pollyfonick skranul

Today's kinda like a magic day. Only shows up every once in a while. So let's talk about magic.

And by magic, I mean, let's talk about the weird stuff my roommate does.

Two mornings ago I wake up and I see one of his papers he wrote for his history class. It's just right there at the side of my bed where I get up. I read it. It was pretty good.

One morning ago I wake up and there's an unopened condom. It's just right there at the side of my bed where I get up.

Today morning ago I wake up and there's a flattened box that says Farmer John, LLC WE DO BLUEBERRIES on it and there's this merry stout child with a bucket of blueberries. It's just right there at the side of my bed where I get up.

Now, I dislike my roommate for a multitude of reasons but he has now entered into a realm that I didn't even know existed. My roommate is like a terrible, unimaginative fairy-tale.

I should be waking up and seeing gold and piles of meat and elves with hooks for hands! That's a good fairy tale! Not some paper about the guy who created the Bailey part of Barnum and Bailey. Not a cheap condom taken from the Fish Bowl in the Campus Center. Not weird box of blueberries!

In a good fairy tale I'd end up fighting a diamond Rhino or saving a mythical land or getting eaten by a wolf with two mouths. In my roommate's fairy tale I just have to sit in my room while he hums and mumbles to himself and furiously clicks his mouse.

...he's not even a good fairy tale. What is he good for?!

And he can't just be normal and boring like the other two strangers I live with. He has to do magically weird stuff but in the most mediocre way.  He's ruining magic!

Polyphonic Scrannel

You just gotta take stuff from your real life and imagine how it would be told by someone more awesome than you:

I know that I talk about food a lot but this food story is an important food story. In fact, let it be known that this is officially IMPORTANT FOOD STORY NUMBER ONE!

It's about how I got emotional about a sandwich today.

To begin, I was having a weird day. You know those days where you just feel kinda dead to the world. The day is slowly smacking you across the face in super slo-motion like in those hi-speed camera videos. And you're like, "Stop slapping meeeeeeee" and by the time you finish saying "me" you're already in bed and about to go to sleep. It was one of those days. Something was missing, I guess.

Anyway, dinner time rolls around and I schlep on over to the dining hall and near the end of my dinner I go up and get two slices of bread and...don't put anything on them. I just go sit back down at my table. And I'm just looking at the bread like, "I should be put something on this bread." And my friend goes, "Nah, just put the bread on the bread and it's an open face bread sandwich." Which was very clever. He's a clever friend. But I had to put something on the bread so I get up and try to put yogurt on the bread, but they were almost out of yogurt so I just got a couple blobs. Then I added some peanut butter even though I'd already eaten peanut butter three times already, then some bran flakes, coconut shavings, honey, and then more cereal, rice krispies. I was wandering around the dining hall just limply smacking things on to these two slices of bread.

And I sat back down and looked at what I had created. And I closed the sandwich, and I took a bite, and I started to do this hysteric, laugh-cry whimper, like if a clown had been punching me repeatedly in the butt and it hurts but you're laughing and crying and he's just honking his nose and honking the little horn he has in is other hand with a big smile on his face while he just keeps punching you in the butt.

But I kept eating the sandwich, and after a couple bites I needed to calm down.

What I think happened, if I can try to justify this, is I had a hole somewhere, you know, when you feel like you have a hole, let's say it was in my craw. I had a hole in my craw. And filling that sandwich was a metaphor for filling the hole in my craw. And instead of thinking about constructive ways to fill my craw, I just grabbed stuff at random and put it on my craw and was like, "This is my life now and this is how I'm going to live it! I'm a success and these coconut shavings bear witness to my infamous deeds!"

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My roommate does this thing late at night--he makes these weird noises. They're kind of like grunts or halted laughs. And he does this at his desk which is right at the foot of my bed when I'm trying to sleep. And it took me a while but I figured out what he's doing. He breathes in, and then instead of breathing out like...you know...a normal person, he holds it in, and then releases it in this sudden burst. And my theory is that he's reading or whatever and he breathes in and then forgets to breathe and then all of a sudden he remembers and exhales with this weird grunt. And that's not his fault. I don't think he's doing it on purpose. It's not my fault that he wasn't raised right and his family wasn't there to mock it out of him. But it's not my place to tell him to stop.

So what I'm going to start doing, as a subtle hint, is after I breathe in, I'm going to breathe out and go, "SHUT UP!"

And I'll just keep breathing like that until he figures it out.

From Stairs

I wanna make a giant head out of something. Maybe gum. maybe something more...less disgusting. But I feel like with a giant head of someone I'll have the confidence to stand against all the sayers of nay...unless they also have a giant head. Then we'll have to battle for supremecy.

But could there be a more noble way to defend one's beliefs? I think not.

The giant head. Don't fear it. Just respect it.

From Sadler

I was reading a pamphlet about food servings. It said you should eat 5 servings of veggies a day and that a serving of vegetables is the size of a computer mouse.

5 computer mouses a day??

Challenge accepted, educational pamphlet.

I started making triangles out of straws and leaving them on this thermostat thing. Someone took it down. But I have another triangle on this thing I had to stand on a chair to reach. It's still there. laughing maniacally I assume.

I like getting really long dinners. The problem is there's no bathroom in the dining hall.

It's getting harder to find places to pee.

If people wonder why I spend so much time here, they don't know my room. I thought my roommate had gotten rid of his pornographic slideshow screensaver. I realized today he just changed his background to a slideshow that occasionally contains pornographic images.

Home boy has a thing for the asians.

Dating advice:

If a girl asks you what color her eyes are and then closes them.

Smack her.

Trick question gets a trick answer.

Richmond Road

I lost my ID last night.

Here are the people I interacted with because of it:

Weiyi Zhang- the person who found my ID in the exact same spot where I realized I lost it. If you do a image search for Weiyi Zhang you get a pretty good idea of what he looked like. He's a big, muscular black man with three nostrils. Stood about 6-foot four, probably from Trinidad and Tobago. Had a large W&M Field Hockey tattoo on his right bicep and his forehead. There was this wild boar following him around with two sausage links skewered on its tusks and it looked like it had something stuck in its craw but it wasn't my place to comment. I know, I know, it's everything you'd imagine when you hear a name like Weiyi Zhang but sometimes stereotypes are true and I'm not about to censor the truth. I was super grateful and he was like, "Hey man. Don't worry about it. But if I find this again I'm gonna turn your throat inside out and give it to my niece for her half-birthday." Then he smiled and went back to the Computer Lab.

Jacoby- Kid's been globetrotting for a whole year and the first time I run into him is in the cold morning rain when I'm out retracing my steps from the night before. He was hungover and heading back home to make himself a bean burrito. I got his number so we can get together for lunch or something. Seeing him was almost fortunate enough to make up for the last ID.

The People...that live by the door.-

Here's the note I pinned to their door at one in the morning:

"Dear People...who live by the door,

Thank you so much for letting me in. You have performed a true act of kindness and you should be appreciated and congratulated. Because you trusted me I don't have to spend the night in the bush. And that's not meant to be a derogatory comment about bushes. They're great. I had one picked out and everything. But come morning I would've had to say to myself, "I spent the night in a bush." And that's not the way it's supposed to be. So thank you for letting me sleep in my bed tonight and restoring my faith in the beneficence of the human spirit. Bless you mucho!"

Yeah I dropped the word beneficence in a note I half-drunkenly posted to someone's door in the middle of the night. I don't even use that word in the daytime!

All the People That Saw Me Skipping Across the Campus After I Got My ID Back- Yeah I skipped in the rain in the dark! And if you don't understand why then you don't realize what that 20 hours without my ID was like! I even had dreams about finding it. I was stumbling along the ground that was littered with cards that looked and felt almost exactly like my ID but there were little details that were off about them. Then I woke up and was half sure that it had all been a dream and I was expecting my ID to be safe inside my wallet. Then it wasn't and later I got locked out of my building for a good ten minutes in the middle of the day because apparently know one lives here!

But now I have my ID once again and I feel like an important vital organ has been returned to my body...like...maybe one of my kidneys...or the part of your brain that distinguishes ice-cream from fire-ants.

Tyler Basement

Ahh...I don't have a lot of time...I'm sitting in the computer lab with one other person here...have to deposit some great truth....push it out Andy! push it out!

I was running up a long hill yesterday in the rain on a road with no shoulder and I was looking into the headlights of the cars and the harder I ran the more real everything felt. All the edges were sharper and all the lines were bold. And no one could take it away from me. It was happening to me and I was making it happen and only I could see it or know it or even begin to understand it. I was burning everything up and when I stopped I felt completely empty and everything was beautiful and shimmering.

But at the same time, it's not the worst thing in the world when you get so wrapped up in your neuroticism that you yell at someone and go on a five minute rant about the importance of keeping chicken nuggets far far far away from strawberry yogurt. To even think about putting them on the same plate and letting them mingle and produce the demonic spawn that gleefully violate every single one of the MAJOR LAWS OF FOOD is madness!

So...just get out of the grey as quickly as possible. Go to a side and go at it as hard as you can. It's the middle ground that will eat you alive. Or...gnaw at you slowly alive until half your face is gnawed off.

...that's not true though. Just...just enjoy it while it's happening to you.

12x4

Still have a runny nose. It was starting to get better and today it came back in full force.

Didn't do any work this evening but I pretty much took care of it all earlier in the day. Go me.

Got a Valentine's Orange Crush soda can delivered to my room. No idea who it's from. Is it from you, anonymous commenter? Do I brighten your day? You brighten mine. Always so anonymous. Always so brief.

I got in to another Comedybrew so I'll post my act for that after the 25th. I think it's my best material so far. I'm not really worried with how I place. If I win, great but then I can't do the show next semester and the show is the best part.

I can't think of anything to say so I'm just going to post the conversation I just heard on my hall:

Girl on Phone: You know what's funny? *laughs* I was looking back at our text conversation from six months ago and *laughs* I messaged you saying *laughs* I said, "MICHAEL!" and you said, "SARAH!". *laughing and laughing* And I was like, "what a douchebag."

THAT'S NOT FUNNY, LADY! THOSE ARE JUST THE COMPLETELY UNORIGINAL NAMES YOUR PARENTS GAVE YOU! They were too busy huffing paint and murdering vagabonds beneath highway bridges with garden hoes to think of good names. Then one day they caught a sleeping homeless man in the back of the neck with a gardening tool. They found his wallet containing 5 dollars and 43 cents and an expired drivers license that said his name was Michael/Sarah. Michael Cera. Not the actor. A homeless dead man of the same name. Then, because your parents were working together on this murderous rampage of the destitute and completely consumed by their insatiable urge for blood, both mothers simultaneously gave birth underneath route 133. It was a complete shock to all involved and they decided to give you names in a vain attempt to stop your whining for a couple hours. Later on you were entertained by the piles of empty pizza boxes that filled your room and were also used to stuff the mattresses of your childhood beds. The first and only movie you ever watched was The Santa Clause 2, arguably the worst movie ever shot and responsible for the  ever-increasing rate of entropy in the universe.

So yeah...

don't...don't tell stupid stories over the phone for everyone to hear...it's annoying.

*Also, I put the Santa Clause 2 and entropy in the same sentence. Someone give me a high-five.

Suite Bathroom and a Runny Nose

You heard me. I have

a) a suite bathroom.

b) a runny nose.

What's the deal, Andy?

Be quiet and maybe I'll tell you, gosh!

I was thinking earlier about stuff. Specifically, I was thinking as I was dropping a deuce, arguably the best time to be struck by inspiration, as we all know.

I was thinking about how the way the suite bathroom is set up. It's a bathroom between two rooms. So you open a door from your room and walk in and there's another door leading to the adjacent room. And each door has a little hooky thing that you latch to lock the door and you don't have to worry about people from the other room unexpectedly walking in on you.

THAT'S. CENSORSHIP!

We can't hide from the truth behind little hooky latches. You think a little hooky thing can hide the truth?! You must be up out your head. Little hooky latch. No way!

So what I'm gonna start doing, is sneaking into the bathroom real quiet-like, so the people in the other room don't hear. And I'm just gonna sit there and act like I'm taking a dump, or I could quiet possibly be taking a dump while simultaneously blowing my nose.

Remember that part where I said I had a runny nose? Did you not think that was going to come up again?! Pay attention!

And so they walk in and see me popping a squat with a tissue over my nose, blowing snot, and before they can close the door I yell, "Don't shut that door! This is the real world! This is real life! Look at me!"

And then I quickly lose interest and go back to staring at the tiles on the floor while they're standing there.

Lost in profundity n' stuff.

Yeah!

Exploding Fist of Power

I went to the Career Center today. It was nice. They have high ceilings. Lots of windows. You can sit in there and think, "That's right. While you people outside are going to get lunch. I'm in here. Getting a career! Good luck with your life."

Except, no. The Career Center was not made for me. I need some sort of Dream Center. You take an escalator up to a cloud and there's a pretty blonde lady that's like, "You're beautiful What do you wanna be?"

And I'll be like, "Comedian, please!"

And she'll say, "Oh! That job? I've had that job in the back seat of my car for months. I've been waiting for someone to take it off my hands. I hope you don't mind that it's covered in dog hair."

And I'll say, "Of course I don't mind! I won't even clean it off!"

And she'll say, "Here's food and a house!"

"Yay!"

But that doesn't exist. At least, I think it doesn't. But the nice thing about the actual Career Center is that you can go in there as a stupid Junior and they'll just give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're an ambitious Freshman.

The lady is like, "Hi, what can I help you with?"

"Weeeeeeell, I wanna be a baker and I wanna make cookies that look like penguins and cupcakes with little hats made out of carrots and I wanna make smoothies that taste like marshmallows and chocolate chips. And I wanna have a bakery that looks like a big happy yellow egg and we'll play the Beegees songs all day long!"

And I might as well have said that. I did ask for an internship that could somehow possible involve humor in some facet and she even laughed a little when she said, "Well, I can show you how to check for internships online but we probably won't find anything that fits that description."

Just one word. "humor". And I don't blame her. I know that's not a "career" you find at the Career Center. That's okay. At least I tried....

"And every Wednesday will be red, white and blue day and if you come in wearing red, white, and blue we'll give you a little crown with jelly beans glued on it and a medium snowcone for the price of a baby snowcone! And all my employees will have funny nicknames like Chuckles, or Princess Fluffbar or Roger. And we'll close from 2 to 3 every day for nap time and on some nights will have movies playing on the projector in the baaaaasemeeeeent. We'll watch movies all night and when it's morning we'll start working again. Smiles!"

So yeah, Operation Bakery is go.

The Evil Tree That Couldn't

A Story for Children and People Who Used to be Children.

Way high up on the top of a hill stood a tree all by itself. Against the dull, grey backdrop of the sky was a lonely tree with lush green leaves, sturdy branches for climbing, and delicate white flowers that would soon give way to hard, young fruits. A light Spring breeze vivified its limbs for a minute and these were the thoughts of the tree as the young children of the neighborhood raced up the hill to play at their favorite spot:

"Fear me, puny mortals! I will destroy you and everything you have ever held dear to your paper-thin hearts. I will bury your pets in piles of your own disemboweled entrails then tie you up on my branches like meat-pinatas to be pelted by furious hail storms and feasted upon by plagues of locusts! I am the nightmare of your nightmares!"

But the children could not hear the evil tree. Because children can't understand tree-speak. And so the merry giggles of their play was carried by the wind and heard all around the neighborhood. And even on this dreary March day, everyone outside carried a little smile on their faces. And the tree thought:

"That's right! Climb high on my branches! Higher, children! Higher! Reach for the sky so that you may come plummeting down to the ground where you will be paralyzed by the the nefarious tentacles that are my roots. And as you lie there, unable to feel your legs, too weak to even whimper, trying to drag yourself away, I will reach down into your slithering body and rip out your spinal chord. And the dried bones of your back will serve as a monument to me! The most evil tree in the land!"

And all the while the children delighted in climbing on the safe and sturdy branches of the tree. They made plans for tree-houses and played pretend. They plucked the tiny branches of the tree and placed them behind their ears so their heads appeared crowned with puerile leaves of Spring. And the tree thought:

"You fools! See what happens when you try to eat my leaves. They will stew in your stomach for six days before causing a horrible infection! You will purge and purge, for six days and six nights but the unrelenting pain will assail you to the point of madness. And just as you are about to give in, just as the Maker comes to take you away, your mouths will froth with a foamy bile and your throats will close up completely and your last thought will be the knowledge that I am the one that brought this upon you!"

But instead of eating the leaves the children took a break for lunch and opened up the sandwich bags they had brought with them and left at the base of the tree. As they were eating their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the sun broke through the clouds and the light played upon the leaves of the tree and warmed the children from the wind so that they could continue playing for the rest of the afternoon. And the tree thought:

"Enjoy the last meager moments of your pathetic existence! For soon, with the power of the raging inferno of the cosmos, I will grow so large and mighty that I will block out the Sun entirely. And as you humans slowly freeze to death under the eternal shadow of night I will cast upon on your miserable literal rock, I will be fueled by the depths of Hell itself. My trunk and branches will turn pitch black while society crumbles until you are nothing but filthy animals rolling in your own ash and ruin! I will tower above all as the one true monolith of power in the barren wasteland!"

And the children played their games, sang songs, told jokes, and hung like monkeys from the branches of the tree that they would always remember as a place of true innocence. Later in the evening, their parents called them in to eat dinner and the tree continued his diabolical reverie. He continued to plot the children's destruction right up until the moment a bulldozer came in the night to knock him down. He was later cut up and turned into pencils while the hill was flattened so that a new CVS Pharmacy could be built. Needless to say, the children were crushed that they'd lost their dear friend.

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My only regret is not being able to include more references to blood.

Blaspheming Balloons

I need one good task to accomplish by the end of this semester. I need to find one difficult and noble endeavor to prove my virtue.

I know!

I will create a monument to 2.0! It will also be a celebration of all of Team Blitz but specifically, it will honor the brave hero known as 2.0. It will include a sculpture, a throne...free soda beverages...and a reading aloud of the epic that I will compose for him that will detail all his heroic deeds and most embarrassing faux-pas. It will be unveiled in the spring on a bright and sunny afternoon and all who hear it will be better in both mind and soul.

Glory in the highest to the 2.0!