whiskey in a teacup . com

#1: The experience of a freshly microwaved hot pack rupturing in one’s hand, releasing its gel innards all over one’s index finger.  May cause one to exclaim, “Ah.  Ah!” while dashing for the sink.  Results in swollen red finger.

Happy birthday to my two birthday buddies, and may we all go cheerfully and healthily into the upcoming year.  I don’t know about y’all, but this particular birthday is a rough one for me (mostly for biological reasons–this is officially the last year of my mid-twenties and I’m still a nullipara) and I am not terribly elated.  However, there’s nothing to be done except to drink some beer, eat some pie and sushi, and steel oneself for yet another trip around the sun.  Huzzah!

I always thought the word “nightmare” was equine in derivation: a metaphor for sinister black mares stampeding through your head, causing your fears to hemorrhage out from your psyche in the form of bad dreams.  The internets, however, suggest it comes from “mara”, the name for an old Nordic demon that visits you in the night.  That’s way creepier, and pretty cool, but I still prefer my theory.

In the mid-nineties, my friend Becca and I used to spend many a sleepover watching The Net, a hokey thriller about a software engineer and some sort of hacking-related drama she gets into.  To demonstrate how high-tech the main character’s life is, she is shown using the internet to order a pizza.  Becca and I had always been considerably ahead of our peers in terms of computer skills and usage (we were beating Doom with cheat codes and playing around on IRC before most other kids even had an internet connection), but the notion of being able to order pizza online struck us (or, at least, me) as unfathomably cool and futuristic.  Nowadays I can’t imagine not ordering pizza online; every once in a while when Foodler goes down and I’m forced (forced!) to procure my Saturday night meal with a telephone and actual spoken words, I feel like I’m back in the fucking Stone Age.

Books and movies are usually dead wrong when they to envision the future; 1984 and 2001 have come and gone and they weren’t anything like the stories.  Current sci-fi tends to imagine us a few decades from now operating our flying cars in minimalist outfits made of shiny white fabrics, which has always struck me as unlikely…but by gum, The Net’s depiction of the Information Age has mercifully proven accurate.

I woke up around 4:30 this morning because I was shaking.  I was shaking because I was laughing.  I was laughing because I had been dreaming of helping Jared pick out clothes in a store, and he was trying on a shirt that I suspected was a women’s shirt.  He started to fret and adjust the shirt and then removed it, revealing a sheer camisole with florets.  Now, I love a man in drag, but it’s got to be in the right context.  I think we can all agree that “lace” and “Jared” do not go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

What the fuck is the point of the internet if people can’t legally post video of Tracy Morgan saying, “I’m the face of post-racial America.  Deal with it, Cate Blanchett!” on an awards show?  (Here, until it gets taken down.)

Our radio is tuned to play a talk station when the alarm goes off, and this morning we heard the following salacious tidbits within the space of a minute:

“Next up, a discussion about what might come out of Obama’s package!”

And, in a cunning metaphor describing the pitfalls of committing corporate fraud, “It’s like riding a tiger…you can’t get off without being eaten.”

In real life, we fell asleep on the couch and eventually stumbled into bed around two.  I lay awake for some time, petrified by various sounds (the radiator knocking, the cat walking around in the dark, distant traffic on the highway) and keeping my eyes squeezed shut so I wouldn’t see what I knew wasn’t there anyway.  I finally fell asleep and dreamed that I was being haunted or pursued by some sort of spectral threat, from which I fled through the streets of my hometown (as always).  At some point it became clear that I needed to sacrifice a pig and a selection of beers as an offering to the specter, and these items had to be relinquished into the ocean at Castle Island.  Jared helped me carry the loot down to the waterfront, which didn’t look right at all, and we wandered around in the spray looking for the right place to deposit the pig and beer, and then the alarm went off.