rorikatherine

Sometimes we all get sentimental for the way things used to be.

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:57:39 -0400

Sometimes we all get sentimental for the way things used to be.

important news

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:11:32 -0400

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

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:29:00 -0400

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:06:10 -0400

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

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:43:00 -0400

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

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:35:00 -0400

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

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:25:00 -0400

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

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:27:00 -0400

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

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:20:00 -0400

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.

The only way to make the internet care that Robert McNamara...

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:31:00 -0400

The only way to make the internet care that Robert McNamara died.

costello's first law

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:07:36 -0400

If you are my waiter at Olive Garden, your tip will be directly proportional to your vigilance in replenishing the free breadsticks.

the hills are alive...

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:44:00 -0400

…With the sounds of all kinds of shit. I sincerely apologize for practically being on a milk carton for the last three weeks. There’s really no specific reason or excuse for it other than I just have not felt like it. I’m an adult, that’s reason enough - I don’t have to answer to anyone - YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD.

I don’t even know where to begin….to start boring you to tears. I have to say the last month or so has been pretty good to me with only a few hiccups, those being the development of a seemingly irrepressible inclination to petty theft and the ever-present “unemployment situation”. But as luck would have it, the former mostly compensates for the latter so really there is no for you need to panic (because I know that you would).

And while my period of (f)unemployment is temporary—really, it’s more of sabbatical from overcooking brownies and spitting in the cupcake batter—I have to admit I’ve developed a taste for this shiftless life I now lead. The absence of responsibility leaves me free to spend all day in the library and all night in the bar, the two places that zoologists would label as my natural habitats should the Discovery Channel ever produce a Rori Costello Two-Hour Special.

So, with all that being said, I bid you adieu and warn you that it very well may be another month before I post since, historically speaking, the only time I gain followers is when I shut the fuck up.

birthday redux-x-x

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:26:00 -0400

Thirteen hours into 21 and the jury is still out on whether or not I can keep up with this nonsense. I thought I was a pretty dedicated boozer (and bruiser), but having spent the hours since 3am passed out in a pool of my own mortality…certain doubts have arisen.

I sound like Dina Lohan today and everything I put in my mouth tastes vaguely of liquor. This is not a good moment, but I have faith that the dust will clear and I will re-emerge as the reigning princess of youth, beauty and self-respect.

Anyway. Real life pals: check your call log. I probably dialed your number at some point early this morn as I was writhing around the floor in an alcohol poisoned panic, and barely any of you came to my rescue. Shame! Curses forever on your soul! I am blogging dead in order to tell you that you are so fucking haunted. Burn.

for posterity's sake

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:46:00 -0400

Tonight, I put the capstone on My Life’s Work To Date, which is to that say I turn 21.

God and alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes willing, I will live to blog again. But if not, take comfort in the fact that I died doing what I loved: drinking wine from a box while wearing a novelty crown.

I would also like to add, for posterity’s sake, that I love you and think you look good in your bikini.

May God be ever with you as you ride, Hunter.

here's to injustice!

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:51:00 -0400

Growing up, you have this notion that adulthood is going to be a glamourous affair rife with tinkling cocktails and sweeping city views from the windows of a 5-star hotel, all enjoyed in the company of a ruggedly handsome male escort named Alistair whose exorbitant hourly fee you pay by stealing money from the eleventh Congressional district of North Carolina which you are presently representing (rather indifferently, it must be said) in the House for your second consecutive term.

Well, maybe you didn’t envision this future, but sometimes I did. I never would have foreseen an adulthood that found me laying down a line of rat poison in a protective circle around my bed and sleeping with one eye open and a rolled-up newspaper weapon at my side, poised to do battle with an occupying army of creatures that live in the walls. There is not a shred of dignity in it, though of course the thought of maintaining a modicum of self-respect in this life has long since been chucked to the side of the long long road.

If I was the type of person (aka: anybody these days) to get...

Sun, 24 May 2009 23:35:46 -0400

If I was the type of person (aka: anybody these days) to get myself covered in a bunch of meaningless tattoos, I could do a lot worse than this Dick Bruna illustration (aka: the cutest thing I have ever seen)

and I swear it's not ours

Sat, 23 May 2009 00:08:00 -0400

Somewhere in the respectable, WASPy neighborhood of my parents, there is a wireless network called “Fuckmountain”.

here have some summer

Wed, 20 May 2009 15:26:00 -0400

Sorry I keep skipping out of your lives like some sort of whiskey-soaked deadbeat dad, but important shit was going down in the month of May. Most of it involved bureaucratic authoritarianism and/or plate tectonics, so I will not torture you with a play-by-play.

A few days into summer and I am slowly readjusting my pace. That is to say, I am quickly slowing my pace. I think sometimes the hardest thing for me to do in this life is to let go of the prescriptions laid out by the example of my parents. Hard work and responsibility, mixed together with a dash of modest living, will suit you just fine. And while certainly I take no issue with any of the above, more and more I question my ability to slog away for hours upon hours in an office doing boring work that has neither direct impact on nor direct benefit for me.

And anyway, who’s to say that working on the mystery of why those drunk Mexicans congregate in the parking lot of the abandoned wholesale grocer is not an adequate use of my time? Certainly not me…

I am about 85% certain that a man put a curse on me this...

Thu, 07 May 2009 23:22:08 -0400

I am about 85% certain that a man put a curse on me this morning.

I was riding the bus to class, and a big fat guy who had obscured most of his face behind his shirt made severe gestures at me. He sort of threw something from his eyes towards mine.

He looked like Igor from The Hilarious House of Frightenstein. I have provided a visual, so you guys can understand the sort of dark magic I am up against.

If this happened to me I would throw up, call 911, and rip my...

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:13:00 -0400

If this happened to me I would throw up, call 911, and rip my fucking nose off.