Category: Roommates

The story of Sunday night

August 9, 2005 /

Running for the shower, my hands wrapped in singed pajamas, gripping a toaster oven belching flames, I began to wonder: where did it all go wrong?

As you may have deduced, Maria and I are trying to move to a new apartment about a hundred yards from our old apartment. It was Sunday night. In less than a week it would have been the two-year anniversary of the toaster’s purchase, and it was the first time we tried to cook anything with the toaster in the new place. Maria was trying to heat up some leftover restaurant tortilla chips (restaurant tortilla chips are very good, but only hot) and asked me how I usually heated them. I foolishly told her to toast them on medium.

Maria: ACK! Brendan, our chips have burst into flames!
Toaster Oven: REVENGE

I proceeded to treat the situation with a carefully thought-out policy of not opening the toaster door, and then, after a few seconds, opening the toaster door. The flames streamed upward like a reverse baby waterfall. Maria began to express concern over the possibility of activating our fire alarms.

Toaster Oven: THROW ME OUT OF THE WINDOW NOW, HU-MANS
Brendan: No! We’re never allowed to open the windows in here, because one of us is mildly afraid of bugs.
Maria throws open the windows.
Brendan: It’s not me.
Toaster Oven: HA HA PAN-SY

But off the stage, things weren’t going so well. Toaster Oven was slowly descending into a nightmare of booze and pills.

Brendan: I guess I knew things were falling apart when, after one session, I had to wrap my hands in old pajamas, grab Toaster Oven and throw him into the shower.
Toaster Oven: MY HABITS WERE OUT OF CON-TROL
Maria: That night was kind of what brought me to my senses. If this was the condition our lead guitarist was in, how much longer could the band last?

As it turned out, not long at all. Maria and Brendan intervened with water, followed by a heavy dose of baking soda. The band’s creative spark was extinguished. Also, the fire.

Toaster Oven: YOU BAS-TARDS ARE THROWING ME IN THE DUMPSTER QUESTION MARK EXCLAMATION POINT
Brendan: This for your own good, Toaster Oven.
Maria: It’s actually not.

It took nearly two days, but Toaster Oven and the Hu-mans would eventually resurface–without Toaster Oven itself. Instead, Maria and Brendan plan to audition new toasters based on a grueling selection process that involves being both cheap and at Target.

Brendan: Aww, this one’s adorable!
Toaster Oven: ARF ARF, AND SIMILAR SOUNDS
Maria: I don’t know. Do you think you’re ready for the responsibility of a toaster oven?
Brendan: I’ll take it for a walk every day! I’ll feed and water it, and I promise I won’t get tired of it, I won’t! Plus it’s on sale.
Maria: Well… As long as you understand that–
Brendan: Hooray!
Toaster Oven: SINISTER LAUGH-TER

August 2, 2005 /

This past weekend, Maria and her family and I painted the living room of our new apartment. It’s pretty fancy! The base is two coats of navy blue, and over that we color-washed a custom purple glaze with brushes and rags. If you ask me what color it is, I will tell you that it is Maria.

July 26, 2005 /

Maria got her board scores back yesterday. She did better than she had hoped, which is better than most of the country! Maria is awesome!

July 20, 2005 /

Wheeler came to visit us. It was fun! We played a whole lot of video games and some board games and ate high-quality vegetarian foodstuffs. He stayed with Lisa and Scott three nights and me and Maria for two, and did not hold me responsible for making him trudge all over Bardstown Road in the heat. Wheeler is, to quote Sumana, a good houseguest and a friend.

Lisa, Wheeler and I constitute three fifths of our weekly instant-messenger-based Nobilis game. Normally we play from our disparate locations in Louisville, Louisville, New Mexico, Georgia and Connecticut; this time the aforementioned three of us were all in my apartment at different computers, which was a neat if odd kind of synthesis. It’s easier to Laugh Out Loud at a joke when there are other people doing the same within earshot.

July 8, 2005 /

I have a girlfriend! Her name is Maria Barnes.

June 28, 2005 /

I never talked about Sad and Happy Movie Day! Sad and Happy Movie Day was great! In attendance were myself, Maria, Lisa, Scott and Will; Maria’s brother Michael showed up for the second movie. We watched City of God and Shaolin Soccer, as was foretold by the ancients–first one subbed, second dubbed, but the dubbing actually worked really well for SS. It added to the goofiness of a film that takes its goofiness very seriously. City of God was appropriately poverty-stricken and filled with violence by and against children. The ending was not actually sad, but maybe that was for the best. We are still testing our toes in this format.

The next SAHMD will probably be in two or three weeks, whatever’s best for most of us. Hackers has been pretty thoroughly shot down, because all my friends are worthless Philistines, but I don’t think anybody objected to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Are there any strong objections to that? What about suggestions for happy movies? Information access protocol!

The Notebook, Spanglish and Monster were the exceptions

May 19, 2005 /

I like Netflix a lot, and Maria and I have used it to power through almost four seasons of CSI in a matter of weeks. I suppose now I should start renting some “movies” with it, although, man, there’s a lot of Next Generation and Six Feet Under sitting in my “Q.”

I have three Netflix “friends” registered: Ken Moore, David Clark and Garrett Sparks. Today, bored, I was scrolling through the Netflix Top 100 when I noticed that almost every single one of them had a little purple person icon next to it.

Between the three of them, they had watched ninety-seven of the all-time most-rented Netflix movies.

May 12, 2005 /

David Flora steps up with a terzanelle of his own–ignoring word count, but with fantastic use of full-line rhyme as a substitute for repetition and slick iambic pentameter (in which terzanelles are really supposed to be).

Fixed-format poetry was just one more subgenre of constrained writing, which is probably why I find old forms so much more interesting than those of modern and postmodern poetry. Constraints like the terzanelle provide so much opportunity for innovation, as Holly and Flora have just demonstrated. I still think the best explanation of the value therein comes from Constrained.org’s FAQ:

“Constraints set additional challenges to the writer. Writing to a constraint is like solving a puzzle. Graceful solutions have a pleasing feel – like watching the moves of a chess master – on top of their value as stories.”

I’m always delighted to rediscover that my friends are masterful, in some way or many.

May 7, 2005 /

Bee and Graham are here! We ate some tremendous meals and toured our favorite parts of Bardstown, which entailed me buying a lot of crap. One of those meals was my second time eating the Tierra y Mar, now called the Beef and Shrimp Diablo; I also talked Michael, Lisa and Graham into trying it. We unanimously agreed that it did not put the lie to my earlier ravings. If you are in Louisville and looking to find maybe the best single meal in the city, you need to go to the Mayan Gypsy and order the Beef and Shrimp Diablo with corn cakes and fried plantains. Get the goat cheese and black bean empanadas, too, and try the exceptionally rich chocolate mousselike cake.

I felt expanded in more ways than one after that meal: as if my consciousness were enriched, my senses stretched out and switched on. I felt taller. I felt really, really full.

Sin City

April 1, 2005 /

Yeah, I saw it already, because I’m better than you.

And I gotta tell you… man, there’s a great movie in that footage, but that wasn’t it. It was a decent movie, an extraordinarily pretty one, and resolutely faithful to the original (as everyone’s pointed out). Cut all the voice-over monologues, I mean all of them, and you’d have a good movie. Cut the length of every shot in half, shrink Michael Madsen’s speaking parts (why, Michael, why? He sounded, as Maria pointed out, like community theatre), lose the stiff wire work and actually put the music from the trailers on the soundtrack–then you’d have a fucking magnificent balls-out bug-eyed noir-fu motion picture. I would watch that movie every night.

I hope there’s a director’s cut, or an editor’s cut, or a pirate renegade interweb cut, or something; I don’t think I’ve seen anything that needed it worse. Last night people were giggling when they should have been gasping, and all it would take to fix that would be a sharp knife and time.