I was a spirited child. I know because I once found a book in my parents' room called Raising Your Spirited Child. (Oh look, it's on Amazon!) I confronted my mom about it much later and she for some reason denied that the book had anything to do with me. I was like, "Uh...I'm your only kid, and I'm spirited, not special needs." Anyway, I suspect one of the possible motives she could have had for owning such a book had to do with the fact that I constantly kept her up at night with kind of irrational fears. Of course there were the expected fits of fear, like when I was 6 and read the entire Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark trilogy in the afternoon and slept with the light on for like, a year. But some of them were more difficult to relate to my peers. I'm sure we all had those, here are some of mine:




-Robespierre and his Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. In a French class I remember our teacher telling us about him and how everyone who “spoke against him” was beheaded. I raised my hand and asked, “What if you said something bad about him when he wasn’t around?”, certain that I had found a loophole. Unfortunately, the teacher responded with “He had spies.”

Basically what I got out of the story was that Robespierre’s spies would come take you out of bed at night and behead you if you said anything bad about them and I was terrified this would happen to me. Never mind the fact that they had all been dead since 1794 and I had better things to do than gossip about one of the left-wing bourgeoisie leaders of the French Revolution. But yeah. (Don't even get me started on the painting of Marat after he was stabbed in the bathtub by Charlotte Corday. It made me nauseous and it made me worry that someone was going to stab me in the bathtub even though years later, I watched Psycho and fell asleep halfway through.)



-Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Soon after our second grade teacher played this movie for our class I grew terrified when passing any woman wearing gloves. My friend, who had a lot of information about witches that she pulled out of her ass but that I still believed, told me that a witch couldn’t touch a child if they had a cross around their neck, and once you turned 12, a witch couldn’t harm you at all. So I decided I would have to wear a cross around my neck for five years, but it seemed a small price to pay. Anyway, I wore this one tiny cross necklace my grandmother gave to me and never took it off, ever. Everyone thought I was so religious and they were all fascinated that I never took this cross off my neck. I took it off for the first time the summer before third grade, I think. It was a huge deal. Speaking of people thinking I was religious,

-Going to hell. Yeah, it's kind of morbid, and I don't know where it started. At first thought it might be from the possible trickle-down economics of Catholic guilt starting from my grandparents, but I think it had more to do with a) kids at school running around making people "swear to God" about things that weren't true, and then announcing that the offending party would now be going to hell when they died, and b) some teacher telling me that God could hear your thoughts. Gee, thanks, that was pretty much the only private place I had left and some crone was making me feel protective and guilty over them. Years later at a friend's house, I noticed an "OCD Workbook" on a coffee table and discovered that there was actually a name for this. Scrupulosity. I was so, so excited. (random note: for any of you who enjoy jack chick tracts, this site makes me pee with laughter)



-THE SPHINX. I know it was all the way in Egypt and everything, but the idea of it eating people who didn’t know the answer to that stupid question terrified me. What a bitch. It wasn't even that clever of a riddle.

-Someone climbing into my window. I think this was a fear planted by my cousin (sorry, Julianna), when in the midst of all the stranger-danger hysteria she told me that "sometimes strangers will climb in windows". The fact that it had actually happened around that time didn't soothe my panic. If I was laying in bed awake at night and heard any type of creak, I would become paranoid that someone was climbing up a ladder to my bedroom. What delusions of grandeur I had and still do have. My mom tried to talk to me about it and said that when she was little, she used to be terrified of dogs and had an irrational fear that a dog was lurking in her closet and would come out and attack her. "Then my mother bought me a stuffed animal dog," she continued, "and it made me feel better." Pause. "Do you...want me to buy you a stuffed window?" No Mom, you would have to buy me a stuffed freaky looking pedophile that I could cuddle at night and slowly view as a friend instead of a fear. Maybe one who looks like Elizabeth Smart's kidnapper.



He is absolutely terrifying looking. To this day, I have a fear of seeing a face in a window or glass door, and it's not even about them coming inside. I just know that the minute I see such a thing, I will freeze, have a heart attack, and collapse. And die. If you're my friend and are thinking "Oh, this would be a funny prank", stop, because I won't laugh because I'll be dead.


-ZZ Top. What? Now that I think about it, they all look like Elizabeth Smart's kidnappers and I would be very upset to see any of their faces at my window, I don't care if the song "Legs" was apparently written about my friend's mom's friend.




I also pretty much freaked out the first time I saw this movie because I remember having an extremely similar conversation with my parents with them reacting in an extremely similar manner. Mainly the homework part. Maybe they bought Raising Your Spirited Child after that.

I'm done. If any of you guys are still here, tell me about your embarrassing childhood fears.

today i woke up and saw that i had 5 missed calls from my mom and i knew it had to be something bad so i was scared to call her back. gilligan died from an ear tumor at around 5:00 this evening and to quote one richard brautigan, i feel like a sewing machine that's just finished sewing a turd to a garbage can lid.

gilligan was always especially special to me. i brought him home around this time exactly 4 years ago, partially to fill the hole in my heart after the death of the dog i'd had since i was 4, and partially because i just love small furry rodents. he was the sweetest, most gentle animal and looked like a fat squirrel without a tail. he had a yellow belly and whenever i would take him out and feed him carrots he would climb up onto my shoulder and around my neck. one of my recurring nightmares is something awful happening to one of my pets and it still feels like i'm not awake yet.


rest in peace my sweet baby.
2005-2009


baby gilligan


(middle!)






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you know that book the game? and how dudes who read it and follow it call themselves "pick-up artists" that are members of some loltastic "seduction community"? (i'm gonna use a lot of links here, bear with me.) i always heard about it online and briefly saw part of the reality tv show based on it. or something. i think it mainly operates under the "women are attracted to assholes" axiom, and the fatal flaw is that they fail to pinpoint exactly which kind, but i don't feel like getting into it because no one cares.
"the pick-up artists" suggests that you "give a really hot girl backhanded compliments and talk to her friends instead of her!!!" and "approach her and offer to read her palm! wear something memorable! women will find you mysterious!" dude, we can see through all of this. it is embarrassing to all parties involved, and needs to be stopped. the best/worst part about this is

a) the fact that men are actually taking serious advice from this guy:




and b) watching some poor misguided soul actually attempt to execute these suggestions. i had the pleasure of being on the receiving end this summer and had a good LOL about it afterwards but not right then because i was incredibly grouchy already. it's humid outside, i'm taking a horrible class (microbiology is just not my thing) which pretty much requires me to reverse my entire summer sleeping schedule, my boyfriend is out of continent, and some dudes who couldn't have been more than a few inches taller than me/a girl with ugly tattoos tried to pick a fight with me, shelby and conor outside by throwing around the word "prep", which i haven't heard since 2000 probably. come on, at least update your vernacular to 2004 or 05 and call us hipsters. meet us halfway.

anyway, especially given these circumstances, if i am sitting at the bar with two of my friends, the last thing i want is some dude seriously wearing basically the hat in the second picture saddling up next to me and assuming that the way into my pants is through vague "magic" tricks that i read in an issue of highlights for children in the dentist's office when i was eight.

him: "do you believe in mind reading?"

me: "what? not really."

him: "okay. think of a number."

me: "...."

him: "now multiply it by 9."

me: "um, i know how this works."

him: "okay, now add the digits."

me: "no, i know this trick, it's not really mind reading."

him: "okay, wait. um, think of a country that starts with d."

my brain: oh my god, he's...he's trying to do the game.

me: "no orange kangaroos in denmark. i know."

him: "okay, now think of a color, no wait, i messed it up..."

me: "oh my god, how did you know?!?!?! let me turn towards you and change my body language so that it is open and inviting. tell me more about myself! women LOVE hearing about themselves. also, astrology!"

nah, not really. just like with the kid who sat next to me in eighth grade spanish who would occasionally mumble scooby-doo-esque ramblings and you would never know if he was actually talking to you or not, i politely smiled and nodded and turned 90 degrees in the other direction to shelby. i would be surprised that he didn't start pulling out the "backhanded compliment" technique, but apparently these pick-up artists are instructed to only use it on girls who are "perfect 10s and know it".

it's not like i'm not willing to have a conversation with a stranger if they actually seem worthwhile. but they're not worthwhile, and they're only interested in you as a conquest, and it's so patronizing and it operates under the assumption that women are easily manipulated idiots. god, go away.

"To all of you ridiculous asswads with your seven point pickup plans and strategies to 'seduce women in sixty seconds,' here's a clue: you are a douche. You are not stylish. You are scrote. You get ass? Good for you. The hotties love you? Congratulations. You've reduced flirtation and the thrills of seduction to a militaristic set of rules, guidelines and psychological manipulation techniques you learned from the Khmer Rouge brainwash techniques of the 1970s Killing Fields? Fantastic. All of the looks and swagger in the world won't change the fact that your soul is an ugly, ugly blight."


ANYWAY.



i'm not a fan of real fur but i am a fan of her, and today i learned that my great-grandfather designed this for elizabeth taylor in butterfield 8! he also designed katharine hepburn's first pantsuit and clothes for a bunch of other ~silver screen stars~. dammit, it's unfortunate that i never met him. apparently he also greatly disliked the godfather because it made italians look bad. (i personally think it makes italians look awesome, but it's a different time and i wasn't an immigrant.) anyway, what a cool guy! and i bet he didn't have to resort to ~*~*magic tricks*~*~ to attract my great-grandmother.

i loved high school.

"paul gayibeau" hahaha

-the other day i was riding my bike when i got cussed out by an old man on a motorcycle who apparently felt that both me and my bike were threatening his mid-life crisis joyride. today we went out to get breakfast and i was telling people about this incident and remarked that he probably listened to "born to be wild" whilst speeding on his motorcycle through allston. this inspired us to brainstorm a playlist of other songs this guy would be listening to, and then i decided that we should totally have a "mid-life crisis at a bar" theme party. people would arrive on motorcycles and wear leather jackets and sunglasses, and we would play such songs as bad to the bone, HERE I GO AGAIN ON MY OWN, LIKE A DRIFTER I WAS BORN TO WALK ALONE, and proooobably i love rock'n'roll, sorry joan jett. i'm open to suggestions to add to this playlist.

-also, the song "i kissed a girl" can get punched in the face by everyone i know.

-also, i'm going to start referring to everything ever as an "inside job".

-also, it was the dead of winter when a stranger knocked on the door friday night a bunch of us were all sitting around morosely when there was a knock at the door. it was andrew and there was much screaming and rejoicing. morale has increased exponentially since his return. yesterday we all went to historic dogtown. i'm immature and kept repeating the name "dogtown" and cracking up. also, the best pizza i have ever eaten ever.

-also, check out this cake i made awhile ago, it RULED.


-also, i can't stop laughing about this image titled "unsettlinganimaltray.jpg". it IS unsettling.

-also, i can't decide between regan from the exorcist or ursula the sea witch for my halloween costume. it would be fun to be ursula because i feel like everyone always dresses up as ~sexy~ villains, and ursula is pretty much the least sexy villain ever.

-also, does anyone know how to transfer livejournal entries to a server like wordpress or something?


coming up: a bunch of my favorite pictures from summer. which was alright, but autumn in new england is pretty much the most gorgeous thing ever.
post your favorite halloween images! i'm collecting them.

THERE IS A SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL FOR BIKE THIEVES.
actually, probably not. i can think of much worse things that deserve special places in hell and i don't know how many acres hell has to work with. BUT STILL.

i was about to make a nice, cheery livejournal entry but i don't really have time because i'm busy doing nice, cheery things, so everyone gets this instead.

i don't care how you feel about PETA because in this instance they're totally in the right. just take 5 minutes to read this article, and this. you could also watch the video, but if you're squeamish or really sensitive to animal abuse like me, i would not recommend it. this is what you're supporting when you eat pork or ham products, especially from hormel foods. i'm not lecturing anyone about eating meat, but just take some time to think about where it comes from and don't support companies like this. this type of sick and inhumane stuff is not an anomaly.

thanks.


ps for some humor after that suckiness, watch this totally inappropriate sesame street scene from 1971. this would never fly today, unfortunately.

-there are some people in this world, mainly public figures such as fred phelps, who i find so loathsome that the only way i can cope with their existences is to love them ironically. love really is the answer, people.

-while i'm in the habit of referencing old livejournal posts with conversations that bring the lulz, let's revisit this gem: http://ifandonlyif.livejournal.com/56768.html

-does anyone else constantly compare their aging process to the ages of fictional characters or songs? when i turned 14, i thought, "hey, i'm older than the baby-sitters club". (of course they were 13 for an entire decade, so that's not even relevant).
when i turned 18, i lamented that all the songs i knew that referenced being seventeen were no longer applicable to me, nor would they ever be again. right now i'm in the billy bragg "a new england" era: "i was 21 years when i wrote this song/i'm 22 now but i won't be for long". i didn't write ANYTHING cool when i was 21, billy, so you're already ahead of me. what will come next? maybe the blink182 song where they sing about how nobody likes you when you're 23.

-during the time that i spent at home, i was able to dig through a HUGE box of handwritten journals that i kept from when i was about 8 to when i finished high school, and then i got my own laptop and started keeping one on there in a password-protected document. ANYWAY, the journals with the most hilarious gems were written throughout grades 6 to 8 (probably the worst years of my and everyone else's lives), so i took the liberty of typing up some of the excerpts for everyone else to LOL at with me. these excerpts will take you through my petty problems, unwarranted existential self-importance (actually i probably still suffer from this), my awkward first kiss, and generally stupid observations and situations. also, to protect myself against anyone who might put their name into google, i changed all the names to sweet valley high characters.

( enjoy me as a middle schooler, i certainly didn't )

QUICKLY:


1) I am a heron. I have a long neck and I pick fish out of the water w/ my beak. If you don’t repost this comment on 10 other pages I will fly into your kitchen tonight and make a mess of your pots and pans.

2) more and more i begin to find myself annoyed with self-proclaimed "grammar nazis". yes, i hate "u" and "r" and "your stupid" just as much as the next guy, but come on. there's a limit. this is hard to explain, so bear with me because i will sound dumb.
first of all, there are so many more complex rules of grammar that everybody breaks on a daily basis, so you can quit patting yourself on the back for knowing the difference between "your" and "you're". second of all, have you nothing more to contribute than grammar corrections? third of all, there are so many different dialects in the english language. sure, one of them may be more acceptable if you want to "move up" in the world or whatever, but insisting that everybody stick to one specific diction made up by stuffy old men years ago is almost kind of classist. i know, i know, i'm the last person to lecture anybody else about classism, but i'm just calling it how i see it. i may have hated my required linguistics class, but at least i got that realization out of it. also, some of these rules that you insist on enforcing aren't even relevant. "never end a sentence with a preposition" was never a strict rule of grammar, it was carried over from latin and suggested by some grammarians in the 18th century.
"That is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."-winston churchill

in short,



also, this post from about 6 years ago. steve had a point all along!

let me know how you feel about this important issue.

3. i take back everything i ever said about macs. well, besides the whole "selling a lifestyle" thing. okay, i take back everything i said about the operating system. i am now one of those ~omg i <3 my macbook~ jerks.

4. in the summertime, allston feels like a trashy beach town without the beach. the humidity, the liquor stores, the drunks, the nail salons. i don't mind it though. i never really got the trashy beach town vacation experience as a child.

5. "you find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal."-elizabeth taylor, who has always been there for me

6. my guinea pig is so cute, everyone watch this video of him eating a carrot. i would have put music to it but i didn't want that to interfere with his glorious munching sounds.

7. honorable mentions: hull beach, black moth super rainbow, three buck chucks, rereading all the harry potters and sophie's world, st. lucy's home for girls raised by wolves, jellies, kudos bars that i bought at cvs that i used to get in my lunch in elementary school but then forgot about, etc etc.

8. i never get to sleep late and this basically sums up why:

"Thompson was a drug addict who made lots of money glorifying vain, childish behavior. Sure I thought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a funny book, but I don't take advice from junkies, never mind pay attention to their political commentary. Thompson was no pundit, just another of our culture's loser addict-heroes. There are too many of them."

1) even though god gave me the curse of no rhythm whatsoever, i'm thankful that he didn't also throw in tourette's.
2) when i was a little kid i read the word "adulteress" in a book and thought that it just meant a female adult, in the same vein as "waitress" or "actress".
3) one of these days i'm just going to compile a huge directory of my favorite strange phenomena i've read about on the internets.
4) there is nothing better than hearing someone watching the care bears movie on demand at 4 am.
5) i don't know who to blame about the weather.

my brain fired its secretary

the internet overwhelms me. i have been using livejournal since 2000 so i'm still affectionate towards it, but otherwise there are way too many freakin' social networking sites and i cannot do not want to keep up with them all. it used to be just myspace, then facebook and myspace, and now facebook, myspace, flickr, last.fm, youtube, and even more that i know i'm overlooking and AHHH they're going to drown me. who demands this many options? WHO SPREADS THEMSELVES SO THIN LIKE THIS?

the less i update, the less i have to say, but it should really be the opposite. and the more i think about it, the more it makes sense that i devote my life to opening a rodent sanctuary.

-jonny made a sort of igloo contraption during the snowstorm of 07 and hung a light inside of it. i think at least 7 people could fit in it and it was actually really warm. ( larry david says tours make him feel gay, but let me give you a tour anyway )
-my friends and i take theme parties extremely seriously. this weekend perrine, shelby and i had a joint birthday-party-type-thingy and the theme was a 20s speakeasy. so we transformed the house into one and covered up all the windows, hung art deco posters on the walls, set up a bar in the kitchen, played jazz and rag-time, demanded that everyone conceal their alcohol and wouldn't let anyone in without the password (which was already given out at an earlier time).


my lipstick's wonky, i know. here are just a few more pictures. in the words of ursula the sea witch, i'm a very busy woman and i haven't got all day.
( Why king midas applesauce, anyone ever tell you you oughta be in the talkies? And I don't just go around tellin that to every tom dick and harry, you're the real McCoy! 23 skidoo!-lindsay withers )

i have never felt like such a fatso in my life as i did the other day when i found pieces of tortilla chips in my bellybutton.
late halloween-ish post
we did the whole dia de los muertos sugar skull crafternoon (and by noon i mean evening) this year. we even got CrAzIeR with the molds! behold.










lis made sure we all knew that the two skulls with the sunglasses are dating. she made some other couples too, but i accidentally separated them (because i'm a heinous killjoy who doesn't want the skulls to be happy).

halloween was sweet, one night i was pebbles flintstone and the other night i was bellatrix lestrange.
oh, and klaus was dino when i was pebbles but this is the only picture he'd let us take. trust me, it was cute.



also, the best costume "halloween has ever churned out", (so spake cullen):


seriously. sutton as gay dumbledore.

friday is my first day of teaching sex ed to 9th graders. it seems a little late to do so, but better late than gonnorhea. i'm nervous. 9th graders are animals. ANIMALS.

is anybody still out there? probably not. okay. stuff i've been up to in the past two months, and whatever:

-the colonial themed party, in which everybody dressed up like american colonists (duh) and listened to classical music, which only really happened because alex wanted to dress up like a slave and make everyone uncomfortable. it also featured conor as paul revere, dan cullen as a native american with some kind of loincloth, jack as a colon, and brandon angrily denoucing "those stamp-taxing, TEA-drinking, faggot-smoking, yellow-toothed brits". there are pictures behind the cut if anyone gives a hoot/wants to relive the evening.
-do you guys think i should get 10/8/07 tattooed on me somewhere as a tribute to the day that guinea pigs were the article of the day on wikipedia?
-tons of street festivals, including the marshmallow fluff one in union square and honk! in davis square with crazy marching bands from new orleans and dudes on stilts.
-vizcachas, my new Cute Members Of The Rodent Family discovery. awww.
-peer health exchange
-i lost one of my control key thingys. it is annoying.
-feeling good.
-laser tag!

( here are a lot of sweet pictures. i did not take any of them. well, i took them from other people. but i did not photograph them. )

i'm bad at keeping in touch so tell me what you've been up to in one way or another.

okay, i'm a huge idiot apparently and had no idea that ANCHOVIES were in caesar salad dressing. sick. i can never eat it again.

my main meal almost every day this week has consisted of crepes and shirley temples.
also, in the past three weeks i have read the entire harry potter series and now i fully understand the hype.

just some:







picking my split ends.













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thanks, come again!

we always want nothing in common with the people we loathe. but i don't care what you do because i've probably done it in a past life even though
i don't believe in them and i don't think reincarnation is the earth's way of recycling bodies.
i have the worst temper, i get so angry that i could probably channel it into telekinesis like matilda did with the trunchbull. thowing things runs in the family.
dear studded jackets--michael's called, they want their bedazzler back.
the 90s called, they want their joke back.
i'm going to bed now
and i hope i wake up as a crotchety 80 year old woman in a bourgeoisie hotel room with a huge bed, air conditioning, and a snack bar.
my guinea pigs are the only people that matter.