Whose name is not appearing in THIS little gem?

I think we all know how I feel about the certain unmentioned someone, but should he choose to exercise a little righteous anger towards some of those quoted I would be supportive.

Man, it's good not to be home right now.

NONE OF YOU UNDERSTAND THIS, DO YOU?

I'm sure most college kids know about this already, but His Noodlyness has impelled me to spread the word of His greatness.

FSMism.

May we all be touched by His Noodly Appendage.

"...so we went to some bars and then I went home. How was your Friday?"

"Oh, Jon pinned me in the back of Sajid's car with the seat and tickled me till I cried. Then we went back to their apartment and watched some softcore by accident."

"Wow, I'm sorry."

"No, it was fun...I think."

Guess What?

I'm going hiking a-morrow!

Life is full of work, with only the occasional interlude for beer, Family Guy, and an illegal, poorly-subtitled copy of Advent Children (fret not, MPAA or whomever, for I fully intend to buy it when you release it in this country WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR>?!>!) Unfortunately, little or none of this work seems to have been done on my thesis, ironically enough because I am totally unable to find sources. HUH. HOW ABOUT THAT.

CRAP.

Oh Man!

I would like to take this minute to stop working on a Damn Paper and congratulate my bestest of all best buds, Big Jon Pugh, who is now engaged to Julie, whom he loves and is quite a cutie besides.

Dude, if I keep teasing you about it it's only because I am excited and happy and all those sappy things. :)

What Can I Say, I'm Charismatic

This has been the week of Nature loving Allisons, it seems. First, I was on the un-BC Walkway the other day when I saw a tiny piece of leaf that was not a tiny piece of leaf, but in fact an enormous, MONSTROUS praying mantis. When I stopped to inspect him, my shadow fell over him and he swiveled his head up to look at me. His eyes were glittering, gold and segmented.

---

Last night marked the renewal of the Allison-Friendly Cat relationship. Friendly Cat is a stray who lives in/near Epworth and craves tummy rubs. Once you start with the rubbing of the tummy, he will follow you if you decide to get alone with your normal life. I would love to keep Friendly Cat for myself, but Friendly Fishes might not appreciate it. Neither would Friendly Housing Contract. Anyway, yesterday he stopped me on the way home and we had a happy tumrubbing session. The piece someone took out of his ear last semester seems to have healed nicely.

---

This morning a black and blue butterfly sat and waited for me in between Epworth and the Health Center, waving his wings for me to look at. Orange spots played around the edges; the blue wavered and reformed.

---

Earlier this morning, I found tiny bugs in my iced tea. They like me so much, they want to be INSIDE ME!

Stupid Selfish People Holding Hands!

I think all of us here know my feelings towards the Phenomenon Formerly Known As Trinity. Many of those feelings involve the phrase "this place would be freaking AWESOME if it weren't for..." Many of times the ellipsis involves a customer or breed of customers (people who do not say hello to me! etc).

In that vein, I have a great Trindignance story to tell you.

So last Saturday I was training the lovely Carina, as it was her first day behind The Counter. We got hit with a bit of a rush, mostly freshmans looking for sustenance before going out to do whatever illegal things freshmans do. We were burning through the line as quickly as possible, considering it was her first day, when a guy and two girls (all collar-bepopped) came up and started asking questions. They were seemingly innocent questions, like

"Do you have any more soy sauce?"

"What do you guys do with the sushi at the end of the night?"

"Do you serve it again the next day?"

To which I replied no, they take it for inventory, hell no what kind of a place do you think this is, and under no circumstances allow yourselves to think that this means you can come back and ask us for free sushi after we close.

They bought some sushi and sat down. Carina and I slammed down the line and I took her to check out the stock under the condiment counter. When I turned around to scan the dining room, I notice Collar Boy tooling around with his hands inside my sushi cooler. When HE turned around to scan the dining room, I noticed his hands were full of soy sauce. We were out of soy sauce.

Dialogue:

Confused Allison: What are you doing?
Collar Boy: Uhh...
*everyone turns and stares*
Pissed Allison: Wait, are you...are you OPENING the containers of sushi...to STEAL soy sauce out of them?
CB: Uhh...I...
PA: What the hell do you think you're doing?
CB: Uh...
PA: What thought process could you possibly have gone through that would lead you to believe that that is an ok thing to do?
CB: Uh...do you want me to...put them back?
PA: NO! You had your hands in them, I can't sell that now.

And then - AND HERE IS THE PART WHERE I SUCK - I did not get his name. Because, boys and girls, I found out later that he had gone into no fewer than NINE boxes of sushi priced between 5 and 8 dollars, and if I had known it was that much and gotten his name I swear to God himself that I would have had that kid in jail for petit larceny faster than you can draw in breath.

This Has Nothing to Do With Anything

Just as there are a few things that irritate me about Whole Foods Markets, there are a few things that irritate me about blogs/bloggers. Whole Foods Markets have the stunning ability to charge twice as much for foods you probably wouldn't eat were they not the only things available in the store (for example, the Organic Crunchy Peanut Butter I am currently munching down is subpar, yet costs twice as much as Smuckers' All-Natural). Blogs do not do this, but here is what they do...do...(DOODOO!):

They give extremely boring people the chance to foist it off on the rest of us. You know what I am talking about. "Today I woke up and ate a sandwich. It was pretty good. There was lettuce. Then I went to class, where we learned about some stuff." Such people can make funny and interesting things boring. "And then I broke up with my boyfriend, and then I went shopping for some REALLY NICE SHOES!!!!1" The problem with these blogs is that usually they are written by friends or people you know, and so you have to resist the temptation to scream '"YOU CAN'T WRITE!" every time you see them. Also, when you ask them pertinent personal questions, they inevitably reply with "oh, I blogged it. Don't you read my blog? I read yours!" and then you have to come up with some excuse about how "my internet browser doesn't allow me to read things that...uh...suck".

They give extremely melodramatic people the chance to foist it off on the rest of us. I especially hate the people who have little sidebars with bios that say their specialties are "spreading life and light and joy!" or "plunging into the existential depths of the universe!" or "learning for the sake of learning!". These are not your specialties. They are your delusions. Even worse are the ones who give their jobs as "aspiring writer", because these blogs inevitably fall into the above-listed category and then I laugh at those people and I'm trying to curb that habit. They need to stop tempting me. I expect such inanities from girls between the ages of 12 and 18, but many of these things are written by supposed full-fledged grownups who never learned that they aren't special pixies riding the winds of Fate to alight on the cloud of Supreme Knowledge. In fact, they are usually just assholes.

A subcategory of the melodramatists are those who use their blogs as mechanisms to further their passive-aggressive tendencies, usually to the tune of "no one UNDERSTAAAAANDS ME!". These people inevitably angle their emo towards one person or situation in particular but, when confronted, will swear up and down that "oh no, I didn't mean you!" because to reveal what they were actually thinking would thwart their passive-aggressive agenda. You are just supposed to GET THEM. ALL THE TIME. STARTING YESTERDAY. The usual reaction to being confronted about the emoblog is to erase the entry, thereby obviating all the evidence that they were an idiot, when in fact the proper protocol would be either to not engage in idiocy to begin with or to have enough respectability to stand by one's statements in a way that indicates integrity or bravery.

For example, here are some statements that I will stand by and not delete (feel free to throw criticism my way in order to make me look better!):

U2 SUCKS.

There, you see? Personal integrity starts with a person!

I don't know why I am writing about this, other than that it has occurred to me today that, being one blog-year old, I am at risk of falling into these patterns (which tend to plague funnyblogs as the writer gets more comfortable with her audience and niche).

That said, yesterday I got my grownup license that doesn't say UNDER 21 in red all over it. And then I bought some really awesome shoes!!!!!1

Life is traumatic and, while I can find a few things to be funny about, I cannot seem to find the ganas to write them. School is stupid. Bah.

Dukies

This weekend, I was pretty much upset out of my mind. News stuff, hurricane stuff, class stuff, work stuff, all that insanity. I'm sure you all understand. So Friday night, when I had promised myself I'd be reading and was instead glued to the Internets watching depressingosity, I IMed a friend of mine and said "let's rent a car and buy 25 pallets of water and drive to New Orleans". I was not kidding in the traditional sense of the word, though I have, you know, freshmen and work and jobs and responsibilities.

"The National Guard is there," I was told. "We have to trust them. There's nothing we can do." So I didn't.

These kids did.

(I can't cry out for my Tutsi neighbors; I have a family and responsibilities. There is nothing I can do for my Jewish friends; I have my own life to live.)

THE LOVE CHILD!

I have not been very funny lately, have I? Well, I have a quick quick funny for you before my staff meeting tonight (oh yeayayayay).

So we are recruiting new hires for Trinity, because all the old hires get fed up and leave. To further this lofty goal, I made me some flyers with mah email on them and a sexy ClipArt picture of a coffee cup and threw them around the freshman dorms. Right. I posted these Saturdayish. Saturday night I get an email from someone with the avatar jing.r.chen and the subject "Work at Trinity".

For those of you who don't know, the beautiful, intelligent, fabulous, talented, and generally inimitable Jeannie's name is, in fact, Jing Rong Chen. For those of you who also don't know, aforementioned amazing and beautiful and missed-by-me Jeannie and I became friends over a little thing called INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE and HATING OUR JOBS and BROADCASTING THIS HATRED TO THE STUDENT BODY AT LARGE. Were it not for Trinity, I would not know Jeannie, and I would not have an excuse to go crash in New York for free someday. And it would be sad.

So upon receiving this email, I start wondering how Jeannie has managed to change her avatar from an alumni.duke.edu address to a normal undergrad address in order to burn me. And then I open it up and it's not from Jeannie at all. And THEN I start freaking out and making all sorts of jokes about Trinity Karma and coming back from the metaphorical dead that is graduation and all that good crap. Ha ha, so funny, yes.

As it turns out, I also had to work Saturday, so I sent an email to pseudo-Jeannie asking her to come meet me at the Trin so we could have a baby interview. She showed up well into my shift, upon which I started bombarding her with questions like "is your middle name...Rong, by any chance? Because if it is HAHAHA I HAVE A FUNNY STORY AND OMG." Here's a hint: I think I scared the crap out of her. When she finally got a chance to put a word in edgewise, she looked at me freaked-outedly and said "Actually, it's Ruth".

And here's the thing: it took me twenty minutes and a comment by Nooree to realize HOLY CRAP, THAT IS ALSO MY MIDDLE NAME and JEANNIE AND I HAD A BABY. Upon which I called her and freaked out. Because I am good at that.

Having a baby with Jeannie was number 1 on my list of life goals, you know. Now it is time to move on to others, like Angelina Jolie or, you know, guys.

Jesus.

I haven't done any work or anything in a day and a half. I don't have tv. I don't listen to the radio. The internet is all I need, so here:

FOXNews


Kanye West

Ray Nagin (listen to this if you choose to ignore everything else)

Anderson Cooper (not normally a bud of mine)

Normally I'd be reticent about pulling source from a site called "crooksandliars.com", but since it's video I'm less squeamish. This is it, guys. This is what it's all boiled down to. There are no words.

Confession

My name is Allison Ruth Clarke, and I eat babies.