Tag Archives: satire

Dance to the beat of a little girl’s drum

Quick! Steal her drum while she’s not looking!

Hey you.

You have the power to be who you want to be. Dance to the beat of your own drum. Steal a little girl’s drum and dance to its beat if you want to.

She might start crying, but that’s okay, because it’s the perfect chance for you to tell her that she has the power to be who she wants to be, and if she wants to be a sissy whiny pants with no drum, then that’s her choice. Run away with her drum.

Now you have a little girl’s drum and you’re out there dancing to it like there’s no tomorrow, because you want to be a person that dances like no one’s watching.

Unfortunately, there are many people watching, including those with pets, the elderly, and one jock who comes up with a great line to mock you with. “Nice moves.” A pet owner’s pet gets nervous and starts barking at you, because you’re flailing your limbs wildly and your eyeballs are rolling around in their sockets and you’re having a grand old time while everyone around you stares in horror at the maniac writhing to the bizarre beat of a hello kitty drum.

Someone calls the police.

You try to tell them but they don’t understand and that you have the power to be who you want to be. Unfortunately, they have the power to make you be who they want you to be. You had never heard the corollary before.

You’re arrested for theft of a little girl’s drum, and dancing is discouraged in the courthouse. You learn that sometimes you need to think about adages before you follow them blindly, and you shouldn’t take advice from someone with unclear motives.

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Hi everyone! I changed my profile picture.

This is my former profile picture.

Dear facebook community,

As many of you have probably noticed (and commented/liked), I changed my profile picture today. For the past year, three months, and…you guessed it! 22 days, my profile picture portrayed me making a funny face while my parents tried to kiss me on the cheek. It was taken on a cliff in Maine shortly after I graduated (with honors, three ribbons, and a wheel of cheese) from Boston University.

The picture was hilarious. It provided all of you with enjoyment for many months, but in truth, I’ve felt for a while now that I needed a change.  I was held back by the fear of not measuring up to past profile picture greatness, of failing to find the one image that bursts with humor, creativity, and wisdom and shines like my beacon into the darkness of facebok.

It just so happened that yesterday, as I was showing my boyfriend pictures I had taken of myself, that I stumbled upon a great prospect.

While being an attention-whore, ham, and all-around obnoxious and spotlight-sucking rockstar in July, I had grabbed antlers and posed with them pressed to my face, as if they were emerging from my cheeks and I was undergoing a painful transformation into a creature both cursed and beautiful. I forced my mother to choke back embarrassment and take pictures of me.

This is the new profile picture.

When I found this gem, glittering in the dust of the My Pictures folder, I realized I must make it my profile picture, that it encapsulated everything I feel about my current situation in San Francisco, that it was the embodiment of who I am and who I am becoming.

“This is it.” I said to myself, and I uploaded it, changing my life and yours forever.

I immediately commented on it, liked it, and did everything I could to promote it, including making it a life event and asking people politely to comment or like anything regarding the photo change. Just a few minutes into the barrage of news about my profile picture I was bestowing upon you, the facebook community, the giddiness of my endeavor wore off and I realized I had made a huge mistake.

The picture was too dark. The community could not appreciate how ridiculous it was. The expected outpouring of likes and comments was not appearing as I had expected. Not only that, I felt in my heart of hearts that this was not the best possible photo for my profile.

I am now trapped, with no way out. Should I change my facebook photo again so soon, I will make an ass of myself and the 5 people who liked it will mock me endlessly. Soon I shall become an echo of my former facebook profile picture greatness and live in the shadow I have created for myself.

I shall grow paler.

My freckles will fade.

And I will be forgotten.

Goodbye, facebook community. Goodbye to those who know me and love me.

Please like this post.

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A Desire Burns in My Breast

So I want to change the world. Go figure. Who doesn’t? The question is: how the blork am I going to do that?

The solid, hot truth is that I have no freaking marbled cake idea of how this dumb globe even works. Thanks a lot, 4-year education at an “accredited” institution.

If only I’d read a little bit more Dante maybe I’d know what the heck was going on, and how hurricane what’s-her-face is connected to the plight of migrant workers is connected to Wal-Mart is connected to the Christ and Madonna and soaring flocks of macaws in the Amazon.

Heck, I don’t even know how to dress myself. Every single pair of pants I own has or had a hole in it, and I spent two hours today trying to figure out what a person who goes to a professional job for work looks like. I failed miserably and ended up gawking at tubs of extra-terrestrial creatures at an Asian supermarket before day drinking and retiring to my abode where I contemplated the chocolate-covered toffee on my desk and felt the impending free time about to destroy my brain.

I must do something.

This is the eternal desire, the ever-burning flame within my pasty breast. I must do something. But what does it look like? How does it taste and smell? Does it like children? Will the child I babysit like it more than me? These questions bubble to the surface of my existence like those tell-tale doom bubbles in the lower intestine after a July chili cook-off.

What must I do? Should I climb the tallest mountain? Should I chop down the tallest tree in the forest? Should I drink the tallest milk shake? Tell the tallest tall-tale? Slap the tallest man? Braid the hair of the tallest woman? Wear the tallest pants? Take a dump in the tallest building?

Am I even on the right track with the tallest thing? Do you see the problem here? Sometimes the world is spinning and spinning and just when I think I have the game down and I’m hopping and stepping in time with everyone else like at St. Gregory’s Church, I catch my breath and realize I have little to no idea what’s going on.

It’s refreshing and terrifying, like a cucumber-scented bodywash that dissolves your skin days after you use it.

And then, after I figure out what I must do, how do I do it? Are the discovery and the doing part of the same thing? Can you have one without the other?

But here’s a better question: how do I forget all of this and just get to the point where I want to make a lot of money? Isn’t that a safer and less confusing place to be—more easily quantified too!

And then I could blog about money, and everyone would want to read my words and learn out how to get rich like me and I would purchase a pair of shoes without holes.

Alas alas, I am in the holey time of my life, and there is much pondering to do. Join me, if you dare. Mock me, if you will. Just don’t ask to see the inner thighs of my pants.

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Weather: The Forbidden Topic

I read once that an author should never start a book with the weather. I don’t remember who said this. It was in the context of a Guardian article in which writers shared their wisdom on writing, and this particular author (I believe it was a woman) mentioned one exception, that there was an author that was allowed to start a book with the weather  (I believe it was a man). The reason I bring this up is because I want to talk about the weather but couldn’t lead with it, so instead I introduced the whole topic of weather-discussion through the very fact it is forbidden at the beginning of a work, such as a blog post.

Let’s start in San Francisco, where I’m looking out the window through the gaps between the blinds. I can’t see much, but what I do see is shades of grey and raindrops, but it’s not sensual. It’s cold and I want to get back into bed and see how many months I can sleep.

If I were the heroine of a romantic novel, I would probably choose this time to go wandering the streets in inappropriate footwear. If I were a detective in an action movie, I’d smoke a cigarette on the street corner somewhere and remember an afternoon all dappled in sunlight in my life before I started police work and got caught bum-deep in the grime of the city. Part of me wishes I had stayed in the sun, but the other knows I didn’t have a choice. I take one last drag on the cigarette and toss it to the ground, waiting to hear the “tssss” of the embers dying in the water.

My real character sits in the mostly dark of her room and types, looking out the slats of the blind occasionally and piecing together the world behind it. The day is October 22, 2012. The rain falls harder outside. Next week is Halloween and a celebration of all kinds of things the administrators of my elementary school found frightening enough to have a night at the gym called “Hallelujah Night” to counteract it. I don’t think it worked, considering many of those students later wound up as pimps and ho’s at frat parties, the dressing-up itch still unscratched. And now they’re deciding who they will be all over again.

North of here, maybe it’s sunny. South of here, it’s definitely sunny. In the lumpy parts of the United States, snow is already falling. As people are leaving their houses all across America, some grab umbrellas, rain boots, down jackets, wind jackets, suit coats, water bottles, brown-bag lunches, and keys. They pat the dog, kiss the loved one, and get in the car, run to the bus, or hop on the bike. It might be wet, dry, hot, cool, leafy, humid, gray, or bright on the outside. Maybe they wish it was a different way, but that doesn’t change what they have to do, unless we’re talking about chalk artists or hot air balloonists.

Now comes the time for some great metaphor about the weather, or better yet, a simile. I’ll say, “The weather is like a hot dog, but you don’t always have to enjoy eating it when the bun is soggy.” You can unpack that statement, or move onto the next one which is this: soon I have to leave to get on the train and go to work, where I’ll probably sing to an 18 mo-old. I’m going to read a book on the train and I’m looking forward to that, despite the weather. I hope you have something you’re looking forward to today as well.

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Lord of the Blog

One blog to rule them all, one blog to find them. One blog to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, in the blogosphere where the shadows lie.

Beware of Mark.

Long ago, in an age that has been forgotten, evil covered the earth. Men struck each other down with their hands, teenagers used poor spelling in social media posts, and children dreamt nightly of living inside a television, in order to break the last barrier between them and the only thing they loved. Humans were slaves of chaos, fear, and greed. Art was rendered impossible, as was music. Only bare shrieks were heard in the never-ending nights.

Then hope came in the form of the Googles, a race sent from Outside to restore order to the earth, a daunting task. But the Googles were a wise race, emboldened with cutting-edge technology and neat glasses. They were strong, powerful, and benevolent. Through their kind words and endless tutorials, the people began to hear and see beyond themselves for the first time after years in the dark.

Decades of toil passed until music could be heard in the streets once again, spilling over from warm homes that were broken no longer. Art covered the walls of cities, and men and women greeted each other with a smile and a how-do-you-do as they went about their business.

But the peace was not to last, for living among the Googles and the earth peoples there lay a snake in the grass, a wolf in sheepskin, a polar bear in a baby seal suit, and its name was Mark. It gets a little complicated, but essentially Mark was a fallen archangel with some serious attitude problems and the overwhelming desire for everyone to worship him. Alas, through his aura of salivation-inducing coolness and his superior coding abilities, he fooled the Googles and earth peoples into giving him their trust, and they knew not that they spelled their own ruin.

Baiting them with honeyed words, Mark used the Googles to construct the ultimate weapon of all time: the blogosphere. He told them that it would be a massive art project, something of true beauty, where anyone who wanted to could write or post or share to their hearts content and thus enrich the lives of other earth dwellers. And thus it was a thing of true beauty, with one horrifying, deadly flaw.

He enlisted their help in building one Blog that was to guide the others and help them achieve their full potential. It was to be the most powerful Blog in the blogosphere, one that only Mark could use. And so it happened. He created a blog so compelling, so readable, that all others wanted to be like it and bent to its will. Each keystroke controlled an army and every post could incite millions to action or passivity. The world breathed only with the Blog’s permission.

With hearts and minds in sway, Mark soon used the one Blog to inspire the earth dwellers to war with the Googles, and the age of prosperity was no more, with darkness once again consuming the earth and cat pictures populating the blogosphere.

Ages later, the password to the Blog was lost and Mark was diminished and moved to Minneapolis. But still the Blog waits, for those who would find it and aspire to wield its power and become Lord of the Blog.

But there is only one. And he is in Minneapolis. Fellow bloggers, beware.

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