Happy Thanksgiving!

Here is a video combining two awesome things: Garfield's Thanksgiving and Garfield Minus Garfield, which according to them, "is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."

Cataclysm

This is officially going to be the lamest, geekiest, stupidest post ever. You have been warned. As something I have spent almost a QUARTER of my life doing (I literally just said, "....holy shit" out loud after typing that), it deserves a nostalgic entry.

Tomorrow, a dear friend gets put to rest. Tomorrow is the Shattering. Tomorrow is the beginning of the end for the World of Warcraft, as the world we've all known and loved for six years gets razed for a new expansion that (let's get real here) can only go so far!

Thanks, Azeroth, for all the years of fun, the nerd rage over impossible achievements and bad guild runs, the friends I've made or played with, the adventures to places even the game creators didn't want us to find, and last, but certainly not least, the all-important distraction from real life and responsibility!

Here are some lame pictures I've managed to save!


This was before I realized how to screenshot, and took a picture of the computer screen instead. This is my first arrival to Outland!


Yay! I don't really have a caption for this...this is my Death Knight cheering with a buff on her hands.


This is my recent triumph. I received one of the best mounts in the game, the purple Proto-Drake, for completing "What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been", the longest, most tedious achievement in the game. It takes at least a year to complete.


This is a picture that I hope becomes the next internet meme. This is some terrible raid group gathered under the Orgrimmar bridge, and the leader is yelling, "Y U KILL GUARDS? U JUST RUIND THE WHOLE THING" at whoever alerted the Horde guards to our presence.


My tank is bigger than your tank. You can just make out my priest hovering in front of his left shoulder on her magic carpet.


Mofokiller cheering in front of the gates of Ironforge during Brewfest.


This is the saddest picture, taken a few moments ago in front of the Auberdine docks, which in a few hours will be completely destroyed!


Nice Things

For the first time in a while, I'm going to write about nice things that have happened to me.

Today, I received a $25.00 MasterCard Gift Card in the mail from my company, as a way of saying "Thanks" during Thanksgiving. I pretty much work for the best company ever; they are always either doing cool things or improving our benefits. It's nice to work for a company that isn't using "the economy" as a catch-all excuse to be stingy dicks.

Yesterday, a lady customer walked by me while I was working and, after greeting me, said "Thank you so much for all the hard work you do! Wow!"

Okay, so, she might have been a little on the crazy-cat-lady side, but it was a very nice thing to say, especially since I didn't even help her with anything. It certainly brightened my day, and made me realize one thing:

WE HAVE TO START BEING FUCKING NICE TO EACH OTHER, FUCKERS. Now, that's not to say you can't put major assholes in their place with a swift verbal nutkick (or a swift real nutkick, if need be), but as a society we have to stop sucking so much at life. The technological depersonalization of life, coupled with the doom-and-gloom media, has turned us all into paranoid, evil-ass, socially retarded freaks. We'll all feel a lot better if we start being courteous to random people at the store.

Also, from the paranoid, evil-ass side of things, people are less likely to rob you/fuck with you if you personalize yourself to them first! Lawl.


Time Machine: Me in 2003.

I kept an online diary when I was in the last year or so of high school. It mainly was an outlet to just write about the boring events of my day, and talk about everything I did with my friends so I would sound more popular. But a few times, I was really on to something entertaining.

Here's an entry from September 20, 2003, in which I wrote a book review. It scares me that I might have been more funny at age 16 than I am now!


"I found this incredibly weird book yesterday when I actually went in my playroom at my dad's house. I haven't actually been in there in like a year, haha. It's called Please Come Home: A Child's Book About Divorce. Obviously something my mother bought me to 'help me cope'....This book frightens me.

Let's investigate:

This is in NO way biased at all.....2 women put this together, so it's obviously anti-father....and that's not how divorce always is, dumb bitches.

So, it's "a book about divorce...and learning....and growing." Multi-tasking.

I'm not going to type the whole book, just excerpts that struck me.

This is about some little piss-ant named Jenny, and her best friend is a talking Teddy bear, named Teddy. If your Teddy bear is your only social outlet, I don't think divorce is your biggest problem.

"Last night they were yelling at each other again. She was afraid Daddy might hit Mommy."

Whoa Whoa Whoa...how token stereotype is this? Just because people get divorced does not mean the dad is some violent psychopath.

"Mommy said, 'Daddy wouldn't have left if he loved you.'
She thought, 'I'll never speak to my Daddy again!'"

Isn't this just teaching all children that their fathers don't love them? I think this is more a book to teach single mothers how to phase their baby's daddy out of their life.

"On Saturdays she visited Daddy. It was fun at the park, but she always cried when he brought her home.
On her birthday Daddy sent a package, and she told Mommy, 'I don't want it.'
Mommy seemed pleased and sent it back to Daddy."

That doesn't even make sense! I don't even understand the relevance except that Mommy is 3vil.

Later on, after Daddy gets a girlfriend and Mommy works all the time, Jenny has a nervous breakdown after bedtime.

"Jenny cried big wet tears on Teddy's nose and said, 'Daddy doesn't want to be with me and Mommy is too busy to talk to me. NOBODY LOVES ME ANYMORE.'
Teddy looked her right in the eye and said, 'Now listen carefully because this is very important:
YOU ARE LOVEABLE!
YOU ARE PRECIOUS!
YOU ARE SPECIAL!"

And underneath it says: (And Teddy made Jenny repeat it 50 times!)

....

This girl obviously needs psychological help. Staying up chanting to her stuffed animals at all hours of the night. My Teddy bears never talked to me during my parent's divorce....Maybe I just had asshole Teddy bears.

Now, at the end of the book, after the divorce is final, Jenny has a breakthrough.

"Jenny smiled and told Teddy, 'When I was little I used to think that every child whose parents were still married was better off than me. Now I know some are much worse off.'
And Teddy said, 'OH! You are SO smart!'
Jenny said, 'I used to think I'd hurt forever. But I don't'
And Teddy skipped a step and said: 'I'M SO HAPPY I JUST CAN'T STAND IT! LET'S HUG!'"

What the fuck kind of book is this for children to read?! At the end there is a list of ways to help a child with divorce--BORING.

So what have we learned?

1. Daddy is always bad, and will desert you.
2. It's okay if Mommy yells at you, she will buy you ice cream.
3. Underwear is NOT a present!
4. Teddy is likely bipolar.
5. YOU ARE LOVEABLE! YOU ARE PRECIOUS! YOU ARE SPECIAL!

Fuck me gently with a chainsaw."

That last bit is a quote from the black comedy Heathers that my best friend and I used to be obsessed with.



Hurray for nostalgia!

Boo-urns, and not the C. Montgomery variety...

So, let me tell you about my burn story. But first, a preface.

If you were "lucky" enough to catch my limited edition paranoid freakout entry last week or so, now deleted, you'll know I've been kinda losing my mind lately, and everything in my life seems to be spiraling towards some abyss that I can only defend myself against by being a paranoid freak always waiting for the next shoe to drop. And a lot of shoes have been dropping recently - like some sort of Doom Millipede is looming over me.

Well, I thought about it, but I'm not going to bother you guys with the details of the seemingly endless stream of bullshit I've had lately - I feel like I've done nothing but complain this year. Instead, I'm going to tell you a semi-amusing "it's-funny-when-it-happens-to-someone-else" story that's sure to make you cringe!

Anyone who interacts with me in real life on a regular basis will know that I cannot stand heat. I have done nothing but bitch bitch bitch for the last seven months of suffocating heat wave that we have had on the Shore. My wrath was especially revved up last week when it was approaching eighty degrees just a few days before Halloween. We do not have central air conditioning, and clearly we had already removed our window units because it was almost NOVEMBER.

So, here's the scene. It's last Wednesday, I'm cooking dinner, and since it is 83 degrees in my house, I am not exactly bundled up! I had planned to make a nice dinner for us, and purchased groceries to make salad, mashed potatoes, asparagus, and steaks. It was going to be awesome, but apparently the Doom Millipede wasn't having it.

Let's not forget the laziness factor contributing to my misery. Since I only have three pots, I SHOULD plan my meals carefully enough to make sure I don't need one of them twice. This particular night, I planned to mash a metric fuckton of potatoes, because you can never have enough mashed potatoes. My huge pot was in use by some crappy invented soup we made last week. I didn't feel like washing it out and discarding the junk, so I decided I would use my two small pots for the night, and just "make it work".

The potatoes/onion/garlic mixture barely fit into my pot, and I had to pour some of the water out once during the cooking because it was boiling over onto the stove. Surprisingly, this is not the part where I failed at life.

My asparagus was cut, but not short enough to fit into my smallest pot of boiling water on the back burner. At least, not without some force! After I dropped the stalks into the boiling water, my laziness came back to taunt me in the form of uncovered asparagus heads!

Because of the shock to my system, I barely remember what happened next. I know I stuck one of my cooking utensils in the pot to either stir the asparagus or to push the stalks down into the water.

Whatever I did, the asparagus was not happy. Just then, a boiling splash of water leaped across the stove from the back burner, and scalded me directly on the right can. Yes, ladies, you heard that correctly. And I do mean ALL of it.

I remember making three high-pitched squeals that sounded like a dog getting run over by a bicycle, and raced over to the faucet to douse my second-degree burns in cold water. I heard Sean just about fall out of his chair racing in from the office, where I'm sure the sight he met with was pretty interesting. But I have to give him credit, he was a total prince while taking care of the sniveling, hysterical wreck that I had become.

I was totally distraught, and my mind and body were a wreck, but somehow I managed to finish dinner with a frozen pie tin stuck to my chest.

And it was DAMN delicious!