. Lame. And it happens EVERY YEAR and yet every year I am surprised. Two thumbs, not so good with learning, etc etc.
Anyway, whatever, here’s some disjointed bullshit:
I am nothing if not really good at doing the same shit everyone else is doing!
 But it’s SPACE, you guys. I would take a space flight even if they GUARANTEED that I would die on reentry. I mean, SPACE, guys. SPACE. Sending my name up is a pretty okay facsimile of space-travel-importance. It’s at least as good as going all the way through astronaut training and then not making the final launch team. BASICALLY. Self-aggrandizement is my 2k11 resolution numero uno.
 A bunch of people are using their new Facebook ~photostream~ to express friendly/jovial sentiments. Or that thing where they break their face into pieces. I am not into either of those things.
 Dyed my hair right before Thanksgiving and heard, “You look like a mermaid” three different times. I felt distinctly cartoonish and it took me three days to figure out that I was reminding myself of Sailor Neptune. Yeeeeeeeah! I think I have seen one half of one Sailor Moon episode in my entire life, but whatever, whatever, I DO WHAT I WANT.
 Favorite new picture of my favorite person on the earth. She is getting peed on by a tree.
I have a couple of funny/interesting/whatever things to say that I have scribbled down in a notebook, but I am not feeling the focus to turn them into full-fledged words. Mostly all I am interested in right now is laying in bed and sleeping and not having to do anything except stay in blankets. I am like Scrooge McDuck if instead of swan-diving into a vault of coins, it was just a great big pile of dogs and blankets and he never surfaced for air.
(I would like to point out that this atrocious font is called “Thug” and 1. That’s racist 2. That’s stupid, and 3. I had to mouse-draw the plus and equal signs because they were just dots in the font. Like, wtf, thugs can’t math? Thugs need not plus and equal signs? RACIST, FONT, RACIST.)
I will, however, briefly talk about how “This Time of the Year” by Brooke Benton and “Little Saint Nick” by the Beach Boys are great Christmas songs that INFURIATE me because “Christmas always comes this time of the year” and “Christmas comes this time of year” are the two most idiotic lyrics to ever occur in holiday music. NO SHIT IT ALWAYS HAPPENS AT THIS TIME OF THE YEAR THAT IS WHEN CHRISTMAS HAPPENS. Christmas has been happening for like MANY YEARS NOW and for most of those it has been happening on December 25th. I THINK WE GOT THAT SHIT ON LOCK, SONGWRITERS. Sort it out.
Anyway:
 Merry Belated Whatever-The-Fuck! Merry Past-Tense Ballsmas!
Day 5: Your Definition of Love
UGH. Again. I mean, seriously, meme. Failing me yet again and yet again, here we go.
I think this is probably not a TERRIBLE topic for someone who is into emotions and feelings more than I am, but I’m just not. Emotions are for other people to think about and for me to have and be really good at hiding, THANK YOU.
Anyway. I didn’t believe in romantic love or marriage or any of that stuff until the love thing happened to me. I think this is a normal/common/average thing coming from people who are weird/ugly/fat/geeky/outside the traditional norm because you just kind of get disenchanted about the whole thing. Love is an illusion! A shared hallucination!
I still believe that, I just get to participate now.
I knew that I was in love with my girlfriend because I wanted to be around her A LOT. And, like, let’s be honest: I did not, nor do I now have a lot of friends.
I have talked about being unlikeable before! I’m NOT LYING. And I spent a lot of time with those few people who WOULD put up with me.
But Crystal… I don’t know. We spent a truly astounding amount of time together and yet, when she was gone, I still really, really missed her. It was actually pretty disgusting and I tried not to talk about it to other people because it embarrassed me that I had feelings at all, let alone this weird needy desperate ones.
I think I realized in like, August of 2007 (four months after we met) that I was basically in love with her, whatever the fuck I thought that actually meant. I wanted to tell her one time, while we were walking around my grandma’s backyard, but I pussied out because I still wasn’t sure she was gay. And I thought she was a slut! (No joke! Untruer thoughts have never been had.)
And it was basically like, “Well, I guess I’m in love with this dumb bitch.” And she was my best friend and we didn’t start dating until May of 2008, so I spent a lot of months feeling really tortured and unhappy and TERRIBLE. Because you are not, NOT supposed to fall in love with your straight, slutty best friend. Especially when you don’t even believe in love.
I was all fucked up.
Basically, I know/knew that I love(d) my girlfriend because I want(ed) to be with her. I liked being with her. Spending a day with her was comfortable and satisfying and good. And even though I was miserable and hurting and wanting because I didn’t have her, because she didn’t love me back, it never once (ONCE!) occurred to me to just… stop hanging out with her.
Also, I like to hold her hand.
I have never in my entire life liked holding hands. I hold hands with my mom sometimes in public because she gets embarrassed and says, “ASHLEY, people will think we’re lesbians!” But otherwise, handholding is not an activity I ever engaged in. But now I want to hold Crystal’s hand all the time. Not kiss, not touch her boobs. Hold hands. In public and not. It’s gross. And I hate myself.
Also, the idea of not being a couple makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. And the idea of her dying makes me miserable in the vomiting all over myself and having a panic attack kind of way.
I think love is whatever the fuck you make of it. The girlfriend and I have figured out a life together that makes us pretty happy and I think the person you manage to do that with is worth hanging on to, generally speaking.
I think loving your family and loving your friends is just as important as loving your partner. I think cultivating relationships with people who will laugh at your jokes and take you to the airport and drive you around for three hours when you’re crying and losing your shit because everything is awful and buy you ice cream in the middle of the night is incredibly hard and important and scary and amazing.
Vulnerability is literally the hardest thing in the entire history of human beings. Being straight up honest about the fact that you have feelings and that you NEED things, the entire idea that you need things from other people? That’s fucked up! And awful.
Which is exactly why I prefer to leave emotions to people who are better at having a lot of them. Like… Mexican soap opera actresses and teenagers.
Day 4: What You Ate Today
I am not even going to address the inanity of writing about what I ate today because I was all, “FUCK YEAH, GONNA GET BACK TO BLOGGIN’. GONNA BE AWESOME.” and then I consulted the handy list of shit I need to write about and it was like, “Day 4: What you ate today, in great detail” and I was like, “Fucking, god damn, gonna have to give up on the 30 Day Meme on day four.” But no. Here we go. Gonna do this bitch.
We don’t have any decent food in the house right now and I just got back from Las Vegas yesterday where I ate a bunch of boss meals, so I was NOT digging the idea of having to make myself a sandwich. FUCK THAT. So basically I grazed on death food all day.
I had the following over the course of the day:
 candy
 wal-mart cupcakes
 pig in a shitty cornbread blanket
 chips
 crockpot pot roast — the bomb
I had so much sugar today that I sort of want to stab myself in the face repeatedly until a fountain of granulated sugar and frosting pour out of the holes where my eyeballs used to rest. Like, I don’t even LIKE CUPCAKES. But they were there and I was hungry and the rest is history. I am sure I will further regret the sugar consumption when I inevitably crash in a couple hours, but right now I am basically just at peace with my inability to just suck it up and make a sandwich.
I HATE MAKING SANDWICHES. I hate making sandwiches almost as much as I hate going to the bank. There’s the bread and the mayonnaise and the other shit that constitutes sandwich filling and I am supposed to arrange it into some sort of delicious and functional arrangement! That’s just too many pieces and too many tasks.
I don’t do jigsaw puzzles, I don’t make sandwiches. Life’s too short for that shit.
I know that I am terribly remiss on my 30 Days of Narcissism meme-thing and that I haven’t even posted in forever, but I just started back to school on Thursday and everything is insane and I just want to talk about today, okay, STOP NAGGING ME OKAY.
Today was really stupid and horrible. I almost got into a really bad car accident on my way home from school after already having a FUCKING terrible day and I had to get off the freeway and park in some bank parking lot and cry and have a panic attack and I just wanted to lay down on the fire-hot pavement and melt into nothingness.
When I say “I almost got into a really bad car accident” what I mean is, “I changed lanes several hundred feet in front of a dude who decided to change into the same lane after I was three-quarters of the way into it and he got REAL AGGRESSIVE about it and tailgated me and then flew back into his lane and slammed around me in a manner that clearly communicated that he was trying to hit me on purpose.” We could not have been more than six inches from a serious accident at 75 miles per hour and if I had not slammed on my brakes, it would’ve been… bad. It was by far the closest I have ever come to an accident WITHOUT ACTUALLY HAVING THE ACCIDENT.
He then flew across the next three lanes of traffic and cut off another guy to exit the freeway.
And it’s like, man, I get PISSED in the car. I yell at people! I am a twenty-five-year-old adult woman who rolls down her window and yells at people while giving them aggressive middle fingers. I get it. Driving sucks 90% of the time and everyone else sucks at it and it’s just awful. IT IS AWFUL. The personal vehicle is probably the worst thing to happen to any of us in the modern age.
But who has that much anger? Enough to INTENTIONALLY attempt to cause an accident while moving at almost 80 mph? When the person didn’t even wrong you? Who is that angry about their life? What happened to that guy in that black Tahoe to make him THAT FURIOUS? That kind of aggression baffles me. I don’t ever want to make other human beings feel unsafe and after that bullshit today I think I’m going to make that an even more prominent effort on my part.
That said, I could’ve easily punched AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE TAHOE DRIVER (WHAT IS IT WITH TAHOES?!) in the FACE. She parked so close to me that she was actually all the way into my parking stall (The kind with the double lines! THE KIND WITH THE BUILT IN SPACE. SERIOUSLY.) and I couldn’t get into my car and I am too fat/uncoordinated/drive too small a car to climb across and I just didn’t know what to do with my life.
And then she comes out and tries to do that sheepish TEEHEE thing and it’s like, “Look, bitch, I know we all have things to do, but you need to reevaluate your life and understand that it would’ve taken you FOUR SECONDS to re-park when you realized what a shit job you did. FUCK YOU.” Paris Hilton couldn’t have climbed into my car, she was parked so close. Fuck that.
There should be a comprehensive driving and parking exam required before you can own or operate any vehicle larger than a fucking SmartCar.
So I was really upset about the duel Tahoe incidences and I was frustrated with school and life and ALL THE THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH EVERYTHING EVER and I just got tired and frustrated and defeated. And for once, I started thinking about why things are the way they are and why I’m feeling all these inconvenient feelings and I thought about MYSELF and about OTHER PEOPLE.
And I think it comes down to figurative breathing.
I’m not asking for like, a social revolution where people start being considerate and thoughtful of one another. I know that is probably beyond the scope of our abilities as humans. I am just as entitled and self-centered and awful as most of the other people moving around on the surface of this planet. I YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY DRIVE BAD. I am often unkind and impatient and self-absorbed. I recognize those things and I am going to try to practice what I preach.
I’m just looking for, I think, the tiniest iota of AWARENESS. Self-awareness or external-awareness or what-the-fuck-ever awareness. Just two seconds out of your life to be like, “Hey, I’m being a dick” or “God, maybe that lady just had a really awful day” or even just taking TWO SECONDS TO TAKE A DEEP BREATH.
I’m just asking for a little cool-down here, guys. A two-second version of counting to ten. A breath. Just one. For everyone’s sake, including your own.
I’m calling it the Two Second Breath and I’m going to start practicing it immediately.
Guy cuts me off? Two second breath. Rude cashier? Two second breath. Internet idiocy? Two second breath. Political frustration? Two second breath.
I spend so much of my life being reactionary and I just think it’s exhausting. Everything is instantaneous — email, texts, calls, television, youtube, all of this media and communication flying at us all day long — and we (I. I. I.) get so wrapped up in responding promptly that I’ve stopped thinking. I react, I don’t respond. And maybe I can’t always count to ten, maybe it’s too hard or too frustrating or too long, but I can always count to two. I can take a two second breath and respond competently and confidently.
I don’t want to kill anyone with kindness. I don’t want to fake my way through life. I don’t want to be conflict and confrontation free. But I do want to think, respond, and relax a little because being always on, all the time is finally catching up with me.
I want to take a whole lot of two second breaths.
I would like to point out that I almost immediately regretted not calling it the three second breath upon publishing the post. Hate even numbers? TWO SECOND BREATHING OUT OF MY ASSHOLE FOR DAYS.
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