kitty lumpkins

Internet, the last time we talked, I was was bleeding and worrying about my dwindling cash hillock. You’ll be happy to know that the former, at the very least, is no longer a concern, so now I’ll die, malnourished, in a cardboard box, rather than slumped over and headfirst in a blood-filled sink.

That’s the short of it. Basically I am still an unemployed slacker; not too proud of that one. Granted, nobody’s hiring—that is, nobody’s hiring unexperienced college graduates, a category that I slot into nicely. Point stands.

HERE’S THAT THING AGAIN, A FOLLOW-UP THING, IF YOU WILL

You might remember this past winter when I talked about My Friends Wot Seem Like They’re Getting Married. Anyway, that happened just the other week. I was not invited because I am Shiva the Destroyer¹ and was therefore liable to make an awkward, unplanned toast. But Groom and Best Man invited me to the bachelor party, which I am more than happy about. There were no cakes, or strippers, or (it logically follows) strippers in cakes, but there were a lot of chips and cupcakes and even video games, which, I don’t know, close enough? Groom doesn’t drink, and Best Man’s not drinking age anyway, so no shenanigans.² But you know what? Sometimes that’s okay!³

CALLING AROUND

Did you know that I have been in a long distance relationship? Shit sucks, man.

AND FINALLY

Have you noticed the fancy footnote shit going on yet? I admit that it is totally unnecessary, what with my posts being minuscule and all, but it still looks great. You wish I made that all by myself. Damn! Maybe one day I will make things that fancy.

Long story short, I graduated and moved back in with my parents. UGH. One of those people.

JOB CONCERNS

“Technical interview.” Technical. No, not comforting.

Here’s something I forgot that grown-ups have to do: know stuff. Since when?! I thought grown-ups just sat around and drank beer and watched their interpersonal relationships dissolve, sip by sip. I had that one down, solid.

BLOG CONCERNS

I figure I need to be technologically informed or some shit and I decided to look into cached webpages, and so but like long story short, you’re supposed to be looking at a cached, static page. A lot of stuff is supposed to be served by Amazon S3. Like a buck a month, so why the heck not?

This is supposed to be good, but I have no clue if it’s actually working. It’s pretty goddamn obvious when it’s not working, though, which is all the goddamn time. What am I doing wrong? I haven’t got the slightest. It’s probably super simple to figure out what it is, exactly, but four years of formal computer science classes have made me despise technology, and so I give up.

MONEY CONCERNS

In high school, I worked in the (fast) food service industry, and as a result, I received tips in the form of wads and wads of wrinkled small bills. I was also (and still am) shy and awkward and lazy, and I didn’t want to put the bank teller through the ordeal of sorting through wads and wads of wrinkled small bills, even though that is sort of their job, and even though I straightened out the bills and stacked them neatly and ordered them by denomination and oh god.

Anyway, I got into the habit of squirreling away my tips in weird places, thinking, I’ll remember this. Guess what? I didn’t! And so now every time I take a book off my bookshelf, or I look in my desk for a pen, I run the risk of encountering a wad of singles or something. Which is great, except I like knowing where my money goes, so I want to stick it in my checking account so the spending shows up on my account statement, oh, but I don’t want to take it to the bank because it’ll look weird that all I’m walking into the building with just this stack of singles, and sir? is that all you’re depositing, sir? and oh god.

BLOOD LOSS CONCERNS

And so eventually I just sucked it up and deposited like a hundred bucks in ones and fives into my checking account, and basically the fact that I waited so long to do it just really made it worse, somehow, but no matter! Because I decided I needed a graduation present, and there is literally no better way to reward the fact that you have grown-up responsibilities than by spending one hundred dollars on wetshaving supplies and sharp blades that you put near your face, every morning, when you’re groggy and not at all with the program.

It’s questionable exactly how much I can justify the purchase, since I only have, like, four square inches of face that require shaving. But the shave cream’s pretty fancy, so my face smells great, at least. The actual shave’s pretty smooth, I guess, smoother than I was getting with my crappy, ancient electric shaver, but maybe that’s just the blood lubricating everything.

A little more complicated than just that. See, the problem is less a lack of things to say than an ability to say them. It’s easy to say, e.g., that I’ve been making foods¹ or freaking the shit out over this particular piece of work—if you can call it that²—and it is almost trivially easy to say that I have filled the rest of my time with a collegiate creative writing class, although mentioning it makes me feel like I have to justify it by saying that I just had nothing better to do, okay, don’t judge, which I have just done. Easy. Fair enough. A little less easy: girls who taste like garam masala. Where do you even start with that?