Sometimes, you are 29 years old and living in Massachusetts. You have way lowered your career standards, mostly due to to a failure at all career ventures. You hope nursing school will fix all that.



You get a shitty temp job that pays $14/hr. This is actually an amazingly high rate, considering that most previous gigs of the past year have paid like $10/hr. (Note: The cost of living in this state costs much more than the national average.)

To celebrate, you buy a six pack of Harpoon Summer Beer and a 21 pack of American Spirits. (Besides, this stuff will be needed over the holiday weekend.)

You proceed to watch a whole lot of the Bachelorette, Season Five. You buy like 50lbs of hay for the bunny.

Isn't how I turned out, but I'm pretty satisfied at the moment anyhow.

It was almost a year ago that I lost my editorial at this medical compliance publishing company. I have no real job, but I do not miss the place. Lo, it was a business entirely funded by health care providers who have a bit of cash to throw around, but who also obviously don't ask the Little People what they need, since all the materials we produce suck. I had to drive an hour to get there. The authors were unfamiliar with the concept of an article outline, and doubly unaware of the sheer banality of their subject area, as well as the quadrouply unaware of the irony of their overinflated egos. The other young women on my team never invited me to lunch with them, and in fact, often made plans for lunch in front of me. I was criticized on my performance review for appearing "visibly upset" at times when the stress made me cry in some meetings, but I'm sure that this document might have noted my inability to show that I gave a shit if I remained stoic during my very short tenure. Fun stuff.



A year later, and I don't have a fucking job with benefits. I also can't really find a fucking job. I've applied to Target twice, only to be spurned. I have applied to a shitload of social service jobs that ask for nothing more than a high school diploma and a clean CORI. Hey, I've never This would make me feel like a loser if other really smart people with even better work ethics than me also didn't lack jobs.

But, unlike a year ago, Obama is in office, and Obama believes in hope. I hope that I find my UMass transcript so that I can show I took Intro to Psych in 2004 and enroll in a slightly less remedial Psychology Through the Lifespan course at community college. I can hope that the registrar at community college notes that I took graduate level psychology courses as an undergraduate in 2000 and 2001 and 2002, and clearly thus probably know the material that got covered at enroll. If the whole hope thing doesn't pull through, I'll roll with this Obama theme and believe in the power of change. Maybe Beacon Hill Community College will change its prerequisite requirements in the psychology department, so I can take some fucking prerequisites to get into motherfucking nursing school.

If that change in BHCC registrar protocol doesn't happen, I'll believe in the power of the computer to change into a sentient being. That retroactive FASFA for the 2008 - 2009 school year I need to get reimbursed for some other nursing prerequs isn't going to fill out itself, you know. Not yet, anyway.

I am a lazy motherfucker in other realms as well. For instance, I have pretty much posted interesting (to me, but perhaps the readers have a different opinion) stuff to Facebook rather than on Livejournal. (Sometimes images and prose lack a certain artistic and/or literary jouissance if the author doesn't expound a bit on them. (But, I like to be long winded sometimes, and perhaps this belief is self serving in that it fules the rhetorical inter referential circle jerk of blogging.)) Also, I really need to get to that Renaissance art exhibit at the MFA. Also, need to make an appointment with my uberfancy rheumatologist and dermatologist because my palmoplantar keratoderma* is spreading a teensy bit. Perhaps unrelated, my best friend worries that the form of scleroderma I have that also defies textbook definition or anything my docs have ever seen might be slightly more active. But that's still two counts of medical laziness.

I do not underachieve in the arena of critter appreciation. Also, since I'm going to school full time in two weeks, I think I'm gonna get me some cable tv. It is like a brain vacation in a relaxobox. Till those two weeks come, I might just watch a whole lot of cable tv. Not because I'm a slacker or anything. It would be to fortify my reserves of relaxify before the academic rodeo, replete as it is with psychological whip lash, commences.

*That's fancy medical speak for generic bumps on the hands or feet that could look like anything, and could have any cause. And no, it doesn't look as gross as anything you might see on the internet.

Oh hai! I am totally stoned on this weed that my friend, a resident of the Spring Chateu, only described as "From Up North." Do you know what I'm doing? I'm listening to This American Life with the Begonia as she fits a new Ikea desk into her bedroom!

So I'm browsing the New England Reptile Expo website, and come across a list of exhibitors. I stumble upon Scott Crowe Reptiles. I do not know who Scott Crowe is, except a man who propegates bad ideas. I might even venture so far as to call him a dumbass for reguarly spending time with alligators, an animal that can kill the fuck out of stuff much larger than a human.

But Scott Crowe wants to show you the beauty of keeping alligators as pets. To facillitate this process, my man Scott has posted a series of videos on YouTube extolling the appeal of keeping gators as pets. In the first video, we see him warning potential purchasers of the potential size of reptiles. On the plus side of ownership, though, the website proclaims, "They are really cool to have though if you have room for one, there's nothing like watching these guys eat."

Then we move on to the second video, with mid-sized reptiles. We note the tattooed dudes poking around, till they fish a half eaten rat from the bottom of the warm pool where the gators reside. They throw the rat to a mean croc, and then proceed to wade into the warmed gator water. Yes, there's nothing cooler than having a 5,000 gallon room full of water continually warming the feces of your reptile friends. One of the dudes notes that a two and a half foot long gator did "some pretty good damage" when it bit his hand awhile ago. Then he pulls a gator by its tail, and holds its head down with a stick. This move supposedly demonstrates the size of the gator, but I prefer to think of it as some perverse freudian manifestation of some really unique personal problems.


Are we having fun with this pet yet?

We also see a discussion of gator personalities. A repdude holding a baby declares that with a lot of handling, your small gator will grow up into a gator that won't "give you any problems." In the next video, we see the same dude searching for one of his gator in the said 5,000 gallon warm poo cessspool / croc habitat as he declares, "this one used to try to kill me all the time." So, where's a gator that shows the benefits of this handling of baby gator that supposedly allows their personalities to flower? It doesn't matter, because we're moving on to the really big gator! The big gator is pissed to get pulled by the tail, but a repdude sits on top of it and uses his body weight to hold its mouth closed. The dude has to cover the gator's eyes to make it calm down. I guess because the gator doesn't try to pull anybody into a death roll, the repdude comments that this alligator "is being pretty good."


OMG, this is just like riding a pony, so fun!

Then, for the money shot, we see the largest gator living in the poo stew. To prove how badass he is, a repdude grabs the gator out of the water and manages to hold it sorta still while noting that in Massachusetts, they have to keep the gators' mouths covered when they present to school groups. I just do not understand the rationale behind that law. It makes about as much sense as gay marriage. The dude adds that "this thing could destroy me right now if it wanted to." Well, since gators live about 60 years, I guess it'll get that chance to have you for dinner when you are frail old men with out of date tattoos.


I mean, after 60 years of nothing but rats, a bet a human would taste pretty darn good.

At any rate, you've got to have a bit of sympathy for Scott Crowe. I'm pretty sure that Scott'll never get laid by anybody under the age of 40 (which could be a problem when he is like 50), or anybody who spends some first person quality time in the croc room. I could be wrong on this, but I sort of doubt it.

Okay, so I'm browsing the Flickr looking at intersting images and whatnot, and then I come accross images of a bi-weekly event called the "Hoppy Hour!" And what does Hoppy Hour involve? Lots of bunnies scampering about and crazy bunny ladies and dudes thinking about how they want to get it on with you and other bunnies humping your bunny while your cuteness quotient gets blown away like woah.

Do you see how engaged all the humans in the background are in loving on all the bunny interaction? None of my friends understand, quite, and my attempts to get into touch with two Ok Cupid dudes who also have pet bunnies and seem rather pumped about the said pet bunnies have all but fallen flat. (I would like these attempts to succeed with a binky!)

I would like to know why this only happens in the Twin Cities. I want to go to a Hoppy Hour post haste. I want to pet five bunnies all sniffing and scritching and feeling soft under my fingers. I want my bunny to finally bask in the presence of her species, a group that understands how over rated manners can be (her usual housemates, the cats, just don't understand.)

Because I have a sinus infection, and the neti pot doesn't work for me. (It is like taking steroids for poison ivy this summer: the cure
was even worse than the disease.)



I'm too cheap to buy a neoneti pot that just sprays the water up your nose in a huge ass jet, so I was thinking maybe tea tree oil? I already have tea tree oil in a bottle for when the rabbit pees on her blanket. (It isn't like I'm underemployed and have a lot of free time or anything, and searching down a bottle to just put warm salt water in sounds sorta like a trial. The tea tree oil bottle is here right now.)

You gotta love the high pitched sounds resonating in your face as the sick sinuses equalize pressure after blowing your nose . . .

I'm thinking I might end up with an overly antiseptic feeling after the spraying. Not burning, necessarily. Just sorta like all-natural floor cleaner.

Here is an Ok Cupid message that I recieved:

=====gedbo wrote=====
You're a great looking woman.  So you had me intrigued you said"you have the most unique looking tongue" do you have a picture ?  I have a fetish for long tongues! lol   Mike

===================================
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Clearly, some folks don't do their research on the J. Breezy before writing. Yes, I have 19 messages in my inbox, but they mostly read like this.

I am a great looking woman by this guy's standards if my hardcore atheist friend is a saint by the standards of the Catholic Church.

Sometimes, my weird tongue is just my weird tongue, and not an invitation for you to write me about your boring fetishes. (I have decided that people who think Panera sammiches are tasty and exciting are also the type of peple who think that dressing up as a maid and/or a little spanking every now and again counts as really raunchy sex.)

Whew, that Target interview sure was exhausting. I am not sure that I made it apparent the extent to which I'm willing to lower my standards to work in the same city where I reside. Panera pays me $9, and I'll stoop to $8.50. Come on, Target. Bite. Um, pretty pretty please? I'll show you my lack of shame if you show me the cup I get to pee in for a pass drug test that'll seal my "provisional" offer of employment.

Anybody who didn't knwo the economy was in the shithole before they started reporting on it on NPR was clearly more economically secure than myself and my Virginia Ladeez.

Will somebody just pay me for 40 hours of work a week? Did I mention that my credit card got suspended for lack of payment? WHERE IS MY SELF-ACTUALIZED SUGAR MAMMA AND/OR DADDY?

Sometimes my fianncial situation sucks so much that I almost wish I was talking to my parents so that I could borrow some of their cash. I said "almost" and "sometimes," people. Jesus, I'd like to hold onto my sanity, plzkthx.  I spent nine months in my mother's womb, and I've been trying to get as far away as possible ever since.

This is the portion of the program where I throw a temper tantrum.



I feel like a million 2009 Britney Spears crying about the Justin Timberlake she let go back in 2003, only I am 2009 Calamity J crying about that decision to go to acupuncture school in 2004. Whatevs. The metaphor is vague, but the pain is real. Like, real Hollywood real.



There is genocide and global warming, and then there is the pain of Britney Spears and the next 11 months of my financial insecurity, k? CLEARLY, ONE CATEGORY IS MORE MONUMENTAL THAN THE OTHER, PEOPLE!

It sure is a good thing I figured out that I could get that nursing degree in like 15 months.

Here is a picture I located via Pixdaus, which I located via English Russia. You might have a bigger brain than nature, but nature has millions of years of trial and error on its side. You might get to live away from the elements, but just get close to nature, and nature will try its darndest to get you.

Below, we see what badass predators want to do with your sorry ass:

"We have to put this in the context of an American administration which when it was flying on Air Force One to escape the bombs of Sept 11, Condalezza Rice, who is no fool, actually quite openly said that we had to get a map out to find where Afganistan is. We're not dealing with a government lead by leading intellectuals who have a full grasp of hte world. So yes, they are open to these influences."

I was surfing around the net, looking for trouble in all the right e-places when I came across a rat costume. Then, I came across some more rat costumes.

Making rat costumes has got to be a labor of love. I mean, they poop and pee everywhere. Which means they'd poop and pee on their costume.

I do not deny that I would like to dress my pets up in costumes. I do not deny that I'm just that sick. But the cats would run away and the bunny would just eat her costume by the time I'd gotten the camera.

The Rat Fan Club begins its webpage with an image of a rat on top of a pile of stew. Is the fate of these becostumed rats as ominous as the critters at the Peruvian Guinea Pig Festival? I can not tell you; I was not there.

Whatevs. Here are some pictures of some rats.



Here is a rat dressed as a jester.





Angel and devil, according to the perceptions of the rats. Known to consume the flesh of under-attended to babies and invalids, these rodents apparently see the head of their stupored caretaker as a gord ripe for nibbling.

( More beneath the cut! )

So I'm watching Encounters At The End of the World, because I'm all into Antarctica and Werner Herzog, and combining the two equals documentary pr0n for moi. And one of the divers mentions this beautiful parasite that lives in the anus of a partucular sea urchin in the area.

And then, I spent 45 minutes trying to gather more information about the said sea urchin. To no avail.

Please help me track down more information, and a deity of your choice will love you more.

Update: Apparently the anus-inhabiting creature is called a scarlet worm. But that's all I could find.


An article titled, "Travelogue, Poot Style," in Brooklyn Rail does not offer a kind review of Encounters At The End of the Earth. But I like the review because of the author's mention of the word poot. Oh, and also because of their prose:

I just set out my nativity scene. It is rockin. We gots some livestock right up next to Jesus. (Dr. Spock endorses keeping sheep and donkeys all up in (or, at least next to,) your baby's crib.)

All was going well with the nativity-arranging activities. A baby Jesus here, and Agent Scully there. But I noticed the absence of a figure usually included in even the most basic of creche statuette kits: the dad.

About a month ago, I stepped upon a personage of my creche. Surely, it tumbled (nay, escaped) sometime during those months of rattling around in a box only partially covered by the roof of the new-to-me creche after I dragged it into the abode from my car. My bedroom is a shithole; the casualty didn't really surprise me.

I put the two bits of the relic into some semi-dusty glass on the windowsill above the bunny cage, and figured I'd glue it back together when I felt motivated to reunify the now-bifurcated pieces of my 1950's style saucy lady candy dish.

At any rate, I beheaded Jesus' baby daddy! Few have had such an opportunity. But perhaps it was in the stars, as I played baby Jesus myself as a wee babe, and am now estranged from my father. Perhaps the beheading of the little Joseph statue was a subconscious expression of my desire to kick the man's head in. Or maybe I'm reading too much into the situation. Whatevs. Having graduated from psychoanalysis, I'm aware that my own associations may reveal underlying emotions. In this case, homicidal ones. (Somebody else can have sympathy for that man. As a person that he has srsly hurt, I excuse myself from any obligation to do so.)

So, maybe I'll fix Joseph. But Joseph sort of looks as stoned as the primary protagonist in any episode of Snoop Dogg's Father Hood, so maybe Jesus needs a role model. I have a wolverine that would serve the purpose well.

Pictures are forthcoming. Uh, maybe.

I love the way all plants start looking like pleasure centers of the body if the viewer even remotely has sex on the brain. Here, we see Sir David getting all curious.



Go on ahead, there, David. You look curious. Rub your stick up against that venus fly trap.




She just wraps herself around you, all hungry and irrestably responding to that stick's stimulation.





Here David lifts the flashy coverlet of a flower, and slides his finger on in to sample its sappy sweetness




Here Sir David tentatively strokes the crimson red petals of nature's hugest flower. From the look of that stamen, the flower's got the hots for David.





Time to cue the porn music. Boom-chicka boom-boom-chicka-chicka.

There is a particular young man who began sitting next to me at the call center recently. We'll call this young man Bobby Jr., because the tattoo on the back of his neck says "Bobby Jr."

Bobby Jr. initiated what I'd generously call our working relationship by offering me tips on calling to ask old people to donate to causes related to the Democratic party. (The job also involves making old people cry. We get fired if we don't ask for money three times, even if the old person tells of their deep debt and the $2,300 chemo shot they need four times a month but can't afford. The only out is if they curse, hang up, or start to cry. (Usually the old people just sound like they are ABOUT to cry, especially that they've been non-tenderly fucked in their old asses by their 401ks as the stock market has plummeted.)) Bobby Jr. is one of the top callers in the room, and so I could perhaps consider it generous that he frequently offers unsolicited advice to improve my position in the pay pool. I should note here that I never intentionally sit next to Bobby Jr., but I think I can say that Bobby Jr. has gone beyond coincidence to sit next to me. Bobby Jr. made several overtures to his after-work plans, and I responded with silence that I hope passed as cluelessness to the fact that he might be asking me on a date.

(In life, I have found that ignoring those who impersonally annoy you usually works better than engaging them in dialogue. Stay polite. But with, like, you know, uh, brevity.)

After several shifts of side-by-side borderline-exploitation of old people and other Democratic-leaning vulnerables, Bobby Jr. informed me last Sunday that I was covered in cat fur. He followed this remark by asking, "do you have a problem or something?" he inquired. "Uhhh, I think I have mono," I said to him. I had not noticed till this moment in time any fur on my clothing. I looked down at my clothing and noticed that they didn't appear to have a lot of fur on them. But I'll admit that my standards for clothing encasement by pet fur are most likely sub-standard, at least by the standards of most. Anyhow, it wasn't worth getting into. I had some potential mono to deal with, and that involved a lot of laying my arm on the desk in my cube, and then laying my head on top of that as I begged people who just got laid off and put their husband in a nursing home to give money they didn't have on a credit card to organizations dedicated promoting candidates who are actually going to make out pretty well in this election cycle. I gave Bobby Jr. a response. I sidestepped his question, yes, but still, he got a response. I hoped that at this point Bobby Jr. would shut the fuck up. But, alas, Bobby Jr. trodded on. "Are you a crazy cat lady or something?" he asked, after several minutes of blissful non-interaction.

Please note that accusing me of being a crazy cat lady, and not with flattering over- or under- or any other type of -tones is not the way to make friends with me. To make friends with me, declare your love of Cute Overload or something. Or tell me that I'm cute. The thought of making out with Bobby Jr. in the hopes that he'd acquire mono briefly flitted through my brain, but then I decided that sending my attack rabbit after the man might involve significantly less revulsion on my part. I went soon afterwards and stayed away from the call center for an entire seven days. Partially, it had to do with the tenable at best ethics of my shitty call center job that I honestly need to hold onto at the moment. Mostly, it had to do with the fact that I started working at a doggie day care part time, and also that I'd spent the rest of the week feeling like I, all sickly and lacking in energy, had mono.

I didn't bother responding this time to Bobby Jr. I had to think abotu the two cats and one bunny back at the homestead who needed cat and bunny fud. Also, I had to think about how I needed fud. Perhaps my tummy grumbled, then. But I was too sickly and nearly hurltastic to care much about that. I got up and left the call center.

My return debut to the call center occurred this morning. I managed to snag a seat between two people who were already seated for the first shift, but my luck took a significant downturn sometime during the unpaid 30 minute break that punctuates the two five-hour Sunday shifts. I returned from my break to discover Bobby Jr. settled in the cube next to mine. The shift was about to start and all the other seats were taken. Lo, escape was no longer a possibility, at least if I wanted to get paid. (Indeed, I NEEDED to get paid, what with my currently tenuous financial situation.)

I resolved to sound busy on the phone, if only to deflect attempts to chit chat on the part of Bobby Jr. (I, honestly,also  wanted to avoid scamming old lonley ladies for their money while also convincing my supervisors who listen in on the calls that I was working, really. But mostly, it was about avoiding Bobby Jr. After all, I'd just started recovering from a week of mono-like symptoms, and was in no mood to re-connect after my week-long absence.)

Sadly, my efforts did not entirely succeed. For somewhere in the first two and a half hours of the shift, Bobby Jr. asked me straight up if I had a "man friend," as he put it. Not wanting to lead Bobby Jr. on, I told him that it was none of his business. Bobby Jr. rebuffed that he was just trying to be friendly, and also, "damn." I rejoiced in his admitted defeat and sent a txt about the encounter to my superbly awesome boyfriend. A boyfriend who does not go by the name of Bobby Jr.

One year ago yesterday, I was "let go" from my crazy evil publishing job. My therapist at the time referred to this gig as the most neurotic work environment she'd ever heard of. Mind you, it would have been worse to transpose the situation from an office to a sweatshop, but still.

Yesterday, I had my first day at a dog daycare. The job consists of hanging out with the pooches, and then hanging out with them some more.

Today, I sat in a lawn chair in the yard of the doggie day care. I was flanked by two gigantic mastiffs. I felt like an ethically-oriented pet care pimp or something.  It was awesome, pretty much.

I'm going to nursing school, bitches. It is like acupuncture school, but you get to deal with a wider range of biohazards, and an actual job market exists for it. Because I have two oh-so-useful BA's already, I can pull it off in a year through several area programs. According to Salary.com, 90% of nurses in the Boston metro area make over 52k. None of my friends make that much money, save for some engineers I met through the rich people church.

Learning that I could make $52k without being evil, pretending to socially like my coworkers, sitting very quietly at a desk, or working over 40 hours a week is like telling me pigs can fly.

Two weeks ago, I thought there was only one program in the country that offered a program like this. And I thought it was in Philly. I was wrong.

I am going to send my ex-boss a postcard with flowers and shit all over it. The postcard's front will read, "Thank you for firing me." The back will read, "I'll never work for somebody as crazy as you again." I am considering a PS, but will probably not include it for purposes of brevity. The PS would read something like, "Maybe if everything looks perfect on the outside, you'll feel perfect on the inside," or "All the underlings secretly resent you," or "You are obviously miserable, but perhaps you are too self-involved to realize that you make everybody around you miserable as well."

I am watching Cousteau's adventures on the Nile. After all, it is about time. My favorite movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, is a parody of this ever-so-retro film series.





Holy shit I can not believe that the organization dedicated this bomb-ass film series is headquartered in Chesapeake, VA. A city bordering my homecity of Norfolk, VA. Like, what? That breaks all the rules of the metro-area mediocrity that characterizes my region of origin.

In this Cousteau film, we see some weird=looking natives approaching. That is how the commentator described it. Then, we hear somebody on the Cousteau boat and somebody on the native boat conversing in French. Then the entire Cousteau boat is interacting with one of the dudes in a native boat. Then they just totally start shooting the breeze. Like, real casual and familiar.

On the Mad Science application, I was asked to describe myself. I provided the following:

I am an articulate and zany nature video enthusiast.

I think that pretty much sums it up.

I can not wait to officially be known as Dr. Calamity at birthday parties.

I just told the mail person that I hope she didn't get gangrene. She looked confused. But it was an overstated well-wish! Like, oh, it is raining so much you could have some seriously accelerated tissue necrosis after a day of stomping the streets.

I usually bring a footstool into work. For some reason, I get really uncomfortable if my feet aren't slightly elevated. At my previous telemarketing job, somebody remarked that they thought I was bringing in a foot bath. "Yeah," I remarked, "I'm trying to give myself gangrene." I think this statement confused my conversant. But really, a girl can't get gangrene unless she keeps her feets constantly wet. And you can't take a break from that shit for work.

I woke up several nights ago with an itch to scratch on my knee. That little itch turned into a bump, and that bump proliferated into a whole lot of bumps on my right knee. The bulbous, pustules grew on top of one another and began exuding clear liquid that left tidbits of my pants wet and dried in an orange-tinged crust. Not pretty. But very, very itchy.

When my ass started showing a few of the same bumps, I made my ass an appointment to get to the doctor. I am not sure how I got poison ivy on my ass. Mr. Makeout and I did our thang on a shower curtain. I took a shower right afterwards with the strongest hippie soap the Autumn Chateau had to offer. I even put the clothes I was wearing in a plastic bag and shit to isolate the offending allergen.

Actually, before I made an appointment this afternoon, I called the doctor's office this morning to solicit an earlier meeting. "Uh, I had a bit of a trist with a nice young man in the woods this weekend, and it appears that I may have some poison ivy on my behind as a result," I told the appointment-maker. She just signed me up to get a phone call from the nurse.

Like I said, I'm not sure how the poison ivy got on my ass. But my ass is pretty close to my ass crack, and I was NOT about to have some poison ivy sprout up there or in a more dorsal, furrier area over the weekend.

I called this afternoon and provided a slightly less polite account of my poison ivy encounter; this time I got an appointment. I feared disrobing, or bearing my ass in some manner that would inevitably feel awkward. But the doctor took one look at my knee and offered up the prednisone without even so much as a peek at my ass. Score.

This is the story of my life.