Category Archives: Two minute read

Feb 07 2012
16 Comments
Best blog posts, Humorous, Two minute read

Bathroom Reading Rocks

Warning: this post discusses something so incredibly awesome your eyeballs are likely to explode on monitors and other electronic equipment. Consider yourself warned.

Some things are hard to say. Words choke in the throat. Cold fingers trip over keys. Sleepiness robs the mind of its sharpness. Synapses are replaced with teddy bear stuffing.

Yet it must be said.

The words must be forced out. They will be squeezed slowly and with purpose, zit-like. The entirety of meaning and expression, the enthusiasm and despair of everything will be pressed and molded into a loaf, a delicious loaf of meaning. Then the loaf will be eaten and everyone will know.

Emotion wells up within me. I cannot bear to hold it in any longer. The naked truth will burst out of me like 10 o’clock secrets at a cocktail party. Oh God here it comes. There is no stopping it! Reality is nigh upon us!

I LOVE BATHROOM READING!

Oh sweet bathroom reading! Is there anything more delicious than reposing on the commode whilst leafing through a Spring 2010 LL Bean catalog? Or the William’s Sonoma quarterly left in your parents’ bathroom? Or the ancient Wal-Mart receipt found in a newly discovered jean pocket?

Could there be anything better than taking the extra 3-5 minutes to finish the chapter in one’s current book or lingering over the pictures in a coffee table affair on the beauty of the Rocky Mountains?

Once upon a time I was afraid of the people’s opinions. I felt suspicious glances when I went off the restroom and imagined others silently taking notice of my absence and judging me for any delays and marking down the state of my return. Shamefully and hurriedly I would perform the bathroom functions with machine-like efficiency. I did not enjoy the time I spent in the pooper.

But no longer.

Bathroom time is me time, and I’m going to take a freaking Dickens novel in there if I feel like it. I might not even be going using the toilet. Maybe I just wanted a quiet place where I don’t have to wear pants.

Let the masses think what they will, but make no mistake, the stack of reading next to my toilet is for exactly what they think it is, and if they’re human—as they claim to be–they best avail themselves of it as well.

I’ve read too many shampoo bottles in my lifetime to be subjected to that monotony in the comfort of my own home.

Therefore I say: may peace reign over the earth, and may every man, woman, and child read while taking a dump.

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Jan 30 2012
8 Comments
Lists, Modern Life, Two minute read

7 Indicators of a Great Start to the Semester

No pen=no doodle. 😦

1. You forget the pen you were sure you recalled and proceed to not record anything for the entire day except for when you borrow that one guy’s pencil. You even regret doing that because the lead is really light and a pain to write with but you remember that beggars can’t be choosers.

2. You spend a large amount of class time debating whether the classrooms feel most like a coffin, grave, cistern, or well. You decide that the grave motif resonates the most because of how you feel about the course itself and the room’s stark lack of natural light, but ultimately you throw out all your choices and settle on describing it as a morgue: stale and lifeless.

3. After staring at the wall for most of your first class, you rush downstairs when it ends to go to the bathroom/escape. Later on you see the teacher from that class who asks you whether anything is wrong. The prospect of taking classes for the next 4 months in the morgue makes you want to curl up and die but there’s nothing she can do so you keep your mouth shut.

4. On your way into the university, you look at the bottle of water you just purchased and wish it were whiskey. You close your eyes and wish for it to turn into whiskey. When you open them, it is still water, which you drink because you hope will cure your massive headache.

5. Having shivered most of the day, you exit your unheated classroom building and find that the air of the city in which you reside has been rendered brown and unbreathable from dust kicked up by the massive gusts of wind. This would make great stuff for a song about witches coming down chimneys, you think to  yourself.

6. The best part of the day was when you learned that your first class might be 15 minutes shorter than originally scheduled. The worst part of the day was when you had to sit through the entire hour and thirty minutes because they hadn’t decided on a time length yet.

7. You’re looking forward to the fact that the only girl’s bathroom is about a 1.5 minute walk away, which will be good for breaks from class over the next four months. If you time it right, you might be able to miss hours of class.

It’s going to be a wonderful semester!

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Jan 25 2012
8 Comments
Anecdotes, Stories, Travelling, Two minute read

Delta Surprise!

It took hours to absorb enough light for this photo

At the airport in Oklahoma City, I munched on a third Major Milk Makin’ Lactation cookie while contemplating the news of an unexpected 29 hour layover in Amsterdam. “That is a long layover,” I thought. Actually, I was a little angry at the time, so I believe my thoughts may have had some more descriptive words that connoted my irritation.

Apparently something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. I had been so excited about the future just an hour beforehand, gushing about the beauty of life like a simpleton. But now the beginning to my spring semester was darkened, and the shininess of the attending Delta employee’s bald head did nothing to ease my dread, and the fact he implied that this predicament was my fault only served to incense me. “Who made the reservation?” he said. “Does it matter?” I half snapped, half asked politely. A Muppet friend could have made the reservation, but that didn’t alter the fact that Delta had confirmed it and then changed the flight without notifying me. Someone was going to pay for this.

As it turns out, Delta/KLM agreed with me. In Atlanta, I learned that my flight from Amsterdam was no longer scheduled for Jan. 24th at 5:25 pm, but for Jan. 25th at 5:25, and that since it was not my fault, I would be taken care of in Amsterdam by nice people who would put me in a hotel and feed me.

At the airport in Amsterdam, I talked to some truly wonderful KLM representatives, one of which had a voice like the Swedish chef, and eventually wound up in a hotel nicer than one I would ever be able to afford (as an Arabic fellow making $520/mo.) and confronted with a lunch buffet of my wildest imaginings.

Bread! Butter!  Prosciutto! Little things of jam I could steal! Oh happy day! I even got a toiletry bag from KLM filled with, among other things, spray on deodorant with man-smell (the cooling sensation on the pits is quite nice), and a European size XXL white t-shirt, which translates to an American medium. This was perfect, since I didn’t have pajamas in my carry-on.

bunny bunny bunny!

Later that day, I chased and took pictures of bunnies in the hotel parking lot, went to Amsterdam, and ate a 3 course meal by myself while reading A Confederacy of Dunces and watching happy dinner parties in a lovely dining room lit by hundreds of votive candles and decorated with roses. It has been a most wonderful paid vacation.

A word on Amsterdam: at one moment I thought to myself, “If you’ve never considered suicide, try going to Amsterdam in the winter. There are many lovely bridges to contemplate jumping off of after tying a stone to your foot.” I had been to that city once before, in the summer, when it was sunny. I now realize that it may have been the one sunny day they’d had all year. While wandering around Amsterdam, I felt like I was in the surreal, dark world of one of the characters from a Rembrandt painting, surrounded by people who were hurrying to get home to the light and remember a reason for living. But that’s just my impression. The windows of the city are quite lovely though.

Hopefully I will arrive to Cairo for real-sies today.

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Jan 19 2012
5 Comments
Anecdotes, Humorous, Stories, Two minute read

What is “Fax Machine?”

I’m trying to get back to San Francisco in July. Yes I got back yesterday, but yes I loved it and yes I want to live out there just like the rest of the dreamers in the world. A large man at a bakery told me to come back when I made it big and buy a cupcake from him so now I definitely have to go back. He awaits me with his floppy hat and the cupcake.

Unfortunately, I’ve found myself in the awkward position of having no money. This sad fact has led me to Craig’s list as I search for the likely-lethal ride share possibilities. I’m also considering the safer yet more complicated method of using frequent flier miles, which got me out to SF in the first place.

Scared of Craig’s list, I began trying to rack up my miles in earnest. After cashing in on all possible miles with Delta, I still found myself short a cute 30,000 miles for a reward trip. Disappointed but not yet defeated, I turned my sights towards American Airlines.

I hadn’t earned any miles for my first trip to Cairo last May, which could put me just over 12.5K miles, the minimum amount for a reward trip. “They owe me,” I thought. I also thought, “This will be easy. Flight problem solved. Next step: find a puppy and an apartment.” As I found out later, the puppy will have to wait.

So I hunted through the back logs of my emails, scrutinized all of the numbers that lay within the ones pertaining to flight information, and found everything I thought I needed. Success was at hand. I could see the California sun, the blue water of the bay reflecting its golden rays. I filled in the information for the first leg of the journey, feeling cocky. Then came the second leg, carried by Royal Jordanian.

As soon as I selected the name of that carrier, this message came up: “Mileage credit requests for this airline must be submitted via fax. Please send a copy of your ticket receipt and boarding pass(es) to 1-817-963-7882.”

Excuse me? Did I read my screen correctly? You want me to fax something? As in, use a fax machine to transmit information? How about instead of faxing anything, I build a time machine and go back to rescue American Airlines from where it is clearly trapped in the past. I could bring their executive leadership into the year 2012 where we have things like scanners and internet.

Also, when they say boarding passes, do they mean those pieces of trash with numbers and my seat number on them that I have to show the person in front of the jetbridge in order to get on the plane? The ones I usually crumple, fill with gum, or tear apart before absent mindedly shoving them into the pocket of the seat in front of me? Surely they don’t mean those things?

All of this archaic nonsense makes it seem like they don’t want me to get these miles. It’s almost like they want me to pay for a flight. But I’ve never heard of a large, failing corporation acting against the interests of the consumer, so that certainly can’t be it.

I guess it’s back to Craig’s list.

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Jan 15 2012
8 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, Two minute read

Let’s Pulp These Redwoods

As I was in Muir Woods yesterday, gazing up at redwood trees that were decades old, trees that oozed wisdom and earthiness and nature, I thought to myself, “These would make a dump-load of paper.” The pile would be huge! A gigantic pile of paper, a majestic pile of all different kinds of paper: magazine grade paper, cardstock, envelopes, post-its, a mosaic of various types and cuts of paper.

I wonder how many dumpsters all that paper would fill. If you took all the trees in Muir Woods and made it into paper (toilet paper, nose tissue, cardboard), I bet it would take up an entire landfill. So much waste…it would be awesome!

Just one tree would make reams and reams of paper. They’re so tall! Those towering majestic redwoods are so slender and shapely I just want to shove them into a pulper and let the magic happen.

If we made Muir Woods into paper and then took that trash to the moon and littered it everywhere, it would probably cover a large portion of the moon’s surface, or at least fill that place that’s called something like the Sea of Loneliness and we could rename it the Sea of Redwood Trash instead.

And if we took all the redwood paper and dumped it into the ocean, I can’t even imagine how much wildlife we would kill. But it would definitely be an insane amount.

Nature is awesome.

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