rorikatherine

important news

Okay. I know you turn to my blog for the hard-hitting news of the hour and this toothsome morsel of news is just in- so ready yourselves. Here goes:

It seems I am getting frown lines- BIG TIME. One of them, anyway.  Actually, it’s probably more like a sneer line, being that that is my #1 Trademarked Facial Expression.  But let’s agree that it would be hard not to spend 97.3% of your time in full-on sneer mode when you live in Wisconsin surrounded by girls named Asheigh and frat bros in loafers.  But whatever the cause, I do it and it shows.

What can I say, my lifestyle takes its bitter toll.

midsummer night's dream

Last night I had some weird dreams - possibly the result of a nocturnal M&M bender  - but who can say what sweet dreams are made of? (these?)  I realize it’s annoying to listen to other people talk about their dreams, but I feel that last night’s epic series, while perhaps not offering broad appeal, was fairly compelling…

Anyway - in one of these dreams I called up this drug service (I guess?) and you could order minute amounts of random drogas like “can I $5 worth of pygmie speed?”, etc. Anyway, part of my candy-store like array of micro drugs included crank. Not being a crank user in real life (Swear. Not just saying that in case an employer is reading this) it showed up in my dream as some janky shreds not dissimilar to chewing tobacco. A quick google image search would reveal this is not what crank looks like, however my unconscious mind is not yet equipped with wireless internet access. Anyway. I had my crank and that what’s important. I had no way to smoke my crank though so, with my mom’s help, I fashioned a pipe out of tin foil and stuffed some of the janky flakes into the pipe apparatus.

I smoked my crank and suddenly I was at this old-timey carnival (here is where the dream begins to crib heavily from a recently-viewed episode of House). So there is this “ride”, or should I say, “attraction” that’s basically just a metal lifeguard’s chair - the whole deal being that it’s as high as the empire state building. Maybe in dog inches… I could totally still talk to my mom who was on the ground. I have never been to the top of the Empire State Building but I’m about 85% sure you can’t have a convo with people on the street below. (However I hear a falling penny can have a convo with a person’s head, neck, torso, viscera, bowels, and lower extremities when dropped from the roof - but given what I know about basic physics I’d hazard to guess this is a real exaggeration)

Point being- this Empire State Building chair was cool at first but then I got so scared I could barely deal. I was convinced it would tip over and my cranked-out self would come crashing to the fairgrounds, embarrassingly.

In the end it did tip over. I leaned back but to my surprise, falling to the ground was neither scary nor painful, perhaps a result of the crank. I couldn’t say. Sitting on my ass (typical) at the base of the once-again-upright Empire State Chair, I perchanced to notice a pile of some old mixtapes of mine, circa ‘98-99. Oh how thrilled I was to be reunited with them! I tried to scoop them up but I was all butterfingers, besides I had no bag to put them in and all my friends (oh yeah and suddenly I had friends there) were like, “I don’t want to carry around your stupid tapes all night. Maybe they’ll be here later.” But I knew that was highly bullshit because what fool would find a nailpolish-encrusted Savage Garden/*NSync bootleg and not immediately pocket that shit?

I was seriously in a bad mood at this point in the dream and desired to see what else was in my brown paper bag/ drug sampler that might cheer me up. I guess I found something because the next thing I knew I was up out of that ridiculous scenario and back in my apartment.

My pal Dan was there, bugging me for a glass of white wine. I managed to find a bottle and pour him some but warned him that it might actually be Hawaiian Punch - but again, I attributed this to the crank I had ingested earlier, which I just assumed had the ability to majorly fuck with your tastebuds.

I never got to find out whether my ‘buds were fucked or not since this dream abruptly ended in favor of another dream for which I can’t remember the details but I know I was smoking crank in the backseat of a car thinking to myself, “I hope nobody thinks I’m addicted to this yet. I don’t even know if I am. I just kind of feel like smoking it in this car right now. No reason to panic.”

get this straight

Ok, so let’s just clear a few things up once and for all:

Salad? It sucks. Chances are you eat it because it comes with your burger/soup/linguine with clam sauce and you don’t want to look like a asshole for not eating it. Or you’re like me and sometimes you like to atone for previous and unrelated sins. You probably wanted to get the fries instead but now that you’re not eleven years old anymore you feel you should get the salad, even though it’s barely edible.

Beavers. Cool, no doubt. They can chew the bark off trees very fast, swim, wiggle their chub bodies on land, and bash things with their tail… but let’s all agree that they would be cuter if they had more prominent ears

Now this owl here, I wouldn’t call these ears as much as “gestural brows” but you see the effect I am talking about yes? Creatures just look better with expressionist flourishes that suggest ears.

Teambuilding exercises,  and also their syphilitic cousin ice-breaker games.  Awful.  Particularly in professional and academic settings.  If I’m sitting in my econ classroom at 8:50 in the morning, odds are I’m there to talk about macroeconomics, not to hear about “tHreE aWeSoMe THinGs u diD oVEr thE sUMmEr!!!1!!1”  or to be forced to hold hands with some Gamma Phi whose acrylic-tipped fingers were probably down some frat boy’s cargo shorts twelve hours ago.  Every minute of class time cost me about sixty cents, so next time you’re planning to dedicate an hour to telling each other our favorite colors, let me know in advance so I can stay home and spend the $36 on a bag of weed instead.

GeekSquad, you are a whole bucket of douchebaggery.  $250-1500?  I asked you to recover some data from my hardrive, not give me a back-alley kidney transplant.

three rules to govern your existence

As you probably know (unless you are from a non-food-appreciating country like Scotland), food can be so excellent!  But Chinese—it can get really tricky with that particular cuisine. Chinese food is often awful, pungent, and mysteriously cheap – to find a great Chinese restaurant is to rejoice!

Here are some of my tips for finding a BAD Chinese restaurant, and hopefully these critical tools will help you eliminate the truly heinous and be left with something approaching good or perhaps even great.

1. Corny name. The name of the restaurant is straight up corny and/or puts out some semi-racist vibes like Chikky Chan’s or Wok N’ Roll

2. Name that alludes to speed. Speedy Wok, China Express, etc. Why? Because! if speed is their main concern, how good can it be? You don’t see any Italian restaurants boasting how they can all whip up some choice manicotti in like 3 minutes. With me?

3. This rule is gospel: if the menu offers SIZES of food items (typically pint and quart size), stay away!! First of all, they try to lure you in with their deceptively low prices; something like $2.99 for ma po tofu, and then BLAM- a whole lot of inedible Chinese food shows up at your house! It’s like magic, if you think of magic as this force that makes you want to vomit on yourself.

Seriously, I ate at a “size place” last week (a joint called A8- which also violated the unmentioned rule of names apparently unrelated to China at all, I’m afraid). I took one bite of this jank and had to call a priest. It was that bad. He exorcised the food, read me my last rites, and miraculously I pulled through. He suggested burning the A8 menu though, and thus, I did.

I saw a few A8 menus in the lobby of Ben’s building shortly thereafter and wanted to write “POISON!!” on them, but I didn’t have a pen. And then I also started feeling bad for the gross food place- thinking maybe my culinary standards are more arbitrary than I’d like to believe, and who am I to try and put a restaurant out of business just because they specialize in a gross taste, etc. Let the MARKET BEWARE I guess. But I’ll say it here, no bullshit: A8 is a real place in Madison, Wisconsin and you should not go there unless you are trying to Litvinenko someone.

Now, clear all that gross Chinese food talk from your mind because a few days later when Laurence, Ali and I were celebrating the weekly pagan holiday of TV Night, we had the opportunity to dine on the culinary epic of Jade Garden. Inauthentic China at its finest! Everything we ordered was like surprising your tongue with an expensive and thoughtful birthday present when it had pretty much given up on you, just like last year. My only complaint is that they did not deliver my food in a huge trough so that I could have eaten five times as much. Oh, and total price for each of us? An awesome $8.00. So, if you ever find yourself within a reasonable distance South Park Street, you should immediately call up Jade Garden and put some of their delicious food in your mouth.

The end.

dash

In this, the summer of my unemployment, keeping up with celebrity deaths has become my full-time job.

And you see, it’s tough. On the one hand I think it’s pretty lame to harsh on the dead. It’s like kicking a turtle, or making fun of Canada. Dead people are just bad opponents. Just last week I was infuriated by Linda Stasi’s libelous and small-minded spearing of Michael Jackson in the NY Post. Nasty in its own right, but crueler still by its timing and the fact that Jackson has three young, appropriately devastated children.

Still, I am moved to hate on Dash Snow.

Dash, I am confused. You bother to get clean only to get dirty again?  You somehow make into the 2006 Biennial and New York magazine’s list of “Warhol’s Children” despite your art being comprised primarily of newspapers and semen? You saddled a child with the name  Secret Aliester Ramirez Messenger Santa Creeper, then proceeded to leave her fatherless?  And still, the world’s cools are tripping over themselves to offer you the biggest full-caps R.I.P.s…

Whatever, Dash. Rest in the peace I’ll never experience because I am neither a world-renowned artist nor a coke addict.

elderlies take note

I have had it up to HERE with the elderly already. I had to wait, oh I don’t know, 30 minutes at Paciugo to get my fave gelato because there was a goddamn gipper chain in front of me all trembling and bobbing its collective head- needing to hear the flavors repeated thirty times and wanting to pay by check and god knows what else (I had my iPod on).

Anyway, I guess I just don’t understand why gips feel compelled to perpetuate this grotesque charade of being functioning members of society during working people hours. Order your lactose-free plain yogurt with extra fiber and pay with a jar of pennies between 10-11:30am and again from 3-4pm when people like me are busy at their desks learning an important trade so they can resurrect the economy thereby enabling you to live another thousand years with your high tech medicines and gleaming bedside machines. K THANKS!

And, so as to not seem hypocritical - let me just say that my own personal gip, my grandmother, lives in a city that basically amounts to retirement community writ enormous in Minnesota.  It is a place ideal for “ladies of a certain age” (e.g. 103 MINIMUM).  They keep extremely weird hours (last episode of Wheel of Fortune is at…what…like 5am?) and pretty much stay in the house except for short trips to the family-style buffet restaurant that seats approximately 4500 people. I would have to say she is model elderly, and it would be preposterous for you to disagree.

i scream

In case you didn’t know, July is National Ice Cream Month. Don’t worry if you didn’t know. There’s still plenty of time to use it as an excuse to make a gluttonous pig of yourself. In my own personal quest to prove myself as “the girl most into ice cream of anyone you know,” I’m hitting a different spot each day.

In making sure that everybody is aware of my reputation, I’ve also been forcing the unnatural phrase “Happy National Ice Cream Month” into almost every conversation I have. It may sound clunky, but trust me—it goes places.

equilibrium

Despite my genuine effort, in about thirty seconds I am going to turn in what might very well be the worst paper of my college career.

But console yourselves, for in about thirty-five seconds, I am going to mix what might very well be the best rum and coke of my college career.

And just like that, the forces of the universe are in equilibrium again.