Hour 1am:

So, here’s the deal with the experiment. I realized that the birthday of Christ offers a wonderful opportunity. Nothing’s open. Nobody wants to hang out. There is no real reason for me to leave my apartment. No real reason for me to leave my bed. So for 24 hours I will be in my bed. Awake. Letting the insanity of loneliness with only a computer to comfort me. I will get up only to go to the bathroom and every hour I will document my adventures. I thought about bringing a bucket in for bathroom purposes. But that seemed too gross for even me. So, here’s hour one:

I started off this adventure as any adventure should start, by taking a massive shit, then making a desperate search around the apartment for toilet paper. I then hauled a large bucket of water into my room as well as a jar of peanut butter and the leftover vegetarian curry meatloaf from my festivus celebration I had in the fridge. I will survive off of this, the Christmas present my mother sent me of Swedish cookies, Emergen-C, and multi-vitamins.

I’m gonna need all the energy I can get because I’ve already been up since 6am. Meaning that after 24 hrs, I will have been up for 43 total. Whoooo! I’ve got a pair of sunglasses, some old writing books and my computer, we’ll see what happens.

Hour 2am:

This is going to be harder than I thought. Already I’ve done all the tasks I needed to accomplish, I’ve played NBA Live, I’ve watched TV online, I’ve read other’s blogs, and I’ve found myself in the missed connections of craigslist. Man those people are pathetic, and sad, and weird, and creepy, how did my account get taken down because I attempted to offer free therapy? These people are way more fucked up than me.

The hardest part is that I really have been up for 19 hours already, and didn’t get much sleep the night before. I’m already having trouble keeping my eyes open and I have another 23 hours to go. Luckily I have a box of Emergen-c to get through and I’ve already taken a B complex vitamin. If you have any suggestions of what to do, post ‘em, I’ll do ‘em. I’m trying to hold off from masturbating, but that’s gonna happen soon.

Hour 5am:

I fell asleep. It was far too difficult. I took a nap. I’m back on though and I’m ready to fight the world. Or fight any demons that might crawl toward by bed.

Hour 6am:

My mind hurts. I stared at a white wall for 30 straight minutes without doing anything and all I could think about is how great it would be to give up. I’m not gonna cheat again, but god it would feel good. I’m gonna play music to keep myself awake. I hope it keeps me entertained too.

Hour 7am:

I”m back mudderfokers! It took a playlist of Lady Gaga, LFO, and Beyonce to wake me up, but with a little help from my friends and music I’m ready to conquer this bed. My friends contacted me via the internet. This is why being in bed isn’t that bad because my computer is the only friend I really need. It contains all of my friends inside of it. No longer do I really need human interaction because I can find a form of it in little chat boxes.

The song that is playing has the lyric: “I’m trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful.”

My friend (who’s blog I linked to even though it is a dead blog) has kept me awake with my favorite game – take one group of people and put them in a different situation. This time: Sitcom actors cast as the characters of Hamlet. Highlights: Bill Cosby as Polonius, Keenan and Kel as Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, Portia De Rossi or Megan Mullaly as Momma Hamlet, Aziz Ansari as Laertes, Aubrey Plaza or Michael Richards as the Gravedigger, Ken Leong as Fortinbras, and Larry David as The Ghost. Lots more was discussed, but if I’ve learned anything from entertaining thousands throughout my life it is to leave a little to the imagination. The other thing I’ve learned is that I can justify any amount of laziness as being important for entertainment value.

How meta.

Hour 8am:

I did a lot of things for the first time this hour. I ate for the first time, I peed for the first time, I watched my first music video. This almost led to my first masturbation. This is my first Christmas in NYC and it’s making me realize the beauty of where I live. Sure, I literally can’t see out of my room because I live in a windowless dungeon, but the knowledge that there is aliveness around me is reassuring.

I grew up in a rural hellhole. I consider it a hellhole because beauty gets stale and it is beautiful. Therefore, stale. People on the other hand are not stale. I saw a man poop on a subway platform the other day. That’s not stale. Things are in constant flux, because people provide variables because people have free will. Trees do not. Mountains do not. Snow does not. Those things get stale, because they are predictable. They are constant. They are constantS.

I want my life to be a complicated math problem with many variables as opposed to a bunch of constants, otherwise I figure out life to quickly and I have nothing left to live for.

Hour 9am:

It’s the real morning now. I would definitely be awake now. That’s not true at all, but I want to delude myself into thinking that I should be awake so that I don’t have to force another multivitamin down my throat wishing it were redbull or something more fast-acting.

It has been pointed out that I should have slept previous to this experiment. Good point. I wanted to, but I was invited to a Christmas Eve dinner with old family friends. It was fun, but involved no sleep. They thought it would be good to sit me inbetween the two most pretentious people in their family who like to prove their intelligence constantly. They argued the entire night about everything from the fall of the roman empire to where the younger one’s father (the other one’s brother in law) kept his condoms. I was a conversational collateral damage. So I took advantage of my position. I spent 15 minutes moving my head back and forth unnecessarily so that they both had to move their heads to counteract my movement and still maintain their eye contact. That was my favorite part of the night besides when the matriarch of the household told a horrible story about a baby that walked out of a window in Brooklyn and may or may not have died to which the whole room went silent shock for a second before it was broken by one of my table neighbors demanding that someone pass him the salt.

I definitely had the best seat in the house.

Hour 10am:

I’ve started watching The Replacement Killers. I got it as part of my family friends’ get rid of the shit they have in their house and disguise it as a fun Christmas exchanging gift thing. It also came with Contract Killer. So far The Replacement Killers is about how some people can kill people, and some people have a conscience and techno music and strobe lights make gunfire badass. I’m having a hard time staying awake. I’ve eaten more of my mother’s Swedish baking and I’ve spilled Emergen-C all over my bed so now my habitat is sticky and crumby – just the way I like it. I’m gonna get back to the movie. I just paused it during the introduction of the petite but badass girl. She’s falsifying passports while a techno song plays. I’m gonna try not to masturbate yet.

Hour 11am:

This movie is so awful. The guy who’s a hired assassin with a heart of gold and the hot chick who has been in trouble with the law for her whole life are trying to get back at hired assassins and they rub dirt into their own wounds in front of buddha statues. I’ve started playing flash games while I watch.

For my last two years of college I always had a tab up to some sort of RPG. It isn’t because I love RPGs – they weren’t usually good RPGs, it was just a way for me to escape from homework and friends and everything else that was happening. When you are playing an RPG you have goals – very specific goals – and you have to figure out a way to solve them. “Figure out” makes it seem much more difficult than it is, but that’s the point. You feel like you are accomplishing something without having to expend any energy. That was perfect for me because school felt like the opposite. I was expending so much energy without accomplishing anything.

Now I have the best of both worlds – I am expending no energy and accomplishing nothing.

Hour Noon:

My eyes keep falling down. I swallowed a multivitamin, but I got tired before I could put an Emergen-C into the water. I like my jug of water. It’s large and big. And redundant. My room is like a sauna because if I turn the fan on, I lose the music sounds. I turned the fan on. My head keeps swinging around as though it were on the end of a pendulum that was knocked off it’s axis.

I found an old bracket I started to make. Paul, you wanted interactivity, here you go: Send me your favorite rap lyrics (25 words max). I’m making a bracket that I will share with you of the best rap lyrics. I already know my two favorite: Lil’ Wayne: “I’m the shit, I leave skid marks where I sit.” and Princess Superstar: “I got sexists beggin to make me breakfast.”

Other things you can say in comment form at the bottom: Things I should do, ways I can make this mattress more comfortable, a backrest besides my wall, a nicer pillow, the ability to form logical sentences and requests from you.

1pm Hour:

Sanity be damned. Though the fan, food and fact that I just played a full hour of this game has grounded me somewhat, I have listened to the different remixes of American Boy by Estelle and Kanye for the full hour so I don’t think that I am necessarily sane. My eyes hurt.

I want to try to read, but I think I’d fall asleep. I’m still gonna try. I’m gonna read Revolutionary Road. I’m gonna read it through sunglasses to make it a real challenge to stay awake.

I still have only eaten cookies all day. When I find it impossible to read, I’m gonna move onto my old writing books. We’ll see what comes out of that.

More interactivity: If you come up with a sketch title I will write it’s sketch in under ten minutes from when you comment with the title.

2pm Hour:

I didn’t read. Fuck reading. I found a new television show. There was plenty of opportunity, but  I still have 11 hrs left. I have plenty of opportunity to read. I’ve found that you can procrastinate when you have nothing to do.

I don’t read enough. I really only read when I ride public transportation, and lately I’ve been writing instead so no books are getting finished. Here’s the most symbolically appropriate thing I’ve written on the bus lately (That I can reach from my bed).

Have you ever seen a man cry through purple sunglasses?

It means he prepared for a day that didn’t happen. Purple sunglasses aren’t meant to keep any rays out, they are meant to simply alter the way those rays are seen. They make everything purplier. They make everything more fun. People may cry from joy, but nobody cries from fun. That man did not prepare himself for the day ahead of him.

He expected sights that would put a smile on his face to match his brightly colored eye areas, but instead he sits barely hiding his true sadness with a set of lenses that don’t completely disguise what he wishes the world would not see.

3pm Hour:

Time is blending together. It feels like just minutes ago that I was copying shit from my writing book onto the screen. I know it’s been time though because I am facing the other way and I am shoveling forkfuls of leftover vegetarian curry meatloaf into my mouth.

Two nights ago I attempted to throw a festivus party. Not really a party as much as a potluck. I only planned it the night before and didn’t do much to force the issue. The reason I felt this was proficient is because of what life was like in Minnesota. In Minnesota I never planned anything more than a day in advance because if I wanted 15 people over to my apartment for free food, all I needed to do was call fifteen people. I don’t know fifteen people in New York and everybody is gentile and runs away on this oh so sacred holiday. Well, fuck it. I wrapped tinfoil around a lamppost, put out some day old sushi and aired my grievences toward the two people who showed up and hung out with me while we ate my delicious concoction of boca burgers, curry, bread crumbs and shit that I found.

It was actually sort of fun, but I’m not gonna say that because I don’t like admitting a good time. The “meatloaf” is still good, but the sushi is not. I’m not used to having to work for company. I am typically too surrounded by people I like to hate, and now, though I am overly blissful to be in New York blocks from a 24 hr. donut shop, it takes a significant amount of effort to have people over to judge.

Side note: My teeth are really plaque filled, but I can’t brush my teeth. I’m trying to gargle with emergen-c.

OMG it’s 4pm:

I’ve been setting my alarm five minutes to the hour every hour so that I remember to write these entries. I hate the sound of my alarm. I hate setting my alarm for anything besides waking up because every time I hear the sound of my alarm it makes me think that I have to wake up and go to work or school or something else equally productive. For some reason there are many people with my alarm sound as their cell phone ring. I hate them. Every time they get called, I get pissed and angry because it means that I have to wake up in the middle of that pizza shop.

I’m working on the bracket, it should be ready by next hour, send in your last minute suggestions for rap lyrics.

I just yawned and I yelled afterward to make sure that I still made noise.

Here’s more subway writing:

This is the shape and size of the stain on my pants. Every time I pull my left leg up and rest it on my right knee it stares me straight in the face. This stain is three days old, yet I’ve persevered in wearing these same pants because I can’t find my belt and these are my only pants that fit without that help. I don’t like looking at it, partly because it’s gross, but partly because I can’t remember where it came from. It could have been from any of the meals I’ve eaten in the last three days except breakfast because I don’t wear pants during breakfast.

I’ve thought of and rebuked the theory that it is a jizz stain. It has a red tinge to it, and though I’ve rubbed my dick raw in the dozen or so times I’ve masturbated in the last three days, I don’t think I’ve seen any blood.

5pm Hour:

I am typing while I talk and making sure that all of the words are being said out loud at the same time at a normal volume. It’s hard to type and talk at the same time because sometimes I think that I’m typing the wrong thing and I read what I just wrote and then those words are different than what I am typing and I am bad at multitasking at this moment. Typos are obnoxious. I just made a couple and i have to repeat stuff when I do. I’m watching a TV show online as I type and talk and i hope no one is home becasue it sounds like I’m a psyctzo!!!!! WHoooo! I’m tired and I don’t want to do this any more because my voice is scaring me. I don’t like hearing voices right now. I spelled right wrong 4 times.

I am different than this guy.

That was what I wrote a half an hour ago. 10 minutes ago my roommate came home and asked if anyone was home. I obligatorily responded, opened the door from my bed and pretended I was getting dressed as he asked if I wanted to come join his family for the night. He was headed home and thought I might like to join his racist, sexist tribe of machismos for the night. I politely declined as I hid the peanut butter, bucket of water, can of beans and general trash of my room from his sight-line. As I “acted” too tired to accept his invitation, I slowly put on article by article of stained dirty cloth that I could reach from my bed. He left again before I could button my shirt. As soon as the door slammed, I ripped of my clothes, crawled under my covers and watched tv while playing computer games.

6pm Hour

I was listening to music and watching tv at the same and I didn’t realize until half way through the song. I was really frustrated because I couldn’t concentrate on either, and I didn’t know why. I’m becoming a functionally incapable human being. I am unable to process inputs. All I can think about is how I have to work tomorrow, and how much I hope that I do things right. This typing business is hard.

I’m now listening to Fiona Apple. I love listening to La Manzana Fiona during work for two reasons. (a) it’s good cafe music, (b) we have a regular customer who is mildly cute and thinks I’m mildly cute who likes Fiona Apple. Every time it’s playing and I’m working and she orders her hot chocolate and her large coffee, she looks at me as though she wants to take me home and put me on her bed and shove her head so far up my armpit that if it were a Narnian closet she would be playing with Tumnus.

We all know my fears of being liked, and specifically my fears of being liked because of how good of relationship material I make. So I like to lead her on. I can’t wait until she finally gains the courage to ask me out – I’m gonna reject her and make her feel so uncomfortable when she comes into the coffee shop she has to shop at for her boss. I like it when people feel as uncomfortable as I do.

I’m a dick, but at least I’m wearing a towel as a cape and about to play superheroes by myself.

Hora de 7pm:

I just went to the bathroom and my legs almost buckled beneath me. I’m presenting a mini bracket of rap lyrics next hour. I’m gonna open my can of beans for dinner. Here’s a piece of subway writing to hold you over.

Nevermind about the beans. I’m gonna dip a chocolate bar in a jar of peanut butter.

This is my description of two people who sat behind me on the bus:

-They read street signs like two 10 year olds reading everything they see on a road trip with the confident comprehension of art critics at a gallery opening.

-They mistook a canoe for a kayak.

-They talked for four minutes about whether or not there was an elephant at the Big Apple Circus, a fact neither of them had any information on besides speculation.

-They asked, when the city did its study on what percentage of the city was single, if “that included gay, lesbian, and etc.”

-They are morons.

Boom – 8pm:

Ok, I’m making the bracket. I got distracted by writing a sketch and watching snl clips on hulu. I still haven’t read a book at all this time. I think the problem is that my eyes have adjusted to a computer screen too much. I know can’t read from the real page. Pretty soon they’re gonna have to make a kindle that reads like it’s reading off of a computer screen because that’s what people’s eyes will be used to. CRAZY!!!

I’ll finish up this bracket and post it in a couple minutes.

If anyone wants a copy of the rap lyric bracket to fill out, email me (g.nisse@gmail.com) with your gmail address and I’ll share with you your own personal copy.

Hour 9 o’m:

I am filthy. Crumbs are in every crevice of my body. Sticky liquid is all over my body. I’m hairy so all of this is accentuated.

It’s the rules that make this weird. When I want to walk around and talk to myself, I do it on my bed. When I need a drink of water, I do it from my bed. I can’t leave and that makes me have a different perspective. No longer do I see the world as this thing that I am a part of, it is now this foreign concept that I hear about from the people who talk to me online or call me, but doesn’t exist in my reality. My reality is weird. My reality is crumbs and stickiness. My reality is real.

Hour 10 pmish:

This has been an important hour! Important is definitely the wrong word. Here are all the things I did. Hulu rejected my advances on the final episode of a show I found, meaning that I only didn’t get to watch the finale. I screamed at my computer and then had a long conversation with it. I did a little bed jumping and tried to jumprope with my towel. I re-realized that eating peanut butter in bed was a terrible idea. I turned off the lights for a while in order to change my perspective on the world. I poured a little water on a corner of my bed to see how fast it would evaporate. Answer: pretty fast. I searched around for one of my stories that I wrote during work and finally found it. And I got a phone call and talked to them for a while.

Here’s what I’ve realized – Talking out loud is important. I hadn’t really talked to a person in 19 hrs and so all of my sentences became monologues that went nowhere. The lights going off was fun. I ran around my bed and did some fun rolls on my back and the glow of my computer monitor along with the constant buzz of the fan gave the entire experience the eerie feel that something ominous was going  to happen in the scary movie in my mind. I think far too much in cinematic terms. It isn’t just the scary movie, but also the conversations I’ve started to have. I’ve been talking to two people online for a while and another on the phone and all of the conversations became unnecessarily antagonistic on my part because I wanted conflict. I agree with myself too much and I’m only hanging out with myself. I need to become schizophrenic in order to do this again.

4 Thousand Words.

11pm:

I only have 2 hours left. I spent a good 5 minutes staring at my picture at the top of my blog trying to see how deep into my eyes I could look. I then tried to play with my webcam. It’s like a cool delayed mirror. I like it. I love myself mirror time. I turned lights off and got very tired.

Oh man, I just talked to my parents. Rephrase: I just talked at my parents. They were barely participants in that convo.

I’m gonna start writing for next hour. This is getting weird for me. I feel sexually uncomfortable and that makes me confused.

Hour of Midnight:

This is the second to last entry and I feel I should do some reflecting. My farts smell even worse in an enclosed room with a fan just circulating the same air over and over. I think that sums it up. I do a lot of gross or weird shit in life. It’s only through this method of forcing myself to only be able to interact physically and visibly with myself that these traits start to really stink.

When people do online chatting a lot of times they want to agree. They try to say “yeah,” but many times they say “yeha.” I love that. It’s like turning mild enjoyment into super excitement by accident. That is also how I feel about this experiment.

I guess what I’m saying overall is that this has been a magnifying glass of my life. A friend was talking to me online about this experiment and was hoping she would make the write up of that hour as she thought she had “made a big impact on the last 10 minutes of my life.” That’s important in this world that I’ve created. Every little bit means something.

That all being said, it is hard to remember anything. I’m going to have re read this to remember what happened at the beginning of this day because it seems like a week ago now. It’s been quite the journey. I plan on this one being the exciting last entry and making an anticlimactic ending in an hour. Earnest Hemmingway said something about one sentence being enough to tell a story or something. I’m gonna do that in an hour. I’ll spend this entire hour thinking of that sentence.

Journey Ended, AM:

I need simply two things to explain tonight.

a) This was a picture I stared at for a while after I spent almost an hour beating a game online:

(b) This is what someone else thought was appropriate to be public, so I’m just a part of society.

The reason I hate so much is because I’m happy.

Other people are so unhappy with their lives that they find it meaningful to strive for contentedness. Me, I’m different. Contentedness seems easily attainable, so instead I must attempt to achieve some utopian ideal of life. This causes me to be nit-picky and these nit-picks are the subject of my hate. I can’t strive for contentedness or comfortability because if that were my goal, my goal would be achieved. And once your goal of life is achieved, what is the point of living?

This is my anti-suicide plan. By hating each little detail of life that I find a little less than perfect, I tell myself that I must continue living until, hopefully, my dreams come true. That’s why my goals cannot be reached, for if they were doable, than there would be a foreseeable end to the purpose of my life and therefore my life itself.

So, go ahead and marry young and get that job you now have decided you would have always been comfortable having, I will be complaining about how things aren’t the way I like them because I’m happy and you are sad. You can strive for comfort, whereas I must strive for utopia.

I Hope You Die In Kansas

My last two years at college I played Super Smash Brothers on N64. I don’t mean that I played it during my last two years of college, I mean that that is what I did during my last two years of college. All of them. I have again purchased a Nintendo 64 and a copy of Super Smash Bros. Luckily I don’t have friends, otherwise I would be trying to use the down b of Yoshi as opposed to being super-productive by typing about how I wish I were using the down b of Yoshi.

In a fit of nostalgia I have decided to recreate my college life symbolically. I will write a script about Super Smash. The 10% of the time that I wasn’t defeating Captain Falcon with Kirby harder than you even can, I was organizing my sketch comedy troupe’s materials as best I could so that Hannah wouldn’t yell at me as much.

Link and Samus stand next to each other near a mushroom. A star bounces around nearby.

Link: So, do you come here often?

Samus: To this specific floating island in the sky? Or do you mean to any floating island in the sky?

Link: I guess, I was specifically referring to this one, but I mean if you go to others, you can tell me about them too.

Samus: Naah.

Link: Naah, what? To which question.

Samus: Well, to both.

Link: What?

Samus: I neither come to this or to any floating islands in the sky very often.

Link: Then why’d you ask the clarifying question before?

Samus: I just wanted to be clear what I was answering “no” to.

Link: But your answer would have been the same either way?

Samus: yeah.

Link: I don’t get why you wasted my time.

Samus: Is it a waste of time to talk to me?

Link: No, I just… It’s a waste of time for you to be redundant.

Samus: I’m redundant to you?

Link: What?! How are you changing my words around to mean these absurd things. I just wanted to extend our conversation.

Samus: Why?

Link: Because I don’t know what we have in common, I was trying to find common ground.

Samus: Why?

Link: Because I like to like you.

Samus: But you don’t yet?

Link: I don’t know. Why is this an interrogation? I just think you’re hot and I thought I could get inside that suit with you and… I’ve made an ass of myself haven’t I?

Samus: A little. I think you’ve gotten yourself a little worked up.

Link: Yeah, I just need to ground myself.

Samus: You wanna go down to real ground?

Link: I mean, I meant metaphorically, but I could use some real ground nonetheless.

Samus: Where you wanna go?

Link: Kansas.

Samus: Why?

Link: Because that’s in the name of the sketch and I’ve given up on this being funny.

Samus: Yeah. It’s definitely not going anywhere.

Link: Maybe we can make out.

Samus: Kansas is known for being a great place to make out.

Link: Really?

Samus: No, but this sketch sucks so I thought adding in absurd lies might save it.

Link: What about gratuitous sexuality?

Samus: Try it.

Link: I have some toys we could play with if you wanted to get kinky.

Samus: Like what?

Link: Bombs and Boomerangs.

Samus: I don’t think those are very sexual.

Link: That was the point. They were weird as opposed to sexual. How funny. Also they referenced my real character’s tools, which will make nerds laugh to prove they are nerdy enough to understand the joke.

Samus: Good point.

(silence)

Link: What about Homosexuality and Midwestern Accents. We could use those too.

Samus: Well, I’m a woman, so I’ll take the midwest accent, you be flamingly gay.

Link: Can we still make out?

Samus: Sure, that could be funny. But I’m not sexually attracted to you.

Link: Why not?

Samus: I don’t like guys that are shorter than me.

Link: What guy isn’t shorter than you? Do you like guys?

Samus: No. I’m a lesbian. Thanks for outing me.

Link: Sorry.

Samus: I hope you die when we get to Kansas.

Link: That is awkwardly close to the title. If we end on that, that’s gonna be really confusing.

Samus: But, do you want to keep going?

Link: God no! I guess we’re done.

Samus: Phew. I hope he edits this.

Link: That’s not gonna happen, have you read his other shit?

Samus: Good point.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my weird fan-fiction of SSB turned self-hatred. I didn’t.

There is an open mic night at my place of employment. Open mic nights are all the same. It is a string of super struggling stand up comics who make jokes about how performing for only 15 people is hard because even half of the audience laughing feels like a spattering of half hearted attempts at enjoyment, and then an even longer string of acoustic guitars accompanied by people complaining that their ex doesn’t like them any more.

Why are break ups so hard? I’ve been on both sides of rejection, and I’ve even cried after some of them, but one emotion I’ve never felt post break up is anger. Yet, all of these whiny psuedo-bearded suburban moved to urban in an attempt to be more cultured guitarists singing slightly higher than their range refuse to feel anything but anger at the woman who broke their heart. Breaking someone’s heart is purely the person whose heart is broken’s fault. They are the ones that got unnecessarily invested. They are the ones that decided they were going to make the wholeness of their heart dependent on someone else’s actions. They are the ones that are stupid.

I am not trying to give another rant against relationships. I think relationships are great, but relationships are made up of two (or more-mon [I'll try to think of a funnier pun by the time I finish, but I promise nothing]) individuals. Those individuals are the only ones that can fully understand their own heart, soul, or whatever vague term that attempts to relate your societally influenced psychological disorders to biology.

People don’t want to be self-aware because people don’t like making decisions. If you are fully self-realized, you must know what’s best for you and therefore you will be able to make decisions that make you happier, but if you need another person to make you whole then you are able to rely on them to also make your decisions. Fuck you you indecisive fuck.

Fuck you for demanding someone else’s time, energy, and thoughts for your own happiness. Fuck you for not realizing that you can make all these decisions yourself. You are a human with the ability to self-analyze and therefore the ability to be self-aware and therefore the ability to make decisions for your self. So, stop singing about how the fact that she decided you were too clingy is her just not understanding your love. Your love is pathetic if it dependent on being dependent.

I don’t claim to understand love, but I do claim to understand what it is not. It is not the fact that you spent 6 months with someone and therefore decided you didn’t want to spend another 6 months without that person because you are too scared of change. Get over your phobia and realize that the girl telling you that you were not good enough sexually, you were too jealous, or just plain deciding she wants a different cock to penetrate her is more than fine, it is an opportunity to find someone new to make a fool of yourself in front of.

You are not being selfless by giving your love to someone else. You are being selfish because you are demanding that they make half your decisions and they live half your life. We have such little time in this world, take control of 100% of it.

We are engineered to assume that minor details are relevant to who we fall in love with. We have been told that because we share the same favorite band, we have to share the same bed. I know this because I’ve fallen into this societal trap before. I dated a girl for seven months because she took a picture of her poop. This is the reason for my fleeting crushes. I get excited about little clues that imply fated love.

These rom-com reasons for romance are stupid.

There is a reason though that I keep coming back to these minute details that determine long term life decisions: I like thinking about my wedding. One of the parts I’m most excited about is the vows. Vows are the time when you get to say something romantic/funny/inside jokey and everyone is listening, and the best way to do vows is to use a minute detail to symbolize a greater truth about the relationship. I think of vows for every person I meet who I am even vaguely sexually attracted to ever within the first week of knowing them. Each is a story about some seemingly innocuous incident that ends with an analogy to a deeper analysis of why our relationship works. They’ve had to do with the way they flavor pancakes, their favorite children’s movie, their breast size, their eclectic love of tea-varieties, our first words spoken to each other being “I love you,” and the aforementioned poop-pics.

I don’t think that this is unhealthy if it doesn’t cross over into the realm of following through.

So, I just won’t follow through, because at least with loneliness I don’t have to worry about following a cliched path.

I got out of the subway and walked into Subway making a beeline for the bathroom. I’ve come to the conclusion that waiting to go pee is the biggest issue of our time and that we should not “hold it” anymore. If diapers weren’t so hard to make sexy when stripping, than my groin would constantly be pee-stained and my face would be happy.

The problem/fun-part of this philosophy is that you see the inside of a lot of public restrooms. Restrooms with used toilet paper everywhere but the toilet. Restrooms with sinks that dispense different colored liquids depending on which way you turn the handle. Restrooms with graffiti. I’ve always found restroom graffiti interesting. In my old composition notebook (that I lost and cried about) I had written down the phone numbers of over twenty people who could either give be a blow job, a hand job, or a good time. I also like the conversations that occur on the stall wall. Nobody ever comes back to the same bathroom to continue your conversation so you have to be willing to accept that someone else might take up your cause and argue it for you later. If you want to assert that Michelle Obama is a slut, you better be comfortable with the fact that someone may disagree and a stupider person with less ability to spell might try to support your claim therefore making you look stupid by graffiti association.

This Subway restaurant was different.

My favorite graffiti that I ever saw was at my old high school when I went back to teach. In the boys bathroom was a large mirror with a wooden plank above it saying: “Look who can get AIDS.” Someone responded: “Not me I’m not a faggot.” to which a long a detailed argument against this young boy’s homophobia was carved into the wood. It was a near paragraph long explanation with nuance, finesse, and the jolty hand writing of a person carving into wood with a key. The next person responded: “I can’t either because I’m a pickle.” To which someone else exclaimed: “I love pickles!”

This was what I thought restroom graffiti should be; prejudiced statements that were responded to with contextually unfit eloquence followed up by absurdity.

That was what I thought until I went into Subway.

Above the sink was written: “Be Happy.” Unable to understand the command another voice chimed in: “How?” To which a follow-up was written by another bathroom soul in agreement with the first author: “Smile.” Uplifting bathroom graffiti is an untapped art. Down and to the right was a sentence written with a sharpie: “Life is short. Have fun, but be careful.” Correctly punctuated, conservatively joyous, and written with bathroom graffiti handwriting. Up and to the right was the third thing thought worthwhile to say on the wall of a public peeing area: “Life Rocks.”

It does.

My roommate is a fucking moron. He has on different occasions told me that he thinks the Jersey Shore girl deserved to be punched, joked on the square that women shouldn’t have been given the right to vote, and told me that he is at the point where any 19 year old who isn’t obese he finds attractive. I almost cried after seeing that Jersey Shore episode, have fantasized about Susan B. Anthony, and want my 19 year old girls to be Sean Kingston in drag.

The hardest part about it is that he is well read and has and continues to find resources meant to increase his knowledge. I always assumed that when presented with the evidence of the world people would come to the correct conclusion – people who were ignorant were just that; ignorant. But my roommate has a signed copy of his XKCD book sitting next to his Art of Sexuality book. He discusses his trip to meet the author of this nerd-mecca-comic as a journey to try to get some nerdy pussy.

I’ve never seen him with a woman. He’s had friends come over and one time one of those friends was female, but they were obviously not sleeping together. He talks about the sex he’s having pretty constantly, yet I live with him and have seen him playing Modern Warfare more than I’ve seen him practicing his own brand of Pussy Warfare.

He’s a fireman who when he found out I bought tofu and soymilk told me that “if I were to bring that shit into the firehouse people would give me such shit because all they eat there is steak.” I pretended I didn’t understand and bragged to him that I’d eaten more varieties of tofu than he’d even heard of.

I think he wants to learn though. Through his diatribes on how the poor are a waste of space and resources, the Iraqis need to be bombed for their oil, and neighborhoods full of minorities should be razed to the ground, I truly believe that he is looking for a way out of this philosophy. He’s the reason we open our apartment to couch-surfers and he reads a lot. This should mean that he’s educated and willing to share (aka socialist). Maybe his upbringing has lead him to a racist, misogynist, lifestyle of hating the poor, but with a little Nisse influence he’s gonna be marching on the streets of Washington demanding abortion be included in universal health care.

With the hellidays (OMG! Hilarious!) in full swing out have come the santas. I like riding the subway with many christmas fabrications. Here are my three favorite santa moments:

1. Santa and an elf sharing a passionate kiss on the 4 train.

2. Santa with a Coors light and a NJ Devils jersey flirting with a German girl on the N train.

3. Santa discussing with someone about how he used to work for UPS on the R train.

All of these things were funny to me. Here’s another list of things that I think are unfunny and people need to stop thinking are funny.

1. Listing references in place of humor – You know who else can reference things that you also remember: A group of aging males who call themselves: Lyte Funky Ones.

2. The word “faggot” – Ironic or not ironic this is just overused and is no longer funny in any context.

3. Demitri Martin/Zach Galifianakis ripoffs – Ok, they were original when they included a multimedia presentation in their standup act, but now you look like an idiot as you try to explain a pie chart that neither makes mathematical or comedic sense.

I thought of another thing I saw on the subway that was funny. It was a perfect representation of mid gentrification (aka Williamsburgh). I saw a guy with tight leather pants a popped collar pea-coat and shoes with heels walk by a group of urban (aka black) teens. One guy checked out the leather pants after he heard the heels clomp by. All his friends called him a faggot and he retorted that he had thought it was a girl. Oh, objectification: how you burst open closets.

You know what happens when you masturbate too much? Your dick starts to chafe. You know what happens when you mentally masturbate too much? Something very different.

Everything that someone says becomes an interesting parallel to your own struggle with meta-analysis of your struggle with meta-analysis. Everybody becomes a funhouse mirror of your own personality. Every object becomes a symbolic representation of your inability to anthropomorphize that object into something symbolic from your own life.

This is my 151st entry and I choose number 151 not because it is a prime, a palindrome, and an alcohol, but rather because today is the day that I decided to write about this and today is the day after my 150th entry was written.  I love myself far too much. Nowadays I find it difficult to experience anything without attempting to draw vague parallels to a fabricated childhood trauma that could have happened. Sure, this seems stressful, but in actuality it is what makes my life worthwhile.

Whether it be the swirl that I made on the top of the latte I just poured that reminds me of the figure skating I attempted on my pond as a rural only child with an absence of gender norms to follow because I grew up in a house where my mother proposed to my father and carried all the heavy boxes and my father liked to read poetry and cross his legs or the eccentric mix of curry, sweet potato, and spicy sautéed spinach, tofu and ice cream that matched my eccentric mix of plaid, stripes, corduroy, and pokadots on one vest that laid over my bright green t-shirt that I wore because when you are six inches shorter than the next closest boy in high school you need to find some way to make sure people see you otherwise they will literally walk over you, I am very good at writing run on sentences about my childhood and a minute detail of my current life. These lengthy diatribes of nostalgic pretentious egotism are what make those mundane moments of latte pouring and curry-cream making interesting to me. So maybe the only way to make something interesting to me is to relate it to me, but who’s to say that’s wrong? It may be selfish, but it’s not taking away any caring I would have had for others. In fact, sometimes I participate in other’s lives just to get stories for myself, so at least I’m participating.

So, you may hate my means – the monologues of mental masturbation with almost all the time alliteration - but do not hate my ends because it is only through this mind-chaffing exercise that I am a part of this world. Take away my ability to self-love and I only have self-hate left.

I lost my writing composition notebook. It had only 20 pages left in it and contained my entire New York adventures. Sure I had copied down anything worthwhile onto my computer, but the tangible copy of paper and written word is something different.

At 3am I woke up with an unbearable pain in my ear and an inability to pop it. I still haven’t popped my ear and my irrational fear of things crawling into my brain while I’m asleep is kicking in.

My roommate bought safflower oil. I’ve been meaning to buy oil for the past week because we share oil, but I keep forgetting. Now he bought oil and I have to find a different way to pay him back. And I don’t like talking to him.

I am nostalgic, fearful, and guilty. These are the only three emotions I feel. These are what drives me to do the things I do. Each day I could break down every one of my decisions to being attributed to one of these three forces.

I lied. There is one bigger force that drives me stronger than guilt, fear or nostalgia. That is laziness. I’m not going to do anything to pay back my roommate. I’m going to hope that my ear issues just disappear on their own. I’m done looking for my composition notebook. I’ll get a new one soon. In the meantime I’ll cry in my bed.