news story: a local little league baseball snack hut was broken in to (yeah, i know) last night and vandalized.
“…and even some snacks were taken,” the reporter chimed in.
well, duh. why break in to a “snack hut” if you’re not going to steal some snacks? that would be like going to get lipo, while chomping down own a jelly doughnut. pointless.
the washer and dryer that i bought off of craigslist were delivered today. although i was extremely excited to finally own my own clothes-cleansing-combo, i was nervous about switching out my dryer cord. you see, the dryer had a 4-prong cord, where as my wall outlet only had a 3-prong socket. disconnecting the existing cord and installing a new one was supposed to be a “piece of cake.” it never is with me.
for starters, i don’t own many tools. if i haven’t acquired them through the purchase and assembly of random household items, then i haven’t got them. i was equipped with a screwdriver (the tool and the alcoholic beverage), a monkey wrench and a flashlight. what more could i possibly need?
i took the new cord out of the packaging. hmm. this cord is super stiff. this is going to be a bitch. i set it aside.
i continued to unscrew the back panel of the dryer. what i really needed was one of those wrenches that looks like a pac man/letter C thing, but of course, i was not thinking ahead. instead, i went out to my car, found a money wrench in my trunk and decided to put my improvisation skills to the test. they should give awards for such things…my mantle would be filled. anyway, i took off the panel and then it hit me: w.t.f. these cords have colors to them, while the one i am about to install has the same amount of connectors, yet no colors. i am going to cook myself.
while saying a quick prayer and contemplating whether i should get drunk prior to electrocution or not, i took off the old cord and tried to feed the new, mono-colored cord through the tiny hole it allowed me. it’s not gliding through like the other one did. what the hell?
i pushed and pulled and just about jabbed myself in the eye with a screwdriver when an epiphany occurred. what could make this easier? lube. good old lubrication. do i spit on it? no. wait…i have just the thing.
i ran in to my house and grabbed some KY Jelly. i don’t use it for anything else, so i might as well put it on my household appliances. but wait, is lube a conductor? when i plug this in, will i electrocute myself and then proceed to burn down my entire townhouse community?
i decided to phone a friend.
friend answers on the other end, “hello?”
“hi. is lube a conductor?” i asked.
“what?” he asked back.
“lube…lubrication…KY Jelly…do you know if that can conduct electricity?”
“i don’t know, but what are you doing?” (fair question.)
“i am trying to hook up a new dryer cord and it’s not slipping through the hole easily…so i put some lube on it.” i said.
“why do you own lube, you butt pirate?”
“let’s not get in to details right now, my fingers are all lube-y. i’ll let you know soon, though, if i need flowers delivered to the local hospital or not. thanks, bye,” and i hung up.
thanks to my genius lubrication idea, i was able to fit the cord through the hole. be sure to write KY and tell them of this story, i thought to myself. i could possibly be the next “jared the subway guy,” except for lube.
i connected all of the wires that needed connecting (thanks to my monkey wrench) and put the back panel back on. this is probably the metal shield that protects the dumbasses from the flames.
up next was putting on the silver dryer tube. finally…it was time for the easy part. not so much. the zip ties that came in the box with the slinky-like contraption were old and apparently past their “i am going to work for you” prime. i tried to fasten the first zip tie. FUCK you, mr. zip tie. of course nothing can go easily around here. and naturally, i don’t own zip ties. i have never found the need to own some until now. good going, renee.
with my half-assed zip ties in place, it was time to plug in the dryer to the wall. i grabbed the cord and swallowed hard. i put the three dryer prongs up to the outlet and stopped. should i turn off the power out here first? i mean, i have come this far without killing myself, i might as well make this a happy ending. i turned to the fuse box and flipped the switch. it made me feel better knowing that i possibly turned off the power to the outlet. (who knew for sure, the fuse box was poorly labeled, so i was crossing my fingers that i had picked the right switch.)
i picked up the dryer cord and plugged it in to the wall while i closed my eyes. part of me envisioned an outburst of flames, resulting in burnt flesh. another part of me said a prayer (again) and hoped that i wouldn’t look like a burnt little cookie in a few seconds. if i get any more dark complected, i will never pass as a little white girl again. i am already having issues with that.
the plug went in without a hitch and i was still pale and not engulfed in flames. this was a good thing. i flipped the fuse switch back on. okay, here’s the real test, i am going to turn on the dryer and see if i finally set something on fire.
i selected my drying option and turned the dryer on. it worked! it effing worked! the final test was passed! i have not lit myself, or any nearby object on fire! amazing!!! (i briefly considered applying for the bomb squad due to my overwhelming success.)
i leaned back against the wall and let out a sigh of relief.
eyebrows? check.
all limbs still connected to the body? check.
next time anything like this arises am i going to get a boyfriend to do this shit for me? check.
i always joke about how “multi-ethnic” i look. depending on the day, i can look hispanic, asian or native american. why look like a little white girl when i don’t have to? these ethnicities never really come in handy for me, it’s not like i could take advantage of them to get college scholarships or anything, they usually just confuse people. here’s proof:
i was out last night with my friend sean getting pizza and beer at a local restaurant. when ordering my beer, i handed my I.D. to the waiter and continued talking to my friend. i held my hand out to get my license back, but the waiter just looked at the I.D. and me with a perplexed look on his face. he turned my license over, studied the back, tried to bend it to see if it was fake, looked for the holograms and everything. at this point, i was just as confused as he was.
“um, is everything okay?” i finally asked, still holding my hand out for my I.D.
“i think, but i don’t know. i mean, you’re white, but the girl in this picture is asian. are you sure this is you?” he asked back.
i started laughing. “that’s exactly what i thought when i got my license at the DMV. great, i can’t even use my own I.D. because i don’t look ‘asian enough’ in person.”
he still served me anyway. i suppose it’s because he felt bad for me. he was probably thinking, “if that girl is dumb enough to use a fake I.D. of someone who isn’t even the same ethnicity as her, she must be in dire need of a drink. dumb ho.”
dear santa,
as i had mentioned in my previous letter, i am following up with you after my disappointing christmas morning. i woke up at 7 a.m. only to first realize that you did not bless me with a new pair of breasts. i peeped down my shirt to see the same pair that i look at every day. when i checked my bank account to see if you left me $8,000 instead, i noticed that you neglected that option, as well. i guess i will have to endure one more year of less-than-average sized boobs.
when i finally got out of bed (with my small breasts) i looked out back and saw the same, broken screen door that i always see. if you “replaced” my screen door with another broken one, then you have one sick sense of humor, santa.
i turned on the t.v. and started watching the news. i normally don’t watch the news, so for a second i thought that you actually came through and gave me a couple of I.Q. points for christmas. but then i realized that the news was the only thing on t.v. at that point, so i wasn’t really any smarter. i had no choice but to watch the news.
and this leads me to my last christmas request…the t.v. i didn’t get a new one. i still can’t get HGTV. it’s driving me nuts to think that there is a full hour of “first time home buyers” shows starting at 7 p.m. that i am missing.
next year, maybe i won’t spend all of my money on steak and vodka christmas eve. if i leave you cookies (or maybe a vodka drink) will you please consider granting my wishes? and i will try harder to be put on the “nice” list…or at least come up with better excuses for my “naughty” behavior.
sincerely,
renee “still pissed about her boobs” carol
dear santa,
i felt the need to write you a letter, although i have reached twenty-five years of age. sure, i might be a little old, but with age comes new requests of what i would like for christmas. seeing as how i don’t have an (in)significant other to get me what i want, you seem like the man for the job.
let’s start with the age old question of, “have you been naughty or nice?”
it depends. if you consider “naughty” to be one who has cussed on a daily basis, had inappropriate thoughts of people of the opposite sex (daily, as well), farted on someone else’s pillow and purposely paired mis-matched socks together after doing laundry, then sure, i’ve been naughty. but it’s not like i have lit somebody’s house on fire and called their sister a whore. (this year.)
if being “nice” entails donating money to people on the street to support their bad habits, telling people that they look great despite the fact that they’ve gained a few pounds, or buying tamales out of the back of a van from a very ethnic looking young man to support “local businesses,” then i guess you can say that i’ve been nice, too.
it all comes down to the situation. i am sure that i have great explanations for the naughty and irresponsible things that i’ve done.
with my confessions out of the way, i’d like to fast forward to my wish list.
for christmas this year, i would like:
1. a new, bigger pair of boobs. being twenty-five, i am almost certain that i am done growing, and it would take a miracle for them to enlarge on their own. (this is where you would come in.) so please, bless me with a new, larger set of breasts…or $8,000 so i can buy my own at a later date.
2. a new screen door for my townhouse. only because my dog blasted through mine trying to catch a lizard earlier this year.
3. a higher I.Q. i know that i am not the dumbest person on earth, but sometimes i feel like it…and i would also like to beat the twelve-year-olds on “are you smarter than a fifth grader?” those schmucks hustle me every time.
4. a new T.V. i am grateful for the ancient one that i am borrowing from a friend, but i am disappointed at the fact that it won’t pick up all of my hi-jacked cable channels. without HGTV, i might go insane. (oh, i didn’t mention my hi-jacked cable? go ahead, put that on my “naughty” list. gosh.)
i know you have a lot of requests to grant, but if you could find the time to fit me in to your busy schedule, i would appreciate it. if i can only choose one thing, i guess i’d like to have #1 the most…because having bigger breasts just might solve all of my life’s problems in general.
before i let you go, please note that i don’t have a chimney for you to come down…but i am sure there are bricks lying around somewhere outside that you could catapult through my sliding glass door. i think that’s how the santa in mexico does it…or so i hear.
have a safe journey tonight, and i will be following up with you tomorrow.
sincerely,
renee
p.s. i would have made cookies, but while at the grocery store today, i decided to spend all of my money on vodka, soda water and steak. (please don’t put this on my “naughty” list, too. i think i already have one too many strikes against me.)
…i am referring to the list of things that i have accomplished. let’s add “baking a cheesecake successfully” to that list. other things on my “accomplished list” would include “making it to my mid-twenties without getting knocked up” and “doing at least 2 pull-ups without breaking my arms off.” as you can see, i am not good at very many things…i am still working on this.
while my internet was down all day on monday for the most part, i thought, hmm, what can i do with my time? i’ve got it. let’s make a cheesecake. and so i did.
i strolled in to the grocery store with a list in my hand a cheesecake dream in my heart. i rolled my grocery cart down the isles, cringing at every wheel roation that birthed a gut-wrenching “squeak.” i always seem to grab the retarded carts. (i seem to attract the same kind of men, too. hmm.)
anyway, i managed to grab all of the ingredients (and a springform pan…because i was in need of one) and halted myself when i grabbed the chocolate wafer cookies to make the crust. WTF. $4.59 for a package of dry, chocolately flavored wafers that i am going to smash up? someone get me the phone number to the cookie-pricing committee. gosh.
so, i returned home with all of my ingredients and started to make the crust. sure, smashing the cookies like a crazy person and mixing them with melted butter was easy…it was the “pressing the crust to the bottom of the pan and two inches up the side” part that was the bitch.
(nope, it’s not dirt in there…this time.)
after i had finished getting black cookie crumbs out of my nail beds, i worked on the filling. that part was easy…and thank goodness i own an electric beater. mixing cream cheese with a fork is not as effective. (yes, i’ve tried it.)
i poured the mix in to my crust creation and put it in the oven. oh, shit. i totally kind of effed my kitchen in the process, i thought to myself.
when it came time to take my masterpiece out of the oven (approx. 55-65 minutes later) i was a little pissed to see that it had cracked. i mean, i followed my cookbook “insider information” and placed a shallow pan of water on the bottom rack to keep it from drying out.
guess it didn’t work very well. oh well, at least it didn’t totally fail. i don’t think i would have survived another failure moment in my life…because i have so many so far.
after the cake had cooled, i pulled the pan off…
…and wah-lah. i don’t completely suck at everything. who knew?
why make an entire cheesecake that you won’t eat all yourself, renee?
simple: because if i am ever going to land a man, i am going to need to rely on something other than my boy-ish good looks and charming personality. those two things only go so far…cheesecake will make up for the rest of it.
i received my rebate check in the mail today, and laughed when i saw to whom it was addressed:
i mean, oil stop and i have been living together for the past few months and decided that the wedding will be in the spring of 2010. we plan on naming our first child “fuel injector.”
romance at it’s finest…
1. i own 69 pairs of underwear. (and, no, i am not making this number up.) i find this to be a little excessive. let me break this down: there are seven days in a week, i do laundry once a week, only wear one pair of underwear per day and own only one set of genitalia that will be placed in to said pairs of underwear. this means that i could probably survive with seven pairs of underwear, if need be. seven pairs are what one would technically need, yet 69 pairs are what i own. does anyone else see the problem with this? and no, i did not have anything better to do today than count how many pairs of underwear i own.
2. the show “so you think you can dance” should change their name to “so you think you can commit sexual felonies?” there has been a second person who works on the show to have a sexual felony charge against him recently. check tmz.com for info if you’re interested. sorry to break it to you, dad, that the people on your favorite t.v. show are turning out to be pervs. i know how much you love watching that show, in the living room with all of the lights off and the surround sound blasting your cochlear hairs out of functionability. when i witnessed this ritual in person, it was a little odd, and writing about it really isn’t giving you any breaks, pops.
…but i should know that white girls, booze and latino bars don’t add up.
yep. it’s story time, and if you’ve got nothing better to look at (your favorite porno site upped their monthly rates…you’ve googled lindsay lohan’s vagina one too many times and it’s old news…or puppiesinbaskets.com has a pending PETA case against them…whatevs) then this story might help you kill some time.
back story: it was a saturday night, i had just got home from work and was getting ready to go out for my friend’s birthday. i hopped on facebook really quick (yes, facebook. shut it.) and updated my status. “i don’t work until tuesday…what trouble can i get in to?!?” i posted. bad idea. i would like to think of this as “the beginning to a really bad night that i brought upon myself via facebook status update.” (this just goes to show that facebook is slowly starting to rule the world.)…anyway….i arrived at my friend’s house (erin and ryan’s) and we left for buffalo wild wings. that’s ryan’s favorite place, so naturally we went there to hang out on his birthday. after a couple of drinks and seeing that the bar was empty after the football games ended, we decided that we were going to migrate to another bar. the one we were originally going to drive to was too far, so we settled on a place that was more “on the way home-ish.” (bad idea number 1.)
“why don’t we go to that bar that had a ten dollar cover charge? i’m sure it’s not ten bucks tonight, and it looked packed last time. could be a good time. want to check it out?” ryan asked.
“sure, it’s your birthday, let’s do whatever,” i answered back.
we grabbed our things, walked out the door and got in the car to head to the other bar. when we pulled up to El Charro (should have been bad indication number 1), it took us a little while to find a parking spot, but we managed and walked up to the line. as erin and i were paying to get in, we saw ryan getting frisked/searched (bad indication number 2) by one of the bouncers.
“dude, they just frisked me. what kind of place is this?” ryan asked.
we peeked our heads in to the bar and we found our answer. we were the only white people in the place (bad indication number 3.) we were three lonely salmon in a sea of hot sauce (latinos.) now for me, this usually isn’t a problem. i can pass as a latina chick given the right complexion and pair of hoop earrings. erin, on the other hand, is a little blond girl that stuck out like a sore thumb.
“wow, we are the only white people in here,” one of us said. but, not being haters, we continued on in to the bar to have a good time.
we ordered three shots of tequila and three coronas, naturally. (bad idea numbers 2 and 3.) erin and i, being females, decided that we needed to use the restroom together and walked off toward the bathrooms. there wasn’t any line yet, just a bunch of “classy” latinas walking in and out to check their lipliner and weaves in the mirror (bad indication numbers 4-27.) when we came out, ryan had made a friend who bought us another beer and we were standing around, shooting the shit with our new found “amigo.” in the middle of our conversation, we saw a black santa claus walking around the bar, chatting and taking pictures with the patrons. (black santa at a latino bar? bad indication number 28.) he was jolly, and probably just as buzzed and misplaced as we were, so we decided to grab a few pictures with him for ourselves. ’tis the season for pictures with a drunk santa claus, i guess.
after we thanked santa for the photo op, he walked off in another direction and we continued on. not more than five minutes later, a fight broke out (bad indication number 29), and who decided to go all chuck norris on a group of latinos? none other than our good old st. nick (bad indication number 30.) ryan pulled erin and i back from the mess, where we were able to witness bottles being broken, white and red velvet being torn and a large latino man pick up a chair and break it over someone’s back (bad indication number 31.)
“wow, who gets in to a fight with santa claus?” erin asked.
i didn’t really have an answer for that, but i am guessing that the latino-chair-breaker man will NOT be getting menudo’s greatest hits in his stocking this year.
the fight was broken up, the mess was cleaned, and the three of us white folk and our new friend walked around the bar. we were having a good time until some beer was spilled. (isn’t this usually how white people get in to fights?!?)
this guy was fooling around and managed to make erin spill her drink all over her pants. the guy gave an apologetic nod, and then turned away from us.
“hey, dude (cholos don’t like being called ‘dudes’…bad idea number 4), you just made me spill my whole drink all over myself, so would you mind grabbing me another beer?” erin asked. (bad idea number 5 is to assume that any douche will buy you another drink if the odds are not in his favor of him making out with you.)
“look, i said i was sorry,” the guy retorted.
(this is where it should have ended, but of course, it didn’t.)
“right, but the nice thing to do would be to get me another drink,” erin mentioned.
“he said he was sorry,” the guy’s girlfriend snapped back.
“oh, okay, apparently you guys just don’t have manners then,” erin replied. (bad idea number 6.)
as i stood there, watching/listening to all of this take place in a very short period of time, i turned around to grab ryan.
“ry, you might need to come over here to get erin,” i said.
as those words were pouring out of my mouth, ryan handed me his glasses and got up in mr. cholo’s face, while erin and mr. cholo’s girlfriend were toe-to-toe. great. the crazy latina chick is going to fight the only blond girl in this bar.
“come on, you guys. let’s forget about it and go somewhere else,” i said. sure. trying to calm down angry, drunk people is like trying to give yourself a brazilian bikini wax. it never works out very well.
somehow the fight had started and the only three gringos (us) in the bar were involved. i mean, santa claus was out, so we really didn’t have anyone on our side. the bouncers rushed over to break it up, and as ryan and erin were getting hauled away, the crazy latina chick (allegedly) broke a beer bottle and threw it at erin, thus resulting in a lot of blood and mrs. cholita being arrested. awesome. the flying beer bottle landed on erin’s forehead, and now the EMTs were being called in.
we were escorted out to the front of the bar where the police and EMTs were waiting. while being questioned by a latino officer, erin had managed to call the crazy latina chick a “cholita” a total of about 148 times. (bad idea number 7 is to use mild racial slurs when being questioned by an officer of the same race as the crazy chick you are talking trash about.)
when all was said and done at the bar, we were recommended to a local hospital to stitch erin up. before we left, a white cop came over to us and said, “what were you guys doing here tonight, anyway?” as he half smiled.
“who knows,” was our response.
…and that is the story of how three gringos went out looking for a “good time” on a saturday night and ended up in the emergency room.
while packing her things for her move to florida, my friend amy sent me a picture text message with something similar to this image. she had bought some “space saver” bags and they all contained the “do not put child in this product like an idiot” warning label.
“yeah, because i was planning on putting a couple of children in there, along with a small dog,” she had text along with the picture.
i responded, “i think i need that warning label printed on my vagina.”
“do i smell our next tattoo?!?” she texted back.
sure, these labels are for dumbasses, and that’s exactly why i need this image permanently inked on my lady bits…to deter the dumbasses who actually think sleeping with me might be a good idea. i don’t spoon…men might get a little disappointed.