A late-night confession that didn't make it

I wrote this little piece on my phone last night, resting in the most uncomfortable position one can possibly contort themselves into on a loveseat.

I need a Funday

I'm posting this from my phone because my roommmate is doing un-Christian things to Lea in my room. I hate Thursday nights. I basically do work all night and get done around 2am to find that my entire suite is drunk, someone if not several people are mad at me, and it's too late to have any fun myself. If there was a day of the week I didn't have to consciously experience, it'd be Thursday.

And looking back without the glimmer of spite I had at the moment, it's still true. I really do hate Thursday nights. Admitting defeat after I get back from finishing work, I usually just want to hit the hay and wake up and it finally be Friday. But the fact is that God, or Satan, or some vengeful deity has it out for me in spades and turns the 90s into a giant rap-riddled brothel at 2:01am. A rap-riddled brothel is no place to get good, healthy sleep.

Then comes the barrage of questions about where I was all night. I can guarantee it wasn't a fun place, and they know where I was, but drunk people love to make idle conversation. Especially when all I want to do is be drunk and have as much fun as everyone else. Meh.

The other sad part about all this is that come Friday morning, no one really has to own up to anything they said or did because, as the classic retort goes, "they were drunk." Things you say while drunk may not phase other drunk people, but they do phase the sober. And the sober tend to remember things. I will continue to contend that if you're not emotionally stable enough to present yourself in a respectful manner when drunk, you should probably stay out of my life. Well, maybe not my life, but stay out of my face for the night.

Because I hate rude people.

I know I came across spiteful and pithy up there but, fuck, I'm in a very weird mood right now. I think it's a culmination of getting no sleep, the yo-yo effect of cutting down on my tobacco intake, and just generally feeling left out of my group of friends right now. You know I'm in a weird mood when I'm actually writing about these sort of things on the Internet.

A pink slip for my morning classes and other random thoughts

Too bad half of my Wednesday classes are in the afternoon or I could totally be reaping the benefit of Rice/Houston going all fuck-shit-ass and canceling morning classes on account of the freezing rain we're apparently experiencing. I think it's funny that anywhere north of Kansas would probably be killing for this kind of weather right now but hey, no on expects Houston to be ready to salt the 610 Loop after a cold and rainy night.

I de-lofted my bed and put up my X-mas prints. Check it.


I still can't say I have the most exciting or the most dazzling room in all of college-dom, but you can only put so many nice things in a room run by Kyle and Louie before things start spontaneously breaking, exploding, or melting.

I'm already fairly guilty of doing something that I said I wouldn't do anymore: losing touch. I haven't talked to hardly anyone back in PCB since I left, including my own mom. Stupid stupid stupid! But my mom did tell me that I won a scholarship and that my brother got all A's. I loves me some good news.

I've started to notice that people just love to complain about the amount of attention they're getting, myself included. If it feels like the whole world is just sort of, you know, ignoring me then I fall into a funk and go all emo. But on the same token, I also hate feeling like all eyes are on me no matter the reason. I've sort of felt both ways as of late. I hate being a spectacle but I also hate being an anonymous shadow. Hmmph... I'll think more about that one and get back to you.

Still haven't shipped Christmas presents. Fuck.

Finally, here's a few pictures of Zach Braff to make everyone feel a little better about themselves.

And how are classes going, DOUCHE?

So glad you asked.

I was originally signed up for eighteen hours this semester because in all of Kyle's infinite wisdom he figured that he could actually handle that sort of work load. You know, because weekly problem sets in Intro to EE II, Waves and Photonics, and Intro to Computer Engineering on top of a total of twelve novels in my English distribution courses sounds like a great way to spend my time here at Rice. I guess I was a bit naive, though I tend to be dumb from time to time.

I'm totally dropping the harder of my two English classes and saving a pass-fail for next year. That'll drop me down to a paltry fifteen hours and still put me ahead of the game for the year. I'm so glad I took 17 hours last semester!

Steve Jobs pooped out the iPhone today. As much as I hate Steve Jobs for popularizing the concept of being a douchebag about the technology you own, you have to admit that the iPhone is pretty damn sexy. My question would be, of course, why NO ONE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE. Is it really that hard to shit out some existing technology built on a full-size touchscreen and gloss it over with shiny black plastic? Put me in a room with a pen and paper and tell me I can't leave until I come up with a genuinely original, money making piece of unique technology that will sell billions of units. It would honestly take me two hours.

Not that I think I'm smarter than, say, the entire staff at Microsoft which birthed an MP3 player based on buzzwords.

Let's see... let's see... what else...

Reality is really raining on the parade I had prepared for myself about this coming semester. Things have been going fairly well thus far but, dammit, a lot of things could be going a whole lot better. I'd love to talk more about my emotions on my blog but it's too popular and I import it into Facebook. This thing is for making people laugh and just slighting hinting at the fact that I am in fact a person with feelings.

It's sort of hard to take me seriously on here, anyway. If I said something like "I cried today" or "I have an honest fear that someone I live with might stab me in my sleep because I'm always an asshole," you wouldn't know whether I was joking or serious. I should probably start writing in my see-cret journal. It's got lots of hearts and ponies doodled in the margin.

Or maybe I'm just not playing enough Pokemon.

I can say, however, that I am in the middle of some very intense litigation with my former husband Ben Churchwell. You should poke him so I can win child custody. Just don't poke him too much: we're still in an open relationship.

Oh man, I totally forgot you could link pokes. I should take advantage of that more often... giggle giggle.

People say I look very, very dressed up when I put on the sweaters I got for Christmas. To them, I pass on this classic Weezer lyric.

If you want to destroy my sweater
hold this thread as I walk away

Houston Cares

It's a lazy Sunday by anyone's typical definition. I woke up around 2:30 to find that Mikey and Dayna were back from whatever and that the 90s ensemble is once again complete. Good thing, too, because we only have a week to plan for this little shindig we're throwing.

Reality about the coming semester is starting to sink in slowly. Eighteen hours of reality plus a good, healthy dose of social snafu and dammit, I have to mail my family's Christmas presents to them sometime before March. I think this semester's book cost, even if I drop one of my English classes, is going to come out to somewhere between $400 and $FUCK. I'll hit up the Amazon tomorrow and see if I can find some better prices than the Rice Rape Dungeon bookstore.

I truly have enjoyed these last carefree days before the semester starts, though. Nothing but YouTube during the day and drunken stupor during the nights. I've decided I can concede defeat and admit myself to be a YouTube whore but only because Google owns YouTube. Speaking of Google, if you spend any amount of time at all browsing, say, journals and blogs and stupid shit like that then boy do I have the tool for you. Google Reader. It's all rather self-explanatory, but basically it takes in RSS feeds and spits them all out on one page. It's a lot easier than having a big-ass list of bookmarks.

The upbeat of the past two weeks is starting to waver again. Someone help me keep tempo.

Ah, Funny.

Finally, one of my editor-in-chief columns from the high school newspaper.

America: home of apple pie, Wednesday night board games with the family, the Boys and Girls Club, and Sesame Street. The United States is definitely the pinnacle of moral values and innocence in the world, right? We have Elmo and Kermit teaching kids that name-calling is reproachable and that fun stems from cooperation. We have radio evangelist James Dobson working to get that heathen homosexual SpongeBob SquarePants off of the airwaves. And we have President George Bush instituting that the United States will not fund groundbreaking scientific innovations for the sake of moral justice.

That's all gravy, except that we're smearing blood in the faces of Islamic prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, making them unclean, and thus denying them their salvation. We're also wrapping prisoners in the Israeli flag and forcing them to soil themselves. Oh, and how can I forget the women interrogators who tease and touch these purported Islamofascists, again to make them unclean in the face of their god. These gems are just a few of new allegations that are leaking from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Iraqi and Afghani rebels are held indefinitely and interrogated in non-accordance with the Geneva Convention.

I'm rather bothered by the fact that Americans hold their noses high in the face of other countries. There's nothing wrong with America having a moral compass but there's a clear double standard at work. We contend to be leaps and bounds ahead of Europe and the Middle East when it comes to values, yet we stack pyramids of nude Iraqi prisoners and take pictures. We make excuses for some of the most abominable acts in human rights history--- stuff that makes Chinese water torture look like a trip to Shipwreck Island. If those acts of torture really are comparable to “frat jokes,” I'm suddenly really, really scared of college.

Some right-wing zealots are quick to condone this behavior, pointing to the images of smoldering towers on 9-11; “they get what they deserve.” The war in Afghanistan to unseat the Taliban and al Qaeda was more than justified by any pretense of the word. Last time I checked, though, thousands of Iraqi and Taliban soldiers were dead and even more maimed. Our revenge has been had many, many times over. I would go so far to say that the revenge has even been exacted on innocent people. Maybe I could live with torturing the hijackers themselves and the higher-ups behind the terrorist attack in order to protect America, but I could never condone torturing a group of prisoners simply because they belong to the same religion and live in the same part of the world.

My favorite argument when it comes to torture, the one that makes me double-take like Daffy Duck, is “at least we're not as bad as [blank],” with the blank being filled with Nazis or the Taliban or the Iraqi insurgency. I'm sorry: America should try its darnedest to be the exact opposite of Nazis, not a notch or two below. No, we're not the Taliban: we're not beheading innocent hostages or driving car-bombs into hospitals. But on the continuum of really bad things, I'd say that renouncing someone's assumed salvation is almost as bad.

"No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” That's what the Fifth Amendment says. “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.” That's what the Geneva Convention says. Those aren't really hard rules to follow.

Enter Alberto Gonzalez, President Bush's nominee for attorney general. Just like his predecessor, John Ashcroft, Gonzalez sees no problem in placing “terrorists” outside of the Geneva Convention's rules and regulations for prisoner treatment. Gonzalez is also very vocal about extending the rights of interrogators to a broad, almost “whatever means necessary” plan. To anyone who voted (or supported) Bush's re-election campaign, realize you may be a small part responsible for the appointment of a repackaged Dr. Joseph Mengele. You may be, with the tiniest sliver of guilt, responsible for unspeakable atrocities performed on wrongly-convicted prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

I realize that the American military has a job to do in defending this country. I also realize that the United States tries to make strides in defining and protecting the morals of its citizens. Heck, most American voters back in November made their decision based on the “moral values” of each candidate. Maybe we should step back and think about what those morals really are. Maybe, just maybe, those morals aren't all invested in one political party.

Panama City Beach: A great place to live when I turn 28

I'm coming to realize that a town's worth depends heavily on its ability to provide me with every type of food, garment, man-made plastic object, and huffing aerosol I can conceive at all hours of any given day In Houston, for example, I might have the following conversation with my roommate, Louie:

Kyle: Hey, Louie, you wanna go get some Thai food, a codpiece, a few vintage Happy Meal Transformers, and some oven cleaner?
Louie: Well, it is only 3AM on Easter Sunday.
Kyle: Exactly.

I've been spoiled pretty good by Houston in this sense. Being home on break and sitting around until the asscrack of dawn on New Years Day with nothing to do but complain about the town in which I was raised, I also realize that Panama City is slowly growing into a town that I may--one day-- actually enjoy flying over.

New Attractions in PCB Since The Summer:

Target/Starbucks

This is the biggest thing to hit the beach since WCW Nitro visited back in 2001. Literally a mile from my house is a grand, brand-new Target outlet store with a nice little Starbucks nestled inside. Approximately half if not all of my graduating class is working there, as well as my brother's graduating class and the class between my brother's and mine. They've also got middle school kids scraping those quarter-sized black things off the sidewalk outside the store. Just another way to keep one step ahead of Wal-Mart, I guess.

Besides scooping up the youth of the city like some bizarre, red pied piper, Target also plays the role of "anchor business" for the developing retail outlet around it, known as Pier Park. I didn't come up with that phrase "anchor business,"by the way, but it's real real clever tagline for a bustling business in a coastal community. Apparently the Pier Park project is so ass-backwards and behind schedule, they're depending on a Target to attract businesses such as the Gap and Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville. Hah... it's kind of like a big target.

I guess there's not a whole lot of remarkable information about the new Target besides the fact that it gives credibility to this dink-hole of a town. The Starbucks is nice and it affords all the mascara-donning emotrash that run the local high school to feel better about themselves when they want to go somewhere trendy for their lunch break. Thanks a lot, brain, for letting me ramble for three paragraphs before you realize there's actually nothing to talk about.

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Okay well... let's pretend I didn't write any of that, except for the jokes you laughed out loud at. I know you did, too, because my heart skips a beat anytime anyone in the world finds something moderately funny about what I write..