Jewboy

I'm really tired. I'm sitting at the back desk, hiding away like a fugitive, in full view of all who pass by, but I want to just flop over to the side and embrace unconciousness.

I'm in such an uncomfortable internal position right now. I haven't bathed (but I'm wearing a decent shirt to hide the fact), I'm tired, and I have to poop so bad my back hurts.

I would have taken care of that last little bit, but I pressed the snooze button 3 times too many and ended up waking up half an hour later than I probably should have.

I just yawned louder than was necessary. It was pretty much a shout. If I were more important to this glorious instiution people may have looked up. But they expect student workers to be freaks of nature.

And if you're expecting Igor, my presence isn't that shocking.

I'm having a REALLY hard time keeping my eyes open. That's the main reason I'm writing this; because it keeps my hands busy, which in turn keeps my mind busy. It's like when old people do crossword puzzles as an attempt to keep off the cold embrace of dementia. But it gets them anyway. You can't beat off Mother Nature.

But you can probably beat off Father Nature.

That was dirty. I'm sorry.

Anyway, before I went on that busted little extravaganza I had the full intention of telling you about Jewboy. And how much I hate him.

He is SO gross.

Don't get me wrong; I love me some Jewish men. They're my favorite. I want to lick sugar off of their shnozes. But not this homeboy.

He's about 5' 7" and of average weight. Maybe a little pudgey. But he has a complete absense of neck and these disgusting waify fingers that play with his greasy, dandruff-y hair while he talks on the phone to "Patti," a girl I am assuming is fat.

His voice sounds like a drag queen meets Urkle, and he insists on talking ALL the time. Either it's on the phone, or to this super friendly black guy with acne that rides the bus with us.

Oh yeah, he's on my bus. That's how I have come to know him. So not only do I have to hear this fool, but the noise echoes in the confines of public transportation.

My first encounter with Jewboy was a great way to set off a bad impression. This enormous cluster of people, including myself, was waiting for the bus when I hear the absolute worst music of all time blasting from some greasy point of space behind me.

I turn around and there he is... wearing green. As always. He has his baby blue slider phone out by his ear and is blasting emo-bitch femme rock like he's doing us some great favor. That fucking dick...

I'm really big on first impressions, and homeboy kicked off our fabulous pseudo-relationship (my hateful creeping) like a champ.

I hate him.

My Encounter with the Asians and Biggie

I have had SUCH a productive morning.

I got up like a person, showered like a person, walked to work like a person and then was told in person, rather than a convenient call, that the staff is having a retreat today from 8:30 to 4, so my being there is unnecessary.

I toyed with the idea of going home and sleeping until my next class (which starts at 2), but then somehow my feet led me to the bus stop and I got to Tempe by 8:30. Having nothing else to do I went over to Einstein Bros. and got a coffee and a freaking delicious Asiago Bagel with Veggie Shmear.

I sit down in the beautiful morning sunshine and begin to eat, watching the birds frolic around me and noticing that one of them is pretty much a person and definitely the leader of the bunch; I'll call him Biggie Smallz.

So Biggie's prancing around like the little sparrow he is, when he looks up and notices that I'm watching him. There was an awkward moment when we made eye contact and we both instictively understood that we had both been creepin'.

The next thing I knew, he had leapt up onto the chair next to me. There was something in his beady little eyes that told me that he was the dominant animal in our encounter and that I should feed him without question.

So I did.

I took a little piece of bagel (minus the shmear; I could tell he had no time for shmear) and held it close to him. He looked at me like I was an idiot. So of course, I put it closer.

And let me just tell you that it was the most spiritually uplifting and bitchin' moment of my life when Biggie leaned over and took it straight from my quivering fingertips.

Of course I instantly texted everyone I know about the event.

So, thinking he's finished with me, I go back to sipping my coffee and watching Laura, a girl with shitty taste in music and pink streaks in her gingery-brown hair whose name I only know because she was talking to her doctor about a cough she's been having that apparently leaves her breathless and dying after an attack (I definitely saw no death and she was coughing enough for an entire culture).

But he came back! I looked over and he was sitting right where he was before, looking at me with the same expression as he had when we first met. But this time he had some crumbs of my bagel on his tiny beak. I would meet the only gluttonous Animorph.

So I gave him another piece.

And then he left me without a word or a cheep. He may as well have left a twenty on the bedside table.

After that I went over to bask in the sunshine on the mall in the middle of campus. On my way there I happened across a booksale and purchased an anthology of Emerson for $8. It was printed in 1969 and smells fabulous. I read the entirity of "The American Scholar" before I realized that ONCE AGAIN I had been bitten by some mysterious insect. They are the bane of my motherfucking existence.

So I scratched it with the end of the concrete I was sitting on, leaving not only a droplet of blood from a scratch, but a huge ashy patch of skin that definitely needed some undoing.

I walked over to the Store of Ridiculously Expensive Bullshit, but on my way I encountered a group of Asians tabling to save the Vietnamese children from poverty and donated a dollar to their cause (because I'm SUCH a good person) and they gave me a box of "Lucky Stick" as compensation. I don't know if you know what those are, but they are the shiznit. "Biscuit stick covered with chocolate flavored cream." Oh man.

But then I get to the SOREB and purchase a tiny thing of lotion for $5. What the hell? It's 3 fluid ounces. They should be giving that shit away! And not only that, but it's thicker than crap and upon applying it, I looked like I was preparing to attack the neighboring tribe! Horseshit.

But that's been my morning. 3 hours of excitement. I would be getting off of work in 7 minutes, and I probably would have just watched Glee. Which is cool. But not as cool as feeding starving Asians and Biggie.

Actually

I hate the word "actually."

I don't use hate lightly, but I can honestly say that out of any word in any language from any culture on any planet, I hate the word actually the most.

It reminds me of sandy 6 year olds and pretentious 10 year olds. The type that think they know more than you do even though they've only been on earth for, at most, 120 months. I could annihilate their entire existence and no one would miss them but their mothers.

I am not homicidal, but sometimes I want to throw those kids over a telephone wire like a pair of sneakers in the ghetto.

And the way the word sounds in its own little maniacal essence is just disgusting. "Ak-chu-al-ee." That's how those little children say it. With an overexaggerated emphasis on the "Ak" sound.

Fucking ew.

Also, in this mental image they have on chocolate-smudged glasses and are wiping the mucus from their dripping nostils with stubby little fingers and looking up at you with hair that sticks up in places that should never stick up. Every child that overuses this word in my mind had a cowlick. A nasty one in an inconvenient place.

And I hate it when adults use it. It is never used in a responsible sense. People only use it when they are correcting other people (or occasionally themselves, but I really don't care to differentiate).

I have a professor who uses it to a degree only known to mutants like himself. The thing is, he is a great professor and he knows his shit, but when he uses a sentence like, "And the protein is actually made out of actual little poly-actual-peptides, actually" I want to beat him with the sharp end of a hammer.

He's a very handsome man. He's very intelligent and he has much to offer the world, but no self respecting woman would ever breed with him because he will always be correcting her. Always be saying "Ak-chu-al-ee".

Lauren

So... Once again the entire staff is in a meeting and here I sit. At the front desk. Alone. On Facebook.

But on the bright side, this gives me time to blog! Joy.

So this is my story: My friend Lauren broke her phone/charger combo so not only can she not text me and keep my pocket company, but she doesn't have an alarm clock. So rather than have her be late for work and get fired so she can't make Gucci money any more, I kindly volunteered to wake her up this morning. At seven o'clock.

I usually wake up at seven o'clock anyway to prepare myself for the rigorous day ahead, but it's one thing to be CONSCIOUS at that time and another thing entirely to have to actually function.

My alarm went off at 6:55 and I arose from my slumber like a lioness. Unhappy and with an enormous, backarching yawn. I rose up, grabbed my keys and hobbled over to the elevator so I could go down 3 floors and knock on her door.

I knocked to no avail.

There I am, standing braless in a t-shirt, barefoot, with greasy hair and puffy eyes, and that bitch has the audacity to ignore my knocking.

So I knock again. After a few seconds she stumbles to the door and cracks it enough to glare at me and growl "Good morning." I had nothing else to say but, "Morning." But I courteously gave an awkward side wave before I began the trek back upstairs where I crashed for another 20 minutes.

I am SUCH a good friend.

Impregnation

I have been eaten alive. I can promise you I am not being the slightest bit overdramatic when I say that I will probably have to have my legs amputated shortly because I will rip them off with pliers if someone doesn't do it for me.

Ants.

They got me. Or maybe it was mosquitos. I'm not an entomologist and WebMD can't tell me what it is when the only description I can yield is, "It's itchy." I left out the part about it being red and raised because that's basically what "It's itchy." means. Obviously.

I'm sure I'm about to become a mother of some tiny pestilence, in the style of the Surinam Toad. Only I didn't want these children. This was nonconsensual.

Not the kind of nonconsensual like, "Oh, it broke." But the kind like, "Hey. You're drunk at a party, I'm drunk at a party. How you doin'?"

Tragic.

They have anti-itch stuff in the store below my dorm. But that requires money. And I have literally none of that. I'm about a minute away from asking a homeless man for spare change.

So here I sit, scratching away, patiently awaiting motherhood.

Follower

Michelle Rivas is the fastest person alive. I'm talking Marion Jones status.

I just made this blog like half an hour ago and finished typing some insignificant crap and posted it to Facebook with the extraordinarily witty caption, "So... I made a blog."

I go back to proofread it and make sure that I'm not a shame to Literature majors everywhere and I see that I have a single follower! You can't possibly imagine my excitement. I look over and there she is, smiling back at me from the little thumbnail.

I'm extremely excited because I find this girl hilarious. Well... her Facebook postings/blog. I'm sure she's hilarious in other aspects too, but I don't know her extremely well. A casual-acquaintance-I-wish-was-my-best-friend type of deal.

But... she likes me! She really likes me!

And of course, I'm extremely excited.

Lotion

I'm at work. There's a staff meeting going on, but because I am a pathetic, lowly student worker I have not been invited to attend. So here I sit. Blogging. I work at the front desk of an office that I may or may not name eventually and there is a girl waiting to meet with one of the advisors. She's on her laptop and I'm sure she's basking in envy because I have the easiest job of all time.

I creep on Facebook. I talk to my coworker. And I smile and say good morning to passerbys. Occasionally I'm asked to file things, make copies, or if they're feeling jazzy I do some data entry. I haven't been trained to use the phones yet, so I don't really have to interact with people.

I'd be jealous too.

But as I sat here I realized that my body was disgustingly ashy. I'm talking straight up tribal Africa ashy. So I walk to the back of the office where they have a little station with antibacterial and lotion and lube up.

I had no idea that that lotion would smell like freaking Vicks Vaporub and that I would smell like an old woman for the rest of the day. But... it did and I do.

I can't say it's an offensive smell, in fact it reminds me of being tiny and small. But it's sort of oppressive and I've definitely been judged for smelling like this.

But ohhhhh... It's so cool and refreshing on my legs. It's eucalyptus-y and tingly. And frankly I may or may not steal the entire bottle from the desk. But that would be embezzlement and I'm not about losing this wonderful job.