Nerd Alert!

A conversation my brother and I had while watching The Pagemaster on a Friday night:

Him: Why do libraries always have lions out front?
Me: Maybe because they’re actually lion-braries.
Him: Or because they have cat-egories!
[Pause]
Him: Because they use the Dewey deci-bird system!
Me: That one sucked.
Him: Yeah.
[Pause]
Me: There’s no paw-city of knowledge!
Him: Nice.
Him: Oh! Because they have tails!
Me: How was that not the first thing we thought of?

Three Important Rules For Breaking Up

Breaking up with someone is pretty much the worst thing EVER. It’s one of those horrible tasks that you want to put off for the rest of your life, like doing your taxes or visiting your semi-comatose grandfather. Ultimately, though, you just gotta rip off the bandage…or, you know, pull the plug. It’s hardest when the dumpee is a nice person; by the end of most relationships, you almost wish that your significant other was a dick/bitch so you could righteously dump his/her ass and then maybe, righteously, set his/her car on fire. But when he or she is nice, it’s the hardest thing in the world because you’ll be hurting someone who doesn’t deserve it, even though it’s better in the long run (because it frees him/her up to find someone else who will probably hurt him/her. Ah, Love!). I’ve been thinking about it rather a lot recently, so here’s the first part in a several part series about ways one shouldn’t break up with someone. (Not that y’all need the advice; you’re all lovely people. I would love to be dumped by any one of you. It’s all for kicks and giggles.)

Inadvisable Method #1:

Through a Friend
Thinking about this takes me back to elementary/middle school. It’s the classic story: girl sees boy, girl develops obsessive giggly crush on boy, girl finally screws up courage after weeks of minutely dissected flirtation, girl writes boy a note in pink glittery pen, girl gives it to best friend, best friend gives it to boy’s friend, boy’s friend teases boy without mercy, boy checks the “no” box, boy dates girl’s best friend instead, everyone wears stirrup pants and vests…How awful. Of course, you can do it the other way around, too, and have you friend inform your significant other that he is “so, like, dumped.” One would imagine that this tactic is followed by the dividing up of assets like best spots on the playground and vacation cubby-space, but sadly enough, I would hear about this sort of thing in high school. I went to a huge high school, so it was inevitable to witness in the hallway at least one break-up a month, some of them through friends whose teachers were more lenient on the four-minutes-between-classes rule. Trust me, though, the break-ups were never as awkward as the, uh…shall we say “unions”…against the lockers.

More later, maybe.

Lord, That Lonely Girl

I don’t know, maybe I’m too old and cranky for teen angst. I used to love it; I delighted in all the drama that my friends came up with and was thrilled when I had my own to bring to the table. Something about lonelygirl15 rubs me the wrong way, though. It might be her twitchy face and frequent use of fillers. “Um, I’m a lonely girl…I’m 16…but I don’t want, um, you to be all, um, stalky, so I won’t tell you where, um, I live, just say a million times that, um, it’s really boring. And make some more faces. Um.” Ugh. It could be that I’ve known about the series for a while, since right around the time it started getting big, before people were seriously questioning how real it was. I never watched it, as initial descriptions made it sound stupid and I had lost interest in the whole blogging thing after my own blogring had gotten too histrionic, even for my tastes. Plus, it got really outlandish, like the Internet version of “Passions”, another relic from my middle school days. When it was finally revealed to be a hoax, I wasn’t totally surprised, but I’ll admit to being disappointed. It’s sort of sad that this public diary, one that touched a lot of young people, was all written by adults with marketing on their minds. I guess this has a lot of implications: our manipulation by the media, the ease with which we can re-invent ourselves on the Internet, our voyeuristic interest in the personal lives of others/our solipsistic belief that people give a damn about the mundane happenings in our own lives, our need for a human connection in an increasingly remote and mechanical society. I don’t really want to talk about any of those, though; that’s fodder for a research paper that I am too lazy to do. Basically, I hate lonelygirl15 for being angsty in a way I like to think I’ve left behind; but I also hate her for abandoning it for some stupid occult theme. If someone is going to have access to the minds and emotions of thousands of people, there should be some honesty in there; teen bullshit is largely no more real than anything lonelygirl15 said, but at least it has belonged to everyone.