Things That I Hate

Today we’ll discuss the flip-side of the things that I like; the things that I hate. I think it’s important that I tell you these things so that we can put all of the wonderful things in context. From now on, you’ll truly understand how wonderful the things that I like really are.

Have you ever been so murderously discontent that you wanted to climb to the top of a water tower just to pick people off with a sawed-off shotgun? Or shake your pillow until the filling comes out like two Jack Russells on a farm rat? Probably, and so have I. Have you ever seen something that made you so sick you wished you had a second mouth on the side of your face because you couldn’t possibly throw-up enough out of the single one you already have to demonstrate how nauseous you are? Probably, and I have too. I’ve catalogued a few of these things because when the second coming takes place, I want the righteous to know exactly why I’ve forsaken God. Let’s go:

Hair is disgusting. Every time I see a hair on the ground I want to throw-up out of two mouths. Now, you may think to yourself, just don’t look at it! Or, just don’t let it get to you. That would be easy for someone who had only 5 senses but I don’t. I have six. I have a sixth sense for hair. I put my fleece jacket on and find a long red hair inside the sleeve or a long brown one in my pocket. I hold a teabag up to the light because I have a bad feeling and there is a hair INSIDE the teabag. I examine a bowl of white rice and see a Yellow Lab hair resting on top. I look at the wood 2x4s on the train platform and I see the hairs clinging involuntarily to the splits in the wood, waving to me in the wind like a hell-child on the playground. I see hair coiled menacingly on the boot impressions in the snow. These hairs follow me wherever I go. I can’t escape them, and though it’s only the loose ones that make me sick, I often look upon passersby and see, atop their unknowing heads, a classy up-do that could turn at any time into the profane figures of Tremors 2 with Kevin Bacon. In the words of Dr. Seuss, I find them nauseous super naus, but even ten Grinches plus two couldn’t save me. Barber shops? Welcome to my hell.

Raw onions taste like what happens if you let lutefisk marinade in turpentine for 10 hours. For any Swedish Barney Gumbles out there, this is a BAD thing. Aside from metaphors for society and the human psyche, nothing good comes from the layers of an onion. They make your eyes burn, which should be taken as a warning to go no further. Does nature need to add a bridge troll to make this more obvious? However, if you cook them even a bit, most of this will fade away. If this is true about onions, is it true about other things? The asshole at work has definitely been nicer to me since I sautéed his arm with a frying pan…

Watching the bifurcated top layer of orange juice being separated from the bottom and then poured into a glass is as horrifying to me as watching a whole birthday cake slide onto the kitchen floor…and the floor is covered in hair. Maybe it’s the pasteurization that does it, or maybe it’s something about the reconstitution, but orange juice needs to be shaken. Up-and-down, side-to-side, like it’s ketchup, swirl-motion, whatever works for you, just shake it. That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, when we discussed poems a while back, I mentioned a poem I had written for a class in college about how much I hated my classmates. A few I didn’t mind, but generally speaking they were all insufferable most of the time and if it weren’t for my love of workshops, I would have spent those Tuesday and Thursday afternoons doing something constructive, like picking dandelions.Well, here that poem is:

I hate you all, especially you.

You, with your smug smile.

I hope you trip in a hole.

 

You, with your ideas you think everyone cares to hear:

I hope a bee stings your inner elbow and you can’t use a fork because of it.

 

You, with your needless existence, sitting there, using oxygen that someone else could have used:

I hope you use your grandmother’s chocolate laxatives accidentally in your culinary internship application.

 

And to you all:

I hope you go to Thailand for a year and discover that the plums there give you a rash, and there’s plum juice in EVERYTHING.

I hope you buy a book on Amazon, which turns out to be hollow and is full of gold, and the gold belongs to the Russian mafia, and they have a tracker on it.

I hope the next poppy seed bagel you eat makes you fail a drug test.

I hope you forget the President’s name if you meet him.

I hope you never meet the President because he came over for brunch at your house and you decided to sleep in that morning.

I hope your favorite musical artist hates you.

I hope you have a rich great-uncle who makes you strip for college anyway.

I hope you’re in Siberia and you eat a veggie-burger and then you find out that “veggie” is the local slang for “all the poisonous animals that can be shipped to Siberia ground up and formed into patty”; and the city you’re in is Fed Ex’s main shipping hub.

I hope you’re the reason the world discovers that artificially intelligent, people-eating computers do exist.

I hope your Tupperware leaks onto your clothes every time you use it but you never learn.

You, in the corner, I’m ok with you.

But for the rest of you,

I hate you.

 

~Emma Garl Smith, 5/3/09

Bloggians, I have nothing but love for you. Goodnight.

Don’t Do These Things

I’ve slowly been formulating a list of things that people do that I think are stupid. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea- I’m not being a hater. Alls I’m saying is that there are a couple things that people do, things I witness everyday, that continue to baffle the human race, apparently. Now, I don’t want you to be one of the select few psychos that makes these mistakes, so I’m going give you a heads up as to what they are. If I list something that you do…LIE.

It’s messed up when:

I see people hug the wall when they turn corners. Anyone who routinely hugs the wall on sharp corners HAS BUMPED INTO SOMEONE BEFORE. This is a fact, so don’t bother denying it. If you decided that keeping your shoulder tight against the wall when you made a 90 degree turn was a good idea and you ran into someone, probably who also likes to hug those corners, you should have figured out that it was a bad idea. Do you ever see two people on the sidewalk who are headed towards each other and they do that shuffle-thing where they try to come to a mutual agreement about which way they should walk around each other? Notice how they always step from one side and then to the other at least once before actually walking past the person? Well, if there’s a wall next to you, you don’t have those options.

I see people on the train who think they’re too good for Newton’s 1st law. The train jolts forward or jerks back or rounds a turn just a little too fast so that you can actually tell that you’re on an angle when you might not otherwise have noticed. Now, we’ve all been on Earth for a long time and we’ve become accustomed to a few givens. The sun will rise, the tide will withdraw from the beach and, god-willing no inner-ear infections come into play, humans can walk safely on flat, un-moving surfaces. A train platform, for example, is a flat, un-moving surface. When you get on a train, the first thing you should notice is that it moves. I might even call the flooring of a train precarious, for it is not an unmoving surface. Maybe if you get too wrapped up in your book, or the latest Maroon 5 album, you could forget this fact and perhaps you will fall. If you don’t learn from that experience that you should maintain a physical connection with a stationary part of the interior on the train, I will steal your wallet when the EMTs take your concussed-ass to the hospital’s face-plant ward.

I’ll keep thinking on these and so should you.

Poetry

Thank you for being here, your presence means a lot to me. In fact, I really enjoy the time we spend together and I’d like to take things in a different direction. This blog, as you know, is about the things that I like. Monkeys, travel, fruit and stuffing my face are things that please me in one way or another. But here’s something else I like: poetry. I completed a thesis on poetry, which wasn’t terribly fun being an anthology of Shakespearean sonnets about nightmares, but I have a lighter side, I promise!

Here, I’ll write you a poem right now-

If you are reading this post

I hope you enjoy it the most

If you find that my verse

Gets increasingly worse

Then I’m not a very good…host!

In real time, that took about 3 minutes. Now, YOU write one and send it to me somehow so that I can put it in my next post. I really feel like we aren’t connecting in the way that we should. Alright, limericks are pretty overrated, so let’s try something harder: the pantoum. I find these especially fun because you really only have to write a little bit and then it takes on a mind of its own. This is what the form looks like. Each number represents a different line-

1

2

3

4

 

2

5

4

6

 

5

7

6

8

 

7

9

8

10

 

9

3

10

1

Now, I’ll try one out but I’m going to write it in couplets because one should always rhyme if given the opportunity:

1 After dinner is the time for something sweet

2 For me, I love a cognac, port or brandy

3 But if I wanted something more to eat

4 We all know that the real treat is CANDY

 

2 For me, I love a cognac, port or brandy

5 That’s what I will always know to say

4 We all know that the real treat is candy

6 At galas, though, I won’t give it away

 

5 That’s what I will always know to say

7 “I’ll have Remy Martin Louis XIII”

6 At galas, though, I won’t give it away

8 ”Ah, yes, you see. I say! Quite right old bean.”

 

7 “I’ll have a Remy Martin Louis XIII”

9 I told my friend Cornelius’ sommelier

8 “Ah, yes, you see. I say! Quite right old bean.”

10 With my eyes fixed on the chocolate souffle

 

9 I told my friend Cornelius’ sommelier

3 That I wanted something more to eat

10 With my eyes fixed on the chocolate souffle

1 After dinner is the time for something sweet…

That took about 30 minutes or so, including the time it took to talk to my Mom on the phone for a while, get something from the fridge and delete a test-pantoum about monkeys throwing poop. There’s really no wrong way to write a poem. I’ve written plenty of poems that didn’t make any sense or that were really offensive. The goal is to hide it. I wrote a poem for a poetry workshop class that I was in called “I Hate You All” which detailed all the misfortunes I hoped would happen to the other members of the class. Really, they were all insufferable assholes and I wanted them to know it. Unfortunately, everyone just passed it off as “art”.

I guess I’ll end all this with a poem from last year. I was waiting for Leslie in the dining hall and she wasn’t answering her phone, so I decided to take out a piece of paper so I could look like I was doing something important and avoid looking like I had no friends or places to be. I churned out this little diddy (A+ word choice) unthinkingly while looking out the window every 10 seconds, but I was pleased to discover that it ended up sounding intentioned.-

When first I see a food from the sea or from the ground,

I then imagine when it was that this food first was found.

I can’t imagine hunger so severe it would compel

A settler or a wanderer to look in an oyster shell.

 

And when they saw its contents and ate it all the same,

I wonder if insanity is where to place the blame.

For I have seen the contents and maybe so have you;

A filthy, crusty rock filled with primordial goo.

 

And what of the potato – those dirty kind of fruits

Hidden in the soil next to sowel bugs and roots.

Why was some man digging and when plunged his shovel south,

Revealed a base potato and put it in his mouth.

 

And then we have the strangest, most confusing, I have thought.

More obvious than potatoes, than oysters faster caught.

We know it as the apple, hanging stately all the while.

The wanderers, after ugly foods, should worry it was vile.

Goodnight.

Childhood Memories

My dearest Bloggians; sorry for the delay, so let’s kick it, once again, right into gear. I decided that I would begin this new post with a little preface. I was born about 23 years ago and since then I’ve had many good times. Given, some were better than others, but I’ve decided that we’ve entered that point in our relationship when I can begin to share with you a few anecdotes that have shaped my being.

God

In my memory, it began when I was six. In fact, much of my life happened when I was six so it’s a good place to start. I remember being in church with my Grandma though I don’t remember exactly why. Although, to be honest, it could have been a play, yeah, we were at a play. Anyway, I turned to her and asked her if she believed in God. I don’t remember what she said, but that’s when I started to consider my own beliefs on the subject. As I had been taught in school, George Washington was the first President. Now, at that age I had no concept of history, and so I figured that if GW was the first President, then he must have also been the first man. God, I thought, is a spirit, like a ghost. These I saw as facts, mind you, and so the answer to the question of Do I Believe in God? was simple: Yes, and God is the ghost of George Washington. It was a relief to get life’s big questions out of the way at an early age.

The Proper Way To Drink Juice

I’m a big fan of juice boxes. They’re compact, colorful and they come with a straw attached. I don’t drink very much so I’m pretty satisfied with the amount of liquid they hold, and I’m generally not offended by them in the obvious ways that juice might offend. The juice boxes I brought to school as an elementary student were small and bright magenta. I’ll admit I wasn’t fantastic at getting the straw through the little hole on the first try, but to my credit, I’m still not. Anyway, I had a very specific way of drinking from juice boxes that I had adopted in some organic way, meaning I hadn’t been taught to do so. I would hold the box about six inches from my mouth and squirt juice over the distance. I was pretty good at it. I’m not saying I was perfect, but I think we can agree that a solid 70% of the time is pretty damn good. The notable thing about the whole process is the reason for doing it. I drank juice boxes this way because I believed that that’s how Michael Jackson did it. You might think to yourself “Why would you think Michael Jackson drank juice that way?” or “Why would you want to drink juice like Michael Jackson?” My honest answer to those questions is that I don’t remember because it wasn’t important at the time. I accepted a lot of things for what they were back then, or at least what I thought they were. Don’t we all? Still, it’s kinda weird.

The Doorknob

My brother used to play pranks on me, so one day I decided that I was going to get back at him. I went into the bathroom and shut the door so that he wouldn’t know my plans. The basic idea was that I wanted to surprise him with some kind of mild discomfort courtesy of me. I pumped a good amount of liquid soap into my hand and proceeded to slather the doorknob on the bathroom door like Kevin from Home Alone might do to Buzz. I got the doorknob real good making sure I covered every nook and cranny to maximize the coverage on my brother’s hand when he tried to open the door. Then, I thoroughly washed my hands and dried them, ready to play the waiting game until my brother walked into my trap. I grabbed the doorknob to get out of the bathroom and found, to my displeasure, that it was covered in soap. It was also too slippery to actually open the door, which might have allowed me to prank two birds with one knob, but I had pranked myself so good that I was forced to wash it in order to escape. I was very disappointed in myself when I left the bathroom for having done something so ridiculously stupid and I never told anyone, until I confided in you, of course.

I suppose I’ve said enough for now, but you should know that I’ve learned quite a bit since then. I’m pretty confident that George Washington wasn’t the first person in existence and that I shouldn’t let Michael Jackson influence the way I do things. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, I pranked myself trying to pull an April Fools Day joke involving lemons, so I can’t say that I really learned my lesson with that door knob incident. Come to think of it, a few months ago I woke up to a hand falling on my face and freaked out. Then, I realized that it was my own hand that had fallen asleep and also the likelihood of someone being behind me was slim, considering there is a wall there. We can put it this way; I’m open to how things work in the world, and I’m ok with that. Goodnight.

Oh, the places I go!

We’ve all been places. Your house counts. And in all of these places, we have different thoughts and memories. After traveling abroad last year, I came to a few conclusions about life – and I will share them with you now.

Ireland. I studied abroad here last year and learned about many preconceptions that just aren’t true…and some that were. For example, leprechauns are considered to be simply lore, though I learned that Irish students learn about them in school. Since school teaches nothing but facts, leprechauns are real. And yes, I DID look for them – in the tall grass. Another idea about Ireland is that everyone there drinks all day, that there’s a pub on every corner, and people sing all the time. The fact is: they drink all day AND all night, there are pubs on every corner AND between every corner, and everyone always sings the same songs that are 40 verses long. Being one who appreciates other cultures, I tried out the Irish experience myself:

Yes, the ENTIRE trash can is filled with bottles.

The food in Ireland is all very…”hearty”. Basically, the Irish will put pork into anything that makes even remote sense. Sausage, rashers, puddings – you’ll often find them all on the same plate along with potatoes cooked three different ways. I don’t think they need to know that boiled potatoes and mashed potatoes are both the same vegetable.

Ireland is also known for being very wet. It is. It is often both cold and wet, and also usually very windy. There are no preparations for Irish weather. I went through 4 umbrellas before I figured that one out. Between bouts of depressing rain, however, there are warm pubs, ancient castles, made-up sluts smoking in front of every club doorway, and trashed rando twenty-somethings with gelled frosted tips. A beautiful land. A beautiful people. Moving on…

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Amsterdam is known as a place with no rules and where everyone does whatever they want. I don’t know if this is true, but I know it’s true for the pigeons. The series of pictures below depict three different attempts at making the pigeons fear and respect me. First, I tried to George Costanza them by running head on into the flock hoping to make them scatter. I walked back disappointed. Finally, I singled one out and tried to capture it the old-fashioned way. I left empty-handed.

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Sweden is a soul-less hell-hole forsaken by God and left only to its crude devices: meatballs in gravy, reindeer, and tall, blonde, beautiful swedes. The fair-skinned Swedish people are thus because of the fact that the sun shines in Sweden 2 of 24 hours in the day. It drizzles rain constantly so that everything is only unpleasantly damp, and the temperature is warmer than needed by a heavy jacket, yet colder than satisfied by a light coat. Even Ikea doesn’t make a solution to Sweden’s terrible weather, though they do make excellent meatballs. Don’t ever go to Sweden.

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London is a pretty well-known city. There’s the London bridge that everyone thinks is the Tower bridge when they see it, the Thames, the Globe Theatre, the palace, parks, crown jewels, blah, blah, blah. But, did you know that the old man in the park has a squirrel named Sally that will eat food out of your hand? No, you didn’t, until just now. I also included a picture of one of the Buckingham Palace guards. A useless relic of 300 years ago (like the Queen herself), the guards are pretty ill-equipped to do anything about someone breaking into the giant doors they guard that don’t lead to the palace. In fact, there are pointless guards all over the place to stand still for minimum wage so that tourists can screw around with them. If I DIDN’T slack jaw that man in the picture, his full days work would be for naught. I did him a favour.

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Scotland is a land of heritage. Every family has about 50 symbols of its own, like the many tartans that all look exactly the same to me. Here are a few time-savers, however, in case you feel the need to get to Scotland RIGHT NOW and discover something, I don’t know why that’d be. 1) Loch Ness is a large flat body of water surrounded by mountains. It’s not even that pretty. There are 50 other lochs within a 1-mile radius that will knock Loch Ness on its MONSTERously large ass. 2) There’s also people-friendly deer and hairy cows ( pronounced “koos”). I recommend looking that up – best pet ever.

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Lastly, Barcelona is paradise. There’s not much else to say. I asked a woman picking up trash on the street for directions, and she acted like I was giving her a million dollars. The people who live in Barcelona know that they live in paradise, and they know that you don’t. For that reason, they don’t feel the need to act like shmassholes. Instead, they pick up their trash, buy a 1 euro litre of wine, go back to their beautiful stone apartments, and enjoy the company of other people living in paradise and know it, eating delicious spanish food. On that note I think i’ll go to bed. Actually, I think I’ll look up tickets to Barcelona on Orbitz and THEN go to bed. I want to be in paradise with the Catalans! Goodnight.

The Quick Fixes

Perhaps you read Over Indulgence. If you didn’t I recommend you do so before reading this. I think we all have moments of weakness when we have to stuff our faces like a dumb animal before we’re satisfied. Today I force-fed myself potato salad from a deli in Evanston and ate two frosted cookies, a bunch of soup, and a croissant sandwich that was was smothered in bernaise sauce. It made me sick but was too good to stop. Damn you Al’s Deli! Your french cooking leaves me with nothing more  than wishing I wanted more…

Today’s post will address this very important issue. What God giveth, God taketh away. There IS a cure, and these are the cures for the effects of poorly managed Indulgence Compensation Disorder (ICD).

Peaches. Peaches are sweet and delicious. They have a refreshing and yet light texture. If you don’t remove the skin you must eat them more slowly biting through the skin and this acts as a cool-down, like when you’re running and you push it and at the end you gotta walk for a bit before you can just stop. I assume. If I ran, I wouldn’t be writing a blog about staring at monkeys and stuffing my face. A few tips: have you every gone to a hardware store and seen some insulation and thought “Big cotton candy! I gotta jump in!” Well, I have. In case you didn’t know, a billion shards of fiber glass in your skin SUCKS for along time. If you feel a peach and think it’s soft, don’t rub it on your face like a moron. I did it and my face burned like I got a fire ant chin facial. One more thing – a peach is NOT AN APPLE. Don’t bite into it unless you’ve done it many times before or you’re looking to dent up a few teeth. Peach stones are like rocks – if they had the chance, they would go after you and everyone you love.

Tea. Mint tea has “ancient” healing properties such as being a digestive aid (which you know I need by now.) I drink a lot of mint tea after i’m too food-sick to move. My Mom makes it. Tea is a complex subject for me. It gets cold quickly or it burns your tongue. In fact, what am I talking about. Tea’s just a bunch of hot hippie water. “Oooo look at me! I don’t drink coffee because I’m too good for popular culture! I drink tea because i’m soooo in touch with my earthy side. Tea comes from nature, look at me, look at me!” SHUT UP! You’ll drink coffee and you’ll like it! If you don’t want to drink coffee because it causes headache for most people and physical and psychological addictions and doesn’t help food-comas here’s what other option you have. It’s called Ipecac and it’s the midwife that will deliver your food-baby.

Greek Yogurt. It’s like regular yogurt but it’s imported and in style. It’s like the goji berry of 2009/2010. It’s good for you and nasty. However, with a little bit of honey it has a very fresh taste and i’ve started to buy in regularly when I can afford it in place of ice cream or other sweet-stuff cravings late at night. The honey has many healthful properties as does the yogurt itself. And, of course, if it’s over-priced, it’s better than everything else, duh. The second image below shows what it actually looks like which is not a sloppy white pile slapped into a bowl. Whatever stupid a-hole took that picture seems to think that that makes it look appetizing. You like that, great? But if you think it looks like blonde mosh, you just gotta trust me.

Finally,  close companion and long-time friend, honeycombs. Leslie Moffat and I sat down one day and bonded over this treat one night. We sat down and realized we both love honeycombs and we knew we would be friends forever. One day you have to sit down and NIKE. Spoon a little piece, chew it up, but don’t shy away from the wax. As you chew the wax it will build in your mouth and once the honey is gone, you can just spit it out. It’s like gum and if you still think it’s gross, it’s just a naturally occurring wax that’s pretty and burns clear. This isn’t sounding very fun for you all, but you need to know about nature’s miracle food.

Fruit

Alright, Bloggians. It’s time to kick it into gear. FRUIT! Mangoes are like the bee sting to my child-who’s-allergic-to-bees. When I eat them, I get a dynamic rash that starts 48 hours after the initial incident and lasts for as long as I keep eating them (or 5 days, which ever is longer.) I say ‘dynamic’ because it’s an all-encompassing rash that gets all the senses involved. It tastes, smells, feels and looks like hydrocortisone. It sounds, however, like a Burmese jungle at dawn when the sun begins to coax the dew from the tops of the majestic trees. To the lay person, however, this sounds very much like hydrocortisone. Mangoes taste like the forbidden ambrosia in all of its perfection. Emphasis on FORBIDDEN. I love them, however, and I will never stop loving them. Well, I might stop loving them for a day or two when I have a job interview, but any other time they’re fair, delicious, game.

Passion fruit is the geode of the fruit world. At first you’re not sure what it is. Is it a rock? A nut? But then…then someone pays you to eat it and it’s…AMAZING. (Please note the dramatic ellipses…I just watched the Tony Awards with my Mom) It may look slimy inside, or seedy, or maybe even dry. It is all of these things. It’s both sour and hard-to eat, relentlessly globular and painfully gravel-esque. And yet, somehow, when I look back on my experience with a passion fruit, I remember the good times – it’s got a skin like styrofoam – so when you finally taste it, if you didn’t like it at least it didn’t take a long time trying to get it open. Next time you’re in a tropical passion fruit forest or exotic hippie farmer’s market, give this a try and let me know what you thought!

Tangerines are like little angles that fly around you singing but periodically swoop down to choke you. According to the Wikipedia post I just added, there are more tangerine-related deaths each year than both inland freshwater eel attacks and rogue waves COMBINED. Just last Christmas I was enjoying tangerine’s son, tangelo and he almost made me swallow a seed. I realize now that it was tangerine who influenced him to do it. However, tangerines are inherently delicious and should not be penalized for their short-comings. They taste better than oranges, look better than oranges and are more orange than oranges though we all pay the price…

Honeydew: The mule of the melons. I’m currently writing this memoir for honeydew about how “Big Perfume” uses it for “Melon Mist” but nobody puts it in salads. It’s OK to exploit it’s subtle flavors behind the scenes, but when it comes time to shine everyone’s “too busy” to shoot a plus-sized melon add. Well, here’s what I say- HEY HONEYDEW, you’ll always have a place in my salad. I’ll butcher you like any other melon, gut you like any other melon, and skewer you JUST LIKE ANY OTHER MELON. You look like a water-logged alien head, so I know the grocery store will never be out of you and for that; I Salute You!

Finally, we have the lemon. No, i’m not one of those attention-seeking 7th graders who eats lemon slices and acts like they don’t think it’s sour. You know who you are…Anyway, lemons are more than just gross. They make lemonade…and floor cleaner. Without lemons, little girls might still end up on the corner for dimes, but it wouldn’t be the same. The lemon is something to be feared and respected for its many abilities. Ren and Stimpy used it in many cheese-grater related experiments. I even coated them in sugar one April fools to tell people they were candy and ended up falling for my own prank. Lemons out-smarted me! Honor these fruits, I say, and remember the scurvy they’ve prevented, the eyes they’ve painfully squirted, the pastries they’ve zested and love them all!