Chapter XCIII: _

Image of the Day: Round Peg in a Square Hole

“I am emotionally unstable,” he says, on freeway 5, “And I’m going to therapy.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill anyone."

Chapter XCV: Master Baster

I may just be puerile, but it seems like the turkey recipe I found online contains subtle homoerotic undertones. It tells you to hold the legs apart while you butter up the hole...and then to fill it with stuffing. Okay, maybe not so subtle. My Victorian sensibilities were scandalized.

It also didn't help that the turkey baster made the most ridiculous noise when squirting its juices.

It was like the scene in Return of the Jedi where Princess Leia strangles Jabba the Hutt with the very chain that was meant to prevent her escape. Imagine that Jabba the Hutt had explosive diarrhea as he was dying, and that there was a chihuahua stuck in his butt, gasping for air. That's pretty much what the turkey baster sounded like.

I let my roommate do the honors of preparing the turkey, since he's white and has more experience in that regard. My duties were to stand back and snicker uncontrollably while reading the recipe, and to man the turkey baster.

The final product was tasty, but a tad gamey since--contrary to the post title--I am not a master baster.

Chapter XCII: Safety in Numbers

Strawberry...
Banana...
Strawberry-banana...

Each box was color-coded by flavor, and they marched along in a syncopated rainbow across the shelf. Damn RiteAid, I seethed bitterly. Why do there have to be so many choices? I've always been horribly indecisive when it comes to choosing just one item out of an assortment of substantially similar things...

You can often find me standing in the middle of The Avenue with 85 cents clutched in my fist, staring blankly at the doughnut wall. During those moments, my mind is actually awhir with fruitless calculation and countercalculation, like when the CPU usage suddenly jumps to 99% for no discernible reason and my computer freezes. I'm thinking things like, the glazed donut has fewer calories than the jelly-filled, so I should buy it because its healthier. On the other hand, the jelly has a higher calorie/cent ratio, so doesn't that mean its a better deal? But then again... and so on, ad infinitum, or at least until someone takes the last glazed doughnut.

As embarassing as doughnut induced paralysis is though, it's not quite as humiliating as standing in front of the counter trying to decide which pack of condoms to buy while the pharmacist watches me with beady eyes.

Why couldn't I just choose? To make it worse, flavor was just one consideration out of a million others...

Trojan or Lifestyles
Nonlubricated or lubricated (spermicidal, "warm and tingly", both, neither)
Unribbed or Ribbed For Her Pleasure™ (ribbed, ultra-ribbed, or ultra-ultra-ribbed)
And the sizes...
And the colors...

In the end, I just snatched up an economy pack of 12 something-or-others. It rang up at the counter at around 20 bucks, which seemed a tad expensive. I wasn't about to raise a ruckus about it though, and figured I must have misread the box. When I got home and looked more carefully, I realized I had bought 36, not 12...

Great.

I wonder whether the cashier thought I was a total stud, or a complete whore.

Chapter XCI: Belated Birthday Update

Image of the day: Wilting Orchids at the Hilton

At 6:15 AM on the morning of my birthday (last Sunday), I was stirred awake by the crowing of an emphysematic rooster. This was odd--considering I was in a room on the fourth floor of the Hilton in Woodland Hills--but I didn't think much of it. The previous night had been a blur of a blur, and nothing would have surprised me. Eventually, the irksome noise stopped, and I dozed off.

A moment later, I was woken up again. As it turned out, one of my roommates for the weekend had hit the snooze on his cellphone's alarm, and it was ringing every five minutes. Thanks to the miracle of polyphonic ringtone technology, it actually sounded like a real rooster (albeit diseased), with echoes and everything. Everytime I fell back asleep, I would forget it was just the alarm, and wake up again, wondering why there was a dying rooster in the room.

So the morning didn't start off too well, but I dealt with it by stuffing all the complimentary coffee packets into my backpack. And one of the not-so-complimentary coffee mugs. After that, it was up to Northridge for the final rounds of the annual CSUN Debate Tournament. Yes...I spent my birthday at a debate tournament. How fucking nerdy is that?

Due to a technicality in the bracketing, Shayla (my debate partner) and I ended up automatically winning our quarter-final round. We spent the two-hour slot commiserating with the team that had automatically lost, assuring them they were the better debaters and that the loss was not a reflection of their personal worth as human beings. We had a group hug at the end and it was all very Chicken Soup for the Soul.

We debated against Sacramento State in the semi-finals, a team we share a small rivalry with. We had faced each other in the elimination rounds of two previous tournaments: At Berkeley, Shayla and I had won on a 3-0 decision (of a three judge panel), but at Pepperdine, we had lost on a 3-0. As Northridge was the last tournament of the quarter, this round would be the tie-breaker, so to speak. Moreover, our previous encounters had been extremely vitriolic, and both teams had bordered on ad hominem attacks. They accused us of "trying to destroy the planet" while I had belittled their "fundamental misunderstanding of their own arguments."

I decided I was going to constrain myself and present the judge with a stark contrast between Cal Poly's composed demeanor and Sac State's theatrics, but Shayla took the lead in fighting fire with fire and shouted them down during cross-examination. We ended up winning on a Reverse Voting Issue--basically, they argued that we were being abusive by breaking the rules of the debate round and should lose and our response was that we did not break the rules, and it was abusive of them to insinuate that we did when it was so "blatantly obvious" that we didn't. All three judges agreed.

It was an incredibly tiring round though, and we ended up losing in the Finals on a split decision (1-2) because we just wanted to go home. After the first speech, Shayla turned to me and asked if we could just forfeit. I sighed, and said no and we half-assed our way through all the rigmarole. Second place out of 36 teams, but it felt like...well, like second I suppose. Which ain't fucking bad.

On the drive back to San Luis Obispo, Shayla bought be a packet of M&M's at a gas station for my birthday. Yay!! :D

I ended up getting home at 11:30, and became wildly intoxicated with my roommate before going to sleep for the next 24 hours.

The end.

Chapter XC: Deviant Conversation

Image of the Day: Yvonne Photomanip 3 by =Nocturnal-Devil (deviantart.com)

xxxxxxxxx: I think it's commentary on the vapidness of modern society
xxxxxxxxx: Naked girls eating fake food, morphed into a simulacrum of real life.
ibleedgraphite: or woman's subordination in a patriarchal world?
ibleedgraphite: that's why she's naked...
ibleedgraphite: and the strawberry stick represents a phallus
xxxxxxxxx: Pink phallus?
ibleedgraphite: it's long and hard
xxxxxxxxx: I think that would reflect her domination of the penis
xxxxxxxxx: She picks the color
xxxxxxxxx: And she can devour the phallus
ibleedgraphite: well, you see, she's been conditioned by society to think she wants it in her mouth
ibleedgraphite: as per freud's second stage of psychosexual development