On Insomnia

This one time I stayed up 28 hours straight because my girlfriend at the time was an insomniac, and she wanted to break her old record and stay up for a full 48.

Yes, to make the young lass happy, I laid in bed awake with her for 4 hours while the rest of the world was asleep. She told me about the times she stayed awake so long she began conversing with people she knew were not there, though they responded to her just the same. She told me about her family reunion every year and her criminally, escalating-ly violent boss and all sorts of groovy things.

We determined that I had a chick's horoscope and she had a dude's, and we were essentially the same dysfunctional person. We talked about squirrels tail colors and armies of them, and booped each other on the nose and said "Mwerp," which I had to figure out how to spell.

I dozed a bit until 5am when we hit her hour 48, I congratulated her, and then I immediately fell asleep. She followed shortly. Around noon we got up and I went back to my place, took a nap, a shower, ate something and then went off to ace a final exam.

Middle-to-Late British Literature is insignificant next to the power of snuggles.

On Toolbags

For future reference:

toolbag - n. portmanteau of "tool" and "douchebag." An individual who exemplifies particularly douchey behavior, conformed to the stereotypical parameters of a half-Italian Long Islander in a polo shirt.

On Ringtones

Ringtone IDs On My Phone

• Standard call - Brunswick's "Decision" - Indie band's self-made ringtone promo. Street cred.

• Standard text - Power Ranger's communicator FX

• Mother - Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" from "Oh Mama Mia…" through rockin solo. Rocks.

• Alec (Jewish Hipeter) - Matisyahu's "Youth." Self-explanatory. Don't even talk to anymore.
  

• Lisa - "Tsukuri Masou." Jingle from a show we both like.

• Dean - LFO's "Girls of Summer" because he loves this fucking toolbag song, and guess who calls me right in the middle of class when i've yet to reset my phone to vibrate and makes me lok like a massive toolbag too.

On Twitter

I refused to get a Twitter account for a while, mostly because I prefer my mobile phone to be a phone and not a uselessly tiny computer. I finally caved after I learned that the entirely fictional cast of a webcomic I buy shirts from all had their own accounts which one could follow if one had one's own account.

After friending 9 fake people, one website, three webcomic artists, and 2 of my friends who no longer utilize it, I got my own Twitter.

Now I actually like this thing. The only thing I'm still uneasy with is the present-tense verb "Tweet." I would tweet if this were Tweeter, but it's not; it's Twitter. I should be twitting. I could Twit on the toilet whilst I shit. This of course could never be a marketable catch-phrase, as it inevitably leads to the past-tense phrase "I twat."

On Shower Curtains

When I was a kid, my family always had showers with those semi-opaque doors. The only place with shower curtains was my great aunt's house. In their public bathroom there was a bathtub, but the shower curtain was perpetually closed. Even before the advent of shows like CSI and Law & Order, I found myself so bored at family functions that I'd construct the elaborate fantasy that behind that curtain was a dead hooker.

Granted, this freaked me out to the point of compulsively checking to this day any and all view-obstructing shower curtains, but I think I'm more worried about the fact that from an early age I never really questioned the possibility that my gun-toting racist alcoholic uncle and local-politics swindling aunt might have a dead hooker in their shower during Christmas Dinner.

On Squirrels

I was walking down the sidewalk one day when I came across a squirrel. He was chowing down on a nut, just generally squirreling it up, while I walked towards him. Granted, he was there first, but I thought that right-of-way kept with the substantially larger, sentient being in situations such as these. Inevitably, this squirrel would see a large mass barreling towards it, and he would scurry off onto the grass as I passed by almost unnoticed, and we could both go about our day.

And yet as I rapidly approached this creature, he looked up at me as if to say, "WHAT? OH, I'M SORRY, I'M A FUCKING SQUIRREL. FUCK YOU." Now to be fair, I laughed this off rather quickly. What could he, a tiny squirrel, do to me? If I were to simply keep walking, he'd eventually be forced to step out of my way.

But for a split second doubt crept into my mind, and at that moment I had lost. I pressed onwards, but we both knew the outcome. I landed my last footfall in front of the furry beast, and as I swung the other leg forward, ready to crush this living tribble, he looked up at me with fire in his eyes and broke my will completely.

I stood there, balanced on one foot out in the open for all to see; ill at ease, confused, vulnerable. I had been bested by a squirrel. This possibility had never occurred to me. It was unprecedented. All I could do was turn on my heel and beat a quick half-circle around my better, hurrying onward hoping no one had seen. He uncaring eyes burned in my mind, and I have never felt smaller.

Yet even today I harbor no hard feelings for my better. He was a worthier foe than any I have faced before or since. He let no thing stand in the way of his squirreliness, and for this I admire him. Of all the souls I've met, his was the most … human.