I wish I could NOT overhear everything he says.

I think the only euphemism for something "unpleasant" I hate more than "make love" is "passed away" (or "passed on"). No, my grandmother didn't "pass away." She's dead. She's embalmed, covered in funeral home makeup and buried in an overpriced casket in the ground.

Also, according to my father, the reason I moved back to Massachusetts last year was because "[I] didn't like the public transportation out there." Jesus Christ, Dad, if you're going to overshare, you may as well tell people that I had a nervous fucking breakdown. I mean, you basically tell people my exact address and social security number anyway.

A simple "wrong" would not have done it.

Sarah Palin, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Waiting for a bus to come crashing into my office.

My day so far, in a nutshell:

1. Walk to Lechmere in annoying drizzle. Notice that train is leaving just as you're getting through the gate.


2. Wait 5 minutes in annoying drizzle for someone to pull the next train up.


3. Get on train, realize rubber piece for right earbud is missing. Realize you have 90 minutes of no entertainment ahead of you.


4. Get off at Government Center. Wait 40 minutes for a D train.


5. Stand until Reservoir listening to adults and children who don't understand the concept of "indoor voice."


6. Walk from Woodland to Walnut St. in a downpour. Almost get hit by car while crossing a crosswalk in front of the goddamn hospital. Again.


7. Get into work. Instantly feel sick upon breathing the air in the building.


8. Check voicemail. Some guy left 3 messages, all after 5pm, asking if you got his 20 page fax yesterday. He failed at sending the fax earlier this week, and he failed at sending it again yesterday.


9. Try to fax out application to potential client who requested one two days ago, only to find out that his fax machine is STILL turned off.


10. Sit directly under air conditioner freezing to death because you have no dry clothing on you.


11. Everything on the Internet is about that insufferable Sarah Palin.
    
    Scream, cry and pull your hair out, wondering if the FedEx guy will stop by today to drop off your meager paycheck because you didn't get your stipend this month.


12. Burst into tears again as you realize there's a home game tonight and you're going to have to spend another one of your evenings surrounded by obnoxious Red Sox fans who don't know how to use a motherfucking train.

Almost five years.

Further evidence that Elliott Smith and I are soulmates:



Those nails alone! Seriously!

Dammit. Why couldn't John Mayer or some other loser have died instead? Life is unfair.

New slogan for the GOP

War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.

I'm just going to take a nap under my desk now.

I guess it must be a lot easier to die if you believe in an afterlife. Too bad I don't. The people who were saddest at the wake were the people who were praying the most. Aren't you supposed to be happy that my grandmother died and gets to go to heaven and isn't in a hospital bed whacked out on morphine and dying of renal failure anymore?

And thanks, random St. Mary's priest, for giving a really insulting, non-inclusive homily in which you called me and probably a couple other people in the church "foolish" for not believing in the KINGDOM OF HEAVEN1!!11!!!. Think about this for a minute: you called me a fool at my grandmother's funeral. Because it's completely impossible for a Catholic woman's family to have non-Christians in it. Because no one marries outside their faith, or converts, or just gives up on faith entirely. You also effectively told my entire family that they wouldn't see me in theoretical Heaven because I don't believe in their religion.

So yeah, thanks a lot. I really needed to be insulted at my grandmother's funeral. And FYI, the organ and the horrible singer were a little melodramatic. I'm not even going to get into how horrible a choice it was to have someone read the story of Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life. Or the fact that you called my grandfather by his given name and not the name he went by (way to make that effort!). Or the fact that you said "MARY" over and over again like you really really wanted us to know that you cared enough to remember what my grandmother's name was instead of reading "insert name of deceased person here" from your book.

Everything Is Green

Amazing writers* that are actually still alive:
Don DeLillo
Alice Munro
Maxine Hong Kingston
John Updike
Thomas Pynchon
Sherman Alexie
Philip Roth
Margaret Atwood
Bret Easton Ellis
Ray Bradbury

(maybe amazing, definitely alive)
Amy Tan
Tim O'Brien (only on this list because Tomcat in Love was horrible)
Mark Z. Danielewski
Jeff Noon
Chuck Palahniuk
J. G. Ballard

*This list does not include poets because I'm not qualified to make those decisions.

Matt Damon - not as retarded as his puppet.

too many lyrics about cold sores.

Edit: Why Sarah Palin Incites Near-Violent Rage In Normally Reasonable Women -- spot fucking on. Palin is still not a feminist. Joe Biden is a feminist. Joe Biden drafted the Violence Against Women Act. What did Sarah Palin do? She cut funding for teen mothers! She believes that only the privileged should have access to reproductive choices (like her daughter, not like poor women who can't afford to have children)! What the hell is wrong with people supporting the McCain/Palin ticket? Don't give Sarah Palin a vote of confidence just because she has a vagina, or because she has a kid with Down Syndrome. That's pretty much as horrible as voting for John McCain because he's not the black guy.

Ok, I usually don't get most of the celebrity crushes I had when I was younger, but I totally understand this one. Sidenote: hilariously bad picture on the Wikipedia page.







Oh, and I totally get this one too:



This has been the longest goddamn week despite the fact that I got one day off, left early twice and came in late once. I have a "visible clot" in my bad socket, which basically means that my body got overzealous and made the clot bigger than the space it needed to fill - it grew up to the surface of my gums. So every time I yawn, eat or open my mouth at all, the clot breaks a little and everything tastes like blood. Hooray.

Yeah, I met with my surgeon yesterday morning. He says I'm healing well, which is more than I could've hoped for, considering I vomited into my sockets and lost a couple stitches early as a result. Maybe my rant should be about antibiotics rather than wisdom tooth extraction.

To Clarify:

Just for the record,

Everyone lies to you about wisdom tooth extraction. If someone says he was eating tortilla chips the day after surgery, he either
1) has the world's highest pain tolerance
2) did not have all four teeth removed
3) had the least complicated extraction ever
4) was eating the chips after they had soaked in a bowl of water for 20 minutes.

As of about 10 this morning, I will have had my teeth out for exactly one week. My face still looks like this:


And it still feels like I got kicked in the jaw by a mule. And I didn't even get dry socket!

Ok, first of all, "dissolving stitches" doesn't really mean that they dissolve. Sure, parts of the stitches dissolve, so you're left with a long knotted string in your mouth that annoys the shit out of you but you can't actually pull it out because you might disrupt the healing process and you just have to pray that it somehow magically dissolves overnight and you don't wake up at 3 in the morning coughing and sputtering with something vaguely pointy lodged in your throat.

If you go out in public, people will stare at your face. Stop mid-sentence when they see the bruising. Look all shocked and maybe point a little but not even have the common fucking courtesy to come up to you and ask if you need the number for a domestic violence hotline. You will be disoriented all the fucking time and no one will help you or even ask if you need help because you are at least as creepy as the old guy in sweatpants who wanders around with a shopping cart full of half-full garbage bags.

The world is fraught with peril when you have your teeth out. You have no idea how close people come to whacking you in the face until your teeth come out. Maybe two days after surgery, I walked through the tiny-ass park next to my apartment to get to the grocery store and I was nearly hit by: 1) a softball, 2) a guy riding a bike and 3) a guy on a riding mower.

I had a fuckton of plaque adhered to my upper back molars, so I tried to floss a bit back there. Some gross shit came off, but I couldn't scrape it all away, so I brushed it off. It was brown like dried blood and decaying crap. I rinse my mouth pretty often! They didn't ooze any more than they've been oozing these past 7 days.

I clean the bottom left corner, everything's hunky dory. A little tender, a tiny spot of blood, no big deal.

I noticed the gums around my bottom right back molar were sitting really high, so I poked around with my tongue and tried to rinse it with a bit of warm water. Apparently my gums were the floodgates holding back every drop of blood in my body. Dear Red Cross: I know you don't let me donate blood because my veins are too tiny, but I just found easier access for you!

So, ok, do I just throw oral hygiene out the window for the next 3 weeks while I wait for my mouth to heal? Isn't mouth tissue supposed to be one of the fastest healing tissues in the body? This is the complete opposite of what I was taught when I had a mouth piercing! You need to keep your mouth clean constantly because you have an open goddamn wound and your body needs to heal it without wasting energy on fighting an infection that you should've prevented. Clean meticulously 2-3 times a day, no more than that, you idiot! Rinse with salt water and don't touch with dirty hands. You should be fine to eat normal food in 3 days if you cut it into smallish bite-sized pieces.

The only things here that also hold true for wisdom teeth are the salt water (thank god no one tells you to use alcohol-based mouthwash to kill germs... and healthy tissue), and wash your hands before you poke around in your mouth (especially after riding the subway).

Why can't this shit just heal over already?! I have a completely unopened bag of Trader Joe's tortilla chips I want to eat. The thick kind.

So yes, if you have not had your wisdom teeth out yet, you're in for the worst month of your life, apparently. It is significantly worse than everyone says it is. This is a million times more annoying and painful than a breast reduction. After my breast reduction, antibiotics didn't make me vomit into my open fucking wounds. They gave me Percocet after my reduction, which unlike Vicodin, doesn't destroy my liver and actually works as a painkiller.

My surgeon was fucking awesome, as was his office, and I will give a good review on Yelp when I'm not so fucking distraught, but JESUS CHRIST. If someone tells you that getting four impacted wisdom teeth out isn't a big deal, you are being lied to. Get the anesthesia. You will be traumatized enough by the shit you have to go through once they kick you out of the recovery room.