Tag: excerpts

[editor’s note] It occurrs to me, as I post today’s message that Mighty Girl left me, she might have at least assumed that I had some big Presidents’ Weekend plans. The fact that I’m posting this at 1:00AM Saturday morning, after having spent the evening playing video games, has nothing to do with it…

While I’m away, you should visit Annie. She doesn’t update often enough, but she’s one of my favorites.

Four Kraftwerk-lookin’ indie rockers stood on the
platform with me; they were thick-spectacled, pale, and thin. I felt instantly uncool for
wearing my purple pajama top under my coat, even though they wouldn’t see it. Indie
rockers make me nervous.

Wearing a white shirt and black pants, along with a tie worthy of placement in the International Male catalog, the
young man slinked his way toward our party. He began to gyrate his pelvis and wave his hands in the air like he just
don’t care — all in front of poor Ophi. Upon closer inspection of Rico Suave’s getup, I noticed that he was sporting a
tacky gold chain around his neck. Obviously someone got a good prize in his Burger King Kids Club Meal.

[Regarding a battle with depression:]

What people say

How long were you on medication?

What people mean

Exactly how crazy were you?

What people say

Do you still go to therapy?

What people mean

Are you still crazy?

What people say

It doesn’t seem like someone like you could have problems.

What people mean

Oh my god, what if I go crazy someday, too?

[One of Annie’s New Years resolutions:]

more rock, less talk.

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While I’m away, you should read Caterina:

“Jim’s roommate, let’s call him Lester, was a prodigious serial
seducer. He seduced more women in college than anyone would ever have
believed, being kind of an unassuming computer programmer kind of guy
with very average looks. His secret was, I guess, charm, but mostly that
he never told a soul. Never bragged, never raised an eyebrow, never
brought it up in casual conversation, never said a word. Kissing but no
telling. No one knows to this day what a Don Juan Lester was in the early
90s at Vassar, not the women he seduced not his CS classmates, only
his roommates, and their confidantes, such as me.”

“Main Entry: lapsus calami

Pronunciation: “lap-sus-‘ka-la-“mE, “lap-sus-‘ka-le-“mI

Usage: foreign term

Etymology: Latin

: slip of the pen”

“When I was little I was over at at the
Vance’s house playing with John Vance, the youngest of six
brothers, whose immediate predecessors were Matthew, Mark and
Luke� John was showing me the hamster that
he and his brothers had gotten for Christmas, which I had come
especially to see. He lifted it out of its cage and showed it to me. It
had twitchy whiskers and I petted it tentatively with my forefinger,
finding it very very soft. I was completely smitten. Then he kissed the
hamster and said, “I love you SOOO MUCH” and squeezed it so
hard he killed it dead.”

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“Whom we love best, to them we can say the least.” -Jon Ray

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While I’m away, you should read Squirrel Bait. Her tagline says it all, “Love is misery in the pupal stage.”

[regarding a new make-your-bath-a-jacuzzi toy:]

“Even on the gentlest setting, the BubbleSpa made the water boil furiously, spurting five-inch jets of water into the air. Worse, the suction cups weren’t strong enough to hold the air-bubbling mat down; as air in water is want to do, it rose briskly, with me on top flailing and fighting it back down. The air-hose kept coming detached and flying wildly through the bathtub, sending water spraying everywhere. Plus, the water was churning so hard and taking in so much air that it went from almost-too-hot-to-sit-in to ice cold in less than two minutes… even with the BubbleSpa set to add heat.

Basically, imagine me buttnaked in rapidly boiling ice water, thrashing around on a 1×4 air float and trying frantically to grab a hose doing its best rattlesnake-on-crack impression.

It was my first aerobic bath.”

[on marriage]

“Yeah, I think I’ll just get 75 cats, a collection of Franklin Mint commemorative dolls, and a really big vibrator and skip the whole thing. ”

“Men of the world, please do me a favor. All I ask is a little truth in advertising. If you’ve got something you’ll be saying to me later under awkward, pained circumstances, just say it to me when you meet me! It’s not so much harder than hello, really it’s not! Repeat the following phrases after me:

1. Hi, I’m Andrew. I’m exclusively homosexual. Hitting on me will do you no good, and will only embarrass us both.

2. Hi, I’m Stephen. I’m proposing to my girlfriend this weekend. Although I may seem to be interested in you, in fact I am merely an incredibly friendly, touchy-feely sort of person. Please don’t misinterpret my attentions.

3. Hello! I know we haven’t seen each other in a while, so I thought you ought to know that while it used to be okay for you to grab my wee-wee, I now have a girlfriend and such behavior is no longer acceptable. And how have you been?

See how simple that was? Cleared the air right up front, didn’t it?

I am going to go blush into my pillowcase now.”

“From here:

A few years ago, Fisher recalls, a typical Silicon Valley cube might have measured 8 feet by 8 feet. No more. Now cubes are more likely to be half or two-thirds that size. In some cases, companies are ordering cubicles as small as 5 by 6, or 30 square feet.

As a result, cubicles — sometimes referred to sarcastically as “veal fattening pens” for their claustrophobia-inducing size — are now smaller than enclosures provided for calves.

In fact, according to recommendations from the University of California Cooperative Extension, a calf should be allotted a minimum of 35 square feet, possibly 30, in structures known as “superhutches.”

The guidelines did not address how much space a calf needs to program in Perl script while drinking diet soda and eating cheese puffs. ”

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Caterina linked to this site awhile ago, and I’m addicted. The objective is to tell a computer very basic things (Fire can burn you. Trees have leaves.), as though you’re teaching a young child. My mission is to give the machine some poetry. Want to help? I’m going through books and simplifying statements by my favorite authors. For example:

• People look mostly the same as they did 100 years ago.
• Love can be so strong that it resembles appetite.
• A violin can sound as though it is singing because it aches.
• When you are unhappy, the night seems longer.

4:42 p.m.

Sweet ‘N’ Low makes everything taste like cancer.

11:46 a.m.

Hat-Baby is my new favorite term of endearment. I don’t even know what this is, but it’s such a happy little link. A commercial? Some kind of odd joke? Watch the first thirty seconds, it gets redundant after that. Here’s a partial translation of what they’re singing.

8:33 a.m.