So I’m in this coffee shop — WHOA! That is huge — and they have on the tip jar little index cards with fun facts on them, which seems to me like a non-asshole way to call your attention to the presence of the tip jar, and while I was waiting for the lady to ring up my latte and trifecta of micro-muffins, I was reading the cards, and one of them said something about how there is a word in the English language that has only one vowel but that one vowel appears six times and that word is INDIVISIBILITY, and I was looking at this and thinking “what about ‘Y’?” because I mean I know “Y” is the sometimes-vowel but in the case of “indivisibility,” it’s serving as a vowel because the word is pronounced “in-dih-viz-ih-bill-it-EE,” not “in-dih-viz-ih-bill-it-YHHH,” which would be how things would go if “Y” were acting as a consonant, that is to say, anything but a vowel, and I thought about pointing this out to the lady and then I realized that this is the kind of thing that makes them do something terrible to your latte, like make it with regular milk instead of soy, and so I’m keeping it to myself.
Posts Tagged ‘Communication breakdown’
I am a lot of fun to tell jokes to
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010Where businesslike grapes go to die
Monday, May 3rd, 2010I’m presently hanging out at the Yale School of Management, of which I am not a student but where I’ve come to do some of my homework because I
a) am in New Haven and need a place to get my homework on and,
b) frankly, cannot abide one more interaction in which I step up to the counter, say to some hipster barista, “hi! How are you?” and have them look back at me, doing and saying nothing until I laugh uncomfortably and ask them what kind of soymilk they use and may I have a latte and charge it, please, and,
c) franklier, I am thoroughly, profoundly sick of homeworking my own ass all over the Yale School of Medicine.
Anyway.
I’m now in this study room that’s lined with little individual computer station/carrell thingies, and it’s very quiet and – fittingly – very businesslike and there is NO EATING OR DRINKING (saith the sign by the door, which I have no plans to mess with), and I am trying hard to not type too loudly or look like I associate too frequently with hipster baristas (no matter what my side of the interaction may be like), lest I attract the unfavorable attentions of the four very businesslike dudes* who are also camped out in here.
Now, though, I’m worried that maybe I have already done that, in case there was some memo about which study rooms are for boys only that was circulated widely but that I, being of the non-student variety, never got.
Also, it’s very warm in here, too much so, so I’ve taken off my sneaks, and my bare toes just discovered under my adopted desk an abandoned but quite plump raisin, and now I’m wondering if this is maybe some leftover evidence of whatever gruesome incident made them implement the policy on that sign. I’m also wondering if this means I can eat my yogurt.
____________________________________________
*Seriously. How else would you describe madras shorts, a North Face bookbag, and a very, very serious engrossment in spreadsheets?
Is this social evolution?
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009I recently got it into my head to apply to grad school. So that’s been keeping me kind of busy, but it hasn’t really been the sort of hilariously fun experience that lends itself to blog fodder…
…until now.
Not long ago, I received an email from an administrator at a university I applied to. This email informed me, basically, that I had applied to a program that doesn’t exist. “We…thought it best to inform you as soon as possible,” the administrator wrote.
How does this happen, you may ask? Well, I’ll tell you.
The kind of program I’ve been thinking I should apply to is in creative writing with a specific concentration in non-fiction; the university in question apparently only offers programs in poetry and fiction, hold the non-.
OK, yes, maybe that would be an easy enough mistake to make…
…except now I’m thinking the first clue might have been when I was filling out my Writing Sample Cover Sheet, like how it had
Circle one: Poetry Fiction
and I crossed them both out and wrote “non-fiction.”
I totally watched the football part, too
Sunday, February 1st, 2009Has anyone seen the new series of Geico commercials in which someone is doing something like eating in a Chinese restaurant or asking for directions in the Wild West and suddenly someone else points out “that’s the money could be saving with Geico,” after which the camera cuts to a little bundle of money with a couple of round things on top of it?
Past experience leads me to believe that I should be totally hilarified by these commercials, and yet I just don’t get them. Like, are those round things supposed to be eyes, maybe the googly kind? If so, the Geico people have – in my opinion – done a terrible job, because those round things look more like stacked iterations of different materials people can pick from if they don’t like walking on regular pebbles when they go from the car to the house. Geico should definitely step it up and invest in some real googly eyes, because EVERYTHING is totally way more hilarious with [successful] googly eyes. Please see Exhibit A: socks.
P.S. My bridesmaid dress will be Pomegranate. No word yet on what this means I am free to spill on myself during the wedding and subsequent revelry.
Take a picture – it’ll keep longer unrefrigerated
Thursday, January 15th, 2009I’m presently trying to do some work in one of the reading rooms in Countway Medical Library, and the guy sitting at the table on a diagonal from mine has been glancing at me every so often over the last couple of hours, and I can’t tell if he’s checking me out or trying to send me signals that I’m chewing too loudly.
The Republic of Shmoblia
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009So I’ve been hanging out lately with this guy who’s of a different ethnic background than I am – we’ll call it “Shmoblian” – and in doing so, I have learned a number of things about Shmoblian culture.
For example, he’ll be like, “oh, Shmoblian people never take the last piece of pie” or “I’ve never been to a Shmoblian wedding with fewer than 300 guests” or “in Shmoblia, it’s actually considered very offensive to be left-handed.”
This is all very cool, but I’ve started to wonder if he is maybe making things up just to mess with me, because I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone in any culture would think that grapefruit should be eaten with sugar and black pepper. On the other hand, if he IS making it up, I have to give him props, because as a creative lie, the grapefruit thing is kind of hilarious.
Sorry
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009So you know when you get a new toy for Chanukah (or Christmas or Election Day or whatever you celebrate) and it’s insanely cool and you want to spend all of your time playing with it and you kind of lose interest in/forget about everything that you used to do with your time, including maintaining your blog?
Sorry, team. I’m going to try to do better.
Does anyone really know how hard is hard enough to kill a moose?
Monday, December 8th, 2008My friend told me two nights ago that over the weekend, his ipod was stolen out of his coat pocket in a bar in New York (where he now lives). At the time of the theft, his coat had been lying in a coat pile on a bench at the bar, and someone else’s cell phone as well as two other coats were stolen, too.
After he and I sorted out all of the obfuscating nuances of Gchat, I understood that my friend was, as he put it, both upset since his ipod was robbed and slightly insulted that the thief decided his jacket was not steal-worthy.
A part of me felt that this was the kind of conclusion I’d have liked to post here, and I considered taking it (with his permission, and giving him credit). But then I felt that it would be equally entertaining to note that he should be more than just “upset” about someone going up to his ipod and demanding its wallet and its watch and its Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals.
Sorry, Sam, for making fun of you about that once live, to your Gchat screenname, and then again on the World Wide Web. Everyone else: also over the weekend, Sam did that “how hard can you punch?” punching bag arcade game at Cheap Shots in the East Village, and he broke the bar’s record.
Three grams of hot water-soluble fiber daily
Thursday, November 20th, 2008I pretty much ran out of bed this morning, because I was so hungry when I woke up I knew that if I didn’t, I would maybe eat my pillow or my face or something…
…but by the time I got to the kitchen (which, for those of you who have yet to view the interior of my infinitesimal apartment, was at about the same time that I ceased to be in my bed), I knew that I wanted a bowl of Cheerios and nothing else. (Except for the fresh blueberries that I bought last week, against my better macrobiotic judgment, but they would have been part of the bowl of Cheerios, duh.)
Consequently, I was within minutes in the Store 24 on Mass. Ave, wearing a jammies-’n'-street clothes hybrid getup (which, nota bene, was no match for the weather this morning) and trying to decide between the whole box of Cheerios and the single-serving version that looks like this:
I went for the single-serving iteration, because I rarely eat Cheerios (and why would I, when I can invent delicious Gorilla Munch II anytime I feel like it??) and figured it’d be best to avoid the fire hazard of so many extra servings of Cheerios just hanging around the house.
Then I went to pay for my single serving of Cheerios, and the woman at the cash register asked me if I wanted a bag, and I very nicely said no, thank you, and she asked me if I wanted hot water for my purchase, and I very nicely said no, thank you, thinking to myself that she, as someone with a patently non-native accent, didn’t really understand the premise of what I was buying, but I had some time to think during the short walk home, and now I am wondering if maybe she knows something that I don’t.
I’d like the fish, theoretically
Monday, November 17th, 2008Being considered within my extended family as something like my own distinct unit rather than just a subset of my parents’ unit, I recently received my own distinct invitation to my cousin’s imminent bar mitzvah.
I’ve since been trying to be responsible and make use of the enclosed, handy-dandy RSVP card, but it’s hard: said cousin may have been remiss in choosing these awesome iridescent invitations, because I’m pretty sure the RSVP card is printed on the kind of paper that essentially repels ink. So now, I’m going to responsibly go look for some house paint and a teeny-tiny paint brush.