Categotry Archives: General

on thursday i had dinner with a mass of people in san francisco. this was due in part to marina’s being in town for the night. mostly though it was due to…something else. all right, i’m just lying now and not very successfully, it was all about marina. while there i harangued christine in this misinformed tirade about our ballet tickets. marina mocked me afterwards and i wondered silently to myself why i put together a dinner party for her (i’m lying again, my brain had no rational thought at this point except “ballet! ballet? why no ballet?! et tu, brute?”).

the thing is though see that i thought christine hadn’t gotten the tickets but it turned out that she totally had! i praised her name! i apologized for my het-up unfair verbal abuse! i realized that i say “ballet” like i said “garbage” at the age of 5. this is embarrassing. and i’m working on it.

when i was 5, my uncles took me to the garbage dump in vernonia, oregon for a dump party. they have them once a year where the town’s population turns out to build fires and get drunk. they placed me on top of a pile of furniture at which point i uttered the words remembered by all vernonians:

i’m sitting on garbage.

now, remember, i was 5. and i pronounced “garbage” with a funny accent. like it was two totally separate words–GAR-bage. i swear to god, every time i go to vernonia, someone in the post office or the grocery store comes up to me and exclaims, “if it isn’t the GAR-bage girl!” then they tell the story to whoever is within hearing distance young enough or unfortunate enough not to have been there back in 1984. it’s a very short story.

the thing is that after years of this miserable, blush-inducing abuse, i’ve managed to train myself to say garbage properly. not so with “ballet” apparently. i totally pronounce it “BAL-let”. even when i realize it and can sense the hyphenated extension of the syllables about to come out of my mouth, i can’t stop it! “BAL-let”! argh!

whatever you do, please don’t tell any vernonians about this pronunciation faux-pas. i shudder to think how they would turn it against me for the sake of a laugh.

following upon the unstoppable success of superfreaks and fjords!: the musical, a gang of talented writers are hard at work on a new script. i don’t want to give away any of the top-secret details, but suffice it to say that it’s about old people. which, trust me, leads to many funny jokes about incontinence and model trains. not necessarily in that order.

recently, i read a book entitled grooves. it wasn’t very good. however, there was this relatively brilliant passage about a television show.

My favorite television show is about a retired barbarian named Yor who is living out his old age in sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Yor carries a sword and a crossbow on his back, and he wears a helmet with two big horns sticking out of it, but other than that he is just a regular retired guy. Occasionally a villain from his past will show up to do battle with him, but usually he just plays shuffleboard with his buddy Rudy. At the end of every episode he sits by a pond and tosses bread crumbs to the ducks. The show is called ‘The Happy, Golden Days of Yor’.

i’m just saying, maybe we could write in a character named Yorina or something. i could totally get behind the slightly delusional female barbarian character. old people PLUS red sonja!

james, you owe my mom $150!

sorry, but i promised i would make sure you knew. talking about my bra shopping in front of pregnant girls, indeed.

life continues well in oregon on vacation. it stills snows and i still eat it when it lands on my tongue. though, of course, it is more a science of swallowing than eating being, as it is, melted water.

tonight i enlisted the help of my youngest cousin, v, in skulduggery. he is only 8, but i feel he has a promising career ahead in life enabling me to attain dubious wins at cards. his actions today gave me the victory in a game of uno ATTACK–wherein, i traded hands with him when he was down to the glorious calling out of uno and he then set me up with a wild card red so i could win the game. what a clever, dashing youth, says i with general bonhomie and cheer.

moo cow enjoys the change of scenery and the joy of having me wholly to herself again without that tempestuous bundle of warmongering fluff, moggy. (whose nickname may change to ‘warrior’ at this point.)

but enough of these tales of cheating and cats, i leave you with another photo. this is taken while shooting off rockets from a baseball diamond in sunriver. the aptly named, ‘chrome dome’, he of the shiny, shiny gold nose, flew up into the clouds, deployed a faulty parachute, and was carried a good half mile off to the north. ‘so long, chrome dome,’ i yelled in parting while waving my hanky.

it’s snowing! snowing in oregon! you know what might not have burned down if it had been in oregon? el tapatio. also maybe the KFC on contra costa that burned out recently too.

at the high school i work at, i’ve been given the job of creating online content to promote the library. yes, a library blog is in the works. and it is swell, friends, no joke. i’ve got a whole voice and style thing going on there. these punk kids are going to flip. or at least they might if it wasn’t the crappiest webpage software known to man. portfolios? that’s like so 90’s. plus it’s only viewable within the school’s network system. hello, that is retarded.

several people (ok, jason and jacob) asked to see some of the blog and their faces reflected scandalized curiousity. so i’m sharing a post from december 6 with you here:

You may be wondering who the man behind the curtain is, so I thought I’d give you some wholly unasked for information. First off, I’m not a man, nor am I going to offer you a way home by shoe-tapping or hot air ballooning. What I am going to gift you with is books, information, and the joy of reading.

My name is Michele, and I’m the new library aide who keeps your library open till 6pm. Hopefully this is so you can come here and work on school projects–write papers, compute calculus problems, research French split-infinitives. Hopefully this is not so you can chat with friends or watch videos till someone comes to pick you up (you know who you are :). So, along with updating this website–adding content, pandering to the crowd, racking my brain for trivia questions–I’d also like to be asked questions by you. So if you need help with researching a paper or have a question on how to do MLA citations, let me know! On the other hand, if you’re having trouble with math or science ask one of the tutors–Mr. Teixeira or Mr. Bouett–because my lack of knowledge on those two fronts is nothing short of embarrassing.

in addition the blog has other pages, including: a trivia quiz, new additions, new releases, book reviews, links, and book lists. it’s the bomb diggity, i’m telling you. i totally earn my keep at this job and deserve every penny of that $15/hour for the two whole hours i work here a day.

it’s possible that if you spent 8 solid hours checking in library materials, you too would rent barbie as the princess and the pauper.

i couldn’t find something BETTER to borrow? seriously, i must have checked in at least 200 videos today.

a lot of the time, i talk to inanimate objects in a tone of voice that’s expecting a reply. if i’m around kristen when i do this, she replies in a silly voice. i finished a book this morning by terry pratchett called wintersmith. the witches in it visit each other for chats to make sure one hasn’t cackled (which means to go mad). when my inanimate conversation counterparts don’t verbally reply to me, courtesy of kristen, i actually feel more cackled than when they do. this is probably because they reply in my head. at least when kristen speaks for them i can tell it’s her and not them. i don’t think this is a good sign.

because i am a huge dork, last night i watched the librarian: return to king solomon’s mine. which is a sequel to the librarian: quest for the spear. a lovely cross between indiana jones and romancing the stone with a librarian hero–the second one is way stupider than the first. they DO both star noah wyle. but hey, at least i have another adventure librarian role model to worship. rachel weisz in the mummy remains the favorite by far.

not being an adventure librarian who travels to egypt and/or rescues the spear that stabbed J.C. is pretty easy so far. last week, i put up holiday decorations at the high school and was given a free computer to take home. at the public library, i am praised daily (or at least thrice weekly, which is when i work). these accolades are not special though when you take into account that they are merely because i’m not a slack-jawed imbecile. they have low standards for my position. and in library school, i’m pretty sure i’ll get an A in both classes even though both my final paper and datastructure were only B quality work. i think in actuality i really qualify as a B student who only gets A because of the crap schools i attend. that’s depressing on many levels.

moo is really only pretending to be friends here. they are not yet friends. i have to say i’ve learned a valuable lesson in getting a second cat. i can’t have 2 cats if i get them at different times anymore. they either have to grow up together or i can only have one at a time. i miss the time when it was just moo and i. then again, i also miss the time when i didn’t have to give moo 2 pills a day or shove a gigantic needle into her ruff and drip IV fluid into her. i miss my youth. maybe i *should* consider the chicken shit or human baby fetuses.