Oh NO

I used to think that owning an umbrella meant I was a grown-up.

In my defense, it was an extremely rad umbrella: an impressively spring-loaded implement in a mature, steely-gray.  I was a freshman in college, and I wrote a whole essay about it (for fun, by the way, just on my computer one day. Aside from being stupid, I was also a mega-dork. Not like now, when I write in a BLOG which is so very very different from an essay in a Word Doc.). I loved this umbrella so much, that I had a recurring nightmare that it would be taken from me at an airport security gate, robbing me of my very obvious super-adulthood.

Eventually, I realized that when you eat all of your meals in a cafeteria - and two-thirds of said meals consist of cereal and soft-serve ice cream - you are not an adult. But the foolishness did not end there.

I then moved on to thinking that cleaning your own bathroom (occasionally) marked the true gateway to adulthood. I laughed at my former, umbrella-revering self as I swept the tiles of the sorority house bathroom. Of course, that was also the period of my life when I thought that building wizard staffs from cans of cheap beer and then puking into bushes was a great way to spend my Saturday nights. This made me a TOTALLY FUN (well, until the puking) person, but maybe not a particularly grown-up-type person.

Now, though, I think I have cracked the true code of adulthood: I have run out of things to be angry about. The magic of youth, wherein I could rattle off 300 word tirades about a new HORRIBLY STUPID THING THAT SHOULD NEVER EXIST each week, has scattered like a pile of glitter confetti in a windstorm (or some other sad simile...). I have left that magical land behind and zoomed straight to old-crotchety-person-who-complains-about-the-same-thing-over-and-over-again-hood.

And you, dear reader, are left saying, "Yes, Great Auntie Thelaurenbell, we know the New York Times is full of idiots - you told us that 800 times!" and "People are annoying! Especially when they are doing crazy math and somehow 4 of them manage to take up 10 subway seats! Yes! Is it time for your nap?" 

So here's the thing: how to reclaim that halcyon era when, every time I left my house, a new thing so enraged me that I had to scream it to the Internets? Is there a magical fountain of youth anger out there somewhere? Do I just have to start leaving my house more? Or (NO!) reading the Times again (I tried this morning - all I could get out of it was, "The French don't keep statistics on race? Umm...what? That seems silly." Silly! That's the best I could do!)?

This is what it means to be old. The sitcoms tell me that, usually, when people get old and boring, they lose interest in sex and going out to dinner, thus leading to hilarious, half-hour-long standoffs with their significant others. For me, the issue is far more personal, and more grave. Dinner? Sex? PSHAW - where is my righteous indignation?

Cleaning Day

Today is cleaning day. It's always interesting to see just how much filth you've been living in.

We have soap scum; that's a given, and I was prepared for it. I was not prepared for soap scum IN COLORS. I watch TV. I've seen the horror movie-lite commercials starring soap scum as a ravenous world-destroyer and bane of moms everywhere, and I've seen said soap scum depicted in a variety of ways: claymation, animation, very scientific microscope close-ups, but I've never seen it depicted in orange. Most of ours is very orange, though we do have some lovely blacks, greens and clear-ishes as well.

Never fear, dear readers -- I've eradicated the orange plague for now. Everything on our floor is another story, however.

Through some fault of mop, mop liquid or mop-handler, all the dirt, hair and flotsam that was once on our floor is...still on our floor, now stuck there under a shiny, tacky layer of cleaner. It's like the world's worst decoupage project, preserving all the elements of our life that we'd much rather forget.

I stopped caring about real-life, so now I have to care about blog life again

Hey! Remember that time I had a blog? And it was so funny and witty and everyone loved it and read it every day? That was fun!

But then I discovered the sordid pleasures of TV and yoga and eating dinner while sitting -- with people! -- instead of hunched over at my desk (I guess technically still sitting), and the whole enterprise went to HELL. I apologize.

Now, though, I have a dog -- a furry poop machine of my very own -- and I cannot be bothered with "people" or "exercising" or "actually putting on clothes before walking into broad daylight."

Today, which was only day three of the Great Puppy Experiment, I left my apartment at 6:30 in the morning wearing flipflops, my boyfriend's old basketball shorts and a tank top that was not built to withstand the harsh rays of the sun. I actually spoke with another human being looking that, while holding a massive handful of steaming dog poo. No, no, I haven't lost all shame -- it has been ripped from me like the arm of a medieval torture victim (you know, when they do that thing with the horses running in different directions? no?), and I will never get it back.

That's okay, though. If there's one thing I have learned from perusing the World Wide Web, it's that shame can only hold you back. Now that I no longer care about real-life, I can focus all my efforts on the secret, sexy life of Internet superstarletawesomeperson thelaurenbell. You're welcome.

Pathetic Thought of the Day

I was in the shower this morning (woo!), thinking about the exciting day ahead: the inane e-mails, the pointless phone calls, the repeated bashing of my head against my desk as I wondered what I was doing at this place.

Suddenly, I realized that all was not lost. "thelaurenbell," I said to myself, "Today is not just any old painfully tedious day; it's a painfully tedious Friday!"

"And that means only 3 more days until the new Gossip Girl!"

So went my personal pep talk this morning.

I am 23.

This is how I treat my friends...

Jolly just got a real freelancing writer job offer. That's really great. Here is how I congratulated him (via gchat because i'm an incredible friend.):

me: jolly, 1) that's awesome, congrats!
2) would you call someone who had gotten their foot sliced off "depedicated?"
i can't think of anyone else to ask that wouldn't get freaked out

John: haha
um . . . i don't know if that's a real word, but that sounds like what it would be

me: awesome
that's a load off my mind

Lucky for me, nothing disturbs Jolly anymore, so instead of trying to talk more about his awesome new job, he sends me this:

depeditate

/dee-ped'*-tayt/ [by (faulty) analogy with "decapitate"]
Humorously, to cut off the feet of.  When one is using some
computer-aided typesetting tools, careless placement of text
blocks within a page or above a rule can result in chopped-off
letter descenders.  Such letters are said to have been
depeditated.

(I was so close to being a word genius! Blast!)

me: humorously, eh?

John: haha

i think it's more of a media term

me: like, omg, that girl was just depeditated...ha

John: but it does mean to have the feet cut off

by a roller coaster!

John: HI-LARIOUS!

me: i'm going to coney island tonight

Thus did I, your trusty blog heroine, deftly turn the conversation away from my friend's great achievements (Bo-ring!) and towards an in-depth discussion of a Christopher Pike book that showed young and impressionable thelaurenbell all the horrible ways I could die at Coney Island.

That's what friends are for.

*(per Jolly's lightning-fast comment): I also made him read a lengthy description of a funhouse statue that is both projectile vomiting and suffering from explosive diarrhea. Really the only proper mental image to have when considering a job offer.

I'm actually not angry this time...also not really funny...

I've started reading Watership Down. No, I don't particularly like rabbits, and, yes, I am over the age of eleven. I picked it up in an effort to fix a bit of a problem I've been having: I cannot stop referencing this book.

For years now, every time I've seen anything featuring, or even resembling, rabbits, I have had the horrible compulsion to blurt out, "Ohmygod Ohmygod -- it's totally like Watership Down you guys!" The numerous occasions that communists, furry bands of animals, or some combination of the two, have made it into conversations with friends (you'd be surprised at how often this happens...or would you?), I HAD to bring up Hazel, Fiver and the gang. It's gotten so bad that, though this hasn't happened yet, I can assure you if I saw a ship on the water go down somewhere, I would certainly attempt a pun on everyone's favorite rabbit-based novel.

The weird part (aside from, you know, all those other parts I just talked about): I haven't even seen the book since I was about nine years old.

Watership Down is, in fact, just one in a long line of classic, beloved works of fiction that I recklessly, wantonly and probably erroneously bring up in my daily conversations.

The boss leaves our relatively youthful office alone for the day? Suddenly I'm making cracks about Lord of the Flies. I rushed through that one once, in a blind dash of terror, sometime around the 8th grade.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I have a bit more context for because I'm creepy and I've actually read the book (and seen the movie) recently, but that doesn't make it any less weird when I start growling about a trunk full of mescaline and a massive bat-fight in the desert.

Why have I let myself become this person? I think it's partly human nature - we like joining in the cultural conversation, embedding our lives into the bigger picture by picking up on things that are popular and connecting them to our own lives.

People reference stupid movies all the time. Because I enjoy getting beat up by common grade school thugs, I'm doing the same thing -- just with books. When you stand on a railing and scream, "I'm king of the world!" (or, more likely, unless you were a 14 year old girl when Titanic came out and you saw it 9 times in the theatre, some ridiculous bastardization like, "I'm on top of the world!" "I'm the king!" or "Fuck yeah!"), it's like me trying to sneak a Hemingway mention into conversation any time there's excessive drinking and manliness going on. You know what I'm going for, even if it's not dead-on.

If a book really is a cultural icon (and I hope to god that's still a possibility), is referencing one really that much lamer than quoting Anchorman for the billionth time? Sure, Gatsby may not be as endlessly amusing, but I'm betting he has many leather-bound books, and his home smells of rich mahogany.

And speaking of on-the-spot come-backs...

(and posting more often): Sometimes I wonder if there is something wrong with the way I was raised. I can never seem to interact with crowds and strangers appropriately; even simple, human reflexes, like saying "hello" or "thank you" dry up in my throat. I often find myself whispering to people, or worse, mouthing things at them. Imagine if a giant goldfish came up to you -- a check-out girl at the grocery store -- you might nod encouragingly as the goldfish gulped away at the air, but in the end, you would never know if the poor thing wanted cash back or was just making small talk about the weather. 

I don't remember any dark moment of my childhood that might have led to this extreme form of social anxiety. Maybe I was secretly raised by evil gypsies, forced to travel the land and deliver sub-par stand-up routines each night of my young life, and I just repressed it like any other unpleasant memory. I doubt it. Perhaps I spent too much time staring at Jim, my fish, or playing with Ninja Turtle dolls, and, like a child raised by wolves, lost any need for language. I don't know. 

It's only important that I discover the cause of this problem so that I can cure it. My inability to speak to strangers has, aside from causing small annoyances like not being able to order in bars, really cut down on the amount of biting sarcasm and well-deserved citizen citations that I can dole out. 

Example: I was standing in line at the worst Dunkin Donuts in the world, when I felt this tapping on my shoulder. I ignore it because who taps people at 9 AM before they've had their coffee? Children? I don't talk to them. The tapping continues, so I turn, and it's a full-grown lady, who tells me, "I could take your wallet right out of your purse!" I froze. Was this a threat? She went on, however, to tell me that she could see my wallet sitting inside my very large purse and that, if she were a thief, she could have grabbed it and been gone. 

I wanted to respond that the joke would be on her because then she'd be stuck with a raggedy wallet, an out-dated Georgia driver's license and a gift certificate to the GAP. But I couldn't tell her that. Nor could I tell her, "Don't worry -- this is just the decoy wallet, I keep my real wallet hidden from criminals like yourself." All I could do was make big eyes at her, nod and remove the wallet from my purse -- thereby keeping it safe in my grip of steel. That story isn't nearly as amusing as the one I imagined -- the one where I had a voice! 

 

There are many people in this world who need my particular brand of tough love. That woman needed someone to tell her that, while she though she was doing a public service, she was really just annoying me and providing fodder for a blog post. The asshole who sits on the stairs in the subway station needs to be told that stairs are for walking on.  The drunk ex-fratty who thinks that massaging your arm as he yells inanities at you will help him get you home from the bar needs to be told that I will stab him if he doesn't stop. If I have no voice, how can I tell these poor, misguided souls that what they are doing is, in fact uncalled-for and, also, that it makes everyone want throw them in a very deep pit? They need these warnings, and I need to cure this serious affliction. 

Suggestions, dear readers, are welcome. 

Life is soooo hard

Hey people. I don't know if anyone reads this blog anymore because I've been so awful about posting regularly. If you do still check occasionally, I'm sorry there has been not been a fresh supply of hilarious anecdotes and charming puns streaming forth from thelaurenbell. 

What can I say? One, I'm lazy. Two, cleverness cannot simply be tapped and harnessed like oil from a fresh Texan field. And, even if it can, I am, unfortunately, no Daniel Day Lewis from There Will Be Blood (does anyone actually remember his character's name in that? I'm pretty sure he was just playing himself.). If I were DDL, it probably wouldn't make any difference because I'd be too busy crushing people and being maniacal -- very time-consuming. 

As it is, I am simply thelaurenbell: a girl so un-clever that she couldn't even come up with a vaguely amusing blog title. No, I had to depend on the glorious cinematic masterpiece that is Maverick to supply my obscure and unrealistic blogger name (it' s the name of the boat, for you philistines who have yet to revel in the genius that puts Mel Gibson on a riverboat gambling binge with Jodie Foster). In fact, I have the same user name (and password, for all you identity thieves out there) for every possible online identity. And my password is definitely a carryover from seventh grade.  

Excuses aside -- I promise to post more often than I have been of late. Feel free to berate and belittle me if I don't. I probably won't be able to think of any good comebacks on the spot anyway.