Clareified

Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

Pauly gives us a primer on how to meltdown in 32 easy steps.

18. Go on tour to make the fat cats millions more and fall in love with a pothead and deadbeat dad that wear’s wife beaters, sideways hats, and can’t afford a belt to hold up his pants.

25. Call up Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan and go on a Grey Goose and coke binge that lasts three days.

“It’s your fault. You made me care about winning.” -Fisch

I have been utterly destroyed in the last three days of Scrabble play. It’s like that old “you mess with the bull” adage. I was winning the majority of the Scrabble races and I got cocky. I’m not going to lie to you. I boasted about my victory, displayed the spoils of war, pointed. Laughed.
Sent mocking texts.
And then. I met fancy Fischel.
Fancy Fischel doesn’t mess around. Fancy Fischel is super lucky and draws both blanks out of the bag on the first draw.
And then Fancy Fischel plays antiqued for a bingo on a triple with the q on a double letter score…and convinces Dawn to challenge it and lose. And then he plays Jolt for another 45 points.
Dawn cries.
Fancy Fischel then proceeds to crush Dawn in like another eight games in a row.
Then for a brief shining moment Dawn thinks, she may have stopped the bleeding when she finds the word “nubians” in her rack and plays it on a triple…this would be her first victory in daaaayyssss.
But no. Fancy Fischel challenges the word (even though he actually thought it was a valid play, but since it was so many points he figured he’d take a chance). It is not in the Scrabble dictionary.
A dictionary in which the word “tux” is somehow valid.
Dawn is ruined.
Dawn plays the word cats.
Fischel coldly says “that play cheapens my victory,” and then beats her anyway.
Dawn is very very sad. She gives up Scrabble forever.
“Do you want to play,” regular Fischel says yesterday.
“Are you going to win?”
“Probably. I’m never going to let you win Dawn, so if you can’t take a loss, we shouldn’t play.”
But…but…I used to win all the time…I had dollars…lots and lots of lots.
We played again and Dawn loses again.
Fischel shakes his head.
“You really are getting worse. Ok, next game we’ll play with open racks. I pissed on my tree, now I will fix it.”
Dawn channels her inner angry poker player and, in a game that started with back to back bingo plays, manages a definitive, crushing defeat of Fischel in five turns.
Dawn is nobody’s tree.
(Yeah, that’s right…I have categorized this post as “Sports.”)

After briefly flirting with the crazy bar having, pool playing nightlife, I have reverted to my natural homebody state.
Fisch and I decided to marathon watch the first season of The Wire, so I ended up getting the new “Blockbuster All Access” deal and let me tell you: WOW!
Netflix is so very dead.
I got the first three Wire DVDs from Blockbuster and then the other three from Netflix.
(Please note, this post is a recommendation that you sign up for DVDs from Blockbuster, not that you watch the Wire. The Wire sucks. The only reason people tell you that the Wire does not suck is because they know they have wasted like 10 hours of their lives on a thing which sucks and this makes them bitterly want others to similarly waste their lives, so they lie. Hmm…on second thought, this post is a recommendation both for you to sign up for DVDs from Blockbuster AND the Wire. The Wire is awesome.)
The cool thing with the Blockbuster DVDs is that you can exchange them at any Blockbuster store and get THREE FREE MOVIES in exchange! PLUS, the store mails the DVDs back for you AND you’ll get THREE new ones in the mail!
I used one of the instore rentals to get Dumb and Dumber because Fisch said that it was “really funny. I can’t believe that you have never seen it. You have to get it. You are going to laugh your ass off.”
Now, I don’t know why I didn’t abandon this plan when I saw that the review that the producers put right there ON THE BOX said “This movie is dumb.”
But I didn’t. And boy. Was it.
Honestly, I haven’t found Jim Carrey funny since he left In Living Color and I was kinda disturbed that Jeff Daniels was wasting away in this flick.
Fischel, on the other hand, laughed and laughed.
“Man, I saw this when I was twelve and it was like my favorite movie.”
“When’s the last time you saw it, though?”
“Um…when I was twelve.”
Awesome.
I don’t know why I trusted a man that thought Crash was a good movie until the fourth time he saw it.
Crash sucked. Right there at first sight.
So, in review: cancel your Netflix subscriptions. Go with Blockbuster. Immediately rent the Wire.
And Dumb and Dumber is dumb. No, seriously. Not like ha ha cute dumb. Just dumb. Regular dumb.
Don’t do it.
Unless you are a twelve year old boy.
Or are Fischel, who still thinks like one.

(more…)

My road trip started out with a conversation like this:

F-train: So, we should head down to Jersey with Mary and Fisch.
Me: Why?
F-train: Because Mary is hot and Fisch isn’t so bad himself and you…umm…
Me: I have a car.
F-train: YES! But don’t feel too badly, every group of hot people needs a not hot person to travel around with them. Man, if it were just me Mary and Fisch, we’d be mobbed!
Me: Right… by the vagrants on the bus down to Jersey trying to rob you.

And so it was, we set out on a freezing February morning to see the frozen Jersey countryside.
I picked Fisch up at around 11:15. Never mind that I arrived at Fisch’s house at 10:30 to pick him up. Or that he was supposed to be waiting for me by 10:25. Or that I called and woke him up at 10.
I say never mind, because he gave me a very sincere apology for the wait and making us hopelessly late picking Mary and Ftrain up.
“Dawn, don’t even be mad. You got me out of my house in less than three hours after I woke up. That was the best you were going to do.”
And then he turned off my radio and ordered that we drive in silence to F-train’s house.
Ah yes, I hope that he wasn’t too badly damaged when the ambulance later found him on the side of the highway.
We got to a much prompter Mary and Ftrain around 11:30, but then had to circle around their neighborhood looking for an ATM.
F-train directed us to a bank on the corner.
“Wait…we can’t pull up out front…they’ll think we’re robbing the place.”
“Ok, I’ll drive around the block…”
“NO! A black girl circling a bank? Yeah, they’ll definitely think we’re casing it.”
We pulled over to the side of the road a couple of blocks away and Fisch got out, wearing nothing more than a white t-shirt and jeans. In 19 degree weather.
By the time he got back someone may or may not have locked the doors. And then not opened them for a good 19 degree weather in a t-shirt minute.
Turn.Off.My.Radio.Will.You.
Finally, we were on our way!
Poddy kept us company all the way to Jersey despite F-train’s pleas for me to make it stop and Fischel’s repeated imaginary calls to 911 which went something like this:
“Hello? 911!”
“What is your emergency?”
“Please…help…Dawn’s ipod…there are three of us…we don’t know if we’ll make it,” followed by the sounds of death throes.
We were so amused that we switched to the Clay Aiken playlist.
Then Mary requested Black Sabbath. And everyone laughed.
Except me, I asked what the Black Sabbath was.
Then they laughed again.
Racists.
We started talking about people we knew and Ftrain commented that people who talk all the time generally get on his nerves. He then added: “Yeah, Fisch has the same problem, but he’s usually not that annoying.”
We all laughed and then Fischel did that “heeeey, wait a minute…am I supposed to be offended or take that as a compliment?”
F-train shrugged his shoulders and said “I’d take it as a compliment.”
Fisch glared at him through the rearview mirror and replied: “You know in cartoons, when the characters are stranded on a deserted island and they are starving how one guy looks at the other guy and all he sees is a hotdog?”
F-train nodded.
“Well, you look like a phonebook right now.”
(A few weeks ago, Fisch learned to rip phonebooks in half and now his hands are full of cuts and bruises. He was driving and tried to elicit sympathy because his wounds were aggravated by the steering wheel. Ftrain said it best when he replied “umm…you want us to feel sorry for you for self inflicted injuries? No.” Of course, then I tried to get sympathy for my carpet cleaning fall injuries, but also got not sympathy. Ftrain is an assface.)
The drive down was especially beautiful. The trees were covered in icicles and — heaven help me for saying this about Jersey — they glistened in the sunlight and were positively postcardesque.
We all made Mary want to cry when Ftrain, Fisch and I began singing along to the Les Miz soundtrack. (Do you know how I know Ftrain and Fisch are gay?)
We stopped just as her hand gripped the car door handle and the desperate look in her eye had seemingly finished calculating that if she curled her body up, she would survive the jump out of the moving car.
“Hey, Mary,” Fisch said breaking her escape plan concentration, “what do you do again?”
She explained that she was a web designer.
“Wow…so what is your most expensive service?”
I giggled.
“Fisch is just itching to find ways to burn through money,” Ftrain said.
“No. That’s not why Dawn is laughing,” Fisch said. “She has a dirty mind!”
I giggled again.
Mary said that she could charge up to half a million dollars.
“$500,000!” Fisch exclaimed “And that’s without kissing?!”
She smiled, “nah, for that much I’d be willing to kiss you.”
I put my hands over my face. This was all fun and games when I was giggling about it privately in my head.
By the time F-train entered the conversation, I was eyeing the car door escape route.
“Hey Dawn,” Fisch said again saving the car from a suicide leap, “let’s play a numbers game. I’ll say a number, then you repeat my number and say another number. We keep going until one of us messes up.”
“Uhmm…”
Ok…well, it’s better than the Pretty Woman conversation.
I beat him in less than a minute.
And then announced my retirement from the numbers counting game. Forever.
“No. Come on! You can’t quit now…two out of three!”
Nope. My mama didn’t raise no fool.
Our destination finally came into view, Fischel very safely turned into the exit, not at all almost losing control of the car and killing us.
We went to lunch and I had my usual Panda Express orange chicken fare. Mary and Ftrain went off to have free Fatburger burgers, courtesy of Grubby. I watched Fisch wander around the food court and I was going to remind him that the last time we ate there, he was allergic to the dish he ordered, but I figure…dude, he was the one that had the allergic reaction, of course he’ll remember.
Yeah. No. Not so much.
He ordered exactly the same thing.
When he got to the table, I shook my head.
“Doofus. You are allergic to that.”
“Yeah…as soon as they gave it me I remembered,” he said glumly.
F-train laughed and took a picture of the “Fisch is an idiot” meal.
Fisch then went off to buy ice cream.
We hung out in Jersey for a while and then F-train drove us back.
Fisch went to sit in the back with Mary, but I explained to him that F-train doesn’t allow black people to sit up front with him. It’s a policy.
“No. Dawn. As I’ve told you before, it’s not black people. Just.You.”
So, Fisch took shotgun.
I asked if I could plug my ipod in just to charge it.
F-train refused and said something like if your ipod comes anywhere near this dashboard, I’m going to tell Fisch it’s a phonebook and it will be ripped in half.
Yikes.
I was exhausted.
We taught Fisch how to play twenty questions. I went with my standard opening choice of “Oprah Winfrey,” which still took them like 16 questions to guess.
Then Fischel went. He chose a politician, but then when we asked if the politician was a Republican he answered “umm…I don’t know.”
“Dude. How do you pick a politician and NOT know what party he belongs to.”
When we figured out that he was thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger, we pointed and laughed and called him dumb.
In retaliation, his next pick was some obscure fiction writer that no one had ever heard of.
It was the most painful twenty questions choice since Karol picked “Chris Kirkpatrick” on a trip back from the Jersey Shore after the Fourth of July weekend.
“Fisch…seriously, this guy can’t be like a religious scholar no one has ever heard of.”
“No…no…it’s not…he’s a popular writer.”
“Has any movies been made from his books?”
“No.”
“And he’s a FICTION writer?”
“Yes.”
“DUDE…is this like the Arnold thing…are you sure?”
“Umm…”
An hour later we were still stumped.
“Hurry up,” Fisch prodded.
“Eh…there’s no clock in twenty questions. The game is designed to pass the time.”
F-train had had enough.
“IT ONLY PASSES THE TIME IF YOU ASK QUESTIONS!!”
“Fine…fine…we give up.”
And then Fisch says the name of some dude I don’t even remember now.
We all rolled our eyes.
Worst.Pick.Ever.
Then F-train went.
We started with our standard “is it a man, is he alive” opener.
Yes. No.
Then Fisch decided to take over the examination.
“I’ve got it!” he says.
Mary and I ask him what he’s going to ask.
“No, don’t worry. This is genius,” he assures us.
And then, he asks this:
“Does he have a wikipedia page?”
The car sits in silence before breaking out in hysterical laughter.
“GUY! Who doesn’t have a wikipedia page, jeez.”
F-train declared it the worst question he’s ever heard in the history of twenty questions. Mary and I concurred.
We stopped for dinner and played some more, until I fell asleep.
When I woke up, Mary and F-train were gone and Fisch was driving me home.
“Where did everybody go? We didn’t finish Mary’s turn.”
“Yes, and she was very angry about it. I can’t believe you just went to sleep.”
“I didn’t…I wasn’t…leave me alone…’does he have a wikipedia page’? How do you not walk into walls?”
Fischel dropped me off and parked the car.
I went upstairs and fell fully clothed into my bed.
What a day.
Wikipedia…hahahahahaah….and then I was out.

Wow! Wow! Wow!
(more…)

Man found dead in front of TV after a year.

Hugging fathers causes cancer.

A British woman who claims she contracted cancer from hugging her father, who worked with asbestos, is suing the Ministry of Defense for $146,000.

Now, who wishes they didn’t have a dad?

Days since carpet cleaning related falls: 0

Upside? The stabbing pain in my right knee completely distracts me from the throbbing pain in the left knee.

The swollen bruise on my left arm doesn’t even register.