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.

An Ode to My Unconscious

I sometimes dream. Perhaps, I always dream and I only sometimes remember my dreams. Either way, those times I do recall my REM experiences, boy, are they spectacular.

In my psychological anthroplogy class we were required to read a bit of Freud. During that time I was also required to keep a dream journal. The dreams I recorded therein were not the best I have to offer. But they were a good sampling platter of how my unconscious makes no sense whatsoever. I think I've actually since misplaced that journal (or it's tightly packed away somewhere just like all my other latent thoughts and desires), but I do have a running list of my top 5 in my head at all times, disclosed below.

Disclaimer: Most of these involve random famous people whom I have never met, or even care to meet (or so I thought....)

1. Back in the day, sans children and pre-Sinead O'Connor hair, Britney Spears made an appearance in one of my dreams (which I actually tend to categorize as more of a premonition, but let's move on). I was attending a Press Conference put on by Ms. Spears and her mother, who was her manager. Her mother was proceeding to tell us that in order to revamp Britney's trashy image, she was going to have two children out of wedlock, by two different men. Of course, we in the press were like "Huh?" Suffice it to say that Britney did go on to have two children, though not out of wedlock nor by different men, but still. This proves my gift. If only I can harness this gift and turn it into something worthwhile.

2. Next, I was once married to the rapper Eminem. I recall going on tour with him and hanging out with his daughter Haley who was my step daughter. His ex-wife Kim was also tagging along. The best part was that Eminem and I, though married, slept in separate twin beds just like Lucy and Ricky. See, my dreams are even G-rated! My grandma would be proud.

3. Another time I hung out with my old pal, Jack Nicholson. And by old I mean cause he's old. But as part of a seeming routine, we met up at a playground to hang out. This was not just any playground however. This was a playground built for adults. Everything was to scale for adults. But it still closely resembled the old wooden playground at my elementary school which was full of nooks and crannies to crawl through. Fantastic.

4. I once was set to fight Darth Vader. What was even more bizarre was that it was taking place in a cultural hall stage/gymnasium at an LDS church building. There was a cargo net suspended over the stage which was what we were supposed to climb across to fight - with light sabers, of course. This seemed wholly unfair to me since I am not a skilled light saberer nor a cargo net climber. I was upset I didn't have time to practice, so I ended up skipping out and hiding in a janitor's closet. I am not ashamed cause I think it was just an unfair match to begin with...moving on.

5. Just a couple days ago, I dreamt I was babysitting a red headed boy of about 7 years old. He had this amazing head of rich, wavy auburn hair. The weird part for me was that we were laying in the meadow that used to be behind my house growing up until they built a house there. It was a nice spring day and I guess we were just watching clouds or something. There was a cameo by one of the cavemen from the Geico commericals that walked by. Then I turned to this boy, during our alleged heart to heart and said, "You've got some great hair. Just promise me you won't become Carrot Top, ok??" Best advice I've ever given.

I can't wait to go to sleep tonight....

Freaks flock together. And we flock to the freaks.

I love Cirque du Soleil. This last time I went though, I couldn't help thinking about it as a freak show. It's full of contortionists, trapeze swingers, gravity defying crazy people, tightrope walkers, stilt walkers and catapultists*. In the words of Arrested Development, these are not "everyday people." I don't even know how one becomes a suitable candidate for the Cirque. I mean I knew people who took gymnastics growing up, but as far as I recall, there weren't any contortionist classes around. Cause c'mon, if there were I totally would have signed up.

Now, granted, I've never been to an actual freak show. And really I'm quite certain freak shows really don't exist anymore (something to do with being all P.C. and for human rights and what not...Psh). Now I get that the Cirque performers do not have freakish body deformities or other oddities. We're not going to Cirque du Soleil to stare at the bearded lady or the albino twins as it was with the side shows of the past. But I can't help but wonder if these Cirque performers are also somewhat of "outsiders" as well. They perform such unique and sometimes bizarre feats that most people wouldn't even dream of doing. They spend their days practicing balancing on top of a tower of 18 chairs or doing a flip on stilts off a catapult while I and many other people sit at a desk/computer for 8 or more hours a day. For them, the norm is bicycles on tightropes and clowns and juggling while dancing in shiny silver disco ball-like pants and riding unicycles with a girl pretzel-ing around one's face. I also imagine all the performers having crazy bonfires together in their spare time and instead of mingling at someone's house party talking of politics and The Hills, they have crazy break dance fights and contests to see who can juggle the most turkeys while bouncing on a trampoline.

Really, I think the freaks have got it all figured out. At $80 and up per person for the Cirque and sold out shows all over, these freaks are laughing at US all the way to the bank. And I am more than just a wee bit jealous.


* I'm making these names up.

Disclaimer: I mean "freaks" in the loving/carefree sense of the word.