Category Archives: Three minute read

Jan 04 2012
2 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, Stories, Three minute read

Gummy Dreams: Lisa’s True Story

just because they’re all gummy bears doesn’t mean they all look the same

What if a gummy bear was one of us, just a regular teenage mom trying to make ends meet? What if she had come from abroken gummy home, where dad ran off with a peach ring, and mom committed suicide by going hot tubbing?

What if the kids in elementary school called her dummy bear, gumtard, and sweet cheeks? What if every night of 1st through 5th grade she wept weird gummy tears before dreaming gummy dreams of a sweeter world? What if no one sat by her in middle school because of her pineapple b.o.?

What if she tried to go through a goth phase during freshman year of high school but had no facial features to coat with black makeup? What if no one asked her to the prom senior year because they didn’t want to be the one dancing with a gigantic 6 foot candy bear? What if her first love and father of her gummy cub said he wouldn’t marry her because he had fallen for a Sour Patch Kid?

What if, after she dropped out of high school, she was reduced to selling her body and being rented out for parties as a freak spectacle? “Mommy, mommy! Come look at the huge gummy bear!” The kids would say. Her name was Lisa.

One New Year’s Day, 3 years after dropping out of high school and after working a particularly grotesque New Year’s Eve party, Lisa decided she’d had enough of this life. She quit her job and got her GRE, passing the test with the highest score of the year. She made headlines that week: “Gummy Bear Mauls Test.” “Why couldn’t they use my name?” she sighed.

But the news caught on. Soon she was a local celebrity, attending mini league championships and appearing in car dealership ads. She started a blog called “Faceless” and it didn’t take long before she became a national celebrity after a youtube video of her in zumba class went viral.

Soon movie deals and invitations from talk shows were flooding in. She was already writing a book and starring in a wildly popular reality television series featuring her and her son called “I Want Candy.” Notoriety began to consume every second of her life. She grew weary from the fame.

She yearned for the days she would lumber home from school and spend hours reading and thinking about the absurdity of life. There was no time to think about anything anymore.

A few years after she had quit her rental job, she woke up another New Year’s Day. The night before was hazy and mostly forgotten, a collage of bright lights, glitter, and plastic. She gazed into the mirror and realized what she’d become: a true monster. That very moment she decided to leave it all, the celebrity, the cocaine, the lacquered friends.

She took her son and fled to a small but tolerant city in upstate New York, where people had heard of her but were too interested in living wholesomely to pay much attention.

Within a month she was signing the lease to a space where she was going to build her dream, a dance studio called “Bounce!” where women of all sizes were welcome. As she opened her front door after driving back from the real estate agent’s office, she exhaled deeply.

“I’m home,” she whispered, “Lisa’s home.”

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Jan 02 2012
6 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Three minute read

Country Music: Proud of Itself

wranglers at Deer Valley Ranch, the former vacation destination of our family

In many parts of the country, a fondness for country music brings a plague upon one’s career and friendships. Country music, outside its native habitat, is as popular as pungent body odor in small vehicles. It is to be masked and not spoken of, its producer’s cheeks reddening in shame and the rest embarrassed to be in the presence of such a foul substance.

Despite the widespread prejudice, country music actually isn’t all that bad. While growing up in OK, I listened to and resented country music all the time, since most of my family members enjoyed it and would play it relentlessly on the radio and at home. Years later at Boston University, this caused the bizarre sensation of both revulsion and pride whenever I heard a country song.

The revulsion resulted from years of carefully practiced loathing, and the pride came from me belonging to something different than the rest of my mostly coastal colleagues. Eventually I came to appreciate the twang-infested music as something unique to the specific subculture in which my adolescence was submerged and an art form that can be quite beautiful in those rare instances where it is done properly. And when it is not beautiful, it is generally hilarious.

Mostly for the ha-has, I’ve been drinking in the country music as much as possible during these short weeks in Oklahoma, but I have realized that a lifetime would not be enough to fully understand the breadth and depth of the genre. Where else do you find such tender descriptions of trucks, tractors, and other vehicles of labor? In this modern music wasteland, what other than country music will dare to describe innocent love in barns, hayfields, and blue jeans? What about all the myriad ways whisky, Jesus, and America are intimately connected with the problems one has while courting the farmer’s daughter?

What I most admire about country music, however, is its ability to admire itself. Since the dawn of the genre, it has been lauding the country lifestyle and the country way, in small towns full of simple, country men and women that like to do country things.

Songs like “I Got My Country On,” by Chris Cagle, “These Are My People,” by Rodney Atkins, “Where I Come From” by Montgomery Gentry, and “Where I Come From” by Alan Jackson, among many others, celebrate a rustic problem free, healthcare free lifestyle. In this highly fictionalized country world, there’s a lot of front porch sitting (AJ) with preacher men in cowboy shirts (MG). It’s where people do things with their own two hands (CG) and give this life everything they have and then some (RA). It’s a wonderful, wonderful, place, and anyone listening to this music would probably imagine a haven of small town goodness, unspoiled by the modern world.

While modernity may not have touched it, the world in which country music lives and from which it sprouts has unfortunately been spoiled by high divorce, obesity, diabetes two, and poverty rates.

However, I am confident that a genre with such hits as “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” “Jesus Take the Wheel,” and “Somethin’ Bout a Truck” will have the creative energy necessary to face this rampant decay with some great ho-down tunes that will get knees a poppin’, heads a bobbin,’ and boots a stompin’.

If you have any other winning country music titles, please feel free to pass them along and I’ll see you down at the barn for the next line dance.

Picture Credit: Trip Advisor

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Jan 01 2012
6 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Three minute read

New Year: Time to Fail

Notice the error in spelling “special.” I can make mistakes if I want.

Welcome to the New Year. Odds are you’ve already messed it up. As usual, you thought that this year was going to be different. Yet barely a day into it, you once again sullied the fresh snow of new opportunity. Now it looks as appealing as Mr. Sprick’s yard on a snow day, and he has 5 kids, a few dogs, and a mule. Have you ever seen how much mules pee? No one wants to look at that yard, much less do anything in it.

Now you’re going to have to wait a whole new year to get a fresh snowfall, and meanwhile you have plenty of time to consider all the ways you went wrong. Why didn’t everything change at midnight like it was supposed to?

One of the more glaring problems is that you have remained the same person. Your new, sequined dress and hair-do for New Year’s Eve didn’t make you lose weight, and you never looked like Gwen Stefani. Furthermore, whatever glamour hocus pocus you attempted wore off rapidly as the evening progressed, like it always does, leaving none for the morning after. You awoke New Year’s Day having retained many if not all of the habits and excuses from your former life of 2 days ago and you still find it difficult to do the things you should do and accomplish the goals you put off when today was tomorrow. Most unfortunately, you’re still yourself, and that has always been your biggest problem.

Another monkey wrench in your New Year’s plot is the fact you had one at all. There is nothing special about New Years. It is an arbitrary day assigned an arbitrary number that has arbitrary meaning in a society you were arbitrarily born into. There is no magic in it that will make your wishes for change come true, especially if you do nothing, as usual. Magical New Year’s fairy dust won’t make you the person you want to be. You can’t sprinkle it on a pile of books you want read or a treadmill you want results from or a human you want to friend and expect those things to happen. It’s just skin cells and dirt, like dust always is, like it was yesterday and like it will be tomorrow.

Perhaps one of your biggest mistakes was that you thought positive life changes can only be implemented on a specific date once a year. This is a common misconception, and you’re not alone in such convoluted thinking. However, research has shown that these kinds of changes can take place regardless of the date. Science has thus released us from the prison of miniscule timelines and disposed of our archaic excuses. Thank goodness.

And finally, you may have unfortunately bought into the idea that transformation happens instantly. This is a most inaccurate notion. A large pine tree grows in my front yard. It was not always large. It has grown over the past 15 years into a respectably sized organism, just as you have. Family dysfunction that has festered for decades will not disappear in a month. Bad habits you’ve practiced daily since college will not take kindly to being abandoned. You are still yourself, after all, and that includes everything you would rather not include.

So yes, you have failed to become a new person overnight, the person you should, can, and want to be. You ate another cookie, cursed in front of a child, or vomited into a friend’s shoe. Nothing has changed.

But don’t despair yet. There’s still hope, and it’s not because next year is another year, or tomorrow is another day. It’s because every day you have a million chances to right your wrongs and strangle your bad habits. You have a first, second, fourth, and eight hundred and sixtieth chance to get it right, and that’s just today, after which there will likely be a tomorrow. But there’s no reason to wait. Screw New Year’s Resolutions.

Lastly, I would like to apologize, as it appears I’ve just written an inspirational blog post.

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Dec 30 2011
4 Comments
Anecdotes, Humorous, Three minute read

The Job I Want

What I would wear as a professional square dancer, sans backpack

I just finished the book my mom had forced me upon me in an attempt to help mold my ethereal career path. It was a book called Quitter, in which Jon Acuff outlines the process of chasing, catching, and devouring your dream career. Aside from the fact that the book was casually written and could have used a good edit—this coming from a girl who is the published author of nothing—I found its advice helpful.

I am certain, however, that much like Plato in The Republic, Jon Acuff was advocating the opposite of what he stated directly. He encouraged people to be smart, evaluate risks, and continue working hard at one’s day job, all of which I interpreted as, “Follow your impulses, throw caution to the wind, and treat your co-workers like crap and your current job like the joke it is*.”

That brings me to my next point: skinny jeans.

I was astonished when I finished the book and found that Acuff had not addressed wardrobe renewal. Since wardrobe is the most important part of a career and because of “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have*,” I decided to update my wardrobe to match my dream of moving to San Francisco and being an indigent writer.

In a bold first move, I purchased a pair of dark skinny jeans. This inaugural pair of denim marks my transition from the oh-so-square world of boot leg and flare jeans to the hip, edgy, sub-world of skinny pants wearers. For years I have resisted this trend, and finally I realized that it was obstinacy in the denim department that was holding back my writing career.

As I wear these skinny jeans and they slowly age, fading, fuzzing, and developing holes in various places, I will not be able to replace them because I will be poor. These might very well be the only pair of skinny jeans that I will be able to afford for the next 5-7 years. However, the ragged appearance will only add to my credibility as an author and therefore this is a great investment.

In addition to the skinny jeans, I should also make improvements in other areas such as hair symmetry. My hair style is currently symmetrical, or rather, boring as all hell. Since hair-dos are the cherries on clothing sundaes, I will need to edge it up by going asymmetrical and highlighting its asymmetry with neon. This will, of course, be accompanied by a nose ring instead of a nose stud. I’ll know I’ve hit the mark when I get at least one or two blatant gasps out of my grandparents.

Final touches will include tattoos I can’t afford and a tube top, though I’m not sure if indigent writers wear those or not. More research is necessary. I also can’t decide if smoke-stained teeth are mandatory or merely a plus, but I’ll be sure to learn more after my initial visit to the West Coast in a few weeks.

Thanks for the career book, Mom! Can’t wait to go shopping! Can I borrow some money?

*Joke semi-borrowed from Parks and Recreation, a wonderful show

*Just to be clear, he doesn’t recommend those things, and the book  is actually good.

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Dec 25 2011
2 Comments
Humorous, Lists, Three minute read

For a Very Special Christmas

This is actually a man covered in pine branches. Now that’s special.

As the years drift by, it gets harder and harder to bring back that Christmas feeling you had as a child. The special aura surrounding the holiday, fueled in part by parentally encouraged delusions of a certain chubby man and his mysterious night journey, begins to fade.

Gone are the days when parents had no flaws, school consisted of Christmas parties for an entire month, and the entire world glowed with happiness because of the presents you were going to get. As we reach adulthood (and I know it’s a stretch to call myself an adult), we see the other side of the coin: the glow is actually just white hot Christmas rage, the Santa Bill needs to be paid personally, and family must be tended to.

How can you bring back the incandescent Christmas days of old, when today seemed like a day apart from all others, a day to look forward to, a day worthy of a countdown, a day of expectation and joy that ended in the ashes of wrapping paper scraps. Here are some tips and suggestions that can make this Christmas the best one of all.

Ways to Make this Christmas Special:

1. Play “family member hides.” Everyone votes on the family member they like the least, and then that family member has to hide for the rest of the day while the others search for him or her at their leisure.

2. Give the youngest members of your family bb guns, making sure they know there are no restrictions on where to use them.

3. After the Christmas feast, sit down with your loved ones and point out one another’s flaws.

4. Everyone loves singing! Give everyone a 3-5 minute solo to prepare and then go sing them at the mall in front of the movie ticket lines.

5. If you haven’t seen them already, rent the first two Alvin and the Chipmunks movies before going and watching the third one in theatres during a daytime showing. Nothing spells Christmas cheer like shameless exploitation of formerly beloved characters set to the tune of wailing toddlers.

6. Instead of fussing over a big meal, let everyone choose their own microwave dinner and heat it up themselves. Then watch television in silence!

7. Indoor bonfire, using the tree as fodder.

8. Hire someone wearing a Santa suit to come and take everyone’s presents away from them after they’ve finished unwrapping them.

9. Have a real-time response to Christmas gifts from people who aren’t in the immediate vicinity. Call ‘em up right away and tell them how you really feel about the Jar Jar Binks soap dispenser you got!

10. Go door to door preaching against capitalism. Have younger family members wail in order to remind people of child labor in sweat shops.

11. Encourage the little cousins to try to get onto the roof of the house, climb a tree, or fit into cupboards.

12. “Accidentally” misplace the remote control.

13. As you sit around the crackling fire with your family or friends, laughing about times gone by, bring up a deep seated grudge from years ago.

14. Instead of complaining about gifts you didn’t receive, speak with dripping sarcasm and spit vitriol while insisting nothing is wrong.

15. Give used toothbrushes as stocking stuffers.

Merry Christmas!!!

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