Carousel of Progress: Beverage Bottles, Google Empire, Transportation, Interns

It's been a fantastic week for Progress. I'm now [sorta] employed, I journeyed to Pathmark for groceries [and stepped directly into a lagoon of tomato sauce, facilitating a somewhat sensual experience between my foot and the cleaning-man's mop], replaced my gapingly-holed Chuck Taylors with brand-new-[sized-too-small] Chuck Taylors [the ten minutes allotted for this errand did not provide for additional store visits to hunt down proper size, whatever, my feet'll shrink or my shoes'll grow, it takes two to tango], got my hair did [Visa's especially excited about that], and....yes...!!!...although the globe is warming, my room is cooling because...

(!!!)

Roommate-Ryan, who coincidentally happened to read my blog for the first time this week, removed those soul-stifling bars from my window, AND, before I was able to jump out, filled said window with my AIR CONDITIONER! Ryan's the best roommate ever, besides Zoey. And me, 'cause last summer, I installed THREE air conditioners in Lo and I's apartment, inspiring Lo to comment: "You're such a lesbian today!" That's right. But now that I'm the girly one in my lesbo-ation-ship, I've got no time/strength for such things. I have to do my hair, etc. Anyway, enough about me. Go Ryan!

a power of butterfly must be the aptitude to fly

So, re: hair? On my first visit to DRAMATICS NYC [also'd be a good name for Nation on Saturday Nights], I thought "Hm, my stylist's name is TRAFFIC? That's weird. Maybe his parents were drunk, or Nascar fans, or both." But this time, my stylist's name was ZONE and his assistant's name: ENERGY. Today, at my new job, I commented to the girl-who-was-training-me: "Everyone who works here has a porn star name!" [E.G., Denver, Rod, Asia, Javier.] Then I said to myself: "Riese, you're not in your room anymore, shut up, weirdo!" She laughed/agreed though. Because I was funny/right. Not really/kinda.

Anyhow I wanna go to hairstyling school so I can get a job at DRAMATICS NYC and change my name to TOXIC.

Onto installment TWO of The Auto-Win Carousel of Progress: Winter-Fresh Edition. I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. Like I ever did. I mean, it's getting worse. My brain is tired 'cause I woke up at 6 A.M. to go to work. That's right, WORK. Did I mention that already? Obvs I'm not cut out for this "working" thing, I'm never going to work again ever. Over it. Totes tiring. What am I talking about? Right: the wheel. You know what though? That was a good one, yeah? The wheel? That was a fucking amazing idea, the wheel.

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BEVERAGE CONTAINERS:


W/O: The New Poland Spring Bottle Caps...

Are accidents waiting to happen. Not even waiting, really. Rather: "actively exploding all over my bag/bed/floor/what-have-you." Has happened approx. 100 times since the cap's introduction, including this morning, when, as you know, I was on my way to my JOB. I didn't have time to check the front bag-pocket for damages--and, fast forward to several hours later: I reached into aforementioned pocket for emergency tampon to find it'd taken on the form of a dead jellyfish, if jellyfish were made out of cotton and not jelly. Why change a good thing, Poland Springs? You had the right idea by bottling water, which's a classic choice, so you had to compensate by inventing a new kind of cap? Seriously, what?!! I'd like to sit it on that meeting, which probs went like this: Hey, this is nice how I can suck water out of this bottle like a baby suckling his mother's breast. Let's change it because we hate women.

W/: Screw-Caps for Wine Bottles

Because I can't possibly go a single post w/o mentioning the Olive Garden this week: we had this wine called Lambrusco--probs sells at Pathmark for about $4.99/bottle. It had a screw cap, but this was back in '00, before screw caps were hip, so we were trained to cover the "opening" process [which in all other instances involved a flourish of "wine key" and a rare opportunity to demonstrate hand-eye coordination or really any useful brain activity whatsoever] with our napkin¹ to hide the cheap-wine-giveaway suggested by the screw cap. I'm glad this stigma is gone, and now there's nothing embarrassing about ordering Lambrusco at The Olive Garden, except that you're at The Olive Garden.

I prefer 'em and love their proliferation: easier to store in crowded refrigerators, easier to tote and easier to open and subsequently hide if one is drinking in a place where one is not supposed to be drinking, e.g. work [not my new job that I started today, obvs, but other jobs I clearly no longer have for whatever reason], and doesn't require purchase of ghetto wine opener which breaks on first usage. Much like my heart.

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THE RAPIDLY EXPANDING GOOGLE.COM EMPIRE:

W/O: [certain elements of] Gmail

Sometimes, in an attempt to prove a point about why I couldn't have Barbies or go to the cool-kids party, my Mom'd say: "Marie, if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?" And I was like, "Um, obviously. Why would I want to be alive if all my friends had just jumped off a bridge?" So, I got gmail. I even suggest gmail to my friends, and then shun them if they don't join up [except you, dear Haviland, and your adorable AOL]. But for reals, it drives me crazy that I can't put mail into good old fashioned FOLDERS. Labels? Wha?! I've never enjoyed labels much. Some of my least favorite include: top/bottom [re: lesbian sexual assignment, apparently for life], "artsy," bisexual, bi-curious, slut, JAP, slacker. I don't need my "Hav" label to indicate which emails are from Haviland--that much's apparent by her email address in the "FROM" field, yeah? Seriously: do you know anyone who's like "Thank G-d for those labels, totes helps me organize my life. Vigilant about the labels. I can see clearly now the rain is gone." This's what I want, and it's what I had on yahoo/hotmail/other retarded email servers: my inbox is just for emails I've gotta respond to. I'd like folders for the rest of it, and I don't wanna "archive" everything I've responded to, which'd be Gmail's solution. I tried indicating emails-needing-response with "stars," but then they slip out of top-spots and my starred emails end up being people I never really intended to respond to, like random dudes I met on J-Date in 2004. That's not a hypothetical. Also I label my emails anyhow, just cause I trust Google blindly, like I'm that douchebag and Google's jumping off the bridge, and I'm like, wait up! wait for me!

W/: Google Reader

I love Google Reader for what it truly is:"Google Reader helps you keep up with it all by organizing and managing all the content you're interested in. Instead of continuously checking your favorite sites for updates, you can let Google Reader do it for you. From news sites to your friends' blogs, Google Reader helps you keep up-to-date with all the online information that matters most to you."

I love Google Reader for what it is accidentally: Say, hypothetically, that one's girlfriend compulsively erases her blog posts at a rate so rapid it'd be hard to keep up if one wasn't informed of each posting more-or-less immediately: well, luckily, it's all stored in the Google Reader cache. Every last redacted word. Holla!

I've refrained from lauding the glory of Google-Reader on this blog because: 1. Google is evil, T.B. read all about it, they're spying on us, etc. [I use "google is evil" and "Al Queda" in this post. And "DRAMATICS NYC." And "porn." P.S., I hate George W. Bush and I love Rosie O'Donnell.] 2. I suspect that when people read this on G-Reader, it doesn't show up on my site-meter. But I'm abandoning pride at the gate, kids.

I actively monitor about 75 blogs right now, a feat only possible with the help of my third favorite site (GMail and this blog being first and second, respectively) on the internet, Google Reader, a site I would make sweet, gentle (and occasionally rough) love to were it physically possible (Don’t even get me started on what I would do to GMail, and as for my own site, well, let's just say it does just fine.)
-Amish, NYC blogger and a member of my social web back at the ol' alma matter, University of Michigan.

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TRANSPORTATION

W/O- AIRPLANES:

Absolutely everything about travel-by-plane is resolutely unpleasant. I know planes've got advantages: e.g., they move super-fast, which's especially important for overseas travel, as no-one wants to spend their vay-cay on an ocean liner. [Except cruise -ers, obvs, like me, but then there are people who get seasick, like Haviland, which's why she took sea-sick medicine and then started hallucinating: Everything's just so--BRIGHT!]

It's not the "flying" part that I despise, it'd be fun to learn fly a jet or go-go-gadget copter. But large commercial airliners are floating torture chambers: we're willingly strapped to Gravitron -esque "seats," we wait like Patient Robots for the moment we're permitted to recline half-an-inch, relish this moment...and then, for anywhere between 30-500 minutes, we experience unpleasant physical sensations like fresh-oxygen deprivation and virus transfusion (transmitted via little devil robo-tit fans) and THEN! THEN!, the half-inch recline is snapped mercilessly from our hands [often by a tired/hungover flight attendant while we are literally unconscious, which's like someone waking you up by whapping you on the ass and screaming MAKE ME SOME COFFEE WOMAN! not that anyone ever did that to me every single morning ever], like a stork bending to snatch up a chortling child. Then you land--which's when you're pretty certain you're about to die--and are spit out into a huge building that smells like rotten festering dehydrated humans. Sorta. Just thinking about it makes me want to throw up in a paper bag. That's why I take trains from New York to Wisconsin. Also because I'm afraid of Al Queda.

W/- LEXUS (I want to make this plural, but how? LEXI? LEXUSES?):

Once upon a time, I bought myself a car. Before you run away with any Riese-was-wealthy? ideas: Lexuses, moreso than other brands, maintain value, and I knew I needed to sell my car within a year of purchase 'cause I planned on being a part of it in New York, New York post-graduation. I wanted to maximize my return, like a year-long car rental?

Anyhow: driving it was like dancing! I'd never liked driving really, it was fine, got me from here to there. I thought shiny expensive cars were just shinier than other cars, and somehow grinned with bling-teeth-money-tongue-cash-tingle, I didn't realize it was almost like a different kind of car. Like, totes AS ADVERTISED. When I was really sad, which I was often then [the heart breaks into small pieces, etc.?], I'd drive it around Ann Arbor for hours, singing along to Fiona Apple: Cause I do know whats good for me, and I've done what I could for you, [imagine me pounding dashboard with I-Am-Woman triumphance] and you're not benefiting, and yet I'm sitting, singing again SING SING again! [almost yelling now, getting very upset] How can I deal with this, if he won't get with this? Am I gonna heal from this, he won't admit to it... Or I'd just park it in the parking lot of my elementary school, Eberwhite, and take a nap with the air conditioner or heater still on. Depending on the season.

The Lexus was white. It was so not-me. So entirely thoroughly not me, it was like floating through life in a stolen spaceship, which sometimes happens to be exactly what you need.

WHY HASN'T THIS HAPPENED YET?: Teleportation.

Even those of you w/o several seasons of Star Trek in your brain's back-log have certainly wished [out loud, probs] to be teleported. I usually declare this particular desire while sitting in someone's apartment or house late at night, imagining my own commute home: bus, cab, car, train, whatevs--anything besides the only other tolerable commute I've experienced, which's "falling asleep and having A Parent lift me and deposit me instantly into my bed, a.k.a. falling asleep and having A Parent lift me, deposit my body into a car, drive me home, and carry me to bed," which hasn't happened since the late 80's.

But if there were teleportation, I could import Unpaid Interns from all over the globe. Especially now that I've got an actual job, time's tight. A.K could flow my paper, Lozo could blow on my hands, Razia could stick it to those mofos and unintentionally practice precognition, Moonkiller could tote my things because she invented the totem pole, Mercury obvs is doing my hair and "word verification" was the cleverest thing EVER for number #1, M could recite Run DMC's It's Tricky which is no small thing, the spaz's ass is black man's kryptonite [making us quite a planet], kate'll let me use her hair products and can count words in her head, and carlytron wouldn't even need to be teleported, she totes lives here, could take a cross-town bus to perform a skit, a game, whatevs. And I need carlytron because we gotta bring The Truth About Stacey and Mallory and the Trouble with Twins to the screen ASAP.

And lk coulda written this post, if she'd wanted to, then I coulda been that black [dirty] angel, yeah, tooth to nail and [perfectly] translating [vain] words [are what sticks to the real]...crawling underground, lifting the phone [could hear our] voice, no black mark [upon their foreheads], yeah, yeah, environmental transformation. That's some translation, ghostwriter.

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¹: Also known as the "tail," required to be on our persons at all time, lest someone place a scalding hot lasanga plate into our hands. Once I was delivering lasanga to a table and I handed it to the server and said: 'do you have a tail?' and he said, No, I don't need it, and proceeded to handle 5,000 degree plates with his bare hands. I decided he was my hero, and now I can do the same thing. I was an excellent expo for this reason.