Lucky You :: The Balls

As a testament to growing up or perhaps to a single moment of restraint, I have not bought any Norman Mailer or Irvine Welsh. I did buy "the world is flat."
Oh come on, it's a first edition with a cover they weren't really allowed to use!
No one understands.
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Got up this morning and took the GRE, proving once again, I am perfectly mundane. Average. My infiltration into American culture is complete. I have a credit score and a GRE composite score that is twice that. Yes, that bad. er. Average.
The test is "an experience."
You are offered a choice of "the chair over there" or "the comfy chairs along the wall," while you reproduce a statement in your own handwriting. There are comfy chairs and even a loveseat in the white-painted mason brick basement.

You confirm your identity to a man who takes a very bad picture of you. Your social security number is all zeroes until you give it to him, if you want to. You put all your possessions but your ID into a locker.

There may or may not be a poster of a cat with it's claws out, captioned "Hang in there," or a dog laying on her back with her impossibly large ears splayed out to frame the word "Relax." Those may be imagined.

There may or may not have have been a string quartet with a violinist who snapped his fingers in between sets just to say "No hay banda! It is... an illusion." (Finally!)
But there was a brass and green glass lamp on each desk. That was kind of cool. And they give you a ton of scrap paper. So that's nice.

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I received my first bill from AEP today. I still do not have power. I think this is very poor form, especially considering it doesn't even take into account that I paid them already. It was sent automatically, unlike my power restoration, which must be done by hand. Neat.
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Rolling Stone has a comedy issue out. While the feature is smaller than I like, considering that it TAKES UP THE WHOLE COVER, like front and back, I chuckled a little. I haven't even finished it and I've been laughing. I laughed at Robin Williams favorite joke and it's take on mother-father identification.¹ I laughed at the Obama fluffing. Because "with us" and "against us" is certainly choice rhetoric to steal from... who? I will, at some point, watch Drunken History and read "Garfield without Garfield."

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I do not care for Volcano Tacos from Taco Bell. That said, they are a fine eighty-nine cent investment...
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I think a man is trying to convince a woman to come with him when he leaves for Rome and his new, exciting, first job out of school in two days.² What "courage or nerve!"

¹ A man, named Teddy for conventional purposes, is having sex with a woman. Despite their various stages of secular detachment, they can't help but notice when the door opens and the brief slice of slight from the hall is obscured by their son. Teddy pauses in mid-stroke when he sees the look of abject horror on his son's face. When his son flees, the man resolves to talk to the boy. The couple finishes up and he dresses. "I should sit down with him," Terry says, "this is a good a time as any for him to learn the way of the world."
He does not find his son in his room. Terry walks into the family room expecting to see his son watching TV while his mother protests about the state of youth-these-days. Instead he finds the boy fucking his grandmother screaming "how do you like it when it happens to you old man?"
²They were dressed like they were older. Maybe they were Master's recipients and grad school students. Maybe I just have a strange conception of how thirty-somethings dress.