UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
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Sunday, February 19, 2006
I haven't played a "tabletop" role-playing game (RPG) since I was in like 3rd grade and a couple of my classmates and I tried playing Dungeons & Dragons. Therefore, I'm sure my recollections or descriptions of same are totally wrong. Later in this post, I plan to use those recollections to construct a lame analogy. Some of you may be familiar with RPGs and may feel a need to leave a comment to correct any inaccuracies. Resist any such urges, you fucking nerd, because after puberty, every hour you spend thinking about RPGs lowers your Charisma by 1 point for an entire year. It's the attractiveness equivalent of breaking a mirror. Don't do it.
Speaking of hopelessly uncool: when you see a teenager who has made some socially suicidal sartorial choice, don't you just want to just shake him like a baby that won't stop crying? You can't help them, because even the most clueless teen would never -- and should never -- listen to an adult's advice about being cool. But I'm not so fucking out of touch that I can't recognize the difference between a) things kids do/wear to annoy their parents that can help them socially with at least some of their peers (facial piercings, hair dye, baggy pants, or anything that goth kids wear, say, or do), and b) accidental social death by clothing. No. I saw this kid at an art-house movie theater in East Stroudsberg, PA, and I just wanted to cry. Here's this kid who probably feels like the most sensitive, intelligent, and artistic kid in his entire high school. He may even be right! He craves a way to stand out from the crowd, to declare his individuality from the Abercrombie & Fitch crowd (and hey -- going to see Brokeback Mountain alone on a Saturday night in rural Pennsylvania is a pretty good start, Chaci!). He wants to be special. Perhaps even The Most Unique Person Ever. [Aht-ta-ta! Don't do it, language cops! See paragraph one! --UD] I can totally sympathize! But dude. Dude. You simply cannot wear a fedora and a duster out in public. No one can ever do that. Not even on Halloween. Stop it now. THAT is the attractiveness equivalent of eating lead paint chips: it seems like a good idea at the time, but the damage is irreparable. Speaking of heavy metals that cause brain damage: Last night my sister was complaining about how she couldn't find a "regular" thermometer anymore, how the stores in California have only electric, digital, in-ear, or forehead-strip thermometers. She was bummed, and for a moment I was totally with her on Themometer Memory Lane. I fondly recalled the act of shaking down an old-fashioned mercury thermometer before using it, or twisting it between my fingers to get the right angle to read it. I specifically remember that I wasn't allowed to shake it down until I was deemed old enough to do so without dropping it, and that reaching that age was a minor maturity milestone of my wonder years. Ahh, memories. Then I realized that within like ten years, mercury thermometers will probably be discussed with the same hindsighty horror with which we discuss shoe-store fluoroscopes or the factory ladies who licked their radium-coated watch-hand paintbrushes. And -- holy fuck -- with good reason. Assume for a sec that you've never heard of them. Okay. So in order to take your temp, I propose to make a tube out of glass, fill it with cartoonishly poisonous poison, poke it into a soft nexus of mucus membrane that provides equally handy access to your circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems, and then have you clamp it jauntily between your jaws so you can grind it back and forth in childish ignorance and impatience. Sound good? No, it sounds like a comedy sketch that even Saturday Night Live would reject as too unrealistically over-the-top. Fuck fuck! Okay, now the D&D reference I warned you about. One thing I remember is that your "character" was a piece of paper listing your characteristics and your possessions. The possessions were on the order of swords and daggers and gold pieces and cetera; characteristics were a list of desirable traits like Strength, Agility, and Charisma, each of which had a corresponding number from 1 to 20, with 1 being an almost unsurvivable lack of a trait and 20 being a godlike embodiment thereof. (I'd bet that this seemingly arbitrary scale corresponded to the most poly of the game's essential ployhedra, the iconic icosehedron -- the 20-sided die.) (Yikes -- I would totally understand if you wanted to assassinate me for writing that last sentence. I await your ninjas with shame.) But so anyway this is about A.D.D. again ((sister golden hair) surprise!) and how additive modifiers to my A.D.D. characteristic made it superhard to post last week. If you think of A.D.D. as a possible D&D character trait (albeit a negative one), most of you walk around with comfy little subpental single digits. That means that without ever once blinking your eyelids, examining your cuticles, or checking your periphery for amusing distractions, you can probably attend a 4-hour symposium (on the difficulties inherent in adapting 21st century agricultural theories, tools, and methods to regions of the Ukraine that have been perfectly happy for centuries with subsistence beet farming -- even though you're a Goddamn law student, but whatever?) and joyously take complete notes organized into coherent subsections with many nested layers of bullet-points and numerically ordered lists (in arabic, roman, kanji, or even Hebrew numbers you showoffy fuck). Well I start out any day with my A.D.D. at 13, but if I don't get coffee in me quick I earn a (+2) modifier. So last week my A.D.D. characteristic was almost pegged at "heroic inability to observe two adjacent muons without getting distracted by the smell of salt, which makes you think of briny, which rhymes with shiny." This week's other A.D.D. modifiers, in no particular order: • Renovations (+1): The office is undergoing renovations, which makes everybody edgy and superbusy and demanding of my bloggy time. Plus when you come in every morning, your entire work area looks and feels like it has been coated with white cornmeal, which if you imagine it in your lungs, you have trouble paying attention to anything but the five-o'clock whistle and how far away it is. • Winter Olympics (+2): I could write a billion words about the fucking Olympics, but I can resist writing about it much more easily than I can resist watching it. Suffice it to say that the coverage seems so specifically tailored to people with A.D.D. that I feel, perhaps for the first time since Athens, truly at home. That Lampley dude, that ass Jimmie Whatever, and Bob fucking Costas are there to make sure that I never have to sweat through five consecutive minutes of the same event, and they swaddle every non-sequitur edit with cottony blather. • Books (+2): I've been reviewing them. It's distracting, but it's all for you, Damien! All for you! (Jump! twangggggggCraaaak! Swingle, swingle, swingle.) • Miscellaneous (±?): Cold fingers. Back spasms. Diner food. 40 pounds of impacted fecal matter discovered in John Wayne's colon postmortem. Next Post: Direct quotes and stock tips from The Sleepy Time Jer Saga. Also more about Olympics: Skeleton. A Ski Jumping quote. Oh my god and my nemesis Al Trautwig who you never see on screen except during the Summer Games Gymnastics Comps, but you hear his comment(at)ing on everything from curling to the Cinderella story of two farmboys who had a dream to win Olympic Gold in honor of their grandma (who's currently dying in a Kentucky barn after an accident sustained while spattin' tabaccy at a hummin'bird), by coming in under that ol' radar and beating Rupert and that other bitch (bitch!) at tonight's special live final Tribal Council. To tide you over, here's a: Usage note for language nerds! Although the media peeps always seem to say "The Olympics," I've noticed a bunch of athletes eschew the definite article, as in "Dude, I'm totally stoked because getting to Olympics has always been my dream" [I made up that quote, but I swear I've heard this kind of thing a bunch]. Other examples of this in English: 1) "Batman" vs "The Batman," which some people get really rankled by the latter, but I kinda like it, and 2) "C.I.A." vs "the C.I.A.," where the former seems to be the insider slang, as in "My boss at CIA was a relic of the cold war" [also a made-up quote]. Also, I was totally stoked to hear a snowboarding commentator say the following sentence, which may be syntactically kosher but sounded really Germanic and weird at the time: "This is the kind of trick we've been seeing him in practice all week long do." Heh. Say it out loud to yourself using a slacker/surfer SoCal accent. 0 comments |
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MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" - misuse of reflexive pronouns, as when someone says "Please talk to Bob or myself." Come on people now. "Myself" is not just a fancy version of "me"! LEARN IT. - tattoos in the Courier font - any use of Comic Sans |
