List of the Week

A lot has happened recently. Or to be more honest, not much has happened but a lot has changed. In any case, I'll be posting details of this bit by bit over the next few days, but to get me started here is the official Monday list. Unfortunately, I can't take credit for this genius creation, but I saw it on an advertisement in an airport cafe many years ago and still think whoever wrote it deserves the Pulitzer prize. Or at least a booty shake.

25 Reasons why Chocolate is Better than a Man

1. Chocolate is rich, dark, and satisfying.
2. You're never disappointed when you open the wrapper.
3. Chocolate doesn't care how many pieces you've eaten before.
4. Chocolate always hits the spot.
5. Chocolate doesn't always secretly want to be eaten by your best friend.
6. Chocolate doesn't think the shopping channel is stupid.
7. Chocolate always smells good.
8. Chocolate won't ask "Am I the best?" or "How was it?"
9. It doesn't sulk when you don't want it first thing in the morning.
10. Chocolates are easy to pick up.
11. Chocolate satisfies even when it has gone soft.
12. You can suck a piece of chocolate even in front of your mother.
13. Chocolate never leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
14. Chocolate doesn't mind what time of the month it is.
15. You don't mind the brown stains left by chocolate.
16. With chocolate, size doesn't really matter. It's always good.
17. You can read the label and know what it's made of.
18. Chocolates do not wear white socks.
19. Chocolate doesn't mind when you bite its nuts.
20. With chocolates, you don't have to be a virgin more than once.
21. "If you love me you'll swallow that" has real meaning with chocolate.
22. You can have more than one chocolate a night without ruining your reputation.
23. Chocolate doesn't just think it's smooth.
24. Chocolates aren't into rope or leather.
25. You can tell just by looking at it, that it hasn't been in anyone else's mouth.

Check out the poster here. Forget men, give me a Milky Way.


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I was going to tell him about a college I got into

me: so guess what
fred: you have a rare but lethal strain of staff flowing througout your body and you wont survive unless i give you a blood transfusion
but its a risky procedure
and it might kill the both of us
me: but you'll do it for ME, right
fred: oh of course
im a bellarmine boy
im a man for others
me: you sit on the couch and play with yourself
dont forget that part
fred: esp the part where im a badass fairy
me: hahahaaha
anyways
GUESS WHAT
fred: oh i wasnt right the first time
shit



No moping can last too long with people like these around.


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List of the Week

By popular demand, the 11,002 things to be miserable about are back.

1. Cures discovered after a disease has killed a member of your family
2. People with a name like Herman Hermanson
3. Children who want to be lawyers when they grow up
4. The sex lives of early Puritans
5. Abandoned conversations
6. Fat people who complain that they're skinny
7. The book selection at provincial libraries
8. Sex scenes with aging actors
9. Young Germans who are afraid to ask what their grandparents did
10. Journalists who lose their jobs to bloggers (hehehe)
11. Poems with secret political agendas
12. Scientists paid by tobacco companies to cast doubt on evidence that smoking kills
13. Job recruiters finding drunken photos of you on social networking sites
14. The 400,000 people on the government's terror watch list
15. The mansions of drug lords
16. Doctors who rape their patients
17. Children who are never invited to birthday parties
18. Hurricane Katrina
19. The federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina
20. Waiting for acceptance letters

Happy Tuesday!


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(The much overdue) List of the Week

This week's List of the Week, inspired by my recent outing to see He's Just Not That Into You, is designed to serve as a first-date manual for how to NOT make yourself seem nuttier than a jar of chunky peanut butter. Sorry, boys. This list is femme-oriented.

Questions you shouldn’t ask even though you really want to

1. Are you comfortable using the word “hot” to describe a guy? What about, like, Johnny Depp?
   
2. Will you be shocked/disappointed/delighted/indifferent (circle one) to find out I swear like a sailor?
   
3. Are you a long-distance-relationship kinda guy?
   
4. Does your room look like the violent end of the Cold War?
   
5. Do you know how to spell in text messages?
   
6. How often do you shower? Honestly now?
   
7. Do you agree that Valentine’s Day is a shameless consumer holiday with no real romantic substance whatsoever?
   
8. What would you say if I told you I can’t go a day without singing and must practice my vocal skills at hourly intervals with tunes from “Chicago” and “Hairspray”?
   
9. Do you have a weird infatuation with comic books or some other 8th-grade-boy crap?
   
10. Please identify the following cultural references so I know I can hang around you for more than an hour without awkward silences:
    

• “What has two thumbs and doesn’t give a crap?”
  
• “We were on a break!”
  
• “Doesn’t any of this look familiar?” “Well yeah! Here is my favorite leaf. How could I forget this place?”
  
• “I doubt she gave you the stink eye. That’s just how her face looks, you know? That’s just her face.”
  
• “And then he ran into my knife. He ran into my knife ten times.”
  

Questions you should probably ask for lack of anything else remotely interesting

1. What was the last good, and I mean friggin’ good, movie you saw?
   
2. What do you want to do in ten years?
   
3. If you could pick any place in the world, where would you live?
   
4. What’s playing on your iPod right now?
   
5. Cats or dogs?
   
6. What’s the last book you read for pleasure?
   
7. Chocolate or vanilla? What, vanilla? Excuse me, I have to go home to take care of my sick sister.
   

Questions too inappropriate for the ‘don’t ask’ category

1. Are you Catholic? Like devoted Catholic or fallen-from-the-grace-of-God Catholic?
   
2. If you chose option 2 in the previous question, how long does your silly little mind reckon it’ll take you to get in my pants?
   
3. Do you have any warts, lesions, pimples, and/or backne in unusual places that I should know about?
   
4. Have you ever shopped at stores like Spencer’s or Hot Stuff? If so, what articles did you purchase?
   
5. Is that a beer gut, or are you going to tell me you’re big-boned?
   
6. Have you ever named your privates (if you answer “no”, you’re a liar), and did the name(s) include any combination of Jack, Richard, Pee-Wee, Gladiator, or Massive Sword of Masculinity?
   

Questions you should ask if your date is a jackass, smoker, or a complete tool, and you want to drive him away

1. You’re cool with dating a commie, right?
   
2. Have you ever seen a used tampon? If you’re curious, I’m about to go to the bathroom and take one out right now, I can wrap it in toilet paper and show you if you’d like. They’re really quite mesmerizing.
   
3. What money limit do you want to set on gifts when we go Christmas shopping for each other next year?
   
4. You like Kanye? Get outta here, so did my ex-boyfriend! Quick, what do you shave with? – maybe your favorite razor brand matches, too!
   
5. Can you try to be more like Edward Cullen?
   
6. What do you mean, who’s Edward Cullen? Did you not do your homework before going on this date?!
   
7. When do you want to get married? I think two years from now would be good, we’d have just enough time to book the wedding band and pick out the cake decorations.
   
8. Are you cool with meeting my mother tomorrow? And don't worry, I informed her you’re coming, she already shaved her legs.
   

Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
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List of the Week

As stated in previous post, this is an excerpt from the book "11,002 things to be miserable about".

1. Death
2. Life
3. Hitler
4. Erectile dysfunction
5. Blind dates with ugly people
6. Monday mornings
7. Broken condoms
8. Dead puppies
9. Models
10. The orchestra that played as the Titanic went down
11. Michael Jackson's sexual proclivities
12. The Third World
13. Driver's license photos
14. Calculus
15. Butt acne
16. Gas station bathrooms
17. Asparagus
18. Having to hear about other people's babies
19. Memoirs by people who are boring
20. Memoirs by people who are more interesting than you
21. The Hilton sisters
22. Chlamydia
23. Oedipus
24. Men who pose for pictures with their cars
25. Standardized tests
26. The fall of Rome
27. Children decapitated by roller coaster malfunctions
28. Planned phone dates to catch up with friends
29. Fat camp
30. Armed rebels in Nigeria
31. The Vietcong
32. Bad kissers
33. Dogs that lick you after drinking out of the toilet
34. Morning sickness
35. Forgotten children wandering the aisles of grocery stores
36. Cell phone bills
37. Insults prefaced by "No offense, but"
38. Accidentally being touched somewhere inappropriate
39. Being touched somewhere inappropriate on purpose
40. Musicals about the Holocaust

This is definitely not the last time this book will make it onto the blog. The stuff's just too funny to pass up.
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Life's pleasures are illegal, immoral, and fattening

I recently bought a book that's called "11,002 things to be miserable about" from the humor section at Borders. It was apparently inspired by a bunnies-and-rainbows book called "14,000 Things to Be Happy About", a comprehensive list of life's small joys. While I find its dark opposite way more hilarious, I'm saving that list for tomorrow's List of the Week. As for tonight - in honor of my (rare) happy mood - here's a small insight on little things that make me happy.

Waking up to the smell of bagels and Philadelphia cream cheese
A good, make that awesome, hair day
A Milkyway bar
Making a real dinner and not burning it
Finding a song that is sing-alongable
Getting daisies
Driving without parents
Text messages
Wednesdays
Cracking open a brand new book and burying my nose in it
SNL skits that are actually funny
"Hairspray"
Drooling over sexy British men
Really bad "that's what she said" jokes
Laughing at your terrible, terrible voice as you sing along to Ne-Yo's "Mad" but joining in anyway, when we're in my car gulping down Tapioca drinks and speeding down El Camino


Just to reiterate a point in an earlier post, don't leave those you love! You never know what kind of crap life will think up next and when you'll ever see them again. Honestly, this is a very rare mood for me, so I'm going to get this out there while I'm still on an emotional high:

Take too many bad pictures, laugh like you're a psychotic poodle, and throw yourself out there like you've never been hurt. Because every 60 seconds you spend angry or upset is a minute of happiness you'll never get back.

<3

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List of the week

Masha and Tina's list of things that are eternal:

1. Love
2. Taxes
3. Scandalous photographs that never leave the internet
4. Greasy hair
5. "Titanic"
6. Death
7. That one sock that never has a match
8. Hugh Laurie
9. Men's tendency to wear socks + sandals
10. Wrinkles on dress shirts
11. collegeboard.com

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Teaching terrible morals to little kids since 1923

There are few things in life that make me angrier than teaching children bad manners. Among those things are fake people, pathological liars, unfair college selection, stubborn adults, idiots who don't see crap in front of their nose, and tucking my feet into a blanket on the couch with a full dinner in front of me and realizing I left the remote on the kitchen table. But that's another post; tonight is dedicated to a rant about a movie so debased, so lewd and twisted, a movie that wears the children's cape of hope and opportunity but reveals to be a warped monstrosity concocted from the vile mind of Walt Disney.

Yes, I'm talking about this movie right here:

As I was babysitting Leeza('s sister) tonight, we decided to pop in our childhood favorite VHS. Little Natalie lay back on a pillow with a fuzzy blanket around her body, looking like the innocent uncorrupted four-year-old she was. So imagine my horror when this movie, which I haven't seen for at least ten years, starts things off with this guy:

Governor Radcliffe, the established villain of the storyline. There are so many things wrong with this image, I don't even know where to begin. First off, what is it with the bowties? Did they decide that pulling out two random strands of hair and tying them in the end with red ribbons alluded to wealth and power? Not only is that 'do inconceivable in real life (as hair will not stay put in that position for longer than ten minutes), the fact that he's a villain tells little boys that it's wrong to adorn their locks with bowties. What if they want to wear bowties? What if their own father wears a cute little red bowtie?? Not only does this promote sexist gender inequalities that criticize all "girly" nuances in a man, it can scar children for life.

Let's move on to the nose. Have you ever noticed that nearly all of Disney's male villains have an inhumanly crooked nose? Did Mr. Walt have a problem with Jewish people? Ah, yes, in fact he did - an article that runs in several newspapers called the Straight Dope talks about some of Disney's anti-semitic shorts, where "... the Big Bad Wolf comes to the door dressed as a stereotypical Jewish peddler. Disney changed the scene after complaints from Jewish groups. They didn't catch them all, though. In the short "The Opry House" Mickey Mouse is seen dressed and dancing as a Hasidic Jew." So yes, kids, people with an eagle beak nose will gladly shoot a comrade and secretly plot to take all of your gold. Next.

I suspect this is the reason people do this to their dogs:

But hold your poodles, it gets worse. Pocahontas does a jump from a cliff that has her in the air for a good ten seconds before submersing splash-lessly right next to her canoe, and then she river rafts off a waterfall. Yes, because if you sail around the riverbend into the great unknown that is the bottom of a waterfall, you won't die. Honest to blog.

Of course, that would be only one of the many stupid decisions you'll make if you take advice from a talking tree. In fact, if only you'll listen to your heart, you can learn a language you've never heard before in an instant. If you dream about something strange like a spinning arrow, well doggoneit it means something. And you must figure out the meaning of that dream if you ever wish to have any chance at realizing your path in life of all that the present and future can hope to hold.

All things considered, I didn't mind this movie too much when I first watched it. In fact, I was so mesmerized that I immediately rented the second one. And after watching such a touching story about the daughter of an Indian chief who saved the white man that she loved, what do we get? - Pocahontas ditches the tribal wear for England's finest and finds no further need for John Smith, her blond hunk, and therefore easily replaces him with John Rolfe. Okay, her English wasn't great and she may have confused the two Johns, but they had different freaking hair colors! On top of that, she criticizes poor Smith for something that wasn't even his fault.

Now, as a five year old, I was enraged at this ridiculous turn of events. What happened to true-love-conquers-all? Then I grew up and found the biggest atrocity this movie has made: historically, it's a bunch of bullcrap. John Smith was just as abrasive and self-promoting as the rest of the English mercenaries, and it is very likely that he lied and embellished the tale about his heroic sacrifice. This is from the real, legit Powhatan Tribe website: 

"The true Pocahontas story has a sad ending. In 1612, at the age of 17, Pocahontas was treacherously taken prisoner by the English while she was on a social visit, and was held hostage at Jamestown for over a year. During her captivity, a 28-year-old widower named John Rolfe took a "special interest" in the attractive young prisoner. As a condition of her release, she agreed to marry Rolfe [...] Two years later on the spring of 1616, Rolfe took her to England where the Virginia Company of London used her in their propaganda campaign to support the colony. She was wined and dined and taken to theaters. It was recorded that on one occasion when she encountered John Smith (who was also in London at the time), she was so furious with him that she turned her back to him, hid her face, and went off by herself for several hours. Later, in a second encounter, she called him a liar and showed him the door." You can read more here.

Disney, Disney, Disney. I guess the songs are the only good things to ever come from his highly corrupted motion pictures. But hey, that's just my late-night opinion.

All stills used above were taken with permission from here.

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The best themed holiday since sliced bread

In honor of it finally being love-joy-and-cuddly-bunnies-happiness day, I'll write a bit about how I'm spending February aka National Singles Awareness month (I like to substitute the A for Awesomeness). For every day of the month, I've designated a special holiday to help me balance out my hate for the fourteenth. I hate Valentine's day, single or not - it's nothing but a consumer company Christmas morning as hundreds of giddly men empty their wallets for diamonds and dinner reservations like they're not supposed to be sweet to their women all the time.

Okay, so I mentioned that I made reservations as well. But that doesn't count because it's a casual friends-only dinner. And that's actually what I wanted to mention - this month of celebrating has been absolutely wonderful. Let's recap:

~ February 5: Fuzzy Socks and Granny Panties day

Went out to dinner with my mom to La Strada, stuffed myself to the maximum with pasta, salad, coffee, and chocolate souffle. Small portions, but great quality. Too lazy/unwilling to do homework when I came home at 8, I pulled on my blue fuzzy socks and enjoyed a carefree, irresponsible evening of Scrubs.

~ February 6: Girls' Night Out day

Didn't work out so well with Jessica's boyfriend there, defeating the purpose of reaping in the benefits of singledom, but it showed me something I suspected before. As I watched Jess and Stevo argue about random things - nothing consequential, but long enough to notice Stevo's exasperated face - I saw the very reason why being unattached can rock your socks. No need to worry about the other person's feelings, no need to check in with where you are and what you're doing, no need to consider their opinion when making plans. Of course, there's a time for relationships, but everyone needs a time for this, too.

~ February 7: Buy yourself flowers day

Many people chuckled when I told them about the theme of this day, but it makes perfect sense to me. It's not about pretending you're not pathetic enough to pick out a bouquet and think someone cares about you; it's like going out and buying diamond earrings for yourself because you can, because you deserve it, and because spending money on pretty crap gives you a warm feeling in your tummy. And in my defense, flowers won't bankrupt my wallet.

~ February 8: Hit on someone twice your age day

Well, my mom's friend did take me out to Los Gatos to practice for my driving test, but this theme was more of a joke. Something to laugh at. Ha ha.

~ February 9: I'm not sharing anything day (& spa with Leeza)

This is also Friend's birthday, and, honestly, his best birthday I've ever had. Priya stopped by in the afternoon, and the three of us finished the spinach bolani and watched a few rounds of Sex and the City - very fitting, as Carrie was just becoming friends with Big. At 5 Leeza and I gave up our spa certificates and met two friendly masseuses, who rubbed oil on our backs for 45 minutes. Destress galore. I spent the night at Jess' house reminiscing about the past four years and making plans for the future.

~ February 10: Dinner out by yourself and eat as obnoxiously as you want day

Somewhere in the middle of that dinner (a Classic Italian Quiznos sub, ridiculously delicious), a decision was made that may very well change the course of the rest of the month. The evening ended at Culture Frozen Yogurt, with a two-hour conversation with Friend about what's happened and where do we go from here. We go left, we decided. And although the outcome of that decision is still pending, I hope that was the right way to go.

~ February 11: I am so much hotter than his new girlfriend day

Considering that none of my ex-boyfriends that I still keep in touch with actually have new girlfriends, this was also a joke theme, although I enjoyed coming up with the idea.

~ February 12: Boycott everything red, pink, and heartshaped day

A nice day at home in my PJs, made a mexican casserole that is already halfway eaten (mostly by me). Take that, mother. "You can't cook." Psh.

~ February 13: Drive out by yourself & buy something expensive day

Got my license, which was what the theme was betting on. Unfortunately, mom had the car all day at work, so the shopping trip was postponed until today. If you want to know the events of yesterday, possibly the best day of the month so far, read the post below.

And so this brings us to today, proudly named - are you ready for this? - Thank god I didn't catch your crabs day! As much of a joke as this theme is, I came up with it for all the single ladies (now put your hands up) out there who, on this fine consumer holiday, will remember their last failed relationshp, scrunch their nose and say, "thank god I didn't settle for that."

Oh, and Isla Fisher and Sacha Baron Cohen's daughter is named Olive. Go figure.

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