05/15/2004 - 11:31 a.m. | CUTERS (raw, seeting anger)

I need to kill a bit of time before I call the Buckle back. Danee has been frantically phoning, trying to get me to work some ass shift either today or tomorrow ("It's graduation weekend!! *goat noise*"), and if you'll recall, I am out of town for the weekend. Well, I mean, I will be tomorrow (Who wants to come visit Nate's parents with him?!), and I want one day of total lethargy before I start doing stuff. Is that so bad? Yeah, probably, but I'm doing it anyway.

Lisa and I have been talking online some, and we finally went out for lunch yesterday. At Cafe Luna. Almost a year to the day from when we met there to talk about AlterNate. I dunno - sometimes it seems like we could be friends - we're so much alike! - but the damn girl knows exactly how to push my buttons to get me really pissed off. Example: We're driving somewhere, and I turn on an Old 97's CD. "There's a girl on Facebook who only lists Rhett Miller and Old 97's as her favorite bands." Beat. "Everyone hates her." Like Kyle said, she's like a character from a very dry sitcom. Or, from completely out of left field, "You know what bothers me? White people who develop this infatuation with Japan when they don't really know anything about it." She might as well have mouthed "YOU" right after she finished saying that. Maybe she enjoys getting a rise out of me, I'm not sure. And it's not like I'm King Friendly myself, I'll admit. While she lay (Another argument there - hopefully resolved) there in her room passed out as I phoned and pounded on the door again and again, I resolved to call her "damn stupid moron Lisa" for the rest of the day, and I mostly stuck to that. In general, if she would just sing poorly, things would be better for all of us.

I guess another part of the reason I'm not up for the Buckle today is that I can't tolerate another series of speeches about my sales. I went in yesterday to pick up my check, find out my hours, and buy a few things (while I have the whole discount thing, right?) So, you know, besides the usual note on my paycheck, I got a little speech from Heather, too. She gave me a ton of hours next week, but she was like, "But if I do this, you're gonna have to promise to work really hard to raise your sales, OK?" I think there is some conflict among the people there because they like me as a person, I think, like working shifts with me and all that, but I don't earn as much as lots of the other people there. Interconnected? Just a conjecture. Little do they know that I am constantly working behind the curtains. Yes, I got the job at candy store. $6 an hour for doing nothing - as compared to barely 6 bucks for working my ass off the whole time. Tough one. And yeah, my 7 minute interview at the Dollar Tree went well, too, so I'll probably get that one as well. I must learn to say no. I simply must.

Kind of a cold, rainy day outside, but you have to make your own sunshine, right? Whatever the hell that means. Not long after I got back, Shelly IM'd and asked if I wanted to go shopping for Kyle's birthday presents. Then she locked her keys in the trunk. Once I ran over there with the spare and she had me safely locked in her vehicle with no chance of escape, she finally told me what she was getting him. Now, I'm not actually supposed to reveal this, I guess, but it's pretty important for the rest of the story, so I will just hide it in white text: Piles and piles of Snack Packs (Pudding, you know? I always thought that was a stupid name for pudding) and red underwear - briefs, specifically. BLECH. This still probably won't keep it hidden from Kyle, even if he didn't mean to look, simply because the ADHD forces him to constantly click and select text over and over again. Poor, sick man. Anyway, the former gift wasn't too hard to find, but Shelly was sort of picky on the latter (Much to my increasing disgust - I don't want to think about those people with... that stuff!), leading us on an increasingly creepy journey through the seemy underbelly of Champaign-Urbana. And we started off at Dollar General, if that gives you any idea of how bad things were to end up. Strangely enough, the underwear section there was all bungee-corded off. I started to take them down and walk through, and the cashier lady nearly had a conniption. "YOU CAN'T DO THAT!" Apparently, they had some problems with theft (A guy filled his coat one time?), so to prevent some sort of massive undergarment crime wave, serious precautions had to be taken. God damn schizophrenics.

We went from there to Farm and Fleet to Target to K-Mart without much luck at all (Plenty of stupid, stupid hats to try on, however!). This was about the time that I got the brilliant idea that we check out those... erotic-type stores. You know, like Lover's Lane up in the Chicagoland area? Yeah, I thought I had seen something like that over on Cunningham, so we tried there first (while listening to the Cars and shortly after Shelly had tried to slowly run down a goose). Yeah, porn store. As if analyzing underwear with Michelle hadn't been bizarre enough, hellooooo dildos! Well, at the very least we owed it to ourselves to take a look around. OK, the magazines and videos are one thing, but as Shelly said, who goes in the to buy a butthold-shaped masturbatory tool? And maaaan! They had like a little blob of skin on each package, so you could sample what the thing you would be humping would feel like. *shudder* So, so, so, so, SO creepy feeling! We asked the fish lady if she knew where else we might look, and she sent us "just up the road" (5 miles - wtf?) to a place called Fantasy's. Sounds a little classier, right, but apparently most people's fantasy is another porn store. This one was even larger, so we took our time observing. I started chasing Shelly with this crazy, glow-in-the-dark revolving vibrator, and she was endlessly fascinated by the Para-dice. By the time we had made it back to the butt plugs and "Realistic Cock" section, this creepy old guy in a pinkish shirt lurched out of the (ahem) "private viewing area." Oh dear God. I could barely contain myself - and he certainly hadn't! *rimshot* Discussing him later, Shelly was like, "Maybe he just came there to watch..." Maybe he just watched there to come, says brain. On the clearance rack, there was a giant rubber fist for sale. If you've ever listened to Doug Stanhope, he's discussed this before. I'll paraphrase: What in God's name would you need a rubber fist for? Okay, a dildo sort of makes sense, I'll agree. But, what are you doing with the two fists you already have that you need this third one to, uh... well, let's not think about it. I started going into this with Shelly when all of a sudden the "confident" sale clerk woman with the awful, awful teeth started explaining all these facts about pornography and why such devices were needed for legal reasons. Thank you so much. You know so much about pornography. Way to go. And it is now clear that the porn stores I went to were almost certainly hiring - there was just no way I was mutated enough to work there. If there's not some sort of Elephant Man working the counter, it would make the difficult task of buying such horribly embarrassing things downright impossible.

Still, we didn't find our query, and the phone call to a very confused Dank didn't help us find any leads, so we gave up for the evening. I might have found another place, but let's put that off for a bit, OK? Lurch up stairs. I was settling in for a long night of watching a "Lilo & Stitch" marathon and trying to finish another of those horrible chocolate bunnies when Andrea called. She doesn't hate me, it appears! We went out for smelly Thai because we are cool, and then rushed to meet Dank and company to see Troy, but it sold out before we got there. According to Jared's review, however, it might have been for the best that we missed it. Come on, though - taking the gods out of The Iliad is like taking them out of The Ten Commandments. Not a movie to be taken seriously, director guy. Wolfgang Fathead or whatever. Instead, we drove really far south to the custard place. Having no money, though, we wandered around until we found an ATM. Along the way, I swear the every passing car yelled something at us. I mean, literally. Not even just the drunk teenagers pumping their fists to the rock and roll - even mid-20's loner guys were going at it. Maybe it's a city ordinance. We ended up in some creepy hotel, and while Andie got money and talked on the phone, I noticed a Miller Genuine Draft - all alone, unopened, still cold - hidden behind a Chicago Sun-Times machine. What the damn? Champaign is weird, guys.

I don't think I get custard. It tastes like it was made with slightly sour milk to me. Anyway, since we are such cool dudes, we parked near FAR and ate our fake Blizzards (Snowstorms!!) while dancing to bad dance music on the radio. Who says I don't know how to have a wild time? Since Andrea had to pack and since she packs in the same manner that Kyle and Shelly do homework, I came over to try and motivate her. Mostly I read back issues of YM. I could never go so far as to subscribe, but I really enjoy trashy celebrity magazines like People and Star and shit. I like tossing out speculative rumors like they are crucial facts, knowledge the world simply must not be without. It took a long time, but she eventually got done, and we crashed, despite our own spotty record of waking up in the morning and the fact that her parents were coming and wontthatbeawkward? BUT! We made it OK, although it was sad because I will miss her and then Weezer was playing on the Planet as I drove home, and we were both probably listening to it at the same time, and OK, that's not poignant, but it still made me a little down. Anyway, I'm still sort of tired, and I've got a few hours before the big sale at the guitar store (Maybe a mandolin sale, too, right?!), so sweet dreams, uh, self. I started giving the car a stuffy British accent and pretending it's my butler.