Uncle Peter 1959-2008

Uncle Peter,

I’m sorry I wasn’t a better neice and that we argued too much about religion and nonsense when what was important was that we loved each other. And I didn’t call enough or try hard enough.

When I was a kid you were my favorite relative to visit because you were a big kid. You used to throw a big jar of coins down the hall and let me and my sisters fight over the quarters. I remember you used to sit on your bed and throw stuff at us and let us run around picking everything up. And you bought a bunch of shaving cream once so we could have a shaving cream fight. And we toilet papered your car. You used to let me sit in your lap and drive and I always got mad that you kept your hand on the bottom of the wheel.

We were all so lucky to have you. I miss you already. I wish you were still here.

I love you.

-Jackie

A Very Christmas Grammar Lesson

When someone committs suicide by “hanging” himself, the past tense is HANGED not HUNG.

You’re welcome.

To the Master’s candidates of Fall 2008

You have done something very few people seek to do and even fewer succeed in.

(You’re middle-class and too idealistic for the real world so you have chosen to hide behind books for an extra few years.)

Now that you’ve expanded your academic horizons, go change the world.

(Now that your education has sufficiently alienated you from most of your peers, and you’ve learned about how brutal and immutable the system is, go out there and get a job that at least doesn’t hurt people.)

Good luck and Godspeed.

(Everything is meaningless.)

Crushes

I like guys that are not available because I am more able to let my guard down with them. That was my major breakthrough of the weekend. Thus I’ve answered the question of “why always unavailable Jackie?” now I just need to train myself to stop thinking people are stupid within five seconds of talking to them.

Now I hate the guys that are there. I shoot guys down in my head so fast. I met this guy who looked like Jason Segel the other night. We were kind of flirting I guess, but he was drunk, so I didn’t think much of it. I hadn’t ironed my hair, and at this short length I looked like Rose from The Golden Girls.

Anyway, we were watching Wonder Showzen and he said he didn’t see the point. I immediately thought like: God, this guy’s stupid…. then later it occured to me that yes, Wonder Showzen IS really weird and maybe the point isn’t all that obvious and hell, maybe I’m even wrong about the point. And that’s another thing… I always think I’m right.

Then sometimes I talk to guys and at some point, this thought crosses my mind: “That sounds like something my students would say or ask.” That doesn’t mean the guy is stupid, but at that point, I feel like his teacher.

The thing that gets me the most is when people think that things like tv shows or news shows don’t have agendas, then act like I’m weird for thinking so. OH MY GOD! Really? Brainwashed nation.

I’m doing it again.

It’s like I can’t stop thinking people are stupid for long enough to like someone, but I’m working on it. I’m working on it by systematically destorying my brain with chemicals until I am one of them.

Maybe I’m Crazy

I’m smart, funny, over-educated and I use humor as a defense mechanism. I’m going to write for television. The end.

Wondershow

Wondershow Zen gives me the creeps and scares me, but that’s why I like it.

I also find it disturbing that when people get mad, their reaction is generally to attack the puppet instead of the guy holding the puppet. I think it says a lot about the American psyche.

I can draw those kinds of parralells now that I’ve finished school and technically have a master’s (that’s the fourth most prestigous piece of paper validating one’s intelligence that a person can have, by the way.)

Unfortunately I can’t figure out the hood. It kind of takes the wind out of my sails, getting tangled up in my hood like a squirrel in a plastic bag.

Dear Canada,

I know you think you can talk shit about us just because we fucked up. You think that everyone hates us and that you’ll be able to get into the popular crowd by talking shit about us. Well, ya know what Canada, that’s not going to happen, because no matter what, you’re still Canada. You’re cold and you use the metric system. Half your population is practically French, except even worse. Yeah, that’s right Canada, I called you worse than France.

And what’s all that shit you talk about no gun violence. Think about how boring the world would be without gun violence. There would be no cop dramas, no action movies, no possibility of death lurking around every corner. Without gun violence we’d all become a bunch of docile Moose hunters.

Sincerely,
J.

Oh yeah, blogging…

I’m starting to remember what it was like having a blog. The upside: getting attention and having people know things about you without having to tell them yourself. That leads to the vague feeling that you’re slightly famous, if not in reality, then at least in a post-modern sense.

Then there’s the downside to blogging. People tell you you’re wrong about things.

Recently Brian told me that I was the kind of person that always had to have the last word. I disagreed. Then like 20 minutes later we got into some inane argument and I absolutely could not let go until I had the last word. So… he was right and I was wrong. I’ll give him that.

Another thing– people tell you when your life bores them, then you feel like you have to justify the monotony of your life to someone who… I don’t know… goes home and drinks 8 beers while watching re-runs of Family Guy? I don’t really have a friend like that per se, but it’s that kind of thing.

Ryan used to like to tell me whenever one of his friends found my blog offensive and said I was a bad writer. Then I would inevitably say something like, “I have a master’s and I teach college writing. Your friend probably huffs glue and tazes himself for fun” or some other variant of the “I am well-accomplished and your friends are white trash” insult.

Oh man, I’ve missed this. I was starting to grow as a human being. I was trying to imagine myself in a world of brotherhood and sisterhoood, where our similarites outweighed our differences.

Fuck that. I’m back bitches!

What the what?

Last night I went out and apparently got drunkity, drunk, drunk. At first it was like “hey’s let’s just hang out for like 1 drink.” Then it was Austin’s birthday… and we ran into our friend Kelly who had just passed her doctoral comps, so, we ended up getting crunk.

I had a great night. I thought I was moderately drunk, but never room spinning drunk and I didn’t have a hang over, but I woke up with a throbbing pain in my hand and a bruise on it. Mysterious post-drinking injuries make me feel young.

If anyone knows what happened to my hand last night, let me know. Did the big girl sit on it? I punched Austin in the stomach, but I don’t see how that could’ve done it. I might have slammed the table emphatically, as I tend to do, but the wrong side of my hand is bruised. It makes no sense.

Cooter doesn’t have pens.

Sometimes when I watch 30 Rock, I feel like Jack is speaking directly to me.

There’s an episode where Jack says to Liz, “You do this because you are funny and you are weird and you are socially retarded.”

At the bar tonight, Jeremy was hitting on me. I guess it’s like that one week Austin had a crush on me. Jeremy is an asshole. I’ve told him that before. Maybe he’s the kind of guy that likes to be smacked around and insulted. Regardless, I like attention of almost any kind.

Personally, I think it’s because Tina Fey has made it sexy to be smart and have brown hair. Flint told me that Tina Fey was doing amazing things for women like me… vaugely ethnic women like me.

I’m back

I gave up blogging for a long time, but I’ve decided to come back.

Last night, I was talking to Adam about his old website. His website was brilliant, hilarious, and very human. I felt the same way when Adam stopped writing, as I did when Arrested Development was canceled and when I burned through the fifth season of The Wire. I felt like something genuinely good was coming to an end too quickly. I was telling him that he needed to write again, because talent like that, writing something people want to read, is so very rare. In all my preaching I realized what a hypocrite I was being. I’m not as talented, but I had this really great forum that people read, and I just squandered it, and why? Because of my irresponsible use of proper nouns.

Well, I’m back now.

A lot has happened over the past few months. Today is my last day of teaching for the semester. One of my students told me she loved my class before she left. Another guy, one that always sat in the back and seemed disinterested approached me and asked, “So, this is it? We’re all done after today?” I said, “Yes, you’re free.” He said, “sweet class” and left. It was really nice. I had a lot of fun teaching this semester and I want to keep doing it. I think my resume for an adjunct position was shuffled through the wrong channels. I gave it to the big guy in charge and not the lady who actually did the scheduling. Wrong move. I forwarded her my resume and told her I wanted to stay. My friend Sara has been working as an adjunct here for a few years and told me that she never knows how many classes she will be assigned until a week ahead of time.

In the meantime I’ve applied to about eighteen jobs, all are jobs I think I’m qualified for, but still haven’t received much of a response. If nothing else, I could get a decent paying tutoring job.

I’m also working on a spec (a sample script) for an NBC writer’s recruitment program. At first I wasn’t completely committed to the idea because I know what a long shot it is, but everyone I’ve mentioned it to has been very supportive– not only supportive, but encouraging. I talked to my mom about it and she was genuinely excited by the prospect. Because I’m more a pragmatist than a dreamer I thought to myself “what makes me think I’m so special?” Then I looked down, and on the table, there was a copy of Newsweek. On it, Barack Obama smiled and the cover said “44.” I was like… OBAMA!! THE LITTLE BLACK KID WITH THE MIDDLE NAME HUSSEIN THAT BECAME PRESIDENT. BECAUSE OF YOU, I BELIEVE IN MYSELF. It was very convenient and very corny.

So things are going well. I know this is my time to work. I’ll worry about the rest later.

Last Post

I’m sorry, but this is going to have to be my last post. I know I’ve said that before, but I think I’m done now. Thanks to all of you who have read.

Sometimes it takes less than 1 minute for me to admit that I’m being crazy

Today I gave a lesson on dangling modifiers. One of my students turned in a short writing assignment that contained a dangling modifier within the FIRST SENTENCE.

Anyway, I automatically assumed she did it on purpose to piss me off. Several hours later I realized that I was being crazy. I’m getting faster at that!

So for those of you who always suspected that your English teachers were crazy… they were– they always are. Yes, always.

Shoe Laces in High Definition

I really need to move out. My parents are, well, they are my parents and Egyptian, and don’t understand the concept of privacy, because privacy is apparently just something Americans invented because they don’t love their parents enough to want to spend any time with them.

And I like my parents, but I cannot get anything done with them around. If I try to read in the house while my dad is home, he’s like a perpetual sabatour. He interrupts me for any reason whatsoever. Once, he interrupted me to tell me how much he loved high definition television. My natural response was to flip out and tell him not to interrupt me unless it was actually important. Minutes later he interrupted me again. Why? Because he wanted to show me his new shoe laces. “Doesn’t it look like I bought a new pair? And all I did was replace the laces.” Aaaand, I went absolutely ape shit. Actually, I didn’t at that moment, but the next day I heard my dad talking about his shoe laces to my  mom… that is when I went ape shit. I was like FOR HOW LONG MUST I HEAR ABOUT YOUR GOD DAMN SHOE LACES?

There is so much more I don’t want to get into, but needless to say, I’m dying to move out. I’m thinking of graduating early, skipping my thesis and forgetting the PhD altogether so that maybe I can get a job at a junior college and make an actual salary. What I make now is symbolic. It’s like they’re paying because it’s illegal not to pay me, but they might as well not be paying me because I got paid significantly more filing stuff at C&D. I just need to tough it out for a little while longer.

Who said I have to turn 25 tomorrow?

Are we really confined by the rules of the “time space continuum”? I just decided to be 24 again.

My sister said she sent me a check and I was all “thanks, but I feel weird taking money from my little sister,” so she was like “Ok, don’t cash the check, or I’ll go back in time and be older.”

But here’s the good news Jenny, in another year, we’ll be the same age, and after that, you will be older than me .

Epic Fail

I failed my comps. So, that was a bummer, but then I got drunk, so I’m back at one.

I actually drank a very small amount, but Justin’s breathalizer said I was over the legal limit for almost the entire night. Taking a breathalizer to a bar is a fun thing to do. With Justin’s breathalizer all you need to do is blow ON it, but half the drunk people at the bar, after explaining how to use the breathlizer to them, just stuck the breathalizers in their mouths. Justin doesn’t read this anymore because he said that reading my blog and knowing me was redundant, but I’m pretty sure his breathalizer has herpes… and that is not something I am telling him in real life. Yeah, that’s right Justin, nobody calls me “redundant” and gets away with it.

Anyway, aside from failing my comprehensive exam and secretly infecting Justin with mouth herpes, nothing much of note has been going on, but the last fortune cookie I got promises things will change soon. I put it in one of my pockets and every time I find it I’m like “Oh cool! Look! How unlikely is it to find an encouraging fortune in my jacket pocket, that I put there and never threw away! The cosmos or God or whoever truly does favor me.”

Match III

I went out with this younger guy today….and I actually liked him. He was kind of adorable and seemed really sweet. Maybe I won’t be cashing in on my 6 free months from Match after all…. which kind of pisses me off because, dammit, I expected a year!

I rejoice in every small victory!

I think that of all the classes I’ve taken before, I’m having the most fun in my class. Let me tell ya, getting to decide everything for once is super awesome, especially after I’ve been in school FOREVER and have had every different kind of weirdo teacher in the world.

Flint and Nate have been engaged in a several day long debate (epic battle) over e-mail about concealed handgun licenses. Nate forwarded it to me, and it made the perfect lesson. It was great, because Nate and Flint are good debaters AND hilarious and got my class all debating. Like… even students that don’t talk, talked. I got my students to think about important stuff!

I rejoice in every small victory.

Match Dot Com Update

It turns out he’s a real person and wasn’t smart enough to be offended.

I really hate the dating world.  I’m having a really hard time finding someone I like. I know I’m picky, but I feel like I’m putting forth enough of an effort to at least find people that I know are people and not internet spam.

Match Dot Com

I just asked a guy on Match if he was a person or spam… not to be mean, but because I couldn’t tell… and if it IS a person and not spam, then he needs to get a better personality so that you can tell the difference.