Clareified

When the birthday season ends, Dawn Summers vanishes for a bit. She must restore the ratio of hermit isolation to attention whoring. Nothing absolute, just cutting way back on the blogging, texting, tweeting, emailing, facebooking, and leaving my house-ing.

As always, I had a great birthday season. Reading this post reminded me how lucky I am to know all most of you.

But after something like five sustained weeks of the birthday season, I am even sick of myself, so we’re Desmond Tutu-ing for a bit…probably till September. Unless the Mets overtake first place in the NL…hahaha, yeah, so September.

Don’t worry, I’ve already lined up an all-star team of Poetry Wednesday guest bloggers and I’m sure Libearace will post some more production numbers. He is one talented bear. And I’ll still be your expert source on animals trying to kill us.

As for Dawn, she’ll be hibernating/hanging out with young Sammy and the people who, even when they are sick of her, are tethered to her by blood. Poor bastards. She’ll also be catching up on her movie watching and filmchaw blogging (I met the one person who reads my reviews!) Blockbuster has been all cocky these last two months, we must put it back in its place. That place being bankruptcy.

I’ve got a toddler birthday, a trip or two to AC, huffing my Droid X power source and ill-advised emotional cutting to occupy my time. Plus, a shit ton of books to get through. Angela gives quizzes. (Speaking of which, do you want to read with us? Join our invisible internet friends bookclub…no, not you, but you? Get on over here and grab a virtual beanbag.)

Enjoy the radio silence…while you can, cause it will soon be followed by lots and lots of…

GO RIOTS!

And now, for your moment of Zen…

It feels like Barack Obama has
been President forever.

My little Sammy is having surgery today on his little boy part. The doctor fears it may be cancer given my grandpa’s death, but we’re hoping for the best. Also, may I just say, the Universe owes this damn a kid a lottery win of like billions of dollars given his crappy crappy first (not even two) damn hell ass years. #RUDE

But he’s a little trooper (insert moment of Zen):

*************UPDATE**********

He’s home, sleeping. They found TWO hernias all knotted up in there. Doctor said he must have been in pain all the time. We all feel soo bad for being annoyed that he was always screaming so much. Who’s getting a big red fire truck with lots of lights? Who?

I tried to go back and figure out when I first met the Buffalo assasin.  This is the earliest mention, however, since it mostly involves my desire to stab him in the head, it’s not a very Happy Birthdayie fodder post.

Then there was that time I picked him up to come to one of the impromptu Crackhouse tournaments, and any number of times I ran into him at the Bash — but truth be told, most of those times I totally thought he was this other mean poker blogger white guy (Sorry, April.) I don’t know how many times Karol would be all  “No, that’s the OTHER guy! The one that came to your house that time and we picked him up.” Ohhh…yeah.

A week ago, one might have called this “racism,” but Astin taught me about this thing call “Face Blindness”! It is apparently an affliction whereby one doesn’t remember faces or confuses faces or something, but it’s NOT racism, so I CALL DIBS! I was all face blinded.

But I do remember the day I realized that Vinnay was not the mean poker blogger white guy. (Well, he is a mean poker blogger white guy, just not THE mean poker blogger white guy. Again, sorry April.) I had announced my hiatus from blogging and Vinnay sends me a hilarious text which said, in sum, that my retirement was unacceptable and that I would be obligated to text him amusing anecdotes for his personal entertainment.

He never really commented in those days, so who the hell knew that he even read my wacky blog, but he did! And that was a very cool text for me to get, especially since I was pretty sour on the whole blogging scene at the time. Of course, he likely does not remember sending that text. In the two years since that message, I have discovered that Vinnay only texts me when he’s totally wasted! And then I make sure to reply as loudly as I can only when he’s hungover. It’s our thing! But drunk Vinnay, is one of my favorite texters. He is completely and utterly insane.

No.

Really.

He has a “survival planning day” where he hones skills necessary during the end of days. Evidently, F-train will last a very long time. I will be eaten by wolves on the first day, which is totally cool, since if there’s no internet, I wouldn’t want to live anyway, and service in the bunker is spotty.  Seriously, drunk Vinnay needs a twitter account.

Anyhow, I can now officially pick the real Vinnay out of a lineup and I no longer confuse him with Meany Mcmeanerston. After an awesome visit up to the Toughalo last year, our Vegas trips and his jaunts to BKNY, including Saturday’s totally memorable, if not necessarily by me, surprise appearance at MY BIRTHDAY tournament, he’s also one of my favorite IRL invisible internet friends! I will not throw him into the Grand Canyon from the helicopter in December.

I found this recap Mary wrote of our Buffalo trip. It was during my blogging hiatus, so I didn’t read it till now. Hilarious! Vinnay has robots in his apartment.

He’s such a nerd.

Speaking of which, he’s decided to protest my religious freedom post, with weekly “Science Thursdays” at his site. So, on this, his special special born day, go stump him with your hardest mathy questions. (I’m going with what does E stand for in E= M*C *C (Malcolm doesn’t know how to do exponents.)

Also as my gift to him, I hereby declare my birthday season over. You are all free to wish him and Chinese Pete Happy Birthdays!

And in exchange for my extreme kindness and generosity someone should tell me the name of his band and write an awesome song about me. And Tito should send me keylime pie. Just sayin.

With the Droid X, you have to turn it on its side just so in order to get the big keyboard.

I prefer the big keyboard because the little one trips you up; it mangles your words and then April and F train laugh at your texts. And then you plot revenge and that takes a lot of time. So now I always use the big keyboard. But to get it, you have to turn it on exactly the right side or else it just stays on the little keyboard and the cursor blinks expectantly.

This is the first post I’ve written on the Droid. I used to write posts on my blackberry all the time. I’ve decided to test out my writing capabilities on a silly unimportant post just to make sure I can still write on subway cars and at poker tables. So far, it appears that I can.

I think I’ve mostly pieced together everything that happened on Saturday night. And since there is evidently video, let me take this opportunity to point out what a brilliant, awesome wonderful person Alceste is. And he looks great without his glasses! Top notch.

Earlier that day I had been at the Verizon store getting acquainted with my new best friend, Malcolm. Afterward, my mother said she wanted to go to McDonald’s to try the new wrap they offer. I said I would wait in the car.

And I did…until I looked up and quite out of nowhere there appeared a liquor store. I was having a poker game that night and the only wine I had left was sparkling, so I figured I would pick up one or two bottles of regular. Because, as you already know, alcohol does not affect me like it affects regular people.

I am was special.

I was too arrogant, too smug.

I had angered Dionysus. (That, or I just saw Percy Jackson and the Lightning Bolt Thief.)

I don’t know much about wine, except that I generally only like white wine and the sweeter the better. I am also poor. Which led me to this exchange:

I pushed open the door, walked past a neatly stacked display of 3 liter bottles of “Semi sweet white wine,” for the low price of $11.99. I didn’t want any part of that. I looked around, but really, I didn’t know what I was looking for, so I asked the guy sitting on a black crate against the wall:

“Do you have any inexpensive sweet white wines.”

He stroked his beard, scraped his nails across the blackboard, cackled and said “yes, dearie. Right there,” pointing his shriveled hand and yellowed nails at the stack of wine. (What we’ve learned so far today is that Dawn’s idea of the worst villain imaginable is the witch from Snow White rolled up with that guy from Jaws. *shudder*)

I didn’t want to take it, but I also didn’t have a valid reason why I didn’t want to take it.
“Oh, it’s too cheap!”
“There’s too much of it!”
I mean, honestly!

So, I bought it. They also sold me something called “Brooklyn vodka,” because credit cards are not accepted for purchases of less than $20. But that’s not relevant. I leave the store and POOF it disappears in a swirl of sand and dust clouds. This was probably a bad a sign.

Anyway, I put the wine and the vodka in my freezer, drive to the Upper East to collect Petitedov and Peter, we get back home and then this happens:

We drink the wine. Not Peter, just me and Petitedov. At first, we’re like “this is not good.” Then we’re like “aww, this is okay.”

And then Petitedov was tweetjacking me and writing terrible things about Tom Brady and my muffins. I mean cupcakes, CUUUPPCAKKKES!

So, I’m outside grilling up a storm and everything is going swimmingly and then Alceste wouldn’t hand over his Chinese food, but he agreed to eat a hotdog with cheese, I accepted this compromise and then things start to get fuzzy.

Vinnay, who was dead to me and forgotten for bailing on my poker tournament was suddenly in my living room! What the hell?! I believe I actually poked him at one point to verify the realness. (In the chest. With my FINGER! GEEZ! You people! #Pervs!)

So then we sit down to play and I was timing the levels on my Droid and then Alceste, who is wise and good, remember, said “um…no, I think I’ll do it.”

Then there was evidently dancing and ranting and people accusing me of being drunk. But that was absurd, right? I mean, it was just WINE! I’ve done almost a whole bottle of Jameson’s standing on my head! I tried to deny their charges, but I couldn’t lift my head off the table, so I decided to tell my tale to Malcolm! He will believe me.

Malcolm is an asshole.

I don’t remember anything after that. Heck, I don’t even remember THAT! But evidently, I am an angry yelly drunk. Who knew? I always thought I’d be a friendly huggy drunk! Ah, who am I kidding! Angry/yelly is so me. I was reading my twitterfeed the next morning and apparently I didn’t feel good and Vinnay is a stupidface! Again, spot on!

In vino veritas!

And in evil monkey paw vino even more so.

I poured the remainder down the sink the next morning — with my one good arm and the one eye I could open…it opened up a swirling blue vortex in my sink. I jumped back and it sucked the bottle into it and exploded in a bright white light!

Take it from me kids, don’t drink evil monkey paw wine. Or do, but confiscate all smartphones first.

Also, er, we’d like to take this opportunity to dismiss all donut stealing charges against Peter. It was just a crazy misunderstanding between friends. Bygones should be bygones. *whistles*

Holy crap i can speak my post

About a year ago, I broke up with J.

It was sad, but one day I realized I either do it and do it now or resign myself to a lifetime of excuses and apologies.

That made the choice clear and very easy.

I’m not selfish, but I have high expectations for the people in my inner circle (Although, truth be told, I didn’t realize they were that high, since in my house “do what you say you’re going to do,” was revered second only to “do unto others as they do unto you,” (um, yeah that’s the Golden Rule remix as spun my jam master my mama.) However, I’ve subsequently learned that other people very casually break promises if something else comes up or if they don’t feel like it and they expect apologies and “making it up later” to fix everything. Also, larger egos than mine (yeah, I KNOW) can’t wrap themselves around the idea that I will treat them exactly how they treat me, unless there is a diagnosed, being-treated medical condition that prevents them from reciprocating. Generalized “crazy” is not enough. The Dawn store is quite fully stocked with generalized crazy, thank you very much.)

Anyway, he took it very hard.

I got the sense that he was used to being able to charm and apologize his way out of situations his flakiness caused. In fact, he had been able pull that off after the second huge letting me down thing he’d done. I walked, and he swore on the lives of people, that, in retrospect, he obviously doesn’t care about very much, that it would never happen again.

I didn’t believe him, but I took a shot, maybe…

Nope.

Remon.

I suck at coinflips.

Anyway, after months and months of emails and texts which vacillated from apologetic to accusatory (why am *I* so hard?! What???) He settled on the “let’s be friends meme.”

Yes! O. K. PERFECT!

We can be like me and my childhood friend, Zee. We live 40 minutes away, but we don’t speak, text, email, OR facebook!

If we run into each other on the train, I will hide behind my handbag, and then, since we get off at the same stop, will be all “Zee, hey, what’s up?” as we exit the train because either her connecting train will come in the next two minutes or mine will! (This blew up in MAH GOTDAMB face one day when the Q line was having difficulties! Stupid MTA making me talk to people for 19 painful minutes.)

I immediately agreed to J’s friend terms and considered the matter closed.

But no, Captain Needs a Clue emails again the next day telling me about some problem or another of his.

DUDE!

Do I have to tell you the Zee story again? Cause I can. If I see you on the train one day, and we happen to be seated in the same car AND there is no humanly possible way to avoid it, I WILL talk to you for two minutes!

I am no longer here to solve your problems or listen to your worries or help with your plans. Yes, I was AWESOME at those things. And I have great ideas and I am an extremely creative and talented problem solver and I shared those gifts with you because I cared about you! Had you cared about me, you would have been at my building at 11 am that Sunday, like you said you’d be or in a coma at the local hospital. You didn’t, so you weren’t and now I won’t because I don’t.

See how that works? I can explain further, but only if the same-subwaycar scenario, outlined above happens. And only in under 2 minutes.

I am pretty firm on my when it’s over, it’s over stuff. I don’t want to hear, see, or smell you. Certainly, I’m not helping you out of jams anymore. Eff that! Heck, honestly, I don’t even want to hear about something bad happening to you…I can be recklessly empathetic.

I’ve watched a number of my friends go through breakups since then, and yeah, their relationships were for longer, but they’ve actually started to make me feel callous in my absolutism, with their sad eyes and quavering voices and nostalgic tones.

I was having dinner with a friend yesterday and listening to her still worry about a guy that did a pretty douchey thing in my mind, I began to wonder if there was a “normal” and exactly how outside of it am I…like on a scale of June Cleaver to Charlie Manson.

I just don’t have time or inclination to half-care about people. Either I do, and then I care all the way and I wanna be part of their lives and know stuff and go to their stuff and I want them to read my blog and leave comments.

Or I don’t care, in which case I don’t want to be a part of their lives or go to their stuff and I just want them to read my blog and leave comments.

Is that so wrong?

I’ve now blocked and reported them as spam.