Rant, rant, anxiety.

Rant: While perusing the Facebook, tanned female crotch caught my eye on an old friend’s profile. The cause? A “What kind of lingerie are you?” quiz. Okay, _______ is a g-string. How fascinating. Only it wasn’t a g-string, it was labeled as a “v-string”. Ready to lol at the clueless code-monkey who made the typo, I googled the term. Victoria’s Secret is trying to deny that if it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck… Meh.

Rant: When did Threadless.com become so high-end? My first purchases from them were made at $10/shirt. Now they’re touting $25 sales. Good for them, but bad for those of us likely to blow $50 on five shirts a year or $0 on a potential two shirts. Damn hipsters.

Anxiety: Flatmate. Heard through the reputable side of the grapevine that he may have done some physically invasive things to at least one female while drunk, while having a girlfriend of his own. No good. May be considering locks on main and bathroom doors, just in case. I trust him not to be creepy while sober, which is 90% of the time, and I feel fairly safe as Drummer has been over (or I at his apartment) most nights of the week. He has been a solid flatmate so far and has shown no signs of ever disrespecting my space. There is also a chance that the flatmate has been confused with his former flatmate, who really was an alcoholic skeeze. I am hoping this is the case, and am gathering information to confirm that more reassuring hypothesis.

Passing On

I remember the earthy, dense smell of my mother’s menses in the old bathroom. By the time I was twelve the smell was gone. An addition to our house added two bathrooms, and she ended her fertile years just as I hit mine.

I remember wondering if she was aware of the strange odor that came from her a few days a month. I doubt she was, because now I am unable to detect my own period-scent.

Womens Advert, Perverted

Click for bigger.

Why does my Photoshop neglect the font “Bodoni”, which I am 90% certain is the original font? I couldn’t quite match it. Meh.

Amtrak, my dear…

This just isn’t going to work out between us. It’s in part because of the ways you’ve treated me, but mostly because of today’s debacle involving my mother.

She boarded you at nine this morning, and she’ll be with you for at least another hour. Your website states that the ride should take about five hours, not eight. At two o’clock you ran her into a truck– no word yet on whether the trucks passengers survived. I curiously perused your online materials and learned that in the past twelve months, only 21% of your rides between our two major midwestern cities have been on time. Really, Amtrak? Wouldn’t it be logical to tack an extra half hour on to your expected ride time and boost that damning statistic up to at least 1/3? Your seem quite content to trap passengers on you and kindly announce that the dining car is open– a bottle of water is only $3.50. Last time I checked, you weren’t Disney World.

I am sick of you for my own sake as well. Last time I rode you, you caused a young business-woman, trying to save money on a 45-minute ride, to be three hours late for a job interview. Your constantly-harassed coachmen did not make it clear whether a refund could be made available to her. After she got off, she was replaced by a gang of 30-something redneck men, who loudly talked about how much coke they would buy if they won the lottery, and how to scam one’s doctor for testosterone supplements (take your gf’s birth control pills.) The time before that, a creepy man harassed me the whole ride, and a one-armed cowboy a few seats back had phone-sex with possibly more than one woman at once while several small children sat within ear-shot. Their parents? Wearing headphones.

And although this is not entirely your fault, I hate the often non-existent cell service along your track. It’s often impossible to contact anyone at your destination if the train is sitting still for hours in a dead zone. Yes, your friends and relatives can check the Amtrack website, but not when you DELETE THE MOTHERFUCKING TRAIN BEFORE IT HAS EVEN ARRIVED YOU COCKSUCKERS.

Now I’m off to pick up my poor mum. She’s going to be terribly frazzled.

Loaded/Load of

Lawyer1: “And then what did you see?”

Witness: “I saw him swinging an ax at the other man, obviously trying to kill hi-”

Lawyer2: “Objection! ‘Kill’ is a loaded word and unfairly prejudices the jury against my client.”

Judge: “Objection sustained.”

Lawyer1: “Could you rephrase your statement?”

Witness: “I saw him swing an ax at the other man with the intent of… of… ending his biological processes.”

HOW MOTHERFUCKING RIDICULOUS IS THAT??? I will punch anyone in the face who can stand before me and try to say that the word “rape” should be barred from courts. It didn’t happen during the Red Scare when Communist was the loaded word and false accusations really were being made. Saying that most rapes are false accusations is an unsupportable statement. This is fucking unbelievable, and life just got a little worse for women across the nation.

In other news, that hike in the unemployment hike? Totally my fault, yo. That pesky 16-24 age group, unable to find summer jobs. But I’ve got some leads and interviews coming up! Also, Drummer is a dream. Today is exactly four months since we first met.

Is this what a real avatar looks like?

It’s time for ranting with unlegion.

First, a shout out to Pepper Pots in Iron Man for falling for the self-absorbed ass-hat who has ignored, disrespected, and taken you for granted for years– and immediately objectified you and made you uncomfortable after your “cinderella” transformation. Fuck that shit, yo.

Next! So there’s this MMORPG called Age of Conan. A load of dudes on there are up in arms because the creators nerfed the boobs of the female avatars (the only boobs those guys are seeing, I presume). Now, judging from the screen shots, the boobs went down in size from impossible-due-to-the-laws-of-physics big to Pamela-Anderson big. OMGWTFOHNOES! And players are threatening to quit unless the extra tissue is reconstituted. Also from the screen shots– where the hell did the pretty lighting go? Why does the game suddenly look like something cranked out by a 15-year old in Bryce? Fo’ reals, dude. Back to the point. We apparently live in a world where people get pissed off if the imaginary and exaggerated female body is scaled remotely closer to reality. Good luck to the game developers I’ve heard about who are scaling down female boob sizes to be more “girlfriend friendly”.

I demand highly visible foot-long cocks rendered in loving detail and pleasingly lit on every male avatar.

Also, D&D 4 looks stupid. I will be sticking with 3.5, thanks.

Excellence.

The semester is over, and even without seeing my final grades, I am certainly a junior. Tomorrow I’ll be watching a few friends get their diplomas.

Tonight I am beginning to move to my new apartment. The futureroommate, as I’ve been calling him in my mind, seems like a good dude. His friends? We’ll see. I am about to go over there armed with air freshener, paper towels, endust, and murphy’s wood oil soap. I love murphy’s, probably because of memories of my mother washing and re-waxing the floors every other year when I was a kid.

And tonight? Greek food, my favorite boy, and my currentroommate’s performance art piece in conjunction with her boy. Excellent.

But while we’re on the subject of soap, I have some advice for vagina-owning readers and anyone involved with vaginas. Never, ever put anything down there as lubricant that is not explicitly marketed as such. Ever. Not even stuff you’ve put there before for other reasons, or stuff that you put on the rest of your body. NEVER. This is shit they need to teach us in high school.

And on that note, would the searchers for “suckmy cock” and “suck mycock” go back to remedial typing class? Thanks.

Ebert, suck my cock.

While studying for a film final (fingers crossed for this evening), I noticed something very odd about Ebert’s 1976 review of the movie “Rocky”. If you’re familiar with the movie, you’ll know what I mean. I tried to find clips to illustrate my point, but no luck. It opens:

She sits, tearful and crumpled, in a corner of her little bedroom. Her brother has torn apart the living room with a baseball bat. Rocky, the guy she has fallen in love with, comes into the room.

“Do you want a roommate?” she asks shyly, almost whispering.

“Absolutely,” says Rocky.

Which is exactly what he should say, and how he should say it, and why “Rocky” is such an immensely involving movie.

Um, that’s not how that scene went at all. I’ll get into that right after a couple of other exerpts:

He is awkwardly in love with a painfully shy girl (Talia Shire) who works in the corner pet shop.

And then there’s Talia Shire, as the girl (she was the hapless sister of the Corleone boys in “The Godfather“). When she hesitates before kissing Rocky for the first time, it’s a moment so poignant it’s like no other.

What, she doesn’t get a name? At the end of the movie, Rocky screams Adrian, Adrian, Adrian, over and over– don’t tell me you forgot, Ebert. She’s not just “the girl,” and the scene where she (is kissed) by Rocky for the first time is called sexual assault. He used manipulative tactics to coerce her into his apartment, started taking off his clothes, invaded her personal space, and despite her numerous protestations that she didn’t belong there and should leave or call her brother to let him know where she was, Rocky backed her into a corner, blocked her escape, and presumably raped her.

So then they’re girlfriend and boyfriend, right? Right. And the tearful and crumpled? This is right after she screams in the face of her abusive and alcoholic brother that she’s been the one taking care of him, and that he’s holding her back, not the other way around (all true). With wrath, she storms into her bedroom and slams the door after having properly intimidated the creep. When Rocky follows her (after standing up for her point of view, thank goodness) she is not in any state of womanly distress. Her emotions are understandably high– she is flushed, full of verve at finding her own voice, and sits with ram-rod straight posture. “Tearful and crumpled” my ASS. While she does ask if Rocky wants a roommate in a quiet tone, this is far more a re-assertion of her rational control over those exhilarating emotions of savagery and anger than out of bashfulness.

Ebert, is “Rocky” a good movie because you interpret it to conform to patriarchal standards of rape-based romance?

My teacher argued that “Rocky” could be seen as a story of two trapped people who escape from their situations. Rocky, a fighter on skid row, gets a one-in-a-million chance at glory and respect through the opportunity to fight Apollo Creed. He becomes a hero for the every-day man, and wins in the sense that he holds his own against all odds. Adrian escapes from her brother’s keeping and from her shyness by getting Rocky.

Fuck you, teacher. That’s not growth, that’s not liberation. That’s trading one prison for another, except now instead of getting yelled at every once in a while she gets fucked (or raped) and lives in Rocky’s smelly bachelor pad, forever dwarfed by his fame.

Let’s not even get into the interpretation of “Rocky” as diatribe against black people. I’m so angry I need to go increase the size of my biceps before this final.

drummer

This boy is amazing. Our skulls fit together. Our morning breath mysteriously fails to offend. Our ears perk up to the same industrial beats. We speak nonsense blurbles.

Excuse me while I go revel in moon-calfiness.

end of semester rants

My apartment-mate had her sophomore review today. I’m a little unclear on what her final piece was, but it involved family and the idea of blankets. One of the male reviewers immediately tried to pigeon-hole her piece as “feminist,” just because it involved domesticity. I CALL SHENS. A sculpture student last semester hung his laundry across campus green and painted it white. No one mentioned feminism. Another made a swiveling potato-cannon cockpit. No one mentioned male-ism. This pisses me off to no end.

Next issue. If you wanted to play a game of baseball, would you head for the pool? If you wanted vegetables, would you go to Coldstone? If you want to chat loudly with friends about HOW FUCKING AWESOME YOUR PROJECT WAS AND IT COST 300 DOLLARS or about YOU HAVEN’T SLEPT IN 36 HOURS AND HOW THE BULLSHIT PIECE OF CRAP FINAL YOU SUBMITTED LAST SEMESTER WAS TOTALLY LEGIT BECAUSE BAD THINGS ONLY HAPPEN TO POOR WEE INNOCENT YOU…

Get the fuck out of my studio. I have work to do. Sound-editing work. And my noise-canceling airplane-approved head phones can’t keep your asshattery out of my ears.