whiskey in a teacup . com

The normally leech-like Red Cross has rejected me once again! I tried to donate blood yesterday, but I was apparently running a fever and was given a very sad deferral letter. Of course if I had an infection my blood would be undesirable, but I suspect that my elevated temperature was actually related to the fact that I walked for twenty minutes in wretched humidity to get to the blood drive. For reasons unknown, I am extremely heat sensitive and tend to turn into a sweaty, dizzy, disgusting mess when exposed to temperatures above 65 degrees. (My Russki genes are more suited to the tundra than to the vile swampy air of New England summers, but what can you do?) The Red Cross dispatched me back into the oppressive afternoon with unpricked veins, but were nice enough to give me a cold bottle of water to prevent me from igniting on the way home. They also gave me a gift certificate for a carton of ice cream.

Alas, the hemorrhaging masses of greater Boston will have to do without my molten blood for a while longer.

At some point this mid-afternoon I decided to take a break from studying (read: lounging the backyard, glancing periodically at my textbook) and drop some Netflix in the mail. This required ambulating to the local plaza, and once there I decided to get an iced beverage. For reasons unknown I bypassed my preferred cafe for the oft-reviled gashouse and ordered an iced latte. After waiting for an unusually long time (fidgeting awkwardly by the counter, as one does), I received my drink in a large plastic cup with no lid or straw. I procured the aforementioned and was outfitting my cup with the lid when, through some accident of physics, I managed to discharge the foamy milk from my drink all over myself.

After that unfortunate money shot, I went to open my straw using the standard procedure: striking one end of the straw against the counter to eject the opposite end from the wrapper, then gripping the exposed bit of straw in my teeth and pulling off the rest of the wrapper with my thumb and forefinger. Because this cafe uses weird, brittle straws that I suspect are made of some biodegradable non-plastic material, my maneuver caused the straw to develop a long crack that then made my beverage difficult to imbibe and enjoy. I’m all for saving the world, I guess, but what the fuck? A straw’s sole purpose is to provide a mechanism through which you can suck delicious, delicious iced drinks, and to stay more or less intact during that process.

This is unacceptable, is what it is!

I got my hair cut today, which is a task I can bring myself to do about thrice a year. As a Semite, my hair causes me endless grief, but over the years I have learned to wrangle it into two acceptable styles: air dried into a mass of waves and curls and clipped into a barrette, or blow dried and ironed to utter flatness (until the vaguest hint of humidity touches it, at which point it Jews up again, but I digress). Every now and then I’ll get a stylist who will iron my hair for me after cutting it, which is just about the fanciest feeling ever, but mostly they just blow dry it the way they think the average long-haired female consumer would want it to look.

This doesn’t always work out so well, because my beauty ideal is more “Isabelle Adjani in Herzog’s Nosferatu” than “Miss Piggy“. I don’t want bounce, I don’t want flounce, and I don’t even care if I look “pretty” as long as I feel like myself. So when the chick who did my hair today spun my chair around to show me her creation, I smiled and paid her and then ran outside and put my voluminous, magazine-cover coif in a ponytail and dashed home. When I get at it with my iron I’m sure it will look fine, and the cut itself is fine, but I’ve never felt more like a) a little girl playing dress-up or b) a douchebag than I did during that five minute walk home.

I received an email from my ex-roommate’s ex-boyfriend today, alerting me to the fact that said ex-roommate had just moved in with my ex-boyfriend. My only contact with any of these people for the past several years has been when my ex occasionally writes to me wanting to “get together”. While I find the whole thing amazingly random and weird, I would generally prefer not to think about it. (Put it this way: when I lived with this chick, our bedrooms were separated by only a few feet. I have heard the sounds she makes during intimate moments. As for the ex, I dated him for a year. One could say that I have a horrifying surplus of data about this union.)

However, I was sufficiently intrigued by this turn of events to google the ex-roommate and see if she was up to any other madness. One of the only results for her name was an article published a few years ago in the local disreputable newspaper about messy roommates. In the article she describes me as “passive-aggressively” leaving dishes in the sink and letting my cat shit in the tub, an incident after which she “shook me awake”. I was never that messy a roommate, but I was a teenager when we lived together and I was definitely less concerned with utter cleanliness back then. So we’d get into arguments about it, but people who share apartments always fight about that shit, so it’s hardly newsworthy. (Oh wait–it is!) Anyway, one day Petra took a dump in the bathtub and I didn’t notice it right away, and instead of telling me (see also: bedrooms mere feet apart), she sent an angry missive to my work email telling me what a dick I was. (Clearly, I was the more passive-aggressive roommate.) There was no shaking awake or anything like that, but what kind of journalistic integrity can you really expect from the Globe, or from people who write stories about several-year-old cat shit for the Globe?

Anyway, it’s true that when she and I lived together, I was sometimes slow to take out the trash. I just never expected that she’d wind up digging through my garbage can and taking the leftovers!

Good luck, kids.

Count Orlok has a penchant for biting his victims in the larynx, thereby missing the major vessels of the neck.

The other details pretty much check out.

Two statements my coworker made today, several moments apart:

1) “My natural hair color is pretty much the same as yours.”

2) “My natural hair color is poop brown.”