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| forsooth! i've got me a new blog. check out
readysteadygo (rsgo.blogspot.com for the link-impaired) for all your new info re: helen's life needs.
MWAH. | | |
| Do you, [insert name here], take this woman, [insert name here], to be your lawfully wedded wife?
I decided this morning that I'm going to open a matchmaking service. I'm not talking your standard-issue Yenta-style "oy gevalt, do I have the woman for you!" type thing. My matchmaking service has - as do all good businesses - a niche: people who really need to get married. Match up the people who need health insurance with the people who need green cards. The workplace-oppression homosexuals with those who are trapped by the constraints of their trust funds. I think this idea is brilliant - not only does it undermine the abstracted "love" that underscores the state's manipulation of marriage as a social norm, but it helps people!
The service would be totally straightforward (though for reasons of privacy and fraud protection quite secretive): you send in an application and a hundred bucks. Explain why you want to get married, what you stand to gain from it, and what you can offer someone else in return. Lay out the terms under which you'd accept a marriage, and under what conditions you'd be willing to leave it. Then I (and my trusty staff) will sort through the other applications and find you a match of relative geographic proximity (in-state marriages are easier when it comes to income tax). You yea or nay the match, and when we set up the marriage you shell out an additional chunk of money. We'll take care of setting up a prenup that clearly identifies under what circumstances the marriage can be terminated, what financial or benefit-related claims the spouses can make on one another, and the minimum/maximum interaction the couples are expected to have with one another. You get married, we maybe throw in a free cake as an ironic gesture, and *poof* you've got your green card/health insurance/beard.
This is the greatest idea I've ever had. All I need now is a catchy name and a business plan. Suggestions, as always, welcome. | | |
| my brother's dream for america
written by joseph, 8th-grade wunderkind and sibling to moi, for a Veterans' Penmanship Contest,* entry in which was required for his US History class
My dream for America:
Is that we don’t screw anything up, and Bush doesn’t get re-elected.
There isn’t much to say besides that. I come from a family that emmigrated to the US after the Holocaust. I don’t really have any roots in America, or anything tying me here that I couldn’t find in Canada. Sure we’ve got the biggest army in the world, and our influence in found in almost every corner of the world. Free speech, freedom of religion, freedom to write essays like this and send it to a contest for $10,000 in bonds.
Hey, judges: Do you have any dreams for America? Apart from your personal life’s goals, like making money and finding love, do you have a hope for this entity of 205-odd million people, half of whom have only been here for 2 or 3 generations?
Well, you should. When or if America falls - say, because no-one left in the world likes us, or our army is too big and revolts and we live in a dictatorship under some old white general, what will you do about it?
You can say, Oh hey, it’s not my fault! I had no say in any of those decisions. But when the jihad comes to our front door, you know what they’ll say? No way, Mr. Smith. You live in a democracy! You voted, you had a say in who decided!
And as they drag you away, you’ll think, Hey, it’s really more of a republic…
You could cross the borders and flee to Mexico, or Canada. But will that help? No sir-ee.
So pretty much to sum it all up, really, when you get right down to it, you have to care about America. Because its reputation on the whole reflects us as citizens. So there. My dream.
Is that we don’t screw anything up, and Bush doesn’t get re-elected.
for more Joseph "screaming midget" Rosner brilliance, click here.
*personally, I was unaware that eighth graders were given awards based on the penmanship of veterans. What the hell. Three cheers for arbitrary criteria for success. | | |
| ***update (11/19): hair is very very dark reddish brown. I look like a Russian mobster's moll. Trés sultry.
again with the hair and the makeup and the . . .
it's that time of year again. the time when i get sick of how I look, and yet am still entirely unable to make a decision without external support. Here's how it works: Click on the link you think my new haircolor should be. Oh man the democracy is killing me.
dark brown
black
brownish red
red red
lightish blonde
maintain the status quo (brown with blondish streaks).
Thank you for saving me from autonomy, friends. | | |
| 'Asininity should not accept grave tasks, but he errs, too, who gives an ass a watchman's job.'
- Nabokov, who should know betterAh, friends, truly winter is upon us: today was marked by utter misery. Waking puffy-eyed to a morning of indecipherable Wittgenstein, followed by a lunch of what was apparently vomit en casserole, and then a walk to class through curiously (and painfully) painful chunks of ice falling from the sky. In the middle of our discussion on the subtle brilliance of poet Stevie Smith, my professor stopped midsentence, did a double-take at the window, and said "my god! it's snowing!" And so it was, and until the end of class I was deliriously happy with the prospect of flakes in hair, warm woolen mittens, bright copper kettles, etc., only to emerge from the building to find that what had for a few minutes been gloriously snowy snow was now just slucky mucky slush being slopped haphazardly from the rusty ice-cream scoop of the sky. Nothing like a healthy dose of metaphor to help you come to terms with that terrible sinking feeling of mid-November, when the end of semester starts lurching into the forseeable future (bringing with it its bastard children Impending Failure, Approaching Doom, and the rotten corpus of Holy Shit I'm Going To Die). According to my mother, what I need is a healthy dose of Familial Interaction, after which point I'll be recentered and ready to approach my studies with vim and, appropriately, vigor. The point she fails to realize (O dear mother. O she who nurtured me and drove me into major therapy) is that I don't want to approach my studies at all. Dear mother, dear professors, dear friends and mentors who see a glowing academic future on my horizon: take your vim - hell, throw the vigor in as well - and shove it where the tenure committees fear to tread. Give me comic books. Give me margins to doodle in. Give me unlimited, 24-hour-a-day internet access. Give me a subscription to Esquire and to Jane. Give me enough money to order a california roll, no wasabi, extra ginger delivered to my room once or twice a week. Give me all that, and leave me the hell alone. | | |
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