HELLO LADIES MY NAME IS COOPER BARNES

My cat has a Twitter now. A cat with Twitter, how ludicrous! The thought just makes you burst out laughing, right? I mean, how do cats use a social networking website? I just don’t get it. I just don’t get this cat of mine. I get to thinking about my cat. She is restless, needs attention, loses patience, seeks affection.

I bought a typewriter last weekend. Set me back 23 bones. Not a bad deal — it’s in good shape, although the ribbon is totally dried out. I ordered a new one the day I bought the typewriter, but I have no clue when it will arrive. The website I ordered it from emailed me about five days after I placed the order to tell me they shipped it, so they clearly aren’t on top of things.

What do I do with this typewriter, once I have the ribbon? I have nothing to write. When I mentioned to Eric that I wanted to get one, he called it pretentious — a fair comment, if I were actually someone who thought I would have some sort of literary cred with it. Let’s face it though, I don’t write anything. I certainly can’t write my personal statements on it. I don’t have any short stories or poems in my head. I am probably just going to end up typing “Hello world” once the new ribbon gets put in, and that will be that.

I’ve been reading Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer. The book is about Mr. Dyer’s attempt to write a “somber, academic study” on D.H. Lawrence after he graduates from university. It’s a book less about Lawrence and more about Dyer’s avoidance of writing this academic study, though he does sprinkle actual discussion about D.H. Lawrence in there. The discussions more often than not tend to center on published volumes of letters written by Lawrence.

I like the idea of writing letters to someone on the typewriter, and having them saved by that person and then when I die, they’re on display at my wake. That’s the best I can do, since they’re clearly not going to be published. Remember that letter Chris Burns received? That’s the sort of letter worth the time to read at your friend’s wake. Others include intimate letters about sexual dysfunction, mild depression, stories about the guy at work – that’s the best way to remember someone.

My neighbor just moaned. I’m outta here.

Gone off dat sloe gin

I watched about 35 minutes of Pink Flamingos today. I got to the point where that one guy jerks off and puts the semen in a syringe, then injects it into that passed out girl. I don’t know why, but that was the last straw. Not because I was offended; it’s gross, certainly, but also incredibly silly. I sort of decided I had better things to do, like act that scene out in real life. When the cat’s away, the mouse will play, you know?

I like the new Lupe Fiasco single. The dude has mentioned anime at least once in his raps, so I certainly won’t admit to him being a favorite of mine, but “I’m Beamin’” is a hot beat, son!!! It’s the new “A Milli,”  you heard it here first. Also, this is a really, really bad song. If Dre is doing those sort of raps on Detox, I want off this ride.

I may leave Facebook for a while, as you may have seen me pronounce on my Facebook status. That was a mistake to publicize on there, because you know I’ll be back, and then it will all just be more embarrassing. I’m considering leaving partially because I want to avoid negative exposure while all my graduate applications are floating out there. Also, I’m mostly on Facebook for the status updates, and Twitter just moves so much faster anyway. It’s easier to check on the go, and enough of my friends are on it that I don’t think I would miss out on a lot if I quit Facebook. I don’t get tagged in pictures anymore, so that excitement is gone. Also, maybe I will do some things that are a bit more productive if I have one less external distraction? I really doubt that, but who knows??? Maybe social networking is the only thing that ever hindered me in the past. Am I finally free to realize my full potential? Am I this generation’s Barack Obama? There are more similarities than you would think; we both like Jay-Z.

I’ll never leave you, blogosphere. Never.

Drinking a beer, blogging a post

The new Hot Chip album. What do you think? I can’t decide! I definitely think so far that it’s my least favorite, but I can’t figure out what it is that I dislike so much. I don’t think it’s dance-y enough for me. I don’t know, it’s not bad, but then again, who cares what I think?

The first two applications are done and mailed in to meet the January 15th deadline. More will be coming, and I hope to have everything finished by February. I don’t feel great about the effort I put forth in the first two, or even good. I don’t feel awful, which is a plus. That essay that was going to be my writing sample that I mentioned in my previous post? I abandoned it; it too was too much like slashing your way through a jungle. I was clearly working full time while writing it, and it shows in the editing process too. Too jumbled and muddled. I went with my senior seminar essay, which, even without revising, was a clearer and stronger essay. I revised it and sent it off, and I’m unsure what people are going to think about it. My expectations in general are fairly low, and I think that helps. That, and lots and lots of pills. Lots of pills.

Mom is on Twitter now. What is this world coming to?

Don’t think I forgot about you.

In a bit of embarrassing news, I’ve been sidelined for most of today with a hangover from drinking a six pack of beer last night.  It used to be that I had to drink a six pack to cope with the unbearable loneliness of existence, and now it just makes my tummy upset!  It’s a real testament to how the mighty have fallen since college.  I remember going to All You Can Drink nights at the Dukum during the summer and drinking an absurd amount of alcohol, then waking up the next morning to go to the rec center to squeeze out a few reps and high five with the bros.  The corporate world has clearly made me a pussy.  Literally.

I’m revising this essay for grad school applications, and man, does it suck.  Not so much the ideas, which I think are pretty sound, but the actual sentence structures and word choices are just sooooo…. I don’t know, retarded?  I’m spending my time basically rewriting large chunks to make them sound more eloquent, which may or may not be working.  There was a New Yorker piece I read a while back about people who take mentally enhancing drugs, like Aderall, or eat strange concoctions of foods and natural supplements because they think that it makes them mentally perform better.  I wish my parents had fed that to me in my formative school years.  Maybe then I could write a goddamn sentence I like, you know?

My neighbor has been moaning a lot today.  Too bad I don’t have a pizza boy outfit anymore.  She’s just begging for someone knocking at her door, asking if she ordered the 12″.  Hey-oooooooo!

A bit delinquent

So I’ve clearly been absent from the blogosphere.  I actually have two different posts that have been sitting as partially written drafts.  I never bothered picking them up again.  Maybe I’ll finish this one?  I don’t know, that’s what so exciting about all of this!  I could stop writing at any moment, and you (the potential reader) would never know that I wrote any of these words.  Or these words.  Or these words.  Or these words.  Or these words.  Or these words.  Or these words.  Or these words.

Enough of this buffoonery.  What have I been doing?  It’s really not been very much.  Much like anything that demands concerted effort from me, applying to grad school has been glacial.  I finally sent my professors the necessary materials to write me recommendations.  My personal statement is in a less shitty form than the previous draft, and I’m trying to make it even less shitty.  Eventually, I hope to be able to look at it and say, “I’ve seen shittier.”  That’s the benchmark at which I judge myself under any circumstance.  Feels good, man.

The GRE is over with as of last month.  Official scores were a 690 on verbal, 560 on quantitative, and 5.0 on writing.  I scored solidly in the 39th percentile for the quantitative secton.  Of course, no schools will be looking at that score, so I really did myself a disservice by not scoring a 420 (though as I was taking the test, I became genuinely convinced that I was doing so poorly that it could become a reality).

I started reading Inherent Vice by Pynchon, a gift from my dear friend over at The Bone Zone.  I’m only a chapter in, so it’s far too early to tell what I’ll think.

I haven’t had dinner tonight.  I’m going to eat Chipotle, I think.  I just don’t give a fuck anymore.

Hungry to Blog

So here we are.  I’ve been meaning to blog for so long, because I have absolutely nothing to say and goddamn it, I need to say it.  I’m still on my 8-5 grind.  Anxiety about graduate school has replaced my working man’s ennui for the time being.  Sometimes at work I daydream of going back to school and putting in my two weeks.  And in those final two weeks, I spend them mentally checked out to a degree that is only rivaled by someone on morphine.  Maybe I do a little bit of work every hour, but most of the time, I’m either up getting coffee, standing around the water cooler talking about the office slut, or pooping in the urinals.

Unfortunately, this naughty behavior is still months away for me.  I face off with the GRE next Saturday.  I think I’ll be okay.  I’m predicting a 650-680 on the verbal section, which would be perfectly fine.  I don’t even think that the University of Phoenix or DeVry even require the GRE, but better safe than sorry, amirite?  This is my future we’re talking about!

I received this text late Friday night/early Saturday morning.  The sender seems to be genuinely embarrassed about it, so they shall remain nameless.  However, it is one of the better texts I’ve received as of late:

I find myself clutching the toilet bowl belonging to the woman i love while she goes off to a frat party.  I remember when i loved college.

I received a follow-up later on Saturday that had the sender saying that what they thought was a funny text when they sent it turned out to be “the most attention seeking sad pathetic thing I’ve ever read.”

I’ll leave you with that.  Thangs need to be done.

Back From the Dead

I was almost resigned to the fact that I may never on here again.  Maybe it’s just the ringworm talking, but I’ve got a bit of inspiration.  I know not every blogger can have the trendiest fucking illnesses, but I think this one deserves some respect, goddamn it.  Plus, if we are to believe the medical expertise of the guy I sit next to at work, who once warned me that ringworm on a cat will “kill it pretty fast” (this is not true, not even close), then I’m really playing with fire over here.

I think I got it from a bench at the gym.  You may not be able to catch AIDS from a toilet seat, but you can catch ringworm from a sweaty bench that you lay on while you’re lowering heavy things to your chest and then pushing them back up again.  Lauren noticed it a few days ago, it’s a dime sized red ring on my back, at the base of my neck.  I’ve been spraying tough actin’ Tinactin on it twice daily, which is supposed to clear it up after four weeks or so.

In other news, I am slowly mobilizing toward grad school applications.  I have my recommenders lined up, I rescheduled the GRE for November since my earliest application is due in January, and I’ve already thought of a few thinly veiled threats of suicide if I’m not admitted that I can include in my personal statement.  All in all, the ball is rolling.

I do have one humble request for the blogosphere.  Post what’s on your Google Reader.  My dear sister over at Marshellow Kissesdid it, and Google Reader has some prominent writers/bloggers posting their lists over at the Featured Reading Lists, and now I want more.  I mostly just have the blogosphere on mine, and want to expand.  Please tell me how to think.

Birthday blog

Well, here I am.  The big 2-4.  I’m not pleased.  By most calculations, I am in my “mid-twenties,” which feels like a phrase that is synonymous with making some long term decisions about which direction I want to take my life in.  Of course, I know many people older than me who are still impotent man-children, so perhaps the pressure is not as great as I’m making it out to be.

I’m going to get a birthday card at work today.  Our office, much like The Office, has a “party planning committee,” which is even more useless and stupid than it is on the show, because no parties are actually thrown.  Someone just zips around with a birthday card inside a manilla folder, stops by your desk, and makes you sign it.  Then, they give it to the delighted birthday boy/girl, who gets to enjoy a bunch of wishes that are completely heartfelt and organic.

Yesterday, my boss asked me how old I was going to be.  When I told her 24, she wistfully said, “Ah, to be 24 again!  And to be smart!  I would have done things much differently if I was 24 and knew what I do now.”  To which I replied, “Oh, so you wouldn’t have gotten fat?  “

I’ve been shoveling GRE vocabulary words into my brain for the past week or so.  It’s being done at a faster pace than I would like, but time isn’t on my side.  I’m going through the Barron’s 3500 word “Master List,” which is broken down into 50 word lists of 50 words, and marking words I’ve either never seen before or am not totally clear on the definition of.  I’m on list 21 right now.  Once I finish, I’m going to have to go back through and see which words I’ve forgotten out of all of them, and then condense the list and re-memorize those.  There’s a website called Test Magic, which has a GRE forum on it, and you have these non-native English speakers scoring between 750 and 800 on the verbal section because they basically memorize word lists (there’s a word list on there that they consider to be the “Master List,” and it has 9000 words on it).  Of course, none of them can craft a fucking sentence because they don’t actually understand the mechanics of the English language, they just know a whole bunch of words.  Once again, the stupid Americans have been outwitted by the industrious foreigners.  This country is fucked.

Poop Blogging

Sort of like the idea of “naked blogging” as espoused by a dear friend of mine with rather tenuous employment at this point in time, “poop blogging” is another style of blogging that I may or may not be engaging it right now.  I know some people may be grossed out by both the general concept and the thought of me partaking (or maybe just one or the other, I don’t really know), so lets keep this is in the realm of the purely hypothetical and assume that I am not actually poop blogging, but just riffin’ about it. Anyway, there’s not much too it, and while my friend got a little philosophical on the idea of naked blogging, I’m just going to say that there’s no real philosophy behind poop blogging besides letting people know you’re doing it, as well as being able to end your entry with “Boy am I pooped!” (something I eagerly await myself for).

I had a political discussion at work today with the guy I sit next to.  He’s the same guy who told me that he voted once and thought it was a waste of time, and he wasn’t going to bother voting in the past election because neither candidate was going to take away his guns.  I’m sure you can’t imagine what a white male obsessed with guns thinks about health care, so let me tell you how it goes:

Him: (In reference to Obama’s speech) I’m not watching that crap.
Me: Not on board with health care reform?
Him: Not when everyone’s saying it’s all lies.  And they’re probably just going to raise our taxes. I just don’t believe any of those guys anymore.

Pretty surprising that the white male obsessed with guns doesn’t like taxes, huh?  Not that anyone actually likes taxes, but I assume most people understand the importance of taxes so we can afford civilization, so I just don’t get people who refuse to even entertain the thought of higher taxes in exchange for something that is clearly beneficial to all citizens.  Anyway, I’m sure this guy is a Ron Paul supporter but just doesn’t know it yet.

Speaking of Ron Paul, during the last election, I was on a Myspace page of some girl who was a Ron Paul supporter.  She wrote a blog post about how if everyone owned guns and knew how to use them, we’d have less violent crime in the States because people would learn to respect what guns can do and wouldn’t want to pull them out on someone else who has a gun.  Isn’t that just the dumbest fucking thing you’ve ever heard?  This entire paragraph has nothing to do with anything, but I’ve always just wanted to talk about what a fucking simp that girl is.

Anyway, I’ve written over 450 words at this time, so I’m going to go.  Boy am I pooped!

Let me learn ya

Here are some opinions I have:

Blueprint 3 is okay.  There are so good songs, some great beats, and some really embarrassing shit.  Young Forever is a song that falls into the last category, and is really just an awful, corny beat.  Which is what you get when you sample the song Forever Young.

Only Built For Cuban Linx 2 is better than Blueprint 3.  Raekwon’s coke raps get sort of tired out, but the supporting cast is strong enough to make up for most of his lyrical lulls.  Ghostface has a fairly dirty verse about getting head from some pregnant ho, which, upon further listening, is pretty prosaic when compared with this song of his that just appeared today.  I assume that it’s a track off his upcoming R&B album, which is an R&B album done right, I will tell you that much.

I’ve been reading The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.  Aside from knowing that dinosaurs existed 4,000 years ago, I don’t understand the first goddamned thing about science, so I’ll believe most anything he tells me, which is a convenient way to approach basically any aspect of your life that might require critical thinking.

I’m sorry this blog post is so fragment and abbreviated.  I don’t really have much to say.  I am in the mood to find a grey, slim fitting suit, Mad Men-ish, of course.  Now if only I could be as happy as Don Draper, I would have it made.