Me: In Clothes

People refuse to allow me to not care about my looks. People refuse to accept that I just don’t give a shit about how I’m dressed and how desirable that makes sex with me seem. I’m not just talking about people who first meet me, but close friends who don’t understand my style of dress.

They come up to me and say: “Y’know that look you go for? well…” No. I don’t. I’m not going for a look. I just don’t care what I look like most of the time. That is not to say that I don’t dress up. I like playing dress up sometimes, but on a day to day basis my clothes are whatever dirty clothes I grab off my pile near my bed and those clothes are not typically bought with any forethought. Typically not even bought.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t care how you dress – it’s fine to have aesthetic that you aim for – it’s just not something I do. I’m not trying to be hip by looking like I don’t care, I”m not trying to be quirky, or pull off some statement. I’m just attempting to be comfortable – and comfortable sometimes means picking uncomfortable colthes that are sitting close to my bed and are therefore easy to grab.

I love attention, but I got over my need to grab attention with my body fabrics by freshman year of college. I can do it with my loud penis jokes, my untimely belching, and my loud penis jokes.

I get told that I look good sometime, always with surprise as though I tried something different today and they like it. “Try it again” No thank you. I will not try at all. Trying is boring.

Lazy, Pathetic

My Mom – The Ultimate Hipster

I flipped over my laptop bag from its resting position on the floor next to my bed. It was covered in mold. I don’t understand how, but there are blotchy green bumps all over one side of my laptop bag. It now rests at the bottom of my bed with the blotches of mold face up. I don’t know what else to do with it.

This bag has been with me for 6 years. It is the longest I’ve owned nearly anything. I can’t throw it out, but I don’t know how to get rid of mold.

There are times when I’m reminded that I am not a good adult yet. That I still have growing up to do. Growing up involves an ability to be self-reliant, and when bad things happen that I don’t understand how to fix, I revert to my 11 year old self and want my mom to come fix it all for me. My mom is the only real adult I know. I don’t think there is a problem that she’s had that she can’t fix on her own. I respect her for it, but I also fear her for it. How did she become so good at fixing things? How did I get half her genes and still manage to be so unfunctional?

I think I’m going to leave the laptop bag with mold side up for a while and hope that mold grows on both sides. Then at least it’ll look like a cool hipster pattern. My mom knows nothing of cool hipster patterns – she wears horse riding pants and baggy sweatshirts with animals on them.

Fuck.

She knows all about cool hipster patterns.

Attention Whoring, Depressed, Pathetic, Selfish

The Heat is Making Me Look Like I’m Cleaning Vagina

I only have one pair of shorts. The pair is also nearly the only non-undergarmet article of my clothing that wasn’t previously owned. It’s a pair of athletic shorts I bought during the week and a half that I wanted to play basketball with my friends because I had nothing better going on in my life. That was a bad summer. All summers suck. I hate the heat. I get dehydrated easily. This is the furthest south I’ve lived in the summer. This is the hottest summer of my life. Fuck New York. I’ve started drinking Gatorade all the time to try to maintain a decent level of electrolytes.

Fuck New York.

New York is making my look like a douche – Wearing athletic shorts and drinking large containers of Gatorade.

There was a douche in my nerdiest math class who wore the same outfit and drank the same thing while he didn’t take notes because he was “too smart for that.” I hated him. I was usually the kid who was too smart to take notes, but this class was fucking impossible. This was Number Theory with Bressoud. Known for being one of the hardest math classes at my school. There were only 7 guys in the class and I was the least nerdy by far. Not by far. By so far that I couldn’t even see the next least nerdy person if we were lined up on the nerd spectrum. I was suddenly the stupidest person in class. My weekly Risk games made me seem cool because I had three friends to play Risk with.

One of these kids way less cool than me and way smarter than me was Jacob. Jacob also liked weightlifting. He was a douche. He would chug 24 ounces of Gatorade every class period in the midst of answering questions I was struggling with. UGH.

I wasn’t jealous of him. He had a really depressing life. He had 4 facebook friends (the true sign of coolness), and I had only ever seen him hanging out with one person: his girlfriend – who was almost as depressing as him – and they broke up at some point, so his life must have sucked. I wasn’t jealous of him. I was confused about myself when I was around him.

Socially, I’ve never considered myself a success. I’ve never cared to be one, so that’s okay. I wear clothes I find comfortable, I am mean the first time I meet people, I don’t censor my masturbation talk. I’m not a social success. What do I have over this Jacob kid though? Not my intellect. Not my athletic abilities. But I’m definitely better. I know that. So I must be better then him somehow, and social prowess is my last avenue to blame. I don’t want to only have my social abilities to rely on to prove that I’m better than somebody. I don’t care about society. Fuck society… No. Fuck him for making me embrace society.

Lonely, Pathetic

One in a Thousand

I am going to a wedding tonight. I forgot I was going to this wedding until yesterday, and I have a guest in town. I feel … bad? I feel fine. I feel as though if I hadn’t been going to visit people, having people visit and shit I would feel guilty, but I’ve done my good deed. Hanging out is a deed.

We went to a restaurant yesterday where a teenager had booked a spot to play his guitar and sing a couple octaves higher than he could and flatter than the chests of his not yet developed groupies. There was a large crowd there to watch him play. None of them were there to see him play. They were all there because this was an excuse to hang out. This was the excuse they could give their parents to be out of the house, to see other people their age. They couldn’t just go somewhere to chill. They couldn’t just get a call from their friend and be like: “My porch 10 minutes.” They had to go see their awful friend whine into a microphone.

I don’t miss being a teenager.

There was one kid there who accidentally got invited during science class. It’s a public area and it’s a kid’s “show” so nobody can kick him out. He doesn’t really have any friends so he doesn’t know that he could just leave and no one would care. He sits awkwardly at the bar waiting until this is done and he can go home and he can think he socialized so that he can pretend he’s not as pathetic as he knows he is.

I still find myself doing that sometimes. I still find myself sitting at a bar with people I don’t know and really don’t like – forcing myself to sit through the night hoping this is the night where something interesting happens. 99.9% of the time I’m wrong and I’ve made myself more lonely than I was before, but on that .1% of the time that I have a misadventure: I have a misadventure.

This is so terribly written so far. I haven’t edited a single sentence, but I also care so little about what I’m writing that I don’t want to read it again. I feel like this is so obvious – this is an obvious way to live life: To go against my desires to sit on my couch playing NBA2K10 while eating sandwiches and chips and instead hope for the 1 out of 1000 chance that my life provides me with interesting things.

Maybe this wedding will be interesting. I doubt it. I also have to wake up at 6:00am tomorrow for work. This wedding is gonna suck, but I really have to go and play the lonely-lottery.

Indignant, Pathetic

Rain Job: Kinky Sexual Position?

I hate rain too. I say “too” because I know I hate something else but I’m too lazy to think of something specific. There were two shows I really wanted to see tonight, but after walking a mile in the upper east side to tutor a privileged little fuck who kept on trying to distract me from teaching her how to find volumes by asking my opinions on indy bands that I don’t know and making me feel self conscious about my lack of knowledge about bands I was wet and sad and that ruined my night.

Wet and sad I had to listen to this girl who could at best describe herself as precocious and at worst describe herself a a piece of shit that no one will love because she can’t stop obsessing over the sound of her voice. This girl told me that she wanted to be a “Music Photographer.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with that profession. Nobody should have those specific of desires at her age.

I wanted to be an NBA statistician from the age of 10 to the age of 13.

My newest story that I’ve been crafting starts with me explaining that I hate myself, but I hate the previous incarnations of myself even more. I was such a fucking idiot. You should be constantly attempting to get more specific in your desires. When you are 5 you should want to be an astronaut, a fireman, a princess, and (like me) a tap dancer. Maybe when you are in high school you can narrow to a broad field: The arts, teaching, or prostitution/investment banking. Once you have a job, you should only maybe be seeking three other jobs. By the time you retire you should know what you want to do – then you can do that because you don’t have to work for money anymore.

The more I think about it, music photographer is a stupid job. And she’s a stupid kid. At least after I’m done with her she’ll be able to do math. Hopefully she won’t be able to google my name.

Attention Whoring, Horny, Pathetic

My Nightmare.

I just had a horrible nightmare. This is what happens when you lock yourself in a unventilated room and pass out with the lights on, the terrible extended interview between Jon Stewart and Ken Blackwell buffering, and your wool pants on but no shirt.

I was getting out of a rehearsal/class/performance (this was unclear and unimportant). Kevin Allison was cleaning up something behind the piano which was somewhat hidden behind a fort made out of cushions. I was doing a slow pack up in order to talk to a British girl in my class/rehearsal/performance. We were attempting to make plans for when we should go see Furry Vengeance. KA kept attempting to get my attention to help him plug in the grand piano with the right cords because I guess I was his tech guy. In my attempt to juggle the two conversations I brought up that I have a British friend coming to visit soon (This part is true in real life, not dream world). Then I got nervous that I had talked too positively about my other British friend who was a girl and the one in my performoclassersal would think I was crushing on the one I had met while traveling the West Coast. (Not this one). So, I backtracked awkwardly and made myself look stupid and fidgety.

I’m scared of society. That’s why I go on stage, it’s separate for society. It’s a place where you are not longer held accountable for your actions, but rather for how you made people feel. I’m going on stage tonight at Belleville Lounge at 7:30, you should come if you’re in New York because I need to escape the nightmare that is basic social interaction.

Indignant, Lazy, Pathetic

Unnecessary Defense featuring Ron Greenberg

I bought a forty cent chocolate the other day and then forgot. So today, on my way to my 2:30pm breakfast I was able to hold myself over with the new snack discovery I had in my pocket. YAY! I recognize that my defense of laziness by stating the fun things it allows me to experience is reaching overkill, but what about defending forgetfulness and filth? Here we go:

When one walks into my room, the first one that one will think is “How the fuck can someone exist in this enclosed, humid, stinky dungeon that looks like what would have been left of a thrift store in Dresden in late 1945?” The drawers are pretty much empty, but the floor is full of the things that should be making the drawers not empty. Why? Because that way I can stand at the door and look around and see everything I could possibly need to see. Including that ice cream sandwich wrapper from three days ago and that half eaten bag of chips. Who knows when I might need any of that stuff?

I once lived for a week off of the things in my pockets. I had no money and I just would search around in different pockets of sports coats for change and snacks, and I ate for two weeks. So, I have a backup plan, and it is contained within the extra cloth on the inside of my jackets.

My forgetfulness and filthiness serves a purpose.

This entry is about me defending the things I do already out of laziness by claiming a higher purpose. While I always assume shit comes from either nature or nurture, I have a hard time finding where this laziness comes from in my family. My parents worked really hard their whole lives, and their parents worked even harder. Then I received this email from my Dad:

i just placed an order for a glare blocker for the mac book so we could possibly sit outside. when it came to giving the guy my credit card number, i had this flash that i knew the number by heart. why i don’t know. it’s not that i use it very often. so i began giving the guy some numbers and realized i better have the card out to at least check. i gave him the first 4 numbers before i had the card out. they were wrong. so i made the correction.

however, i put a finger across the other numbers believing i still knew them all and continued. the next for numbers were also wrong. so i dumped that idea.

when he asked for the expiration date i quickly rattled off what i thought it was without looking. why? it too was wrong.

i did turn the card over to get the 3 digit code.

so here was my thought process. when he asked for the card number i immediately knew there were lots of 2s in it. so i began with a 2 and things flowed smoothly from there. the problem arose when it turned out that there aren’t an extraordinary amount of 2s and the fact that our credit card number doesn’t even start with a 2.

It’s not the laziness that got passed on, but rather doing things that are actively harmful to living life appropriately/comfortably, but then attempting to defend them only to come to the resolution: Okay, maybe I’m wrong, but I’m happy so whatever.

Lazy, Lonely, Pathetic

Tabs

I never truly turn my computer off. I put it to sleep, but when it awakens everything is right where I left it. I like this, because I never have to put something away, which also means I never have to be done with it. Right now I have 8 tabs up on my google chrome window. The first is my gmail so that I can constantly pretend I’m connected to the world. The second is this tab for my blog so that I can pretend the world is connected to me. The third is the sketch show I just wrote so that I can memorize my lines. I read over it once yesterday then got distracted by the fact that my roommate has xbox 360 and NBA2K. The next is the instructions for how to apply to write for this blog I found and want to write for. It involves explaining what I want to write. I’ll do that when I have time. The next is instructions on how to apply to a sketch comedy festival I want to apply to. I’ll do that when I have time. The next is a job at College Humor that I want to apply to. That one involves a cover letter. I don’t have time to write something that matters. The next is the Moth website to remind myself to think of a spring themed story to tell on Monday. I don’t have a story yet because I don’t have time. The last tab is the one that will disappear first. Not because I like it least, quite the opposite. It is because that is the only tab who’s task will be completed by the end of the night. It is my hulu queue.

My bottom task bar is also full. Full with stories that I’m “working on,” scripts that I “need to edit,” and people’s phone numbers and important information that I received while sans paper and pencil but not sans the computer in my lap. I have 3 untitled Notepad documents open. My computer is my life, and my life seems pretty unfinished, but that’s the way I like it. I figure if it’s unfinished that means that I got shit to do in order to finish it. Sure. That seems like a very flawed but reasonable defense to make myself feel less guilty for spending the next two hours watching Fringe and Flash Forward.

Depressed, Lonely, My favorites, Pathetic

Alliterations and Depression

It’s fascinating to me how many words can start with “s” and sound completely different. My shoe was a sponge for slush. Though I was only permitted two hours of sleep before my day started with squeezing lemonade and making lattes, I was now laboriously marching through slush toward my prospective client who needed to learn long division. My eyes were heavy, but my sponge shoes were heavier as each step found me in a puddle of what I’m sure the Inuit have a word for but I do not. Somehow the threading that kept my moccasin like payless shoes that I bought because there lack of shoelaces seemed like less work than the opposite was expanding and letting in full chunks of snowy ice that immediately melted with the heat of my sweat.

The hour subway ride I had just spent melting had left a puddle underneath where my feet had been, and though I had had Vonnegut to keep me company, I was psyched for the opportunity for a friend that was warmer. A friend that was indoors. I was hoping indoors was my friend.

6:30 this day had started after the last day had ended at 4:30 with a drunken friend proclaiming that a journey for sandwiches was more rewarding than the quick nap I was trying to take before work. I forced myself down the half block to my cafe through a downpour of raindrops the size of a barely pubescent boy’s testicles. Every 40th raindrop was different. Every 40th raindrop was a snowflake. Still disgustingly sized, but falling slower as it liked to take into account the air around it’s demands for it to move slightly back and forth. Below me was a clean sidewalk, but one that knew that soon this surreal mix of snow and rain would turn it into a horrid puddle of depression.

I was now in Bushwick, far from my side of Brooklyn finding each piece of ground I stepped on less sturdy than expected. Men’s size 10 indents followed behind me in the slushy mix of Seasonal Affective Disorder tangibly realized. I had to pee. I stopped in at an autobody shop to call my soon to be client and to release my penis to the wild world of a toilet.

“So where exactly is this apartment building?” I asked on my bipolar phone which decides to cut out as often as I want to use it.

Her description made no sense. There was no Popeye’s. There was only this Napa.

“I’m on Rockaway Blvd.”

“Your supposed to be on Rockaway Beach Blvd.”

The two are an hour apart by subway and I wasn’t making another trek through this slush of sadness. Instead I screamed. I left Napa, felt the cold raindrops of snowish substance on my face and I screamed. I dragged my sixty pound shoes sixteen blocks back to the c train so that I could enjoy the cold comfort of typeface masquerading as my best friend. My book wouldn’t leave me. My book wouldn’t lead me out into a tundra of wet only to tell me that I was in the wrong place. My book was there for me.

I got back home ready to take a nap but realized I had to go out again. My friend had just woke up and once again he suggested sandwiches. I obliged.

Lazy, My favorites, Nostalgia, Pathetic

Time Machines

My phone fell into a bucket of water that was meant to be drank out of instead of spilled in to. It works fine except that the screen displays fun bright lights instead of a screen of useful information. It has transported me back to a time when you had to remember people’s numbers, “Hello?” was a question, and if you wanted to “hang out” you had to talk as opposed to type. This happened about a week ago.

I finally went to the AT&T store only to find that I needed a piece of information from my parents. Restart. I got off work at 2pm and went to the AT&T store that is two blocks away at 5pm. During those three hours I watched clips of the latest late night feud between conan and leno and nbc and anyone else who has a TV show. None of them were interesting.

My parents are in my mother’s native land of Sweden right now so when I needed information from them I couldn’t contact them because of the 6 hour time advance (yup, that’s what it’s called in my mind). If I had gone after work like I said I was going to I could have contacted them before they fell asleep, but now I am stuck with this non-time telling flashlight that vibrates with the requests of unknown persons for another day.

I don’t mind how my laziness has affected me though, because my laziness has given me a time machine to my high school years. A time when cell phones weren’t had by all and weren’t as multi-functional as they are now. A time when sex was a distant but constant dream for me. A time when the only way I understood how to output my rage toward humanity was to dress in women’s clothing.

Shit.

I need to get my phone fixed. Time machines are terrible.

Nisse Greenberg

Category Archives: Pathetic