Sleep in or survive?

Things:
a. spider juice sounds like a Halloween appropriate mixed drink
b. Humans are so groggy and useless in the morning it is surprising we have survived this long. If you put a lion in my room and I woke up staring it in the face I would probably bop it with my pillow - turn over and go right back to sleep.
c. which is the most appropriate book to kill spiders with?
       1. Crime and Punishment - the crime: you are a spider in my house - the punishment: I kill you
       2. At Home in Midford. Because there is something outstanding about killing things with a book about              picturesque little towns.
       3. Not a book - instead the first season of Breaking Bad because Walter kills his first person like I kill spiders - "shit...sorry.. sorry...what have I done?...there was nothing else I could do - he was messing up my entire life...sorry"

I am the creepy runner.

I like to run. Running defends me from having a spaz attack of hyper-active energy. It also provides the illusion that I might be fending off the stream of calories coming at me from my steady diet of goldfish crackers and kraft mac and cheese.

Every morning I run pretty much the same route and end up at the same ending point at pretty much the same time. I am a creature of habit. I loathe change.

Now this ending point that I appear at around 8 am each morning happens to be an elementary school. At around 8 there are a couple of late children and parents trickling in and a couple of teachers outside waiting for them. This little school is a charter and it doesn't have any fences or gates so I walk right through the front of it. 

      It occurred to me a little while ago that I am a large, hostile looking person who appears at an elementary school everyday at precisely the same time. Conveniently, I also appear at a time when I can see kids go into the school. It dawned on me that behavior has a hint of stalker-y with a little tint of total creeper - but I said to myself, "Listen, self, you aren't doing anything wrong. It isn't your fault that you are gargantuan and odd looking. You are free to run wherever the crap you want to without being suspected of having a criminal record." 

      On Friday I got to the end of my run and stopped. 

I noticed that there were two women standing outside. One of them I had seen many times before, she was a principal or something. Today there was another larger "could-totally-take-me-in-a-fight" sized woman.

Both of them looked at me. 

They looked at each other. 

They glared at me simultaneously. 

I pretended not to noticed that, made a right angled turn and started walking off as normally as possible. 

The more intimidating chick started to follow me.

"It may be -" I thought, "that we are just walking in the same direction."

We were not just walking in the same direction. 

I turned around. 

I made my least creepy face. 

It made me look creepy-er.

Many potential scenarios flashed rapidly through my mind- 

"What are you doing here everyday?" she might ask - I am running I might say. I could say that I live right by here...wait no then she could look around, find me and beat me up..."

She said: 

Issues in the lives tall people: sometimes when you think that someone is going to come up and accuse you of being a sex-offender they invite you to be on a women's basketball team instead.

On a slightly related note I have also made this (chart? diagram?) thing regarding how I feel when I am running I have good days and I have bad days. I also have many other kinds of days - as described here: 

Okay OKAY! Fine the Greeks who are running around in those funeral games are not gods - whatever they are called godlike no-less than five thousand times so I am close enough. 

Absurd Cards II

I made more of these because now I am addicted to captioning stock photos.
In review: Once upon a time Seize the Absurd decided to make some crappy cards / postcards with MS paint. She enjoyed it and continued to make them (much to the dismay of the people throughout the land).

no really though the most normal of people are in fact insane

grammatical confusion? whatever.

Okay that one might be a little dark.

and that might have grammar issues and be math related ...

It might be possible that an entire range of greeting cards could be made from the lyrics of trashy pop.

The Spelling Test

It is stories from my childhood day.
I have always loved to read and I found the majority of school work inane-
So I read in class.

In elementary school-

In junior high -

and in high school -

When I read a book I stop seeing the words on the page. I also become utterly oblivious to anything which occurs around me. Some people mall this being off in "la - la - land" La-La land sounds like a terrible place full of tellitubbies. This place is more like "not present to this world of endless drudgery - land" and it is awesome.

One day in fifth grade I was reading a book in class and paying absolutely no attention to what was going on. Suddenly an echo-y voice from a different reality said, "Aright turn in your papers class." Slowly- sluggishly my brain tried to grasp what was going on, "papers? what papers?" As I regained consciousness I shot a glance at somebody else's paper, "I see numbers - numbers with words written next to them." and the top of my neighbors page said, "SPELLING TEST".

The fog lifted.
                  My mind spun frantically but to no avail. I read straight through a spelling test.
The rest of the class passed their papers forward.
                 shoot shoot- um okay I know most of the words right? we practiced them this week but they are never going to be in the right order and even if they were close there is no way that I have enough time to...
Miss Smith flipped through them one by one...
               Ah! AH! brain panic mode coherent thoughts equal zero. error. error.
Her brow furrows and she starts to walk towards me
              No time. No plan. O gods of foursquare help me now.
And she says: "Elizabeth where is your spelling test?"

I attempted to answer that question.

Her eyes stared coldly into mine with the hatred of an underpaid school teacher who cannot understand why children live to torture her.
And then she said nothing and walked away.
I never retook the spelling test.
She never said anything about it again -
and I learned what mercy feels like.

I have some strange wishes.

I have some strange wishes - I thought I would share them with you.

The number of push-ups I am capable of doing is in fact negative two.

The candles mock his pain.
sorry this is late-ish.

Absurd Cards

I am unemployed - and I thought to myself, "Self, there are people who write greeting cards and stuff. I think they might get paid like 2 dollars an hour for it."
Today I tried my hand at writing some greeting cards and postcards.
It mostly degenerated into me bestowing captions on a ton of stock photos using MS paint. They are the quality of greeting cards you can buy at the 99 cent store.
They came out absurdly.

A birthday card for people who are getting old. May also double as a thinking of you card for people in rehab.

Tell your friends that you went camping without them - so they can all be glad that they did not go with you and that they do not smell like campfire smoke.

It sounds a little bit like the gorse bush is the one who is there for me when I do stupid things. Grammar = needs practice.

Probably the worst smelling thing at the zoo- but then lots of things smell bad at the zoo.

Somewhere a greeting card writer sends cries for help via the cheap greeting cards that he writes everyday for 14 hours.

Actually I think I usually do mean this when I whine about wanting to be somewhere else. 

- Ron Weasley 

annnnd I need a job.

St. Tequilus

The patrόn saint of upperclassmen seminars:

Anyway I have always thought that icons were beautiful - thus I am appreciating them by drawing blasphemous-ish spoof.
I think this picture is funny all by itself -
but I wrote more because it felt lazy not to write anything - thusly I have composed the whiny rant below. Feel free to skip it.

His hat askew and his eyes looking in slightly different directions - St. Tequilus is the one who is there to help you in seminar when somebody asks about Emma, "Why are we reading this book anyway?" -to which I think I said something uncharacteristically romantic like, "Love is beautiful and worth imitating." Answers like this are only pull-off-able if you have had a little tequila and are not considered a fluffy romantic sort.
St. Tequilus is there to help us when we are reading Gulliver's Travels and we wage a two hour fight to show that the houyhnhnms are not Swift's depiction of a perfect society.

St. Tequilus give us patience to bear with the extremely philosophical people -
Who do not do well with literature- a world of simultaneous contraries.
Who do not think a story can be great unless it ballyhoos their perspective - (Cough* Flaubert).
Who believe that literature exists to serve ethics.
Who hate The Waste Land - but only read it once and skipped the notes.
Lastly St. Tequilus help us to be not overwhelmingly pompous in the face of this philosophical ineptitude. Help us to admit it when we don't understand and maybe actually learn something - amen. 

Saying amen to your own prayer is like saying "I agree with myself," at the end of every sentence.