an overlong ode to disneyland

I am missing Disneyland today.*

22609 -- disneyland resort

Well, to be fair, I am never not missing Disneyland, but today is wielding a particularly powerful ache for it around my ribs. Sort of haunting and cold and sad.

This is partially because I spent a couple of hours last night reading posts about Disney projects that never came to fruition in their original forms — Port Disney, WESTCOT Center, Disney’s America, and The SS Disney — and partially because I am just a person who is subject to flights of whimsy, nostalgia, and misery.


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back to school with judy blume: tales of a fourth grade nothing

Dear Judy,

I started talking about Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing to my girlfriend last night while we were sitting at the dinner table. Dinner was delicious — mashed potatoes topped with chicken breast, broccoli, onions, and parmesan slivers — and I was expressing my displeasure at feeling pretty blocked with what to write about this one. I read it in about an hour and a half on Thursday morning, set it down on the side table next to our couch, and forgot about it immediately.

This isn’t to say it’s forgettable, Judy! Not at all. Quite the contrary, I learned, as my dinnertime conversation devolved into me screaming, “He ate the turtle! He just ate it! He just swallowed his brother’s turtle and no one cared. It was all ‘Poor Fudge!’ and ‘We have to save Fudge!’ and no concern that this sociopathic animal child just ate his brother’s pet!” I could say it’s unlike me to dissolve into outraged screams over fiction, but it’s really, really not.

I recounted Fudge’s many and sundry sins to my girlfriend as we were finishing up our meal and grew more and more outraged by the utterly dreadful parenting going on around these kids. They are so permissive of Fudge’s abominable behavior that it ends with him eating an animal alive! I wish you could hear me screaming through the internet, Judy, because I am that outraged. And then, once the drama of Fudge passing the turtle through his digestive tract has ceased, these atrocious parents buy the kid a puppy and joke that they made sure it would get too big for Fudge to eat.

Judy, can we stop and address the absolute terror you’ve inflicted on the world here? Fudge eats his brother’s pet! A tiny, helpless, living creature with whom his big brother Peter has formed a bond and with whom Fudge has been told time and time again not to touch. I am so traumatized!

I’ve never been a parent and, barring a large seismic shift in the universe, will never be, but even all other behavior aside, I can assure you that if my three-year-old ate someone’s pet, I’d at least be taking him in for psychiatric observation. This is not a cricket or a caterpillar or dirt. This is someone’s beloved companion. This will be the only thing I ever think about ever again in my life.

I am going to be screaming about this turtle being eaten by a three-year-old until I die. My last words are going to be, “He was just a little turtle! How could you?! How could you?!” and then I’ll expire in a great gust of breath and unanswered questions.

Judy, I love you, but gawd save you. Gawd save us all.

– Ash

P.S. RIP DRIBBLE

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

movie monday: the avengers

Let’s talk about how I’m a crazy, excellent, obsessed fan of stuff, yeah?! And it will also serve as a LONG OVERDUE Movie Monday!

Obviously this is going to be about The Avengers because, duh, are there even any other movies IN theaters right now? SPOILERS! Probably! Because I’ve seen it four times! And I can recite a lot of it! And HAVEN’T YOU SEEN IT BY NOW?!

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scott disick or how i learned to stop bitching and love a kardashian?!

Do you know how hard it is to write about something when you can’t talk about it?

Do you? I mean do you really understand what it’s like to try to put FEELINGS and STUFF into WORDS when you can’t actually talk about the things that are causing the FEELINGS and the STUFF?! Because it sucks. IT SUCKS A LOT. And it turns the thing that you do to feel better (ie: writing) into a thing you never ever want to do because it’s TOO HARD.

(This is why there was no Movie Monday this week. SORRY.)

I am waiting on some things right now. Two pretty big things that are sort of complicated to talk about. Things that I and other people involved aren’t particularly ready to articulate. For good reasons and stuff! But those things are DEEPLY impacting the life I’m leading right now because they’re trapping me and they’re making me unstable and they’re causing all this FLUX.

And because I have anxiety and a variety of other issues, they are REALLY stressing me out. And I’m caving to my anxiety. And I’m keeping terrible hours. And I’m doing all this while trying to freelance (and find freelance) and blog and twitter and tumblr and keep up with my 366 projects and look for a full-time job and not be a terrible girlfriend/daughter/friend/sister/housewife. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but HO BOY. It is.

It is also deeply impacting my ability to be funny/insightful/creative/awesome. And, like, do you understand what that means? It means I’m BORING. It means I feel broken. My humor is SUCH an important part of who I am and what I think of myself and the only laughing I’ve been causing lately has been because I have a tendency to fart at really delightful/inopportune moments. JOKES WHAT ARE JOKES?!

Like, I spent ten minutes with my girlfriend tonight RELIVING DUMB JOKES I TOLD A YEAR AGO because I haven’t said anything funny in MONTHS, it feels like. She would argue otherwise (because she’s a good girlfriend) but she would also be HARD FUCKING PRESSED to remember something hilarious I’ve said recently.

I’m not the kind of person that’s hilarious on my own. Like, I am never going to be a stand-up. I am never going to stand somewhere and just BE FUNNY. I don’t tell jokes. I’m funny when I’m responding to things around me. I’m hilarious in conversation. And the reason it’s not happening is because I haven’t SEEN anyone since basically December 10th.

December 10th! One outing aside, I’ve been devoid of non-girlfriend or familial companionship and I think it’s finally starting to destroy me. I feed off of my friends. And they’re not around for me to feed on! And that’s not all my fault and it’s certainly not all their fault. I mean, I don’t get out of my pajamas. Do you know what that’s like? (No… probably because you’re, like, a functional human being with a job.) It’s gross. And it’s weird. And sometimes the thought of even TRYING to get dressed and leave the house is so daunting it’s embarrassing.

But I’ve gotten comfortable in my pajama cocoon. I feel safe. And neither my parents nor m girlfriend judges me. And so I let it feed itself. And the other day I found myself stretched out in bed, petting a dog, and watching one of those Kardashian shows.

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30 Day Meme — What You Did Today

Day 6: What You Did Today In Great Detail

So this week I had these Really Grand Plans about how I was going to BLOG and I was going to get on a SCHEDULE and do this thing in a way that proves how much I actually love blogging and writing and stuff (because I actually DO, despite what my entry calendar says) but then I got sick and barfed up orange foam and spent three days in bed. So. Best laid plans of mice and men and fat chicks and stuff.

mice and me

But I am climbing out of the stench pit that is my bed and getting myself together by continuing on with that long-ignored 30 day meme thing. Day 6 is “Your Day in Great Detail” and I had initially planned to a day in the life photo thing, but then decided that would probably be EVEN MORE BORING than just reading about what I did today.

So today, I got up and ate breakfast when my gf left for work because I had a headache and needed food to take Advil without barfing, but then went back to sleep and slept late-ish and had SUPER WEIRD dreams about fighting with my friend and then got up and dicked around on the internet a lot (I spend lots of time on Tumblr, like any good internet-human at this moment in time, and also caught up on my greader stuff) while monitoring whether I had a fever or not and also being mopey and kind of smelly even though I took a hot, happy shower last night and made sure to scrub all the foldy places at least twice. Illness, what a bitch. And also watched some HGTV and TeenNick because basically those are my life right now, OKAY.

love

Then my sister came over and I got attacked in a loving manner by her dog which is actually a fucking MOOSE pretending to be a dog. And we hung out and made fun of my mom (who was present, obviously, we aren’t terrible children) and watched the Michael Jackson doctor trial and talked about OJ and how televising trials is icky and weird and uncomfortable. Then we had lunch and hung out some more and I showed them the trailer for the MissRepresentation thing because they talked about it on Ellen and then my sister left and I spent a large portion of the subsequent hours painting my nails.

naaaaaaaails

Then updating my iPhone and then playing with new stuff and being PIST that I can’t put Newsstand into another folder because I really and truly am so anal retentive that this is what my iPhone situation looks like:

lockhome

Home and lock screens have to be coordinated, only three things on the dock because those are the only three I absolutely use every single day, and NORMALLY only one page of apps. BUT AS YOU CAN TELL BY THAT SECOND DOT. Newsstand lurks now on page two, just out of sight, but never out of mind… haunting me…

Then I ate dinner with my gf when she got home and watched some tv and laughed at the dogs and then I helped her sync her phone and iPad and ALL THE THINGS and fought with her shitty laptop because I am a real good gf. Then I spent time fixing our tv so it would stop making us click through channels that we don’t subscribe to. And examining the many things we have on the DVR that we need to watch because it’s getting full. And then we watched nothing instead.

I put her to bed and then I sat here on the internet and wrote some stuff and made some stuff and ate an ice cold cheeseburger from McDonald’s because I truly enjoy the finest things in life and am now drinking a Diet Pepsi with fresh squeezed lime juice in it and after I post THIS will go dick around on Tumblr and queue up some posts until I get tired enough to go to sleep in like an hour or so. [EXCEPT FOR WHERE DREAMHOST DECIDED TO DO SERVICE BUT I NEVER GOT AN EMAIL ABOUT THIS SO I DIDN’T GET TO POST IT UNTIL AFTER FIVE AM. I HAD TO FILL THE TIME WITH LIVEJOURNAL AND DISNEY CARTOONS FROM THE 2000S AND ANGRY TWITTERS OH GOD.]

WHO RUNS THE WORLD? I RUN THE WORLD.

Fun fact: the pictures where my palms are turned up are REALLY HARD AND PAINFUL for me to take because both of my wrists have scar tissue in them from being broken that kind of prevents them from working the way normal wrists work. The things I endure for my ART.