diona’s cat luci used to really like me but now she hates me, even though i keep on trying to be nice to her. meanwhile tesla and duke both like diona. tesla even sort of likes luci, though luci hates diona.

here is what i imagine luci is thinking.

when i first moved her over: “he put me in a cage. i don’t like this.”

when she was here for a few weeks: “he brought me here in a cage. i hate this. i hate him. i hate this place. i liked the old place. i hate you.”

when i needed to get her out from under the couch: “this is my place. you can’t touch me. i hate you. i’ll even pee here. move my food here. i hate this. i hate you. i hate you so much.”

when i try to pet her: “i hate you. i hate you a lot. didn’t you hear me? I HATE YOU. i hate you. go away. i’ll bite you. i’ll fucking bite you. i’ll do it.”

when i try to pet her and diona’s holding her: “IHATEYOUIHATEYOUIHATEYOUIHATEYOU DON’T THINK THAT JUST BECAUSE SHES HOLDING ME I CAN’T GET AWAY LET GO OF ME BITCH THIS IS THE WORST PERSON AND HE’S PROBABLY GOING TO TRY TO KILL ME NEXT I HATE THIS PLACE I HATE YOU”

when i feed her: “i hate you. it’s probably poison. i’m gonna eat it, but if i die, remember that i hate you. always remember. it’s very important to remember how much i hate you.”

when i throw her a treat: “don’t throw shit at me. don’t… especially not poison. i’m not eating this. it’s poison. i hate you.”

when duke and tesla visit: “fuck you, fuck you. i’m out.”

when she’s alone and has a moment to herself: “someday i’ll grow thumbs and mix the baby poison with his toothpaste. then he’ll be fucking sorry. hate is all i know. what was that noise? fuck. fuck. i hate you.”

love you luci!

“I have one baby, but I want zero babies. Do you sell anything for that?”

“Does rat poison work on really big rats? What if the rat is as big as a small baby? Would it also kill the small baby?

“You have the baby food on this end of the aisle, and the poison on the other end. I would expect to find the baby poison between the two, since that’s where people looking for poison would look but also where people looking for things you would give to babies would look. It’s not there, though. Do you keep it in the back?”

“My house is full of cats that just won’t leave. Pretty reasonable sized cats. I don’t have enough time to keep on feeding them and replacing their diapers and paying for their college. Do you sell cat poison? Does it only work on cats, or does it also work on other mammals? You know, just in case.”

is it strange that i have this visceral hatred for whenever i see someone on xbox live associated with the military? i find the troops despicable and prefer to keep them abstracted. great guys, fight our wars, but don’t play battlefield 1943 against me on xbox and certainly dont live two doors down from my parents, jackass.

you know that dodge charger ad that has been enraging feminists lately? about man’s last stand. the one with michael c. hall (which i totally just realized). here’s the thing.

i had lunch with four other guys on friday and three of them got dragged to see the movie “valentines day” with their wives, one of them paid $200 for the privilege with some full service deal at a high class cinema. diona has been playing bioshock online. i win.

i think it’s fair to say some dudes are pretty emasculated and to tap into anger about sacrifice in order to sell a car is a pretty basic example of what advertisements do. is this kind of eFeminism just a numbers game, mathing out how many women are bitches and how many women are harmed by the stereotype? i mean i get it, instilling male entitlement for a car can affect male entitlement in other areas indirectly and thats probably somewhat harmful, but why the fuck did i have to listen to three guys discuss the pros and cons of the film “valentines day”?

for what it’s worth, it probably goes both ways. i mean, it probably takes a pretty stupid/desperate dude to date a pretty stupid/obnoxious bitch.

last year there were only really two albums that came out that i previously looked forward to - wale and the hood internet the mixtape volume 4. this year i think there will be quite a few more, because already out of the gate i am looking forward to…

1. rhymefest - el che
2. the heligoats - goodness gracious
3. kanye west - album #5
4. steve burns and the struggle - deep sea recovery efforts
5. miles kurosky - the desert of shallow effects
6. weird al - album #13
7. the avalanches - album #2
8. vampire weekend - contra
9. ted leo & the pharmacists - the brutalist bricks
10. lcd soundsystem - album #3
11. los campesinos - romance is boring
12. the thermals - album #5
13. she and him - volume 2
14. gorillaz - plastic beach
15. lupe fiasco - lasers
16. whatever annie hardy is recording
    
    that should probably make a pretty good year. yes this blog entry is mostly for myself

i saw this billboard the other day for verizon, where it just said america’s largest and most reliable 3g network and had the can-you-hear-me-now guy just crossing his arms smugly.

the assumption verizon makes is that we’ve all seen the can-you-hear-me-now ads. and probably all of us have. but it strikes me as a little bit evil - verizon is acknowledging that yes, we all know these ads so well that just seeing the dude evokes the message of the ads. but they’re buying billboards solely to prime us, to make sure that we’re thinking about that dude all the time. i don’t know, when a billboard is providing information we might not have had before, great, it’s informative. when it’s just hammering in what we already know, i start to get suspicious.

not that it’s a bad strategy or anything. i’m just worried at how good corporations are at manipulating what we think. we are all so dumb, i think.

here’s what i don’t like

i don’t like when people reject a song on its premise. it’s entirely possible to be disingenuous when writing a song, sure, but if the song is good enough you can overlook a faulty premise. for instance, the cam’ron song “i hate my job” is a really good song, but the premise is that cam’ron is an underemployed woman/man (the gender changes based on the verse) who hates her/his job. it’s pretty universal, but cam’ron is such an asshole that it’s easy to challenge the premise. but you know what, in this economy when if you bitch about your job someone will always go AT LEAST YOU HAVE A JOB, sometimes you have to be such an asshole, and the song makes me laugh and is something i blast on particularly intolerable weekdays.

another example is the taylor swift song you belong with me. sure, it is hard to envision her in as frumpy a light as she casts herself (though being over 6 feet tall she probably does wear the sneakers. perhaps she was once lanky and awkward) but she does this affable diary style of songwriting that i think makes up for it. at least thats what i tell myself.

my girlfriend has a rather tenuous relationship with art. she is a graphic designer, and she doesn’t like her art to “mean” something, but rather to just look nice.

but doesn’t that by itself mean something?

if a piece of art is supposed to express an idea, or make you think, or make you feel a certain way, then a good piece of design that has no function other than to look good thus qualifies as art. the design was something that the designer thought was interesting enough to compose. more than that, something that looks good is enough to evoke a feeling in you, even if the feeling is just that everything has been put in its place. when you look at something and say “that looks nice,” it’s not just the item that looks nice - it makes you feel nice. if art ought to make you feel something, who’s to say that something that makes you feel nice is any less art?

Attention Dominick’s shoppers: Do you like crappy apples? Then you’ll love our crap apples! Grown in the lush gardens of Kankakee, Illinois, these can be described with one and only one adjective: runny! Before you even take a bite, Kankakee crap apples will ooze with an unidentifiable miasma that will turn your outie into an innie. You’ll find them in the dairy aisle, next to the cottage cheese. Pick up a Kankakee crap apple today!

i wonder why everyone always gets so worried about china. even on npr today they talked about our financial relationship as one of mutually assured destruction - if our assets ever tank, the value of their holdings go down, as well. add that to their contradictory relationship with technology - high censorship does not play nice with an information economy - and the severe one-child free-rider fuckery that will lead to an disproportional amount of cranky, sexless chinese men (and, if the invisible hand of adam smith tells us anything, a lucrative market for prostitution) and i think china’s threat is vastly overblown. but why do we pretend that they’re just micrometers away from cashing in our debts and putting the us in the poorhouse? probably because the generation that runs the world is so used to one superpower having another as an enemy, the dot com bubble extinguished our irrational exuberance that we were living in a post-soviet utopia, and we realized that terrorism, either as an organization or as a dogma, isnt a worthy adversary. so some of us need an enemy so that we feel worthwhile. q.e.d., china is evil.