Alright everyone, sit down criss-cross-applesauce, it's time for storytime! Come share your humorous anecdotes, awful sex escapades, old family stories, things that definitely happened to your old roommate's mother's friend, sundry misadventures and straight-up fish tales! Here's a few choice ones from my childhood: Spoiler: babby wiwaxia terrifies some poor paleobotanist This one I actually heard from my mom, because I was too young to really remember it (about 3 or 4, probably?). So keep that in mind for the following. So, we were moving into a new apartment, and the previous tenant who was just moving out was a paleontologist, probably a grad student or the like. Babby Wiwaxia was every bit as paleontology-obsessed as I am now, and got wind of this. So we apparently have a few minutes to chat with the guy while moving in or something or other, I don't know, and I ask him about being a paleontologist. The guy, no doubt used to deflecting dinosaur-hyper kids, goes "I study plants, not dinosaurs." Babby Wiwaxia, undeterred, goes "how old?" The guy is a little startled because I don't immediately lose interest when it's not dinosaurs, and goes "Cretaceous" "Upper Cretaceous or Lower Cretaceous?" I ask. "...lower." This is the bit where the dude's starting to get a bit unsettled because, seriously, how many non-geologists actually know the names of geologic periods, let alone the divisions within them, and this kid is like fucking four. "So are you studying the evolution of flowering plants?" "um. ...yes?" Spoiler: things about her college experience my mom has told me There was a couple years when my mom was at college before MDMA/Ecstasy was classified as a Schedule I drug, so the house of chem majors cooked up a bunch on the side. (after it was classified, the FBI showed up on their doorstep and they were like "haha yeah, we ain't doing that shit anymore. please don't hurt us.) Speaking of drugs, she had some friends at a nearby college in a state capital who went and harvested hallucinogenic mushrooms off the lawn of the state capitol building. Also, she straight-up snuck into the section of the library where they archive all the old senior theses and stole her senior thesis because she wasn't happy with it. I've also got some great diving stories from her from when she was working as a marine biologist in grad school that I'll share here later. Spoiler: the worst way to get off work in the history of ever So I had a summer job at a zoo a couple of years ago. I'd been volunteering there as a teen volunteer for a couple of years and got a paid internship on weekends in the spring and over the summer. It was pretty great. So one day in the spring, I went down and helped the program coordinators (K and L for the purposes of this telling) and some other interns and returning volunteers train up the new batch of volunteers. We were getting close to the end of the training and that day we'd taken all the interpretation backpacks (filled with stuff like furs and skull casts and footprint molds and whatnot) that the volunteers would take out docent-ing, so they could get a chance to practice with them. We had also collected a bunch of surveys about the training from the new volunteers. So, everything went pretty well, and all the trainees went home and we start packing stuff up. K's gone home and L needs to take care of some last things at the education center where we were doing the training, so she asks me and another intern, T, to take back the cart with all the interpretation backpacks and collected surveys and assorted pens and post-its and notes and all the other junk you generally need for a training. The headquarters of the teen volunteer/intern program, where we're headed, is in the back-stage bit of this big indoor children's play-area building called the Zoomazium, a few minutes walk up the path. So T and I take the cart and start walking up the path. T realizes she forgot her backpack in the education center, so she runs back to grab it while I wait with the cart. While I'm waiting, it starts to drizzle lightly a bit. We get a lot of drizzle and not a lot of cloudbursts in the area, so this isn't particularly worrying. By the time T comes back and we start walking up the path again, it's started to pick up a bit, and T asks if we should wait in the education center. But we expect that it's not going to be too bad, and also that it's probably not going to let up soon. Hah. Well, we were half right. By the time it really starts to rain hard, by local standards, we're more than halfway to the Zoomazium, so we make sure all the interpretation backpacks are on the bottom shelf of the cart, out of the rain some, and put T's backpack over the volunteer surveys to keep them dry. And we continue up the path. The rain keeps getting stronger. And it starts to hail. Hail is accumulating in little drifts on T's backpack and the undefended notes and post-its and whatnot. We're both soaked, at this point, and pretty much running up the path to the Zoomazium. We get there, and take shelter under the eaves at the back of the building, right by the back door. It is at this point that we realize two key facts: 1) The back door is always locked from the outside, and neither of us has the key and, worse, 2) the zoo's closed for the day, so the front door of the building is pretty damn likely to be locked, too. And the rain and hail show no signs of letting up. So we're stuck there huddling under the eaves, trying to keep the cart as dry as possible while the wind blows rain and hail in at us. Hail is accumulating so thick that it looks like snow on the patch of grass across from us. There's a rain drain at our feet, and water's coming down so fast that it's not draining fast enough, so there's a soup of hailstones floating in water several inches deep above the drain. I have no idea how long we were stuck there, but it felt like ten minutes at least. Well, actually, it felt like hours, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. A couple of times other zoo staff drove past in trucks or motorized carts, but we had no luck flagging any of them down. We may have called L in here too, I don't remember, but if we did we didn't get a reply. Eventually, we realize that the storm is probably not likely to stop soon and we are probably not going to get anyone's attention to get them to let us in, so I stay behind with the cart under the relative safety of the eaves while T goes to scout out the situation at the front door. Fortunately. Fortunately there's some nice ladies from Events setting up the inside of Zoomazium for an evening event, and they let us in. Of course, the rain stops almost as soon as we get inside. Of course. But now we still have a cart full of wet office supplies, damp surveys (T's backpack, while valiant in its efforts, could only do so much) and, worst of all, backpacks full of valuable and potentially water-sensitive presentation items. We call L in a panic but (still?) no response. Oh well, we're Adults, dammit, and Zoo Employees and if our boss is out of contact, we'll just have to Show Initiative and deal with it ourselves! So we start unloading the cart. We check to make sure none of the presentation items were damaged (none were, thank god) and pull them out of the wet backpacks and spread them out across table and counters in the little staff kitchen in Zoomazium that's the de facto program headquarters. Then we take all the surveys and carefully pull them apart so they don't stick together and spread them out across the kitchen to dry. Then we start seeing what we can salvage of the training notes and office supplies. Then the Events ladies come in and tell us that they need this space for the event and they need to start setting up in here pretty much right now, so could we get all this cleared away, please? Fuck. Everything back onto the cart. Fortunately, L shows up at this point (she was in her car hiding from the rain and hail and evidently didn't hear our calls) and helps us get all the papers and supplies back onto the cart and the backpacks hung up and the presentation items set up safely, and we wheel the cart into her and K's office to deal with later and joke about K having to deal with it if everything gets all humid in there over their days off. And then we all go home. Yeah, I bet you thought the story ended there. Haha, nope. Y'see, on account of that little misadventure, I decided that I would leave via the exit closer to my house, rather than walk back down to the exit by the education center. Here are some relevant facts about the exit closer to my house that I neglected to remember: 1.) The administrative area of the zoo is up by the parking lot there, so once you leave the gate of the zoo proper, you're still in a fenced-off area around all that junk 2.) The zoo was closed. The gates were locked. 3.) The inner gate, from the zoo proper into this fenced-off area, has a one-way exit turnstile in it. The outer fence does not (well technically it has several, but they're all locked and never used). 4.) I did not have a perimeter key (almost nobody at the zoo does). 5.) Did I mention that the zoo was closed and the gates were locked? I'm sure you can all see where this is going. So after blithely strolling up the main path and being confronted by a locked gate and a non-functional turnstile I ran around the perimeter of the fence, desperately hoping that one of the gates would be unlocked or one of the turnstiles would work. Haha, no. Neither do I run into any other zoo staff who might be able to let me out. I do however, run into several vans of Boy Scouts and their counselors, here for the overnight event. I'm in zoo uniform, so naturally they ask me if I'm coming to let them in. I reassure them that someone will be along to let them in soon, and scamper as quickly as I can while still looking professional. Okay, I'm trapped. Great. Well, I can just call L and... oh. My phone is almost out of battery. And L missed a couple of our calls earlier, and I don't even know if she's still here or if she's gone home while I was looking for an exit. Fortunately, L picks up and is still here at the zoo. Unfortunately, L doesn't have a perimeter key either (like I said, very few people do). Fortunately, the Events ladies do, and would be perfectly willing to let me out when they come up to let the Boy Scouts in. In half an hour. :T And it's starting to drizzle again. Did I mention that it's a half-an-hour walk home from the zoo? However, all's well that ends well. The Events lady does come up and let me out, and there is a truly excellent burger place on the way home, where I stop and get a double blue-cheese and bacon burger to pig the fuck out on. The end.
Spoiler: burglary and true love So when my dad was going to grad school he and a friend made an arrangement at the end of one school year to rent a house together for the next year. Both of them were spending the summer out of town, so they would rent the house, but not occupy it, for the summer and then move in together in the fall. During the summer, someone broke into the house and was presumably very disappointed to find that, being unoccupied, it had no stuff in it. Rather than leave empty-handed, the burglar elected to steal the cut-glass doorknobs from the house. At the end of the summer, my dad and his friend came to move into their house and discovered the break-in. My dad's friend declared that he had no desire to live in a neighborhood where people steal doorknobs and decided to find somewhere else to live. My dad couldn't afford to rent the house by himself, so he had to break the lease. The landlord demanded that my dad handle the business of finding a new tenant. My dad held an open house. My mom came to the open house. That's how they met. (She didn't get the house, though).
That's adorbz, yo. My parents were high school sweethearts. My dad actually followed my mom to college. And then she broke up with him like a week later, haha. (they got back together for a while, obviously)
Spoiler: THE DEFLOWERING I lost my virginity when I was 18, on March 30th, 2010. The reason I know the date is simple: I was writing a fanfic that day. My BF-from-when-I-thought-I-liked-dudes, Jeremy (he'll come up in another story here, incidentally), asked if he could come over that night. I was all "hell yeah," of course, and went back to writing my fanfic. It was in four short parts, and he arrived just after I finished the third part. Needless to say, we ended up fucking, and there's nothing terribly interesting about that story. We cuddled for a bit before he had to head home, and it was all pretty nice. Then I immediately went back and finished my fanfic. I dunno why this is funny to me. Next few are copy-pasted from my Tumblr. Spoiler: COLLEGE ROOMIES FROM HELL I only really had one roommate, and she was this annoying uber-rich girl from Beverly Hills who embodied basically every awful spoiled brat stereotype you can imagine. Like, at one point our toilet clogged, and she complained about how back home she would’ve just gotten the maid to fix it, and the boy who had come over to help us unclog it and I both stared and said “wait, you have a maid?” and she just said “you don’t?!” And this is a girl who claimed “oh, but I’m not actually rich,” but she always had the nicest fashions and was just this spoiled asshole. Anyway, here’s a story about her. So she was also this hardcore Christian with some pretty strong fundie leanings, and one time she asked me, out of the blue, if I’d ever had an abortion, to which I just sorta stared at her confused and said “uh no??” (Which was and still is true, but why would you even ask that, what the fuck.) And she said “WELL DON’T EVER GET ONE, IT’S ENDING A LIFE“ started spouting all this pro-life bullshit and I’m just sort of sitting there trying to figure out what even set this girl off, because there was literally no fucking context. This never came up again and she dropped out of school midway through her freshman year because she decided she didn’t actually care about art. Spoiler: DRUGS ARE BAD KIDS In junior and senior years, there was this girl, who I’ll simply call Ty, who was the embodiment of everything wrong with our generation, in that she seemed to only be capable of talking about weed and booze and would constantly talk about how “rasta” she was despite being pretty fucking white. She was bleach-blonde, her tan was borderline orange (pretty clearly fake), and she was a complete ass to me at all times. You can probably picture her, as I’m pretty sure every high school has at least one kid like that, probably an entire clique of them. If you’re wondering why I’m describing her like this, it’s because I think it makes the story I have to tell kind of speak for itself. So we had a class, humanities, which lasted a good chunk of the day (I went to this hybrid homeschooling program thing so class schedules were a bit funky) and had a break in the middle for lunch and stretching your legs and such. And somehow, one day, the entire class—all nine or so of us—ended up sitting at one table. And Ty opens up her backpack and pulls out a pencil case, saying “Hey, look what I got!” And she unzips the pencil case, and inside it is a truly ridiculous amount of marijuana. At school. In a very public place. Less than ten feet from the door to the classroom. I can’t make this shit up. I had asked her a few times before where she actually procured her pot, and she’d refused each time. I later learned that she was scared I’d rat her out. Given the fact that I was a bit of a teacher’s pet and also dating the TA (before you ask, he was only about two years my senior, so it’s not like I was dating someone out of my age range), this was not an unjustified fear in theory, but the truth is that I doubt I actually would’ve said anything, and I certainly didn’t in this case. (But hey, if my high school humanities teacher sees this post? Ty totally brought a fuckton of weed to school once.) She also once got really mad at Jeremy (the aforementioned TA, and the same Jeremy I fucked between chapters 3 and 4 of a silly fanfic) when he tried to explain to her that Rastafarianism wasn’t just The Sacred Art Of Getting Turnt or whatever, and one other time in that class we had to do a collage and she turned in a really shitty collage of Bob Marley, because of course she did. I genuinely wonder if there was anything to her persona other than smoking copious amounts of ganja, because that was all she fucking talked about. Apparently she’s been in and out of rehab since graduation, which is a really depressing note to end this story on and clearly I wasn’t thinking this through, but it does go to show you that even if you’re the biggest fucking loser in your graduating class, you still might be better off today than the girl who brought a pencil case full of weed to school. Spoiler: THE MARSHMALLOW INCIDENT When I was in 8th grade, my school had this assembly thing where a “representative” from each grade (7th through 12th) would come up and play a game. The game, in this case, was essentially a fusion of Chubby Bunny and Jeopardy—they’d ask the group a trivia question, and whoever answered it (correctly) first won the round, meaning everyone else had to put a marshmallow in their mouths. In order to win, you had to be the last one standing—the marshmallows were not allowed to dribble out of your mouth, and if you answered any questions, they had to be intelligible. The prize awarded to the winner was the remainder of the bag of marshmallows. I was always really fucking eager to do shit like this, because I’m kind of an attention whore and always have been, so I volunteered to represent the 8th grade. Now’s a good time to note the size of these marshmallows. They weren’t those pansy-ass cocoa marshmallows—these were honest-to-fucking-God campfire marshmallows, about an inch long. This is important. Now’s also a good time to mention that I have really crappy reflexes. This is also important. The game started, and I quickly discovered that my reaction time simply wasn’t as good as everyone else’s. I knew all the answers, pretty much, but I couldn’t raise my hand fast enough to actually answer them. You’d think this would get me out of the game early, right? WRONG. Keep in mind that if the marshmallows began to dribble from your gaping maw, you were out. This disqualified a good chunk of the group fairly early on, since these were pretty damn big marshmallows. And for some reason, I was a really determined 8th grader, so I just kept shoving marshmallows into my mouth like a fucking champ. I might have given up on answering questions at some point—it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was the only one who never did get to answer a question, but I was able to hold so many goddamn marshmallows in my mouth that I was still one of the last two standing. The only reason I didn’t win was because my opponent had answered a lot of questions and thus didn’t have a mouth full of ‘mallow. As we were all exiting the assembly, a girl came up to me and said, “Anna, you do realize you managed to fit twenty-three marshmallows into your mouth, right?” I had not actually realized this. I had lost count. I don’t even remember who the winner was—just that he was a boy, and that I think he was an 11th grader. What truly stands out to me is the fact that for the rest of 8th grade, I was the fucking Marshmallow Girl, and I basked in that glory. THE END.
Spoiler: popular post on my old personal, tmi/nsfw I once had to skip out on sex because me and the at-the-time bae were laughing too hard. They started laughing in the middle of making out, completely at random, and I thought I'd done something wrong, like nudged their tongue piercing wrong or something? No, apparently they were thinking about the Sonic "gotta go fast" meme and started laughing while we were about to do the thing. They're laughing so hard they can't kiss, I start laughing so hard because (1) that meme is fucking funny and (2) why were you thinking about it when we were about to do the thing, and then we both laughed over basically nothing for 20 straight minutes. I timed it, I'm not exaggerating. And by the end of that giggle fit we were both just kind of "yeah sex is not a thing that is happening tonight." The next day my ribs were sore. Spoiler: please drink responsibly So the first time I got shitfaced drunk was in my sophomore year of college, over St. Patrick's day (sort of). I remember going to the grocery store for wine with my friends, who were underage but apparently got really lucky with IDs. There was red wine, and there was Jack. We decided to stay in, about nine or ten of us, and watch the Harry Potter movies and slowly get toasted. I was the bright one who suggested the drinking game. And we didn't do sips. We did shots. Shots of Jack with red wine chasers. In the first hour, I had maybe five or six shots. It's not a lot of liquid, I'll be fine! And I'm sipping on red wine to chill everything. So eventually I notice that this one Quiddich scene in the movie is taking a lot longer than it really should. And the room is twirling, like, a lot. And when I put my head back against the couch it gives me the giggles and a bit of "whoo!" And then my stomach started... doing things. I got up (badly), sprinted for the door (more like stumbled a lot and mumbled something), and made it to the dorm bathroom so I could throw up in the huge janitorial trash can. I was drunk. I mean D-R-U-N-K drunk. Completely shitfaced. My roommate was alert to this and followed me out and noticed how out of it I was, and how I was wiping off my dirty mouth on my shoulder. She somehow got me out of my clothes, shoved me in and out of the shower to hopefully help me get less drunk (which worked for sensations at least, it was a very cold shower) and stayed with me while I held our tiny room trashcan between my knees and yarfed up everything I had ever eaten in my life. It felt like throwing up rubbing alcohol. And my roommate was such a sweetheart that to keep me from completely blacking out she quizzed me on ASOIAF. She'd lent me the books and so she asked me where I was, what the characters were doing. I woke up the next day feeling like I got hit with the splintered end of a two-by-four. I went to the campus clinic because I had no idea this was a hangover. They diagnosed me with dehydration and just told me to drink water, but I think they knew better than I did and just didn't tell me. I couldn't eat anything but scrambled eggs and mac 'n' cheese for three days. It was terrific. To this day I cannot drink whiskey if I can taste the rubbing alcohol underneath it. Red wine, even the smell of it, also gives me the instant heaves. Although, when I told my parents this story, they started laughing, because they couldn't believe I'd been that stupid. Well, neither did I. So I love telling this story. It's hilarious.
@Wiwaxia I also have a tiny-dinosaur-obsessed-weirdo story, entertainingly. Although mine isn't quite that impressive, haha. Spoiler: tiny smartass adventures So when I was little, I think about five through seven, I was super into dinosaurs, and I read obsessively about them pretty much whenever I could. I was visiting a museum with my grandpa one day and there was an exhibit of fossils, including a mammoth skeleton that was fully assembled. Also there was a woman and her son about my age. She evidently had to go somewhere and told the kid, gesturing to the mammoth skeleton, "Wait by the dinosaur until I get back." I was super offended by this and had basically no filter because six years old, so I marched straight up to this lady and went, "that's not a dinosaur. That's a wooly mammoth, they came after the dinosaurs." My family will never let me forget this. Apparently it's because it was the start of my, ahem, wittiness.
Spoiler: dad jokes My dad is incredibly numerically minded. Two great anecdotes related to this: 1. My brother and I had a favorite set of storybooks growing up, the Bill and Pete series. There's one point where the writing goes, "Ooooooooo! said all the little crocodiles." My dad read this as "zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero, said all the little crocodiles!" Dad. D a d. No. 2. My brother once asked my dad what nuns were. My dad, not missing a beat, said "nuns are less than ones."
my sister has quite a few hilarious work stories, she worked in the parties department of a really shitty water park: Spoiler: let it go part of her job was to set up decorations for any of the cabanas* that were rented. one of the many, many frozen themed parties had little snowflake danglies to hang from the ceiling and an elsa themed barbie stuck in the top of a cake. said cake also had those sparkly candle things that are basically a type of firework, because why the fuck not. unlike most parties, however, the mother of the child having the party "stayed behind to help set up". she didn't actually help set up, she just stood there and criticized every snowflake placement until they were hanging in everyone's faces in a sort of curtain formation. after everyone arrived, my sister carried on with the rest of the party service things, like cutting and passing out cake and making sure they had pitchers of fresh water. she broke a few rules here and kind of rudely and insistently told the woman to watch the cake, because of the candles. about five minutes after they lit the terrifying candles and my sister ran inside for more water, elsa's (the barbie) hair caught fire. because of course it did. the mother was on the phone, not noticing any of this, until what my sister described as "scream crying" started. the mother grabbed the barbie, and instead of chucking it in the pool quite literally three steps from her, she panicked and started waiving it around frantically. which, of course, ignited all the snowflakes. now all of the screaming children are trapped behind a wall of flaming decorations, and the mother is getting hysterical. my sister came back about when the snowflakes started blazing, and splashed the woman and the decorations (and therefore the kids behind them) with the pitchers of ice cold water to douse the fire. and of course the mom was wearing a thin, white, expensive looking blouse that day. * a cabana was essentially a picnic table next to the pool that was sort of boxed in by shitty walls on three of the sides to provide the illusion of privacy without actually providing any privacy. Spoiler: my little whoopsie a special party came in one day, the group had paid out the entire arcade room (all five shitty games, oh yeah now were cookin) to have a My Little Pony party. everything was fine, the cake was nice and the decorations were set up and everyone was having as okay a time as you could have at such a crappy water park, when it came time to serve the cake. my sister then proceeded to start cutting it into servings. about halfway through, however, she heard a SNAP. wondering what the hell in a cake could have made this noise, she proceeded to remove an ultra rare toy pony's head from the most recent slice. you see what the host had neglected to tell her or any of the other staff was that they were planning to surprise the birthday girl with this pony she had been searching for years for (surprisingly, she was more into the old show than the new one). the host looked over, went completely pale in the face, an proceeded to grab chunks of cake and decapitated pony to run into the bathroom and flush it before the birthday girl saw. her coworkers nearly died of laughter after it was all over.
Once I stole a monkey from a zoo. It was a stuffed toy monkey from the gift shop. Mum had to go back and pay for it.
These are probably pretty dumb, but here goes! Spoiler: The Spitball Incident One day in third grade, the regular teacher was replaced by a substitute. Having read a lot of books, I knew the thing to do when a substitute teacher comes is throw spitballs. I knew they were made of spit and paper, but I had no clue as to their size. So during the first part of the day, I discreetly wadded up more and more soggy saliva paper. By recess, my wad was as big as a baseball. I hid it under some pebbles by the slide, played for a while, and retrieved it. Now it had a bunch of pebbles stuck to it. A few friends told me that this was definitely not the correct size, which made me happy since up until around tenth grade, my life philosophy was "always be an outlier." Anyways, I threw the spitball at the substitute and since I wanted to get away as fast as possible in the hopes that she wouldn't catch me, I didn't even wait to see if it hit. Some kids told me it did while others told me it didn't. It probably didn't since I don't remember her with a messy face or messy clothes later. Spoiler: That Time I Made Up a Conspiracy Thing As an elementary schooler, nothing ticked me off more than the fact that adults had power and authority while kids didn't. So I came up with this worldview where adults were evil monsters. They raised kids because they loved the taste of kid blood and when somebody turned 18, they were killed and replaced with an adult. Every adult had a human form, a monster form (their preferred form when kids weren't looking), a metal form, and a dark form (these last two were mainly for battles). Luckily, I had another spirit in me, like in Yu-Gi-Oh, and his name was Lava Panther. As could be expected, he was a panther made out of lava. He was so hot he had to stand on his claws because if his toes touched the Earth, they would melt the ground beneath him and he would sink to the Earth's core. He could make one foot diameter balls of pure energy that would cut through anything and he could make a 2-minute pure energy shield that would repel everything. His main weakness was fire, since it was colder than him but he couldn't just evaporate it away like with water. He had a fire form and a light form for battles, though I forget what their strengths and weaknesses were. Anyways, he fought adults and when the right time came, I would turn into him and free all kids. I tried to get other kids to join me and find their "monster forms" like Lava Panther, but I always got frustrated with how they wanted their parents to be exceptions. I got in trouble a lot for calling kids who never got into trouble "slaves to the adults" and talking about how they went into adult-made torture devices on the sly because adults liked seeing kids get tortured. I also got in trouble for drawing an adult monster form with dripping penises on its shoulders (it had to pee somehow!). I believed that adults accidentally put messages about their evil plan in popular media. Spoiler: Weird Ways I Distorted Art Projects -Whenever I had to draw a self portrait for art class, I would draw myself as a bald vampire leaking bodily fluids from everywhere on my face just to be weird. One time we were supposed to pick our own backgrounds so I drew different kinds of freaky eyeballs behind my vampire. -I once did the first grade art project instead of the fifth grade one because there wasn't enough time to be the best and I was worried about grades if I was the worst. It was that outlier thing. -Writing prompts, even for major standardized tests, were violence-fests where everybody died in the end. Once I had to design a new Greek god or goddess and I made the goddess of nuclear bombs. Another time we had to choose a perspective to write from in a picture of a girl holding a frog. I chose the girl's fingers (just to be different, since everybody else chose the girl or the frog) and they died one by one. A third time we were supposed to write a story set in a hotel we visited and I wrote about aliens invading and killing everybody, and then a ghost killing the aliens. -We were supposed to make masks in art class and I based mine off the aliens from a nightmare I had about aliens killing everybody. -We had to design our own countries. Overhearing that somebody named a city "watahoti" (what a hotty) as a one-off joke, I named every city something like "manamikudlukin" (man am I good lookin') or "boidoilukud" (boy do I look good). There were like 20 cities, and each one had a long name talking about how great I looked. I reused the idea at the next school that made me do the design a country project. -Not an art project, but when I had to use vocabulary words in sentences, I would use them in ways where they could be replaced by any word and the sentence would still work. Like "my favorite word is X" or "X is a word with Y letters" or "this sentence contains the word X."
Spoiler: drinking stories about my brother are always great This one time my brother got super drunk off of martinis and was super hungover the next day well, the next day we were hanging out with some old family friends and my mom (who didn't realize he was hungover) noticed his bloodshot eyes and went "hey what's up" And he looked at her and went "yeah i think i'm allergic to olives. see, I had a bunch of martinis the other night..." (side note, he's also apparently a little allergic to olives somehow. my brother, ladeez & gennelmun)
Spoiler: Odd Workplace So, my second job after arriving in the US in about 1998 was for SBC Smartpages in Pasadena, California, which was the online yellow pages division of Southwestern Bell. It was really the same division of Pac Bell, except SBC had swallowed it up as one of the mouthfuls by which it got big enough to become AT&T again. Phone companies are notoriously dysfunctional places to work. I'm sure most of you have encountered the newspaper comic strip Dilbert. Well, the guy who draws it used to work at Pac Bell, and most of the early material came from there. Possibly including the talking animals; I'd buy it. Anyway, this was in the midst of the first Internet Boom and SBC's brains could just not handle how much they had to pay people to get competitive staff for internet stuff. Policies and procedures could not change, including the salary scale, but some enterprising person found an out: they made us all managers. Every single one of us, from the most newbie of newbie software developers on up. This also meant that the hiring process assumed that we were going to be handling million-dollar budgets, and thus we had super detailed background checks, credit checks, drug tests etc. before we got hired. If it had been legal to polygraph us, they probably would have. And sure enough, it was pretty dysfunctional inside. The CIO (Chief Information Officer, or basically the boss of the techies) was a slimy toad of a man who the boss of the division didn't trust beyond kicking range, so he wanted techies who didn't report to the guy as a second line of information. That was us, the systems administrators. So we were placed under finance. The CFO, the chief finance guy, was someone who had been promoted sideways from somewhere else in the company to get rid of him. Phone companies are like the Government; you really have to work on it to get fired. They just put the fuck-ups into places they hope they can't do much harm. This guy was Italian, 6'5", skinny and cadaverous, and we voted him Most Likely To Really Be A Vampire very quickly. He loved funerals and graveyards; his assistant had worked for him for a whole week and her grandmother died, and he insisted on going to the funeral. Apparently what his family did for fun was visit the dead in the cemetary and bring them presents and have a big party there. He had clearly heard somewhere that one really should smile, that it helps one get ahead in life. So he had practiced one in the mirror. It was scary. It was so fake, so exaggerated, and came on at really inappropriate times. He also had a habit of going off on people who didn't deserve it, and he had an underling trained to remind him to have people skills. This consisted of tapping him on the shoulder and saying "people!" in an urgent whisper. My partner met him and pretty much her first words were "Does he own any chest freezers? Because I swear he does, and he keeps bodies in them." So there came a point when we needed to take on a junior sysadmin to assist me. So Mr Creepy did the final interview by himself. We eventually hired the guy, so I got to hear the story: halfway through, Mr Creepy stands up, places his finger to his lips, and whispers, "Follow me!" He takes the candidate to the restroom, leaving the guy wondering just what personal service he is going to be asked to perform for a job. No, he just continues interviewing him while he pisses. Where on earth does that sound like a reasonable or acceptable thing to do? We did get the toad CIO fired eventually, though. He was using his work computers to download porn, blatantly. We sicced SBC Corporate Security on him, and after a short investigation got marched out of the building. Still the oddest place I ever worked, and I worked for some odd ones.
i swear one of the dilbert strips had a creepy bathroom interview as a joke now that you said that. it's probably just deja vu though. i used to be obsessed with dilbert comics when i was young, even though i didn't understand most of the jokes.
My mom told me another bad Dad joke that she actually got from her dad. How do you catch a unique rabbit? Spoiler U 'nique up on it. How do you catch a tame rabbit? Spoiler 'Tame way. #baddadjokes2k15
Here is an amusing story! Well, at least it's amusing to me. Well, at least it's amusing to me in comparison to the story about SS flipping out about New Glasses (which was upsetting) or the one about SS forgetting how to make green beans be cut-up green beans in a saucepan (which was distressing). Today was Eventful in the Not Fun way. Spoiler: =>SS: Be confused about slippers. =>SS: Regard feet. You are pretty sure that those are almost definitely your feet. I mean, you're standing up and they are directly underneath you, so either they're your feet or else the universe and your perception are disagreeing with each other in ways you are not equipped to handle right now. Especially because you just did an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle. That was a joke. It's funny. You probably shouldn't laugh at it though, because laughing randomly to yourself is Socially Inappropriate. You are so great at social appropriateness. Go you. =>SS: You were thinking about your feet, dumbass. Oh yeah, there's something wrong with the things which you are pretty aure are your feet. Well, they're in the right place (directly beneath you). And they're the right colour (black). They are, however, the wrong size. Further experimentation suggests this is because you are only wearing socks. Man, you should be a detective. =>SS: Fondly regard green beans. They are green. They have the ends cut off. They are in a saucepan. =>SS: FEET. Oh yeah,you should probably fix that. =>SS: Find the black things you put on your feet. Here they are! =>SS: So put them on your feet already. What? No! Those are shoes. They are for your outside feet. You need to find the other black things you put on your feet. =>SS: Go upstairs. =>SS: Go into the bathroom. Wait, why the shit did you think your slippers would be in the bathroom? Oh yeah, because you found your glasses there earlier. Why were your glasses in the bathroom? You have no fucking clue. Definitely not because you were crying alone in there earlier, you are way too cool for that. NEXT QUESTION. =>SS: Go into your bedroom. Look, your inside black feet pods! You found them! Go you! Feeling accomplished, you wander out of the room and halfway back downstairs before you realise that oh wait shit wasn't the whole point of this dumbass adventurequest so you could put the feet pods on your feet? You return to your bedroom. =>SS: So put them on your feet already. You put the slippers on your feet. You definitely knew they were called slippers all along and did not only just remember it now. Man, you are so great at problem-solving. Nobody can beat you. You are simply the best there is. =>SS: Return to the kitchen. Your feet feel weird. You express this to the guy in the kitchen. He suggests that maybe it's because you're wearing your slippers on the wrong feet. You regard your feet. Oh, you say.
i've been stupidly nostalgic all day for some reason, so here's some funny stories about my first roommate during my short college stay: Spoiler: too late for sorry so my roommate grew up catholic, and i know next to nothing about catholicism. she was having a particularly bad day once and every time i'd see her she'd say "god be with you!" to which i always replied "uh, thanks". as you can probably tell, i'm not that great at social niceties. as the day progressed, she persisted. "god be with you!" as one of us walked out the door "god be with you!" as she heads towards an important test "god be with you!" over and over, each time sounding a little more frustrated at about dinnertime, i stayed in the room to study while she went to the cafeteria and sure enough a disgruntled "god be with you!" was called out. but this time she waited in the doorway. i looked up when i realized she was still standing there and she shouted "YOURE SUPPOSED TO SAY 'AND ALSO WITH YOU'", slammed the door and stormed to the elevator. i nearly fell out of my chair laughing when i realized what she was talking about. Spoiler: buzz, buzz one evening, we were watching tv when we heard screaming from the hall. we decided to see what the commotion was. bad move. as soon as we opened the door, a hornet flew in. seeing as we and nearly every other person on my floor were either huge weenies or trying to sleep, we had to "take care" of it. there was much debate about whether we should try for catch and release (a friend from another room's idea) obliteration by shoe(my idea) or leave the room and never enter again(roommate's idea). we tried for catch and release first. we got a cup, waited for it to land on a wall, and ran at it to slam the cup around it. once we had succeeded, the person holding the cup was supposed to...oh. we hadn't thought this far ahead. so we found a plate, convinced the holder to ease up on a now VERY agitated hornet, and smoothly cove- oh god it's free everyone run. here comes the next idea. we weren't going to catch and release, so let's just off the thing. we started with shoes. mostly just throwing them in it's general direction. it's probably around 1 am at this point, and option number three is looking a lot nicer. suddenly, roommate remembers an article she read about using hairspray to kill bugs. something about how it sticks their wings together. well alright, i say, let's do this. we go running in with borrowed cans of hairspray spraying it madly while flailing our arms and making enough noise to put us on our neighbors four doors down's permanent shit list. the hornet tries valiantly to hide in the shutters, but alas, the beast was slain. finally, we could rest. until three more hornets flew in. turns out the unused room down the hall had a hornets nest in it. Spoiler: trapped the elevator in our building at one point started to break down. if more than eight people got on it at a time, it would stop between floors, and you would have to wait for maintenance. about five minutes after roommate announces she's going to study in the library, i get a call from her. she says the elevator's stopped. i tell her to use the stairs. she says she's in the elevator. i say oh. i asked her if she needed me to do anything. she just asked what you do in this sort of situation, that she already hit the emergency button and nothing happened. she wasn't really too worried, she had her laptop. i stayed on the phone with her and went downstairs to ask the front desk if they could call maintenance or security or whoever because the elevator was broken and my roommate was trapped. the front desk person immediately expressed worry and i said "nah, she said she's fine. she's just doing her homework in there." cue bloodcurdling screams from phone. i asked her what was wrong with no response for several minutes except more screaming until, "oh never mind i thought i saw a bee". she eventually got out, completely unfazed aside from the bee bit. it's probably pretty rare for someone to be able to say "my roommate is absolutely bonkers" purely as a term of endearment. i miss her lots.
Spoiler: The Snail Story Here's a tale from my internet reviewer fandom days. Once upon a time, a silly joke spawned a fanart of one of the reviewers as a snail. This turned into a whole cute AU with the reviewers as animals. All was well until I read Uzumaki. For those who don't know, Uzumaki is a horror manga about spirals by the guy who did the "this hole was made for me!" manga. In particular there's a chapter about people turning into snails So to troll a friend, I wrote a shitty fic in her inbox about this reviewer turning into a snail. Well one of my followers is a friend of said reviewer and he convinced him to make a live action video of my shitty joke fic. So there is a video of a fic I wrote acted by the people the fic was about and it's great. There were costume pieces made for this. They put more effort into it than I did. I'm not sure if the joke is on me, the reviewer, or everyone who watched that thing.
Spoiler: Teenage Swirl: psychic, weather-based mutant, or secretly Haruhi Suzumiya? So back in high school , about 3 months before my birthday, I decided or possibly realized that it was going to snow on my birthday, in the area where we lived. I told my friends in the cafeteria that day, brimming with confidence and grinning my delight that the weather would subvert the seasons like that. I told my parents when I got home, either that day or a few after. Just telling everyone wasn't enough. I wouldn't get the gratification of being right for months yet, and I wanted to milk it for more than that. So I cheerfully announced to them all that, when we did get snowfall on my birthday, they were to build a temple to me. People humored me a little, and we went off on a tangent to discuss what sort of temple, and what to make it out of. My mom, who used to do landscaping and had a nice garden at the house, humored me on the condition that I include some winning lottery numbers with my prediction. I reminded people of it every few weeks, and reminded them that I had started in February. The night before my birthday, I had a sleepover/pre-birthday party, and we all stayed up late playing Halo and chatting. There was no snow, and there hadn't been snow for about three or four weeks before. The morning of May 18th, my mom woke us up by yelling at me up the stairs. The sprouts and flowers started only a couple weeks before, and a frost could kill them. May 18th, in southern New England, and it snowed a few weeks after the previous time, and I knew it would months ahead of time. I never did get the winning lottery ticket number, though.
Spoiler: In Which I Display a Regrettable Lack of Taste It's 2010 and my aunt is comatose in a hospital in Houston. My grandmother is staying in an apartment in the city to be near her, and I'm with her because I was visiting when she got the call that Aunt had taken a turn for the worse and that she should come. I don't get along with Grandmother to begin with - no, I should say that between the two of us only I get along, because she's is the spoiled baby princess of her family and I am the stereotypical responsible perfectionist oldest-child of mine. When I'm around her, I constantly adjust my behaviour to avoid conflict, and it wears on me. (I should mention here that the reason I was visiting her is because I stayed when the rest of my family went home after my step-grandfather's funeral. So Grandmother has lost her second husband and is in the process of losing the youngest of her two living children. She's grieving and under the kind of stress that can shatter people, and her response is to become more neurotic about housekeeping and more snappish when frustrated. The woman is made out of steel, I swear.) I, on the other hand, don't know how to deal with stress or vent frustration. I tend to suppress emotions and ignore them when possible, and one of the things that helps me do this is finding something else to think about, something that makes me happy or interested, something that holds my attention more than worrying about Aunt and my family and the significance of the feeling of a thin bright wire snapping in my head, something to obsess over. And the thing I settle on, because it's June 2010 and there's less than a month left to the U.S. release, is ... The Last Airbender. See, I already liked M. Knight Shamalan's movies when I encountered Avatar: The Last Airbender, and I loved ATLA. My feelings had cooled a bit by season three, but I loved the characters, I loved the setting, I loved the bending and the way real martial art styles were used (matching concepts is my jam, the fact that the creators had considered the distinctive attributes of each element and then picked an art that suited it visually is still my favourite thing ever), I loved the animation, I loved the story. So when it was announced that Shamalan would be directing a live-action adaption of Book One I was thrilled. And when 2010 rolled around ... well. I had been following the casting (with some trepidation). I watched the trailers when they came out. I trawled the internet for articles about the production. I watched the trailers again. I made my mother watch the series. I watched the trailers some more. I dipped a toe into fandom and hastily withdrew when I realised how much conflict there was. In the week or two leading up to the release, I watched the trailers just about every other day. And that brings us to the first week in July, when I collar Grandmother and take her to see the movie. ...There's dead silence in the movie theater after it ends. (Anyway, that's how I remember it.) And there's dead silence in my head as I exit the theater with Grandmother. But it gradually gives way to excitement as I list, in my head, all the things I did like about the movie. The costumes and sets were pretty cool. I really liked that one fight. Or two fights. Most of the fights, actually, except ... I consider the Pebble Dance, and move on quickly. It was pretty neat that we got to see Azula! I wonder if they'll have the same actress in the second movie. Speaking of the second movie, I come to the conclusion that I like the ending of TLA better than the ending of Book One, because it makes sense to get Aang's coming-to-term-with-being-the-Avatar arc over in the first movie, and include mastering-the-Avatar-State in that so that it doesn't have to be crammed into the script for the second. The storyline was quite good, I think to myself, even if the dialogue was ... aaaaaand moving on! I carry a notebook around with me and write down things about TLA that I find interesting. I fill a page or so delineating the chiastic structure of the plot (I can't remember how it went, but I'm pretty sure I still have that notebook). At some point I become aware of just how badly the movie is thought of by most people, and stop being able to contain my fixation in my head. I read reviews and complain to Grandmother that the reviewers didn't even watch the movie. I track how much money it's making in theaters and email my mom about it. I write a review on IMDB in which, current me is relieved to note, I am not entirely unaware of the movie's many flaws. I write fanfiction. I think I get into an argument with someone on the IMDB boards, but that's perhaps best left un-remembered. I order Book One on DVD so I can re-watch it and compare it to the movie. When my sister Key comes out to help, I take her to see it, too. And everything I think about or do, I tell Grandmother. Repeatedly. And often. Until one night as we're driving to the hospital, I notice that she doesn't seem to be enjoying my ramblings. "Am I talking about this too much?" I ask. "Yes," she says, between clenched teeth. And then I go home and watch it again. (In the epilogue to this story, I become aware that The Last Airbender is a really terrible movie with a really terrible script. But it was nice while I liked it!)
The first day of sixth grade (at a new school, for the usual reasons), I pretended to be an exaggerated hippy all day. There was an external reason, like it was "hippy day" for the school or something. I enjoyed it so much that for the next month, every day I pretended to be a different subculture or nationality. Like one day I was "'Strayan, mate, got kangaroos at my house" and the next I was "like, totally a valley girl." It ended when I did one the teachers found offensive and I got in trouble. In fifth-sixth grade, I signed all my papers "The Perfect Miss (name) The Great (name) Dangerous (name), Girl Of Amazement." I tried to get everybody to call me that, too, but it didn't work out. Before that I had for a time signed them as "Glitch" because glitches were cool. I eventually left Lava Panther behind by thinking he was a demon and hating him. I associated the number 168 with him because if the devil had a number, it followed that demons had them too. One time on a math quiz I answered something along the lines of "I am religiously opposed to this number" instead of 168 and amazingly enough, the teacher didn't mark me down for it. In fourth grade, I broke into my friend's house to see if we could play late at night with no parents, since at the time I believed parents were evil because of the whole Lava Panther thing. I sneaked in through the window well, which they forgot to lock. The first time I tried, I had to leave because his mom sent the dogs down into the basement because they were barking too much (because of me). The second time, she just grumbled "stupid imaginary rabbits," yelled at them, and went back up to her room. When I got to my friend's bedroom, I shook him awake and all he wanted to do was go back to sleep, so I went back out and tried to get to my other friend's house, where I finally got caught by her mom.
