the John Cusack Seal Of Approval
I hope no one has noticed that lately I have been kind of obsessed with finding school lunch menus online. All my strength (well, not all my strength—RAAARRRR! MIMI STRONG! MIMI SMASH!) goes to trying to keep my school-lunch obsession off the page as much as possible. However, I need to share the taco patty with you. Enjoy. And think about how nice it is that you don't have to eat it.
Other things I am obsessed with lately include straight-edge message boards, which are just too ridiculous to be believed and remind me of “Ask The Imam”-style websites,* Slavic Romanticism (Borodin, Dvorak), the rubbery bit on the barrel of Uni-Ball Vision Exact pens, and joining Friendster solely for the purpose of creating fake profiles. Farm animals would be good fake Friendster profiles, as would geometric solids (Cube does not watch TV and ironically refers to it as “the idiot box”; Sphere is into alternative religions and Oriental medicine; Cone just likes to party), or unsavory traits (Sycophancy thinks Narcissism is the coolest!)
*LT and I got really into these for a while, enjoying all the legalistic hair-splitting religious questions, and once we read one from a young unmarried man in Malaysia, who lived on the second floor of his apartment building above a young unmarried woman. He wrote to “Ask The Imam” with the following: if he slept in the nude, and there was an earthquake, and his bed crashed through the floor, and he landed on top of this woman and accidentally penetrated her, would that be a sin? And would they then be married in the eyes of Allah? The answer from the imam, basically, was, “Go away.” Oh, and also oral sex is forbidden, according to that imam-asking website. I wonder if the straight-edge kids are still debating that one. Perhaps they need a charismatic leader. He or she can shut them up in a Waco-style compound with their floor-punching records and their soymilk and then, hopefully, lead them to a fiery, drug-free demise.(Disclaimer: let it be known that I am not really this hostile toward these people, I just find any sort of scene-definition debate to be part of this complete breakfast stupid.)
Yesterday was my wedding anniversary. Yes, eight years ago (I was a child bride), LT and I said some magic words (the gist of it was “you rock” and “let's hang out together until one of us croaks, no matter what happens”) in front of about fifty people and the deed was done. We mostly celebrated the anniversary Monday night, since our favorite sushi place is not open on Tuesdays. But then last night, even through my cranky tired feelings that resulted from dealing with a lot of work-related fuckwittedness,* we decided some food and drink should be had to mark the day itself, so we went on a beer-and-pierogi run. The Eastern European Seriousness of all that potato-cheese goodness wrapped in dough, served with butter and sour cream just in case you feel you have too few fat grams on your plate, was a joy to behold. However, I feel I might never eat again.
*For instance, one of the chiefs bitched at me because a certain tiny piece of copy (a filler, really) had not run in the previous issue. I soothed him and went to go trace the problem, and it turns out this piddly paragraph had not, in fact, appeared in any issue since APRIL 1999. And no one has said anything until now, which should tell you something, and thus the aforementioned bitching is completely uncalled for.
LEFTOVER BITS
1. Lunchtime conversation at CVS: My Father's Day card (sigh, Hallmark holidays), bottle of vitamin B-complex, box of tampons (I Enjoy Being A Girl), Altoids Cinnamon Strips, and large bottle of water came to $21 exactly.
Me: Wow, cool.
CVS Girl: What?
Me: No, uh, nothing. Just that it's unusual for a total to be a round number like that, with no change.
CVS Girl: Twenty-one dollars? That ain't a round number.
Me: Well, it's twenty-one dollars exactly, right? That's the total.
CVS Girl (who by this time has already taken my $21 and now is just staring at me): A round number is something like twenty dollars. Twenty-one dollars is what you had.
Me: Yeah, but…okay, never mind.
CVS Girl: Have a good day.
Me: You too.
2. I forgot to tell you about certain shenanigans last Friday. First, I went out with coworkers to Black Beetle, where I consumed too many Bell's Oberons and nearly got in a West Side Story-style rumble. One of my colleagues has kind of a loud voice. Often, at work, especially when depressed or hungover, I have wanted to play Mommy and ask everyone to use their Indoor Voices, but she is a good egg and a good editor so I usually just deal. So anyway, we are out at this BAR, which is the very definition of LOUD (particularly the Black Beetle, with its XY-chromosome-slanted clientele and its fondness for Black Sabbath), and this ho at the next table has the chutzpah to come over and tell my friend to keep her voice down. I basically told this noise-police girl that if she wanted quiet she should have stayed home, and then this sort of Latina-gang-girl-looking table on the other side of us (respectable young women with good jobs, probably, but with the black-lipliner-white-lipstick, super-high-ponytail thing going on) was all like, “What the fuck was that?” and they start telling those bitches that they had better quit fronting, and we’ll be as loud as we want to be, and if they don't like it they can come talk to us outside. So the same girls who wanted to kick my ass in junior high school are now mysteriously on my side in public. Yay.
3. Later that evening I ended up at the Hideout, which I remember perfectly, and talking to venture-capital pornographers, which I remember fuzzily. I may have still been on the astronaut-porn kick at this point, and this guy overheard me and seemed very interested, not in me but in the idea, and gave me his business card and wrote his e-mail and other details on a scrap of paper. On the other side of the scrap is this slightly scary party invitation, to “Rich And Derek's Crystal Palapocolypse” (whatever that means, and if you meant to invoke “apocalypse” you spelled it wrong). It promises beer, dancing, “DJ equipment” [just the equipment?], “lights, sounds, and smells,” [!], and “sexual delights.” Oh, “AND MORE!” Apparently this happens Saturday. Let me know if you want the address. I won't be there, because I have all the lights, sounds, and smells I can handle right here.
4. Some dumb sweepstakes spam I just received is from sender “Spree Coordinator.” Yes. Nothing worse than a disorganized spree.
pimps up hoes down,
—mimi smartypants from the shizzle to the shiznit.