January 30

This is not how you'd expect a band named "Hooray for Earth" to sound. Who would call their band "Hooray for Earth"? What a stupid name. You can't even say it without feeling dumber.

"Hey, Teeney, what are you listening?"

"Hooray for Earth."

"What? I can't hear you. It sounded like you said "Hooray for Earth" or something stupid like that, but I know you're not that dumb."

"... Oh."

Yesterday I sent my Popular Music in World Cultures professor a frantic email. "I've been looking for next Tuesday's reading for twenty minutes and I can't find it!" She wrote back, tiredly, that I shouldn't have any problem finding it because it was mapped out in the syllabus. It turns out that the exceptionally long article that I'd read all of for Thursday's class was broken into multiple readings. Tuesday's reading is a subset of this article--which explained why I couldn't find any articles with that as the mainn title. Boy did I feel silly, but at least I'd finished my homework early.

Hegemony

Today one of my professors defined hegemony in a way that made it sound identical to social contract.

I find this very unsettling. It might now be a big deal to her, but she is raising demonoids who will justify diminishing individual rights because they were "given up."

I think it is worthwhile to blame the societal collapse on her.

Today's thoughts.

Few people are comfortable talking about--or thinking about--their parents having sex with one another (or with anyone, for that matter).

This afternoon, I was waiting for my mother at my parents' house, and, not having brought anything with me to do, I turned on daytime TV just in time to watch a thrilling episode of Casino. In this particular episode, besides a murder occurring, an employee being mistaken for a prostitute, and a bikini contest being sabotaged by a contestant from the Mid-West, one of the main character's wives has a fit because she's pregnant, and her husband has too much work to do and is too stressed to have time to sleep with her. Wah, wah, wah.

But this got me to thinking--ugh, parents having sex. But it went further--dad poking mom while I'm the bun in the oven.

Dear God.

Here is some great stop-motion.

And an okay song.

Today I found the COOLEST thing on the whole internet.

It involves bunnies, music, AND it's in Italian.

You can find it HERE!

Hurt

The worst moments in life are the ones you don't expect. It just takes one horrible, early morning phone call to ensure that you will answer any early morning phone call that you ever receive. And every time you wake, blinking sleep into your tired eyes to stare at the resounding phone, you'll relive that first phone call, just a little bit. It gets easier the longer you're around, the more phone calls you receive. But that sinking feeling, the voice coming over the line that first time, the hurt in your stomach when you turn to face the wall, to curl your legs into your stomach and wash your face in salty tears, that feeling never goes away.

Early morning phone calls are the worst. The absolute worst. You never recover from them, and they hurt so badly. They're horrible. They become a metaphor for everything that comes afterward, everything you can never forget, and everything that will haunt you for the rest of your life.

I am making the decisions of the rest of my life, and the only sound I'll remember forever is the first shovel-full of dirt falling on the coffin of an eighteen year-old boy.

How can you trust a God after that?

Selling Sex

Vice Magazine. Perhaps the glossiest magazine ever. Shiny pages cramped with indulgent hipsterism, selling glorified prepackaged scene cred. American Apparel appropriately owns the back cover. It screams. "Go directly to Scenedom. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200." But the best thing about both of these pandemics--Vice Magazine and American Apparel--is that both are fabulous simply because they are filled with sex.

I know that this is what makes them fabulous, because this is why my father judges me for them. One day, about to drive off my parents' home, I paused to chat with him through the open passenger side window. He eyed the facedown Vice Magazine in the seat, picked it up, humphed at the raunchiness of the ad, and turned it over as if to verify whether or not I was browsing porn. He scowled, dropped it back on the seat, and went into the house.

But that has nothing on the disdain the time that he caught be reading The Story of the Eye in church.

More on "crack addiction"

One of the girls I work with on Monday morning asked me this past Monday if they'd told me about our Yelp review. "Yeah!" I said, "I even wore makeup that day."

"I think about it all the time now," she replied. "I looked in the mirror and was like, how many colors am I wearing? Is my hair alright?"*

So I guess I'm not the only one.

*This is not verbatim. We had this conversation around 7:00 AM. I cannot remember it that clearly.

More good news.

Fidel has been in contact with the good people at Playboy, they should be figuring out why I haven't been getting my subscription. This means, of course, that I should start getting my subscription... and I will finally have the necessary amount of smut in my life.

Yelp!

Apparently, we got a negative Yelp review on Monday morning, while I was working, that said we looked like "recovering crack addicts."

And I actually put on make up on Monday morning.

Good news!

I have a working computer once more!

I now give you permission to kiss my feet and rub shoulders. Commence!