Drainbow Brite

Something else you might not know about me: Bright, appealing colors affect me strongly. Here's how you can tell:

I dyed my hair red because I had wanted to for my entire life.

I bought my toothpaste because it's pink and my mouthwash because it's purple.

I think spring oreos taste better than plain oreos.

I enjoy books with pretty covers more than books with drab covers regardless of content. Well not entirely regardless, but it does COLOR my experience (nyuk).

My apartment is painted in three bold, non-complimentary shades, and I still look at them after all this time and think: Wow. I'm so glad I have walls the colors firecracker, morning meadow, and sudden sapphire.

There is a 20% chance the accent color in my next bedroom is going to be hot pink.

Bright colors just make me happy, and they make doing stuff more fun and I don't even care if my life looks like a Lisa Frank trapper keeper. I've never had so much fun brushing my teeth as I do now with my pink toothpaste. It has little sparklies inside and miniature breath-freshening strips. The flavor is Kiss Me Mint!

Mwah, mint! That is for you.

Idiot Box

Holy crap.

Also this is fabulous because I'd been diligently working all day until I decided to stop and watch a 30-second YouTube video and that's when my boss walked by. Touch my Quizno-nos.

(If you're reading this on Facebook, stop reading this on Facebook. They never import video and it doesn't make my blog look popular. VIEW ORIGINAL SOURCE!)

Anyway this last weekend my mom was here and we went shopping for clothes (her) and apartments (me.) Luck on both sides. More later. What's more important is that I watched the entire first seasons of Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies. In case you didn't know, both shows feature lead characters who are undead girls with boy names. You may also be interested to know that Pushing Daisies is pretty much the best show I have ever seen. It has nice colors.

Last night featured pizza and a mini Gossip Girl marathon. Season 1, though, so nobody better tell me what happened! I left it where S got this mysterious note from G and I have no idea who G is so nobody spoil it even though it's probably Michelle Trachtenberg because I know she's supposed to show up at some point.

Isn't it awesome hearing me say nothing interesting about TV shows you already saw a year ago? I know, that's why you keep coming back for more! You know you love me.

xoxo

Man Unearths Memories, Describes Them As Misty, Watercolored

Yesterday ended the longest week I've ever had pretty much ever. Yesterday all I did after work was watch Season 1 of Dead Like Me and go to bed early. That's a pretty good show.

Last week was just one thing after another every day both in and out of work. Lots of it was fun, parts of it sucked, and all of it left me kind of a zombie for this date I had on Sunday. PLEASE DO NOT JUDGE ME, DATE FROM SUNDAY WHOSE IDENTITY I AM NOT REVEALING BECAUSE YOU DON'T KNOW I HAVE A BLOG AND I DON'T WANT TO FUCK UP YOUR LIFE WITHOUT PERMISSION!

IT'D BE COOL IF WE COULD GO OUT AGAIN!

Anyway I wanted to tell you about my shower this morning when I had the opportunity to marvel at the mysterious wonder of the human mind. So I'm about to get out because I was remarkably late for work as usual, when some bizarre switch was flipped and this song popped into my head.

A song I had not thought of for 8 years! I KNOW!

When I was a sophomore in college, I found this flash animation of a little cat in a box singing about how sad he was that he hadn't found anyone to love. It was sweet and schmaltzingly heart-breaking and pretty much the best flash animation to ever have been. I memorized all the words and learned to play it on the piano by ear and it was totally my life for like 3 months until it was taken down for copyright infringement because apparently the song was from some anime movie.

So years passed, and the song is totally absent from my memory... until today! I grabbed the shower curtain and from nowhere the sound of that kitty cat's high-pitched croon "Wiiiishing on a dream that seems far off..."

But that's all I had. I kept thinking and repeating it trying to get more of the song to come. And eventually, line by line, I reconstructed the entire thing! Sometimes I'd remember a word and sometimes a snippet of melody, and from that, I'd get the entire phrase and then move on to the next. It was like a miracle of nature! That for 8 years, I've been living my life with the kitty song deeply embedded in my unconscious, and then some errant synapse fires and brings it all out!

What other long-suppressed mysteries does my yucky slimy thing hold? AND WHEN WILL THEY RESURFACE!? Kitty song was a part of my identity those years ago. Am I not a full person without these forgotten experiences? Or perhaps kitty song has been defining me in subtle ways ever since without my knowledge. Perhaps who I am today has everything to do with the unrecognized influence of a sad, yet optimistic kitten in a box waiting on her shooting star.

OH WAIT I FORGOT WITH THE MAGIC OF WEB 2.0 NO MEMORY IS EVER LOST!

Ha! "There's a hole within my soul." Well done, YouTube capturing algorithm!

OH LOOK I DID ANOTHER FUCKING MEME!

Even if you don't care about what books I've read you should still read this because I make some awesome and mature puns!

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag others and pass it on.

Here's the list:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [more like BORED of the Rings hu hu hu, I wish I'd thought of that myself]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte [x]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling [x]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [x]
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman [x]
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy [x -- one of my favorite books ever]
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [Ok no but only because there are some works that are seriously skippable]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien [x]
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [x]
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald [x]
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [more like BORE and Peace! Just kidding, I've never even tried this, I'm sure it's great]
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams [x]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [x]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis [x]
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [x]
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden [more like Memoirs of a Gaysha!]
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne [x]
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [x-- more like The Da WINCY Code... because its so bad I winced all the time.... ok that one sucked]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding [x (Bored of the Flies, yeah yeah, we get it already)]
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel [x]
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [Moooooo! Frozen hamburgers!]
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [x-- more like A Tale That's Too Shitty!]
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [x-- I hate this book so much it doesn't even get an awesome pun]
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon [x]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [more like Ho-lita!]
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville [more like Moby DICK!... wait that doesn't work]
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker [x OMG BORING... more like.... more like... i got nothin' OH YES I DO: "This book sure SUCKED!"]
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White [x]
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad [x -- I also hated this book. Ummmm FART OF DARKNESS!]
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery [x-- favorite ever]
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole [x]
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl [x]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Totes: 25.

1/4. Not bad

Analysis: WHO MADE THIS SHITTY LIST!!??! What is it even supposed to be? Books you should read because they're good? Books you should read if you don't want to make an effort developing ecclectic literary taste? Books that we have heard of here at BBC and thought would make us sound smart?

Is Hamlet somehow excluded from the works of Shakespeare? Was it necessary to exclude The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from The Chronicles of Narnia at the expense of the 101st choice that didn't make the cut and was maybe the slightest bit outre and perhaps by a non-European/Russian?

Brave New World? Really???

Oh shit, am I in a bad mood? I didn't think I was in a bad mood, but now I'm acting like I am.

Oh, I gotta go! Facebook wants to teach me to make over $1,250 a week from my kitchen table in my underwear!

Open Letters

Dear Sirs and Madams:

It would appear we have an issue that must be dealt with. Please scroll down to find your personalized letter and take the necessary steps to respond. Your haste is appreciated, though waste will not be tolerated.

Hope you are well,
~2H~

Letter #1

Dear Subway:

It came to my attention last night that you may or may not have altered the recipe for your tuna. By my calculations, the tuna I had last night tasted largely the same as usual but with about 20% more deliciousness added. What is your secret? Have you done the same at all 30,000+ of your international locations? Do they eat tuna in India? Please respond and I would also like a free t-shirt.

Keep eating fresh,
~2H~

Letter #2

Dear Old People:

Would you please stop OH WAIT I forgot you can't use the internet ok nevermind.

Letter #3

Dear Chickens of the World:

How many of you are there!? OMG think about it, like how many chickens get eaten each day? There are millions of restaurants, and all of them need SO MANY CHICKENS like EVERYDAY! WHERE DO THEY KEEP YOU ALL!?! What is it like? Do you have to have lots of babies all the time? How many of you share a studio? Do you save on rent?

Curiously,
~2H~

Letter #4

Dear Cows of the World:

Same goes for you except you're even bigger!

Mooo,
~2H~

Oh my God, why are 75% of my letters about or addressed to foods?

Poll: McDonald's today yes or no?

Spidey Sense

Quick link. I found this in my To Blog pile from a while back.

So check out this spider maker, it's pretty cool. It's the latest in arachnid-simulation technology. It's especially cute if you give him long, skinny legs, and big body, and lots of "walk bounce." And you can feed him. Via Ze Frank.

Whoosh Update: Your Source for Whooshiness

How many hamburgers did I eat this weekend? Four.

I know!

They were so good.

Hamburgers! Hooray!

Hooray for hamburgers!

Other than that, this weekend basically consisted of me looking at apartments. I saw 8 and was impressed with but one. One other was this Grey Gardens nightmare that the selling agent was all "Oh, you can do anything you want with it! It's all surface stuff, you can have it the way you want in no time." My realtor whispered to me "You're looking at $100,000 in repairs and upgrading here. Srsly." I like my realtor.

Anyway my friend Sam also stayed with me because his floors were getting redone. We bed shopped, which involved him making me lay on beds and getting my opinion. But that got boring so I would walk away to lay on the $5,000 beds and say "Oh, but Sam, try out this one!" pretty much with the goal of making him dissatisfied with whatever he ended up choosing. I'm a good friend.

I also went to a The Bird and the Bee concert at Carnegie Hall, which was pretty much the best thing ever. They're a super-talented duo, and the girl who sings (presumably the bird), Inara, was such a trooper because she was sick with a horrible cold but stuck it out and had a great time anyway. Highly recommended.

Bottom line is SNORE I'm so tired right now. Can I tell you how many sets of stairs I did yesterday? I've been looking at lots of walk-ups.

Anyway, there's an awesome apartment with a private roof deck (just for me), so if you pray for me to get it, you're invited to my Memorial Day barbeque. If you're a vegetarian, you might want to eat something beforehand because all I can offer you is Snyder's cheese pretzel niblets.