Job : Boils :: Ashley : Roommates

Trash night is on Wed. nights at our house. Last week I took the trash out, and brought it back in, as the ritual goes. On Mon. night I see this note to me in the dining room:

Really?! Cause it's much more important that I go outside 2 days before the trash is supposed to go out and physically rotate the cans the optimal 180 degrees instead of my roommate doing it when it's actually her turn to take out the garbage. I probably saved her about 10 seconds of her life. (However, those 10 seconds were completely negated when she took at least that to write me that note.)

This was almost as bad as my previous roommate a couple years ago who said to me, "Ashley, when you take a shower, will you put the toilet seat lid down? I don't like it if I have to use the bathroom after you've showered and there's condensation on the toilet seat, even though I know it's just water."  

So now I'm thinking, I should start leaving notes too! My first one will be:
"Roomie -

Please turn all the soap dispensers in the house so that the spouts form right angles with the faucet handles, ensuring that my hand to dispenser trajectory is most efficient."

Disaster Date

Let me paint a picture for you. A picture of a disastrous date. I had to pinch myself to believe that this really happened, but this story will make me laugh for decades. The other day I bought two tickets to see Devendra Banhart at the 9:30 Club. My date was a guy I've been "seeing" for approx a month now. So we plan this date the day before. We meet up in DC. We grab a couple jumbo slices of pizza before the concert. He seems a little out of it. He mentions how he stayed up til 3 am the night before working on his resume cause he's fed up with his boss. So that morning he was feeling kinda stressed and decided to take an anti-anxiety pill he had gotten from a "friend"..hmmm. I forget the name of the pill. It started with a K. The pill definitely put him in a very mellow mood.

So after the concert we decide we'll watch a movie at his place. (GI Joe...horrible movie that even Channing Tatum can't save). I fall asleep. I wake up at the end of the movie and the TV is blaring. I look over and he is passed out next to me. So I shake him gently. Nothing. I shake him harder. Nothing. His drink is toppled over in his lap (luckily empty). He is officially PASSED OUT hardcore. I start to get a little concerned. What if I have to call the paramedics? And then they ask me what he took, and I have to say "I dunno, something with a K that he doesn't have a prescription for?" I start shaking him fervently. Still breathing. Check. He finally shows signs of life and kinda opens his eyes. He looks up at me and mumbles something about how we should check his pulse. My eyes got big and my own pulse I'm sure was starting to race. I was actually slapping his face a little to get him to wake up more. So once he's relatively awake, I help him stumble to bed as I support him since he can't stand by himself. He decides he needs to go to the bathroom. He goes in. Oh boy. After 3 minutes of no noise, I decide to check on him. I knock. Nothing. I have to go in. I find him sitting on the toilet with his upper body completely rag doll style plopped over and passed out again. I shake him some more. He wakes up and says, "You know what I'm most concerned about? The civilians." I nod and drag him over to his bed. (As an aside he works for the DoD doing Civilian policy so I guess it's not a completely outlandish comment.) He immediately throws himself on the bed face down and assumes a crouching position. As far as I can tell he's completely out. And so am I...

Dating Advice from an Aquabats Fan

Friday I sent an IM (aka a Spark as it's called at work) to a coworker to check on something for me. He responded at one point with a line from an Aquabats song, which I'm pretty much unfamiliar with, but happened to see live once in DC on a date. So I said, I've seen them live! thus spurring a further and quirky conversation with probably the quirkiest character that I work with.

Exhibit A:

Quirky: So yeah
Quirky: WHen did you see the Aquabats?
Me: hmm a few years ago
Ashley Gerber: at Nation. that club they closed in like SE
Ashley Gerber: i think
Quirky: I went to Nation quite a lot
Quirky: And I may have been at that show
Me: oh cool
Me: they put on a pretty entertaining show
Quirky: Got any of their albums?
Me: no. i hadn't listened to them before that concert. someone took me there. on a date haha
Quirky: Was it a first date?
Me: uhh, maybe? maybe like 2nd
Me: i think it was the first one
Me: and the last hahha
Quirky: Yeah, I can see that
Quirky: I love the Aquabats
Quirky: But I would have to have been seeing someone for like 6 months before I took them to one of their shows
Quirky: I would be like "Hey, I'm busy this night, but do you wanna get gelato Friday?"

So there you have it. Dating advice from an Aquabats fan. 

Ashley's Dating Rules

Oh, I've done some dating in my time. Thus and so, I have started a list of some dating mishaps. Not my mishaps; I'm perfect. Their mishaps. Duh.

My bladder should be smaller than yours. If you are a male over the age of 10, I think it's safe to say you shouldn't have to go to the bathroom an exponential number of times in an hour and a half long meal. Especially when I haven't even gone once and had the same amount to drink as you.

You're photosensitive, but you're not a vampire. Do you find yourself having to ask to switch seats because your chair is in direct twilight, yet you are neither an albino nor a vampire? Then please don't call me. (Actually if you are either of the latter, don't call me either...)

YOU have bad circulation?!? What a coincidence! So does my grandma!!! My grandma really does have bad circulation. I too have inherited this disease. I generally have subnormal body temperature and I freeze if it's under like 70 degrees. So if I'm not cold and you are, I question if you really do have a Y chromosome.

Cheap Feels. Grabbing my arm muscles to see how "strong" I am as a way to put your arm around me and/or grabbing my waist/hip/picking me up off the ground around my stomach a la King Kong = awkward. My uncomfortable levels really can go to 11.

This may need to be a running list. But for now, this will have to do.

Oh the irony...

So last week my roommate sent me the link to a mildly amusing website called passiveaggressivenotes.com. People upload pictures of, obviously, passive aggressive notes they either find or people write to them. So ironically enough, this morning I see this post it note on our door, posted by the same roommate. (The Miles Grant thing is a cut out of our friend's friend Miles who ran for a delegate position in our area and we use him as our little area to post notes to each other on our door).
In case it's too blurry, the note reads: "Miles Grant Says: 'I'm glad nothing happened in the house last night since the study window was wide open all night!'" She designated me as the official window closer at night since I am generally the last one to go to bed. And ooops I missed one! So now I must pay, passively of course.

Conversations with an 8 year old, via Gmail

My 8 year old niece recently got gmail and has since been sending me emails and chats. Below are the all-too-riveting conversations we are having. Why aren't we all this succinct? Please note these three messages were sent before I had a chance to respond to each separately, so I basically just responded to all simultaneously.

Subject: nothing [subject line was not blank, she actually wrote the word "nothing"]
Alicia: "hello,

how are you doing?"
Me: "Hi Alicia!
When did you get this email address? I'm doing well, how are you doing?
I'm done with school. Now I'm just working.
When are you done with school?"
Alicia: "I'm done with school on Brandons birthday.
I got my email address on the 16th.
I'm doing fine."

Subject: nothing [again]
Alicia:"Hello Ashley cherryblossom,
I'm just wondering how you are doing?"
Me: "Hi Alicia,
Why am I Ashley cherryblossom??"
Alicia: "I dont now?"

Alicia: hi AshleyI was just wondering how school is

Listography

I received a small raise at work this week. Yes, yes, thank you, thank you. I'm slowly climbing my way up the corporate ladder if you will. It can only get better up there, since I'm already getting a plethora of free food and tshirts. So when I make lots of money (because according to the woman who read my palm 2 years ago I will be a billionaire someday), here are a list of things I want:

1. A Great Dane. This gigantic, yet gracefully beautiful creature, necessitates a large living space and plenty of food and luxury canine accoutrements. I think having a Great Dane was like the status symbol of sorts in the pre-car era, akin to owning a Cadillac.

2. A trampoline floor, in a room with padded walls and tall ceilings of course. Rumor has it Bill Gates has one. It'd be at least 7 times more awesome than Tom Hanks' trampoline in Big.

3. No stairs in my house. Just escalators. Why? Because I can. And also for the excessively long hallways in my huge home there will be people movers like in the airport/NGA. This is also a good investment for when I become old and mobility-challenged.

4. Aquarium tunnel. I can't remember if it's at the Baltimore Aquarium or not, but you stand on a people mover (see above) and are effortlessly maneuvered through an amazing aquarium tunnel as if you were underwater yourself! Fish and sharks etc glide over your head. Children cower. Old people drool and point. It's fantastic.

5. A fireman's pole. I will make my children slide down this for dinner when I ring the dinner bell. Call me old school.

6. I'm going to pull the world's top marine engineers away from their important work. Then I will put them to work figuring out how to create some private islands in the form of a palm tree out in the middle of the ocean. This would merely require spending billions of dollars importing sand and rocks and shooting them out into the water almost futilely - oh wait, Dubai beat me to it!

7. A Segway. Don't judge.
My inspiration:

Where my hoes [sic] at???

So at work, I look at lots of custom designed t-shirt orders. Generally they are boring: So and So's family reunion, So and So's "Fling Before the Ring" (or some other cutesy rhyme about getting hitched), Such and Such sports team, etc. However, peppered within the boring ones are some sparkling nuggets of craziness. I oft come across blatant sexual references, or perhaps just an innuendo. There are orders with curse words, orders that are anti-Obama, orders that are artsy, orders that are hideous and poorly designed, and orders that are just silly and or quite clever.

When I first started back in August/September, I was unfamiliar to the gamut of material I might see and how I should proceed. Well, turns out we totally just support the First Amendment, so pretty much anything goes if it's what our customer wants. One of the first orders I got that taught me this went something like this:

A particular group of saxophone players at a university in Arizona made some t-shirts, I guess to commemorate their group's inside jokes and what not. On the back of the shirt was a list of their top ten quotes. It was a barrage of bad grammar, misspellings and bad punctuation, not to mention chock full of multiple swear words. I pulled a coworker aside to see if we actually would print this, and he just laughed and said yeah, and that I should go through each of the ten lines and pull out edits for grammar/punctuation and have our customer service reps call the customer to see if they wanted us to change those things. So my list for customer service was something like, "Should we capitalize 'bitch' in line 7, since they capitalized 'Whore' in line 6? Should we put a comma after 'Fuck' in line 3 or before 'shithead' in line 4?"

The best however was their spelling of "Hoe," to which they made some malicious statement. And I don't care that Urban Dictionary says it could be spelled either way, because as far as I and Merriam-Webster are concerned, this spelling refers to a...gardening tool.

Eventually the customer told our service rep, "NO! DON'T change ANYTHING on our shirt." So we proceeded to have this shirt printed and somewhere in Arizona there are multiple people walking around with angry commands aimed at gardening tools. I mean, while I would much rather prefer to initiate delicate communication with a "hoe," at times I find it is necessary to perhaps speak with aggressive tones and slightly raised voice towards the aforementioned "hoe."

God Bless America.

Don't Fear the Reaper, Fear the Rascal!

Dreams seem to be a good blog topic. I'd love to hear anyone's interpretation of this gem:

Last week, I dreamt I was trying to park my car in a rather full parking lot. It was nighttime, and I had two friends in the car with me. I pulled into part deux of the parking lot (like the overflow section) and finally see an open spot. I'm pulling towards this spot head on. Still a decent distance away from the spot, I see an old man on a Rascal scooter scoot his way across this spot. Then he actually stops right in front of this ONLY open parking spot. Oh, nooo he didn't!!!

But he did.

Then he and the scooter fell over. I gasped in horror and sadness and was about to take action of some sort. But before I could do anything, he leapt up from the ground and bounded toward my car at superhuman speed/strength (not unlike zombies do in that zombie movie with Will Smith, or any other movie about the "undead..."). Luckily I reacted fast enough to lock the car doors before he was able to open them, and I floored it forward into the grass just to get away. The End.

Mildly disturbing? Perhaps. Now I really question those 80-something Rascals...and their scooters too.