Stoves are heavy and precarious

So I get home from work yesterday and all I want to do is change clothes and pee and brush my teeth and take a shower. That's all. Twenty minutes.

So I get home and walk in the door and there's my landlord in the living room trying to carry an entire stove with his big manual labor friend. The whole thing doesn't look particularly safe. They're carrying it lopsided and one of the corners is touching the carpet and there are veins daggering out of their foreheads. Stoves are heavy and precarious, is what I learned.

My landlord says, "So, yeah, now you have a stove."
"Yeah. Awesome," I say.
We stand and look at the stove. It's big and white and new. I grab a corner. We move it some.
"When are you moving out?" he says.
"Probably tomorrow," I say. "Maybe the next day."
We stand and look at the stove. It's now in the kitchen. We put it in place and connect the gas pipe.
"OK," he says. "Well, there's your new stove."
"Awesome," I say.

Then I go into the bathroom to pee and brush and the toilet has been taken out of the ground and placed squarely in the middle of the bathtub. And the sink is gone. And I can't find my toothbrush.

Fratty Lite

The frat-boy set has a knack for getting me to roll my eyes, especially when they talk about "getting wasted, brah" and the like.

When I hear similar statements come from the mouth of a middle-aged co-worker, it's simply eerie. For example:

Co-worker: [Sighs]
Stanley: Sounds like your day's going like mine.
Co-worker: I assure you mine's much worse.
Stanley: For what it's worth, I'm about to take three aspirin.
Co-worker: Aspirin won't help with me. My entire intention tonight is to get as drunk as humanly possible and pass out.

Uh, sweet,...dude.

High-Water Mark

A bit belated, but worth sharing, I hope:

As I drove home from work Friday, the National Weather Service interrupted my NPR broadcast to inform me of some flash flooding south of here. The Service then reminded me that it's a very bad idea to drown, by way of this clever little slogan. I laughed aloud in my car, thinking of how that slogan might be greatly improved:

Turn Around
Don't Drown.
Fuck You, Clown.

This May or May Not Have Happened to Me or Somebody I Know on the DC Metro This Past Saturday

You are on the DC Metro. It is clean and carpeted and well-lit. Lots of orange and white. It is not very crowded. Most of the seats are full, but nobody is standing. It is 7 at night.

Your friend has a sticker that says 100% COTTON MADE IN VIETNAM and he sticks it on the sleeve of your shirt, but you don't notice. You sit down. You are sitting at a ninety degree angle to a 35 year old couple. Their knees are almost touching the side of your left leg. Nobody is talking.

You notice the sticker on your sleeve. You flick it off. It lands on the jeans of the 34 year old guy. It sticks.

You very carefully reach to pick it off the 34 year old guy's jeans. It doesn't come off. It is stuck very well. You try again. No luck. You try again. No luck. You have rubbed his jeans 3 times now.

"Excuse me," the 34 year old guy says. You look at him and he does not look happy. He looks at you, and then at the sticker, and then back at you.

"Oh, sorry," you say. "There's a . . . sticker." You try to pick it off again. No luck. "It's stuck to your . . . um . . .you know . . . leg."

"Yeah," he says. "I got it." He picks the sticker off his jeans and hands it to you. The rest of the ride is awkward. Your friends try to joke about it, but the guy doesn't laugh. It is more awkward.

Seeing as how people don't like to be touched by strangers, especially on the Metro, should you have even tried to pick the sticker off his jeans in the first place?

Oh Oh

Why did none of you tell me that I would like Man Man? Is it because (a) you haven't heard them, (b) you didn't think I'd like them, or (c) you didn't think of me at all?

Hand percussion. Marimbas. Yelling. Chaos. A Clarinet, played old-timey style! Compton?!

I love all of these things more now.

Mi diverti

This week (and some of last week) has been my birthday week, because incidentally my birthday fell on one of those days. I like presents, and here is a list of the presents that I got:
- 1 chocolate cake from Ukrops
- 1 vanilla cake (mostly pink) from T(h)om
- 1 cheesecake, of which my boss said, "This cheesecake changed my life."
- 1 tub of freshly ground peanut butter
- 5 cassettes (Sir Mix A Lot, Tchaikovsky, Morrissey, Fine Young Cannibals, some French mix tape that some French person made and then gave to the Salvation Army)
- 1 set of instructions on how to become a soccer ref in Charlottesville, because I want to be a soccer ref in Charlottesville
- 1 dinner at Pizza Hut
- some books (Poe, Faulkner, Roth, The History of Punk Rock, and some other book that I can't remember)
- 1 pair of socks
- 1 hot air balloon ride
- Duke Ellington's Three Suites
- A collage in a picture frame
- A shirt
- 4 bottles of wine
- bowling
- shots
- love

Good Lord

I've refrained from posting about the ongoing fuckfest, as I'm no Middle East expert, and there are plenty of blow-hards opining away already. I'm content to sort through their rubble for some sense of what-in-the-fuck-Jesus-Lord-Allah-holy-motherfucking-God-what?!

Anneth, for example, does a good job fretting over the possible scenarios that might play out (though, clearly, it's too soon to tell). But what I really like about her post is the sense of exasperation and frustration. This hand-wringing is the worst part. (Well, the piles of dead babies are worse; but hand-wringing = very stressfull, too.)

Stanley Stickler

Few bumper stickers annoy me more than those "W the President" jobbies currently donning the backs of Hummers and Expeditions everywhere. (Although, the fact that they elicited these as a response makes them almost bearable.)

Nothing, however, can make up for these Jet Noise: the Sound of Freedom stickers and the halfwits who employ them.

Monday, Mundane

I awoke at 8am sans alarm and fully shod. I was on the floor, next to my bed.

I thought of many things:

• The relative merits of competing brands of veggie dogs
• Brent, the intern
• Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson (why didn't I finish watching that?)
• Very personal late-night phone calls about people I care deeply about doing very stupid things
• Freedom Kisses
• Curry, tahini, and other Indian spices
• Willie
• Gardening...mmm...
• Sitting around in a large circle of people, nattering on and on and on
• "Be kind to your dick."
• Birthday cakes with too many candles (and ruined surprises!)
• The ongoing case-of-wine negotiations with Ryan and Lady
• Which reminds me:

God, I fucking love Sundays. And tonight: we roll.

Relative Deprivation

Co-worker: [examining paycheck] Dammit! The government took $3,000!
Stanley: [wryly] Well, they have to pave the roads and stuff...
Co-worker: Yeah, whatever.
Stanley: At the risk of being rude, what was the gross pay on that check?
Co-worker: Seven.
Stanley: [vomits]

Blurg

Recently, I updated the blogroll to reflect the sites I read often. (N.B., Ryan does not with any regularity "read blogs," so I felt okay doing so without his approval or consultation.)

More recently, the blogroll and profile info seemed to have migrated to the bottom of the page. Does anyone know why?

Admittedly, our crap formatting is basically a half-assed doctoring of a Blogger template. But it was working (I swear!), and now it's broken.

[/lament]

Wrong

Beth: Were those gunshots?
Stanley: Nah, no way. Those were just some leftover firecrackers. I used to hear gunshots in Chicago. It's more of a "crack, crack, crack" than a "boom, bang, boom."

[Twenty minutes pass; Stanley leaves on his bike and turns the corner to find a lightshow of blue police lights ricocheting off the houses and gawkers.]

Stanley: Did something happen?
Gawker: Um, yeah.
Stanley: Oh. Um. Something bad?
Gawker: Somebody got shot.

UPDATE: "gunshot wound to the foot." Oddly, a comforting phrase...

The Fourth, The Fifth

Well, the turrists have won, and I had to work all day yesterday, clear signs of our nation's ongoing decline.

But there are the occasional glimmers of hope. Check out Beth's cake from yesterday's celebration.

Fuck. Yeah. Indeed.

Vacation After Vacation

My vacation after my vacation was wonderful and much-needed, thank you for asking. We went to the beach. I met the Mother. Always a festive occasion. The Mother and I were wearing identical shoes and therefore she liked me and gave me lots of ice cream and wanted to show me middle school yearbooks and the like. Lady (who does not, in fact, have a name outside of 'Lady') and I bought a kite and a balsa wood airplane and a football and Lady said, "I bought this football, but I didn't know if you could catch it. Or throw it." The assumption being, I think, that she does not think I can catch objects thrown at me at relatively mild speeds, or throw them. Or do anything mildly athletic.

The kite flew beautifully for five minutes, and then it fell. It ripped in half, because it cost 69 cents.

We swam in the ocean. We played games. The stand-on-my-shoulders-and-I'll-throw-you-high-up-in-the-air-over-a-big-wave game. We played the I-swear-to-God-I-just-saw-a-fish game. We played the I-just-swallowed-a-shit-ton-of-salt-water game.

The balsa wood airplane was not much of a success. Granted, I was standing on top of Lady's car, in front of her Mother's house, at like 9:30 at night, drowsy on barbituates and wine, winding the rubber propeller thing up and telling them both - Mother and Lady - how far it was surely going to fly when obviously it's just going to dive violently to the right and almost hit Mother on the head and then the tail fin is going to snap in half. Granted, that is what happened. But I'm still glad I paid $2.99 for it.

We did not throw the football. But now we have one.

On the way home, getting gas, as we were in the station putting cream in coffee and deciding on candy bars, a woman runs in to the station and says, "HOLYFUCKINGSHITTHERE'SGASEVERYWHEREBYNUMBERSEVENCALLFUCKING911!!!" and I turn to Lady and say, "I'll bet that's from your car" and sure enough, the tank had overflowed about $80 worth of unleaded all over the parking lot and everybody was freaking out and they called the fire department and sirens blazed. Understandably, we got the fuck out of there, although we did have to pay for the gas.

On the way home we played Twenty Questions and I won.