U B Hatin'

Hi haters!  Welcome to my blog!

I seem to be rapidly approaching my goal of becoming an important part of the internet because I woke up this morning to a string of badly misspelled hate mail and syntax-free angry comments.  Normally, this would have made me crumple into a heap of trembling anxiety and self-hatred, but for the last few weeks, I have been secretly training to withstand superhuman amounts of hatred by hitting myself in the face with a bag full of bird carcasses, so I'm ready for this.

First of all, congratulations for noticing that I draw pictures!  Apparently, other people draw pictures too!  I know this because you have kindly informed me that I am copying Natalie Dee, XKCD, The Oatmeal, Nicholas Gurewitch and several 4Chan memes.

While I must admit to being influenced by all of those sources, I feel that the diversity and breadth of your accusations prove that I am not copying any one of them.  Also, I don't know if you've ever drawn anything, but there are a limited number of ways to draw a face.  I could draw something like this:

But that picture doesn't really make any sense.  No one would understand what I was even trying to do. 

Haters, you also pointed out that I wrote about cake and pie and that other people in the world have written about cake and pie too.  This is true.  I am sorry that I talked about something that other people have talked about before.  Please allow me to apologize by providing a preview of what it would look like if I only posted unique combinations of words that had never been talked about before:

That was stupid.  No one wants to read about that because it has no context and it doesn't even have any sentence-structure. I will never, ever, EVER intentionally copy someone else's work, but the internet is really big and no matter what precautions I take, chances are good that I will say something at some point that has been said before. That's just how statistics work. I am sorry.

Anyway, I have been told that if I want to do lots of shit on the internet and have lots of people see it, I will have to deal with haters.  Forever.  Luckily, I wrote this post and every time I get an email accusing me of stealing something or telling me that I suck or that I'm going to hell for swearing, I can simply reply with a link and then go about the rest of my day doing important things like blogging about pie and drawing pictures of bears.

P.S.  In the interest of fairness, I feel that I should also mention the overwhelming amount of positive feedback I've gotten in the last few days.  For every hate-filled email or comment I've received, there have been at least 100 supportive and wonderful emails/comments.  Even my rigorous hatred-withstanding training could not have gotten me through this without you guys.  Thank you.  You make me love the internet so much that my face hurts.

7 Games You Can Play With a Brick

If you have a brick or a pile of bricks, you may be thinking "bricks are really boring."  But you're wrong.   There are probably a million ways to have fun with a brick.   Here are seven of them.

1.  "Brick Tag"

The rules of brick tag are simple:  if you get hit by the brick, you're "it."  You can also play brick freeze-tag, but it is not recommended since a game involving blunt-force trauma to the head doesn't really need to be complicated by not being able to tell if your friends are dead or just not "unfrozen" yet.  

 

2. "Brick Roulette"

Have your friends stand in a circle around you.  Put on a blindfold.  Spin around as fast as you can while holding the brick with your arm fully extended to build up maximum force.  Let go.  

3. "Jump Over the Brick"

Put the brick on the ground.  Jump over it.  See how high you can jump.  

4. "Truth or Brick"

Tell the truth or get the brick.

5. "Drop the Brick"

Find something tall.  Go up on top of it.  Drop the brick.  

6. "Brick Conquerers"

Fuck the brick up.  Hit it with a stick, stab it with a sword, set it on fire - the goal is to inflict maximal harm on the brick. 

7. "Duck, Duck, Brick"

Cake Versus Pie: A Scientific Approach

I love cake.  Cake is wonderful.  But it is too easy to get caught up in the idea of cake.  When you compare the data, it is clear that pie is a better choice.  

1.  Ability of enjoyment to be sustained over time

The first few mouthfuls of cake are almost magical, but as eating continues, enjoyment drops off precipitously.  The enjoyment curve for pie appears to be much more stable over time.  

2.  Unequal frosting distribution is a problem

Pie exhibits much greater homogeneity than cake.  In cake, the highest concentration of awesomeness is found in the frosting.  The act of decorating a cake can polarize it and cause a dangerously uneven distribution of frosting, leading to discord and animosity during serving time.   

3.  Pie appears to contain a greater relative volume of enjoyable substances.  

4.  Pie is more scientifically versatile:

5.  Pie is relevant in a greater variety of situations:

Cake is appropriate in a very limited number of situations, whereas almost any day is a great day to have pie.  

6. Cake has much more severe, longer lasting consequences than pie:

UPDATE:  It's too early to tell whether this hybridization is the best idea ever or just dangerous and foolish:

Most likely it will either solve all the problems in the world or end humanity in a hyperglycemic blaze of glory. 

This Post is Brought to You by Spiders. And Logic.

I stayed up until 6:00 AM because when I tried to go to bed, I found two spiders on my blanket and I thought maybe there were more and maybe the entire blanket was full of spiders, so I put my blanket out in the hall and then waited for Boyfriend to wake up and go to work so I could use his sleeping bag which I arbitrarily decided was spider-proof. It seemed perfectly logical at the time.

Anyway, I woke up at ten and I thought it was at least noon, but no. It was ten. And then I was like "Shit. I only got four hours of sleep for no reason."

And that's why I'm posting some of my drawings that I found on my computer instead of a real blog post.

Am Adult

When I woke up this morning, my house smelled like death and sadness.  I walked into the kitchen and saw what appeared to be a piece of petrified wood sitting in a bowl on the counter.  I was like "What is this thing?"

Boyfriend:  "What thing?"

Me:  "The thing in the bowl that kind of looks like petrified wood covered in human skin."

Boyfriend:  "Oh, I accidentally left my oatmeal in the microwave for 20 minutes."

Me: "And the microwave was going the whole time?"

Boyfriend:  "Yeah.  I meant to set it for three minutes and thirty seconds, but I must have hit an extra zero.  I took it out before it caught on fire, though."

Me:  "You waited twenty minutes without thinking 'this is way longer than three minutes'"?

Boyfriend:  "I just thought that I must have missed the beep and then I was like "meh, I'll get it later.'"

Me:  "I guess that's understandable.  Did you get breakfast?"

Boyfriend:  "Yeah, I had a tortilla."

Sometimes I feel like Boyfriend and I are retarded cavemen.  All of our friends are going about their lives as normal, well-adjusted adults who cook their meals and live in clean, well-decorated houses, while Boyfriend and I are sitting on the floor eating beans out of a can with spoons we made out of tinfoil because we can't find any of our real spoons.

We bought a toilet brush back in September with the intention of using it to clean our toilets, but it is still sitting in a corner, encased in shrink-wrap.

We always try to start being normal and responsible.  Every week we have a little pow-wow and decide that we are really going to do it this time.  We are really going to stop stuffing our candy bar wrappers in the couch cushions and we are really going to sweep the floor and scrub the toilets and clean things up when we spill them.  

 I keep hoping that one day we will magically morph into responsible adults like everyone else, but I'm pretty sure that we're going to either get eaten by wolves, become homeless or end up being featured on A&E's Hoarders.  One of those.  Possibly all of them.  We will probably be the only homeless people ever to be shunned by the other hobos for our lack of organizational skills. 

P.S. I want to sincerely thank all of the people who have been tweeting and emailing and stumbling and reblogging and Facebooking and Digging my posts.  If things keep going like this, I might be able to spend the rest of my adult life drawing and writing stuff on the internet and then I never have to become a real adult!  You have no idea how happy this would make me.  I would be so happy that my body would probably explode but it would be okay because there'd be rainbows inside of me! 

Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you.  You are wonderful, crazy people.  

PROCRASTINATOR!!!! (Updated, Like, a Million Times Probably)

Today, my procrastination on returning emails finally reached critical mass.  I woke up with a feeling of dread and apprehension - like maybe I was going to get stabbed.  I drank a whole bunch of coffee, but that only made me feel paranoid.   I tried not to check my mail because I knew it was going to look like this:

I never intend for things to get this way.   I ignore something for one day, and pretty soon it's eighteen days later and I still haven't done it.  Then my responsibilities become wrapped up in so much guilt and helplessness that I have to ignore them because I'd rather feel good about myself.  

I just keep pretending that I don't have anything to do until the amount of stuff I have to do becomes so massive that it ruptures my pathetic psychological defense system like a water balloon and all my responsibilities explode out at me at eight thousand miles per hour and hit me in the face and then I'm lying on the ground flailing dramatically and that's not making it any better so I drink more coffee, but no, it still doesn't work, and it makes me have to pee and that reminds me that I don't have any toilet paper and somehow that seems like an impossible problem to remedy so I just lie on the floor, helpless and uncomfortable, wondering how this happened to my life.

Anyway, I kind of forgot where I was going with this.  I think mostly I wanted to draw dramatic pictures  of myself being stabbed and beaten down by my responsibilities and I didn't really think of how I was going to make it into a coherent blog post.   

I am sorry for this post.  I'm going to publish it anyway because I'm feeling irrational.

UPDATE:  Now I thought of an ending!

UPDATE:  I was reading over this again and I remembered that I'm unemployed and I don't really have any responsibilities except maybe a few things like writing emails and feeding my pets.  Then I felt bad because I'm sitting here in a life-altering panic over a very basic task that most normal people accomplish while drinking their coffee in the morning - before heading off to their real jobs where they have real responsibilities.  

This is a perfect example of why I would crumple up and die in the workforce.  Anyway, I made an award for everyone who manages to work and email and take care of kids and not kill their plants:  

UPDATE:  Now I made an award for the procrastinators too.  I wasn't trying to be ironic by posting it four hours after everything else, but I guess it kind of worked out that way: