Sunday, May 6, 2007

There's No Place Like Gnome.

I have a garden gnome living in an empty KFC bucket in my room. How MTV cameras aren't following me around yet, I don't know. Recap of the week and then explanation as usual.

Monday was the waste-of-time Walk-a-thon. The Boner forced us to “donate” $75 to literally walk around the neighborhood for half an hour, during which me and Steph vandalized public property with advertisements for prostitutes [“I’am a hoe. For some fun, call SUGARBUSH at *insert Brenna’s cell number here*"]. After we went to Paneantico’s to fill my prosciutto and pretension quota for the month. Then we went to buy Steph a car; a silver [oh wait, sorry, “crystalline grey”] Subaru that I named The Raven because of its wing-like Spoiler. The rest of the school week was fairly ordinary. Now that there are only nine [eight?] school days left and all thoughts of education have vanished from student and faculty minds alike, we're in heavy movie mode, all of which enigmatically feature John Malkovich. Senioritis [Actually it’s gone beyond pedestrian senioritis. It’s like a dull impatience I just can't shake] is at an all time high and I am rebelling from doing anything that remotely resembles work for the remainder of the year.

Thankfully, Friday we had off because of our “kind work” from the Walk-a-thon, so I decided to host a little scavenger hunt. And by scavenger hunt, I mean a highly-competitive teamed car race throughout all of Brooklyn in pursuit of eternal glory and the following eccentric items:


THE HUNT LIST
ITEMS:
POINT VALUE:

1. An “Employees Must Wash Hands” Sign: 50 points
2. Teams must tag a bench on Shore between 79th and 85th, the find another Team’s tag and take a pic with it: 50 points
3. Picture of someone wearing lingerie: 50 points
4. Five pics with strangers, including: 20 points per picture
a. security guard/cop
b. a balding man wearing brown shoes
c. bar bouncer
d. senior citizen
e. waitress
5. Stolen condoms: 10 points
6. A periwinkle crayon: 20 points
7. A packet of ketchup from McDonald’s: 10 points
8. Picture of team walking through McD’s drive-through and ordering food: 75 points
9. A parking ticket: 50 points
10. A clip-on earring: 30 points
11. Picture of team with Winnie the Pooh: 10 points
12. Picture with Mike’s Chinese Cat: 30 points
13. Switch clothes with someone not on your team [picture is acceptable]: 50 points
14. Stolen garden gnome/Jesus statue: 100 points [200 for both]
15. Picture of team member in a stolen shopping cart: 50 points
16. Membership card from an adult film store [must be in team member’s name]: 75 points
17. Picture of team in a photo booth: 30 points
18. Picture of a hickey [cannot be self-sucked, sucking must be in progress in the photo]: 25 points
19.Purple shoelaces: 20 points
20. Picture of someone getting tattooed: 80 points [180 if it’s a team member]
21. Picture of team member with a dog with a doggy biscuit in team member’s mouth: 90 points
22. Picture of team member wearing bowling shoes: 40 points
23. Picture of senior citizen flipping off team [cannot be team members’ grandparents]: 150 points
24. Flintstone vitamins: 30 points
25. A bowtie: 20 points
26. Picture of team in wigs/toupees: 40 points
27. Tube of Preparation H: 20 points
28. Ping pong paddle: 10 points
29. A dill pickle: 10 points
30. Something that says “Made in Canada” on it: 20 points
31. A skateboard: 10 points
32. An empty KFC bucket: 40 points
33. A funnel: 10 points
34. A kiwi: 10 points
35. A tambourine: 15 points
36. Picture of members in front of a bakery: 20 points
37. Picture of team with hamster/gerbil: 50 points
38. Finished Sudoku puzzle: 50 points
39. Picture with a map of Narnia/ Middle Earth: 30 points
40. Picture with a Swahili dictionary: 20 points
41. Picture of team with a bottle of spermicide: 20 points
42. Picture of team member hoolah-hooping: 30 points
43. Picture of team with a Twister game set up and ready to play: 100 points
44. Picture of team with an actual pitched tent [not, I repeat, not a boner.]: 100 points
45. Picture of team member with a bowling trophy: 20 points
46. A boomerang: 40 points
47. A tape that teaches French [picture is acceptable]: 50 points
48. A wooden spoon: 10 points
49. A toilet seat: 50 points
50. A whoopee cushion: 20 points
51. Picture with a Daniel Steel novel with team reenacting the cover: 50 points
52. Picture with an 8 ball: 20 points [50 if actual 8 ball is present]
53. Picture of team with someone in a cowboy hat: 10 points
54. Picture of team with someone with a mullet: 50 points
55. A bible [bible must be present in every picture taken by the team. Oops, guess you should have read through the whole list first huh?]: 100 points

There were three teams, three cars and three hours to complete the fifty-five tasks. Team Cruiseship was me, Dre, Mike, Chris and Angie; Team Whistler was Jackie, Jamie, Amanda and Jesse; and Team No-Name was Ana and her boys. Team Cruiseship did pretty well; obviously we got the garden gnome [who is in my possession and has been named Nigel the Fabulous], we walked through McD’s drive through, got an old fart to flip us off, found a toilet seat, stole Preparation H, the periwinkle crayon, Sudoku, spermicide, Flintstone vitamins and condoms from various pharmacies, etc. At one point we were literally in the ghetto looking for a tattoo place so that Angie could get a smiley face and put us in first place for eternal glory but tattoos aren't cheap and an army of giant rats stole Deirdre’s salad so we had to escape. In the end, Team Whistler won with their enthusiasm and amazing-ness, but Team Cruiseship came in second with a respectable 1000 points [Woot!]

However, our party was cut short, in what Mike correctly described as a “dog pissing on your Carvel”, when Team Whistler got in a car accident during their victory lap. They sped right into a mint-condition Mustang at a red light, though, thank Coco Peru times two, nobody was seriously hurt. It did shake everyone up though but I'm so happy Yesterday was Cinco de Mayo and Glenn’s birthday [the golden oldie is the big 4-5] so I had to choose to celebrate one or the other. Luckily, Jody’s was taking Glenn out so I was going to go hang out with Jessica and get wrecked. But of course, excrutiating physical pain took over [due to over-exertion from exercising (when your abs hurt when you sneeze, you know you're in bad shape) and severe nausea from ancient homemade pizza crust] so I spent the night in with my Tivo. Today, Jody is throwing another insane Dinner Party competition [although I really shouldn't talk because my hunt-making abilities are definitely inherited from her side of the family] so me, Hootie, Steph and maybe Mel and Manda will probably go out for dinner and a movie. I have to go clean up the war zone that it is my room. Ciao.

The Adventures of Brooklyn Girl in Boston

I have literally had this post festering in my email box for a week now and have just discovered it. This will be long so I recommend you stretch beforehand. Anyhoo, here it is, better late than never:

I'm writing this in Pre-Cal and Sister Helen keeps interrupting my writing spree with her teaching. What does she think this is? school? Preposterous. Anyhoo, got back last Saturday from Boston, which was a lot of fun even though the weather did not parallel the good mood. Me, Deidre and her parents left Thursday after school for Boston, hit shitloads of explicable traffic in Connecticut [apparently the rest of the world has caught on that Connecticut bites the big one and wanted to get out of there as fast as they could] but still managed to make it to Massachusetts at a decent hour. We stayed at a nice hotel, which though didn't have a Neutrogena bathroom cosmetic line for me to steal, did have beds of bliss, mini-muffins and "Pride and Prejudice" on demand, all three of which are key factors to my existence.

The next morning, me and Deidre went to BU's [or The Boo as to it will now be referred] open house while her parents moved out her sister from Northeastern. We got there late, right in the middle of the Dean's Welcome, plus we were parentless and New Yorkers [They can smell the subway on us. They're like enraged wolves], so we really started off on the right foot. After a few presentations, we got to eat lunch at one of the cafeterias. The pasta was horrid but it did have pretty good coffee [Wow, a stretch for Beantown] and even a goldfish dispenser. A goldfish dispenser! That, coupled with the red plastic cups and "Baba O'Riley" [see October 9th post], have assured me that The Boo is indeed home.

However, once the cheese-coated high of the dispenser wore off, we realized that a lot of students were eating alone during lunch, which, aside from Paris Hilton trying to write a book, is the saddest thing I've ever seen. Eating is such a communal process to me, like the amount of calories you're lining your esophagus with is meaningless when you have a bunch of friends around you doing the same so that you'll all die together with high cholesterol. If I have no one to sit with at lunch next year, I will literally hide in my dorm in shame, gnawing on a year-old rice cake.

Anyway, after stalking other open housers for an hour to make sure we didn't get left behind, we were taken on a dorm tour by Chow, one of the Benetton-Ad-looking tour guides that were obnoxiously cheery [like Happy Girl cheery] and most likely on something. The hallways of the freshmen dorms look like something out of "Hostel" but the actual rooms are nice-sized and pretty tolerable. However, said tolerability may not correlate to the subject of roommates. Think about it: you are practically encaged with a stranger in a two-by-four for an entire year. What if I have an obsessive compulsive cleaner who will be revolted by my slob lifestyle and will douse me with Windex in my sleep as punishment for my messiness? Or what if I have a roommate who performs routine animal sacrifices involving ferrets in the middle of the night? Or, God forbid, someone who chews with their mouth open when they eat. THE HORROR! THE HORROR! Or, worst of all, what if my roommate isn't the strange one? What if I am?

Enough anxiety. After, all of the accepted students had a Q&A with actual students of The Boo. It was all major and minor mumbo-jumbo until finally a Jeri-curled Jew asked about partying and fake ID's, and the real shit came out. Afro boy is my kind of people. We took a campus tour, during which me and Deidre tortured the poor guide girl with our incessant pestering about the student store [which has its own Jamba Juice and Starbucks. I am going to be the most caffeinated girl on campus], which we raided. After that, because, again, apparently the scent of Brooklyn is specifically putrid in the nasal canals of Boston cabbies and therefore they ignored our frantic waving hands and left us stranded in the rain, we had to trek a mile in our matching The Boo hoodies to Northeastern. It appears that walking in Northeastern territory in The Boo hoodies is like Don Imus walking through Harlem- it’s a guaranteed death act.

While we did almost get hit by a train and had the fury of Northeasterners burned into our retinas, we managed to get there in one piece. We helped her sister move out of her apartment, which was inexplicably covered in feathers and thumbtacks, stated ourselves on Au Bon Pain and started the long drive home, salvaged by “The Devil Wears Prada”. We got home late, I went to bed later and geniusly took off work on Saturday so that I could catch up on sleep and Tivo love [sidenote: My Tivo officially knows I’m a notorious faghag. It records anything with the word “gay” in the title or description. It’s bad when a nonhuman digital recording device knows me better than some of the actual human specimens I know.].

Saturday night didn’t go out because my brain was still on snooze mode, so instead had lively conversations about marijuana and multiplication tables with intoxicated fifteen-year-olds over wine and cigarettes. Sunday, I couldn’t skip work again so I had to spend a day at the office, though, thankfully, I was left alone most of the day. Okay, so that’s it for this post. I’ll save the rest for the next one. Ciao.