dear blog

i have a desk now! and all my clothes came! including

• $0.65 kona gold tshirt from san francisco
• channahon peewee football league tshirt that some girl thought was great on unofficial this year until i admitted to buying it in a thrift store, at which point she rolled her eyes and said "oh god, whatever". i'm not bitter, and i hope she fulfills her dream of fucking a genuine peewee football player.
• ten white tshirts. welcome to the return of laser guns, a big fonzie 'eyyyy', and not looking like a homo
• nike warmups that a bird crapped on the day i brought them back to illinois
• i just went back and looked at the pile to remember what else
• some oversized tshirts and love-making boxers (one pair has metallic red license plates sporting phrases like 4 A HUG and KISS ME. the state? STATE OF LOVE. oh, seriously.) thank you, high school.
• ten dollars from my dad to cover the cost of picking up the boxes at the UPS store. it melts my heart because we both know how unnecessary it is
• pot holders. my parents have taken to sending me everything they don't want from their kitchen. my mom admitted once to giving me things she knew she'd have to replace, so she could justify buying new ones. i will have to ask them to please stop sending me old kitchen items, as i'm now forced to use the same box they shipped my care package in to take half of it down the hill to goodwill
• Our Game: a history of baseball. And a book on mutual funds by John Bogle. These will be sold. Still no sign of my prized hundred-year-old sexual psychology book, or its outlandish appendix B, a scandalous letter by Ben Franklin which i did not make up. when i tell you the story though, you become one of probably no more than a hundred people in the world who know that ben franklin once encouraged a young man to put baskets over old women's heads and fuck them.
• a stack of CDs from my dear departed Trunks. these will be chucked at poor people after my iPod arrives this weekend.
• packing peanuts. because i needed more ground into my carpet.
• more journal articles from grad school. sometimes i burn them a little before throwing them away. bet me i don't.
• climbing chalk. "white gold" brand. i thought it was a clueless name until i saw the tagline: "the first high is always free". i don't know which sucks more, natural high people or coke heads. there's some kind of suck/blow joke in there somewhere. bonus points if you figure out how to make it work.
• AND
• the anti-diarrheal tablets dad insisted i buy for spain. he worries about me when i travel. i guess the image of me robbed, lost, hurt, unable to get home, AND shitting my pants was too much to bear.

the rest is a snippet of a conversation with british matt, who is funnier than everyone else i know put together:

"so, i just went to the amazon talk. there were a couple of quite clearly non-tech girls there. you should've come and been all like 'yeah, it's pretty good I guess. I mean its a job, right?' then we coulda got on the piss."

struck dumb...here's a quote

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
-Lt. Col. Mervin Willett Gonin DSO
(and that dickhead banksy's manifesto)