The Day the World Ended aka A Patronizing Blogpost

Because I'm an unemployed and worthless gypsy, I've been spending a lot of time visiting "friends" aka people who will let me crash with them for free. My favorite target for a variety of reasons is my boyfriend, despite the fact that he lives in New York City.

New York is an excellent place to go if you hate nature and constantly want to confront all your image-related insecurities.

I guess it has good dim sum.

My boyfriend, who is bro-lite (read into that however you want), lives in a Frat Castle with a large group of gentlemen of likeminded interests (modern day fairy tales!). I'm still discovering exactly what those interests are, but if I had to identify a focal point in their apartment, it would be:

The mothership of all entertainment centers.

There's always at least one person sitting on a very questionable couch in front of their technology altar either 1) watching television aka sports 2) watching movies aka the Godfather 3) playing video games aka FIFA or 4) surfing the internet. And yes they do keep their modem on an old keg. I like to think of it as a tribute to living in a digital age.

Mostly the roommates watch football, or watch people talk about the football they've watched or will watch. This involves a lot of burly men in loud ties espousing opinions about things I will probably never care about.

(This is kind of how ESPN sounds to me).

I've noticed that "watching football" happens to involve a lot more technology than just the TV.

I don't get it, but they don't get why I stockpile images of Newfoundlands and watch "Say Yes to the Dress" marathons, so we're even.

This story though is about the darkest hour the Frat Castle has seen, which I happened to be around to witness. It happened one day in December, when I was home alone with one of the roommates. He was engaged in a DIY project, the end goal of which was either to hide a pesky cord that dangled from a set of interior lights or assert his masculinity, I'm not sure which.

He had decided that the best way of dealing with the offending cord was to: staple gun it into the wall. I wouldn't have thought of that - but I like staple guns too and it's not my apartment. And I was curious to see where this went.

(Probably).

First, I should mention that the lights connected to this particular cord were turned on at the time. Second, we were chatting while he was doing this and he might not have been fully focused on the task at hand. Which is how we found out what happens when you put a metal staple straight through a live wire.

I'm not actually sure what most of those words mean, but they were things I'd heard my contractor parents say when we had plugged in too many Christmas lights and caused a blackout in our home.

(To be fair, in reality I might not have been quite this helpful).

So:

And it worked.

He was right. A big one. You see, we had managed to mortally blow out a circuit tied to one very isolated outlet. Being extremely educated and intelligent guys, the roommates had created a crazy set of technological dependencies on this one outlet. See the below graph:

To be more clear.

None of which could be moved to an outlet that worked for various reasons (i.e. modem connected to the phone line there, TV was screwed into the wall).

The message spread quickly via text.  While they were careful about handing out blame, I have never seen a group of people so hopelessly demoralized.

For example, when they realized they didn't have access to television, they decided they could just watch Hulu or Netflix on their computers. Until they realized that to do that they needed: internet. There was no ESPN, no NFL network, no Call of Duty, no Grantland, no Reddit, no 'Gladiator' or 'Breaking Bad' on dvd. They still had their phones, but, as they discovered, you can really only Snapchat for so long.

I offered to let everyone gather around my laptop to watched the copy of 'Midnight in Paris' I had downloaded. No takers. I would have suggested Monopoly, but that seemed mean. One of them wandered over to a long forgotten bookshelf and announced he might try some "reading". The other two sort of just sat on the couch.

Here is how the night concluded:

For the next three days, everyone got LOTS of sleep.  

I wanted this to be a heartwarming tale about how a group of technologically-dependent bros discovered the joys of Hemingway, good conversation, and a meal home-cooked by candlelight (by necessity, not for ambiance).

Instead, what happened was that the most technologically savvy roommate decided he couldn't take it anymore. At 11:30 at night on the third day, he biked around to every tech supply store in the city to find the longest extension cord available for purchase.

Which is how the Frat Castle now has a TV/Xbox/DVD player/modem/router that are connected to one very fragile little outlet right next to...their kitchen sink. This has inspired some very delicate dishwashing at the Frat Castle.

P.S. The elaborate title of this post was a modification after I let the Boyfriend read it. Verdict: very unappreciated. His take: "We weren't THAT bad."  ...someone's memory is very short.

P.P.S. He's wrong - it really was pathetic.

It's Important to Respect Nature

Some people have a weird recessive gene that makes them love all animals. I've deduced that because I love animals in a borderline obsessive way, which super freaks out my parents. Like I've already resigned myself to the eventual Hoarders episode my 75 year-old self will star in where they struggle to explain how I have 135 golden retrievers and one palomino pony, whereas Mom and Dad are big fans of chicken nuggets and rodents who died terrible deaths.

Growing up not having pets would have been the equivalent of making five-year old me follow a raw vegan diet. I begged for Newfoundland puppies and white kittens, and especially a flying squirrel. Shockingly my parents didn't acquiesce to that one (things got real when I demanded a unicorn).

We eventually got a puppy and then a succession of cats. We would get a cat, it would get eaten by a coyote, then we'd get another cat and restart the trauma all over again. Finally we found a cat that was more evasive but that's mostly because it was feral. Fortunately childhood me didn't care if my pets loved me back.

Mom and Dad were pretty inflexible beyond the dogs and cats. As an Adult, their attitude makes sense to me. As a kid, it was unpardonable. I got around parental resistance and my lack of purchasing power by adopting - well, finding wild animals and attempting to domesticate them. Not surprisingly this didn't always have happy endings.

First there was:

I had Manty for one week before I had to let him (?) go because I didn't know what to feed him (again, ?  I didn't know how to sex a preying mantis and my parents discouraged me from plugging those search terms into Ask Jeeves).  Manty and I had some nice times where he balanced on the end of my pencil while I did math homework.

My wildest avian dreams also came true and I had a baby hummingbird for awhile:

It was really fun to show off my baby hummingbird to my friends!

Cause of death remains unknown, but at least the funeral was beautiful.

My favorite 'wild pet' came from my grandparents' cabin in central California. Their house sat at the intersection of three creeks - well, hm. Now that I think about it as an adult it was probably just one creek with different access points.

Actually it was:

The creek had a proliferation of California newts. This inspired my aunts and uncles to fits of what they thought was cleverness, coming up with newt puns to name various parts of the property. I don't know if they ever understood how much trouble they got me in.

One Easter we were at the cabin and a torrential downpour hit. Our Easter egg hunt was ruined, but that was okay because rain though lured out a much, much better attraction than what the Easter Bunny had in store: newts.

They were everywhere - they came out in droves. I have no idea why this particular rain made the newts so active. But I had never seen anything like it then, and I've never seen anything like it since. It was like March of the Penguins, but with me and two hundred cold-blooded salamander-wannabes.

I couldn't even believe my good fortune.  To put it mildly, I was thrilled.

I threw on my most serious naturalist outfit, grabbed my Easter basket, and ran screaming outside.

Fortunately for me newts on land are pretty slow, so it's not hard to 'befriend' them.

I put newt after newt into my Easter basket. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with all the newts I collected. Maybe a tea party or something - I could invite my stuffed animals. It would be nice.

My parents had other ideas.

And there it was. My parents were unable to ignore the connection we had formed - or my desperate sobbing - and agreed to let me have a pet newt of my very own.

We brought him (for the third time - ?) home in a little terrarium, but Mom got worried he'd feel confined. So, at least for the night, we put him in their steep-sided, slippery bathtub.

I went to bed that night dreaming of all the adventures Norman and I would have. Specifically, I fantasized about being a goddamn rock star that month at class Show and Tell.

The next day I woke up extra early and scampered into my parents' bathroom. What I saw sadly wasn't going to be the most horrifying experience in my life as a pet owner (in high school my beloved cockatiel got eaten by a hawk and I still find nothing humorous about it) but it was still pretty terrible:

Expectations:

Reality:

We searched high and low for Norman but couldn't find him anywhere. I was inconsolable, but Mum convinced me he had found a new life elsewhere.

I bought it until about a year later. My parents were moving their bedroom furniture around. Exciting because I could pick up loose change that had fallen behind things and add to my coin hoard.

This should have been a really excellent lesson about respecting nature by observing rather than possessing it. Norman's death was at least traumatizing enough that for a few years I was pretty satisfied with my dogs and cats.

But then in middle school, I somehow got back to my old tricks.

to be continued...

What is 'weather'?

Growing up in paradise had its advantages. When I wasn't at the beach or Disneyland, I spent my time roaming our neighbor's avocado orchard with my best friend/golden retriever. It's called "growing up in Southern California", bitches.

There were some drawbacks though. The biggest being the slow discovery that I'm not sure life gets better than what I was raised with. Pretty much everywhere else I've lived has had some crushing dose of reality.

The first time I had an inkling that I was raised in a metaphorical Garden of Eden came when I experienced winter. Growing up "seasons" was something I read about in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. For context, my family's Christmas Eve tradition is a picnic at the beach. This was my life twelve months a year:

When I went away to college, the first few months didn't hold any meteorological surprises. One fall day something odd happened: water fell from the sky.

I'd seen rain a few times in Malibu, but it was kind of a mist that made people drive incredibly slow. This was different. It was like someone turned on a showerhead and doused me with it every time I walked outside. It made doing anything other than sitting in bed surfing the internet very difficult.

So I came up with a solution.

I found the warmest clothes I owned and put all of them on...

...and promptly learned there's a difference between being warm and being dry.

To make matters more complicated, our campus was enormous so most people rode bikes to get to class. If you've ever ridden a bike in the rain, you know that the back tire is lovely at spitting up puddles and dirt. Like so:

Which had an unfortunate effect on one's backside. Pretty much we all walked around looking like victims of explosive diarrhea.

After awhile I got tired of perpetual laundry and the forest of wet denim hanging off my bed. I called my mother crying.

This is how I got a package in the mail with my junior high sister's water polo parka. I'm not a very big person, so on the long walk to class it made me look like a goddamn hobbit.

Two days of this shame and I couldn't take it anymore.

I thought about it long and hard. I didn't want to look like a freaking gnome of darkness but I was also fed up with having so many wet clothes. And there it was - that was the problem...too many wet clothes.

Solution:

Brilliant, right? The less clothes you wear, the less that get wet. Welcome to my 'rain uniform': a tank top, athletic shorts, and Rainbows.

Full disclosure: this probably got me more judgment than the parka, but it came with less laundry.

This was my strategy all through college. My senior year I did notice something for sale at the local department store.

Maybe it was overkill but...