Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Even with the extra second, I didn't finish this entry soon enough to get it in before the new year.
Anyhow, look at what I found. It's from the We Are Scientists show we went to a while back. Ignore the terrible, terrible Martha Stewart joke. I don't feel like re-editing the picture. I'm sort of around the middle with the goofy haircut and corresponding grin. Ana is right under me with the wonderfully captivating features reminiscent of the most beautiful, blurry tropical sunset with the mesmerizing, murky silhouette of a bird of paradise gliding across a picturesque, pixelated setting sun. Chris balances out the picture with the stately grace a person wearing a white fitted. And you can even see Carlos!
Now that I'm famous, movie producers have been all up ons. I'm like Jump off my dick, kay? Such are the trials and burdens of famoushoodedestednesses.
PSYCH! Being famed is ultracool, registering in at about ten Kelvin. People are always calling me by my first name, as if they know me! They're all, "Alexis, this paper is already three weeks late," and "My dad just bought me a Lexus," and "Hey, Allison!" (my name is hard to pronounce until you hear it). It's great! I love all my adoring strangers!
Anyway, about me and Rachel.
The other day, I decided to go stargazing. It's been very cold lately, and I've been having unsubstantiated premonitions of the air and light pollution somehow diminishing because of cooler climes. Something like the various carbon compounds and sulphurous emissions present in the atmosphere condensing and coalescing in mid-air and then coming down all at once, covering every square inch of the tri-state area. With that less than sensible understanding of atmospheric science, I waited indoors until I heard a crashing sound outside and then I called up Rachel and we went to this place on I-80 that I remember passing by as I drove to some Pennsylvanian locale, wondering what might give cause for the Department of Transportation to label any non-essential overlook near the road, let alone a "scenic" one.
I have this thing where I cannot help but drive FAST on I-80. It's one of those things: you just gotta go fast. Fast for me isn't even all that breakneck, but it was fast enough to kill us both upon impact if a hook-handed maniac in the backseat shot us in the back of our skulls. Point is, everyone does, otherwise the semis will run you over. We took the red pickup truck that a really shady mafioso sold me in a parking lot in under ten minutes for what seemed like pennies at the time. I knew sooner or later it would come back to get me and this is the story about just such a time.
It was slick and frigid and Rachel was sleeping in the most unimaginably contorted way that would immediately make any observer either melt with adoration at her delightful somnolence or boil with bitterness at her irritating form in repose. Some people just can't stand it when people do weird stuff. Seriously, who the fuck sleeps like that? Anyway, as I was saying, there I was, driving fast in a shady red truck on wet roads through cold air, catching an occasional glimpse of Rachel and trying not to grin/grimace, in case she was just pretending to sleep with her head hanging off the seat and pushed against the door, her neck bent double, a sneakered foot on the roof of the cab, an arm snaking around the leg. I wouldn't let her get the satisfaction of seeing me see her and being amused/antagonized at the sight.
A sign designating the intended destination flared up on my right and a troubling click-clank emanated from my beneath. I looked quickly at the floor of the cab, as if there would be some visible sign of the malfunction manifested under dangling feet, a gaping hole or a spreading conflagration. I didn't see any skewed axels or oscillating drive-shafts through the rough carpet and cab floor, so I looked to the console, a series of radial fans telling me I had fourteen volts, three-fourths of an F and a quarter of an E, and less than a thousand rotations per minute. In addition, my speed was dropping, like the painful descent of an Alzheimic wife who stares at you and knows you're losing each other, except that she won't feel it when it happens. I assessed the situation, decided that a vehicle moving at less that eighty on the coincidentally named Interstate-80 would be a hazard, and switched on the appropriate lights.
Once I had pulled over to the shoulder, I labored intensely at hoping for things to become functional of their own accord without my having to actually touch anything powdered with coaly dust or drizzled with sludgey grease. Then the engine just stopped, leaving me with only a whining, clinking, grating sound, each cylinder of the V8 engine undergoing its own apoptosis, leaving vapors uncompressed, levers unlevered, and the muscles in my face with a complete loss of control. After my brain had sent enough electrical impulses to my jaw to make it undrop, it sent a good bunch to my legs to get me out behind the truck to push it the few hundred feet to a parking spot, instead of stalled straddling the shoulder and the road of a very narrow turn.
We were on an incline, and the roads were still wet, puddles and potholes strewn about like barely disguised landmines, ready to make me pay for some karmic debt I had accrued long ago. I gave a mighty shove that I am positive would have relocated Mount McKinley or some other large mountain named after a forgetable president at least five feet from its original position but the truck barely noticed. "Oh, you're there?" it asked, acknowledging me as sardonically as it could. I fumed and redoubled my efforts. I am fairly certain the force I used was adequate to shift the axis of the earth a minute of a degree, but the truck remained obstinate and only budged a little. It was enough, though, and its inertia slowly became more amicable towards my goals. I had nearly crested the incline, when the 19.5% APR on my KarmaCard kicked in, and my foot tried to dig into the ground but instead teleported some several inches away. Or so I thought. What had actually occurred was that I had slipped on the road paint (it was very slick) and my foot had gone out from under me, dragging the rest of me with it. My chin thunked against the bumper, my knees cricked against the aspalt, and my pride flupped out of commission.
The onomatopoeic injuries were the least of my worries, though. Despite my consistent striving towards moving the truck, gravity had not given up on trying to kill me. With me down on my knees, it pounced with the fury of a constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2, first halting my progress of the truck, then reversing it. The pickup began rolling back down the hill with me still prostrate behind it. It nearly bent my back in half the wrong way before I spastically corrected myself, the way a fighting animal twists, completely devoid of grace or efficiency, a maneuver that looks to save a life through the unskilled application of sheer dumb luck. Even with such an adroit escape technique, I only managed to flip to my back, and I was now lying perpendicular to the descent of the truck. The left rear tire was threatening to advance over my thigh, whether I moved it out of the way or not, so I obliged it and reached out my left hand from under the truck to grab the bumper. You'd be surprised at how much of a handhold you can find on a smooth surface when there's a truck about to run over you.
I had gotten just enough grip to drag myself along with the truck, the wheel still menacing my legs, gravity still at her old tricks with trucks. I took a quick mental assessment at how fucked I was and published my conclusion to the bottom of the truck. "Shhhitnuggets." I'm really glad I didn't die then, not just because I probably would have to be pretty badly hurt to die from having my legs run over but because those would have been really terrible last words. One day soon, I'm going to sit down and really plan out my last words, so I know what to say before I kick the bucket and don't resort to proclaiming such estimable (and delectable) utterances.
It was my absolute worst moment on the planet, and I was fully prepared to start remembering an ex-love or a scene from my childhood where my father ominously warned me about being careful to not get run over by a truck rolling down a hill, but I figured that giving up was a really pussy way to go, so I pulled myself out from under with such a Herculean effort that I had opportunity to stand. I considered just getting out of the way until I recalled that Rachel was still in the truck. I thought a lot of things about her in the instant I remembered she was there: whether she was really asleep or not, if she could save me, how she looked naked, how long it would take for the authorities to find her corpse. Maybe a few other things.
As if on cue, her head appeared in the rear window, looking about as shocked as anybody might. Surprise! I started pushing, fat lot of good that'd do. If I was useless before, when the truck wasn't advancing on me, it was almost as if I was speeding the thing up by pushing my hardest now. Sensing the danger of the situation, she jumped out, then ran to the rear and lined herself up. She grunted for a full three seconds and her sneakers slid back on the asphalt but she stopped the truck in the span of one yard. It was like standing next to a titan. Together, we pushed it up into a safe place, and I put on the emergency brake.
I felt like a child. She caught her breath first and suggested we take a look at the scenic overlook before something else happened. I sucked wind a little more intensely to signal my assent. She took my hand to lead me towards a landing that dropped off steeply. I couldn't tell if she was eager or just impatient with me, and I looked at her like a beaten dog. We came to a stop and looked up together at an overcast sky the color of slate and defeat. These are the kind of things you need to check before you leave.
After much more trouble and a considerable amount of time, I dropped Rachel off at her place and walked her to the door. We had made the return trip in almost complete silence. She opened the door and stepped in. I opened my mouth to say something, I don't know what, but she cut me off and said, "Alexis, you know that all of that was made up and what really happened was that your truck broke down on the highway on your way to school and you ran the rest of the way, right?"
Oh.
Anyhow, look at what I found. It's from the We Are Scientists show we went to a while back. Ignore the terrible, terrible Martha Stewart joke. I don't feel like re-editing the picture. I'm sort of around the middle with the goofy haircut and corresponding grin. Ana is right under me with the wonderfully captivating features reminiscent of the most beautiful, blurry tropical sunset with the mesmerizing, murky silhouette of a bird of paradise gliding across a picturesque, pixelated setting sun. Chris balances out the picture with the stately grace a person wearing a white fitted. And you can even see Carlos!
Now that I'm famous, movie producers have been all up ons. I'm like Jump off my dick, kay? Such are the trials and burdens of famoushoodedestednesses.
PSYCH! Being famed is ultracool, registering in at about ten Kelvin. People are always calling me by my first name, as if they know me! They're all, "Alexis, this paper is already three weeks late," and "My dad just bought me a Lexus," and "Hey, Allison!" (my name is hard to pronounce until you hear it). It's great! I love all my adoring strangers!
Anyway, about me and Rachel.
The other day, I decided to go stargazing. It's been very cold lately, and I've been having unsubstantiated premonitions of the air and light pollution somehow diminishing because of cooler climes. Something like the various carbon compounds and sulphurous emissions present in the atmosphere condensing and coalescing in mid-air and then coming down all at once, covering every square inch of the tri-state area. With that less than sensible understanding of atmospheric science, I waited indoors until I heard a crashing sound outside and then I called up Rachel and we went to this place on I-80 that I remember passing by as I drove to some Pennsylvanian locale, wondering what might give cause for the Department of Transportation to label any non-essential overlook near the road, let alone a "scenic" one.
I have this thing where I cannot help but drive FAST on I-80. It's one of those things: you just gotta go fast. Fast for me isn't even all that breakneck, but it was fast enough to kill us both upon impact if a hook-handed maniac in the backseat shot us in the back of our skulls. Point is, everyone does, otherwise the semis will run you over. We took the red pickup truck that a really shady mafioso sold me in a parking lot in under ten minutes for what seemed like pennies at the time. I knew sooner or later it would come back to get me and this is the story about just such a time.
It was slick and frigid and Rachel was sleeping in the most unimaginably contorted way that would immediately make any observer either melt with adoration at her delightful somnolence or boil with bitterness at her irritating form in repose. Some people just can't stand it when people do weird stuff. Seriously, who the fuck sleeps like that? Anyway, as I was saying, there I was, driving fast in a shady red truck on wet roads through cold air, catching an occasional glimpse of Rachel and trying not to grin/grimace, in case she was just pretending to sleep with her head hanging off the seat and pushed against the door, her neck bent double, a sneakered foot on the roof of the cab, an arm snaking around the leg. I wouldn't let her get the satisfaction of seeing me see her and being amused/antagonized at the sight.
A sign designating the intended destination flared up on my right and a troubling click-clank emanated from my beneath. I looked quickly at the floor of the cab, as if there would be some visible sign of the malfunction manifested under dangling feet, a gaping hole or a spreading conflagration. I didn't see any skewed axels or oscillating drive-shafts through the rough carpet and cab floor, so I looked to the console, a series of radial fans telling me I had fourteen volts, three-fourths of an F and a quarter of an E, and less than a thousand rotations per minute. In addition, my speed was dropping, like the painful descent of an Alzheimic wife who stares at you and knows you're losing each other, except that she won't feel it when it happens. I assessed the situation, decided that a vehicle moving at less that eighty on the coincidentally named Interstate-80 would be a hazard, and switched on the appropriate lights.
Once I had pulled over to the shoulder, I labored intensely at hoping for things to become functional of their own accord without my having to actually touch anything powdered with coaly dust or drizzled with sludgey grease. Then the engine just stopped, leaving me with only a whining, clinking, grating sound, each cylinder of the V8 engine undergoing its own apoptosis, leaving vapors uncompressed, levers unlevered, and the muscles in my face with a complete loss of control. After my brain had sent enough electrical impulses to my jaw to make it undrop, it sent a good bunch to my legs to get me out behind the truck to push it the few hundred feet to a parking spot, instead of stalled straddling the shoulder and the road of a very narrow turn.
We were on an incline, and the roads were still wet, puddles and potholes strewn about like barely disguised landmines, ready to make me pay for some karmic debt I had accrued long ago. I gave a mighty shove that I am positive would have relocated Mount McKinley or some other large mountain named after a forgetable president at least five feet from its original position but the truck barely noticed. "Oh, you're there?" it asked, acknowledging me as sardonically as it could. I fumed and redoubled my efforts. I am fairly certain the force I used was adequate to shift the axis of the earth a minute of a degree, but the truck remained obstinate and only budged a little. It was enough, though, and its inertia slowly became more amicable towards my goals. I had nearly crested the incline, when the 19.5% APR on my KarmaCard kicked in, and my foot tried to dig into the ground but instead teleported some several inches away. Or so I thought. What had actually occurred was that I had slipped on the road paint (it was very slick) and my foot had gone out from under me, dragging the rest of me with it. My chin thunked against the bumper, my knees cricked against the aspalt, and my pride flupped out of commission.
The onomatopoeic injuries were the least of my worries, though. Despite my consistent striving towards moving the truck, gravity had not given up on trying to kill me. With me down on my knees, it pounced with the fury of a constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2, first halting my progress of the truck, then reversing it. The pickup began rolling back down the hill with me still prostrate behind it. It nearly bent my back in half the wrong way before I spastically corrected myself, the way a fighting animal twists, completely devoid of grace or efficiency, a maneuver that looks to save a life through the unskilled application of sheer dumb luck. Even with such an adroit escape technique, I only managed to flip to my back, and I was now lying perpendicular to the descent of the truck. The left rear tire was threatening to advance over my thigh, whether I moved it out of the way or not, so I obliged it and reached out my left hand from under the truck to grab the bumper. You'd be surprised at how much of a handhold you can find on a smooth surface when there's a truck about to run over you.
I had gotten just enough grip to drag myself along with the truck, the wheel still menacing my legs, gravity still at her old tricks with trucks. I took a quick mental assessment at how fucked I was and published my conclusion to the bottom of the truck. "Shhhitnuggets." I'm really glad I didn't die then, not just because I probably would have to be pretty badly hurt to die from having my legs run over but because those would have been really terrible last words. One day soon, I'm going to sit down and really plan out my last words, so I know what to say before I kick the bucket and don't resort to proclaiming such estimable (and delectable) utterances.
It was my absolute worst moment on the planet, and I was fully prepared to start remembering an ex-love or a scene from my childhood where my father ominously warned me about being careful to not get run over by a truck rolling down a hill, but I figured that giving up was a really pussy way to go, so I pulled myself out from under with such a Herculean effort that I had opportunity to stand. I considered just getting out of the way until I recalled that Rachel was still in the truck. I thought a lot of things about her in the instant I remembered she was there: whether she was really asleep or not, if she could save me, how she looked naked, how long it would take for the authorities to find her corpse. Maybe a few other things.
As if on cue, her head appeared in the rear window, looking about as shocked as anybody might. Surprise! I started pushing, fat lot of good that'd do. If I was useless before, when the truck wasn't advancing on me, it was almost as if I was speeding the thing up by pushing my hardest now. Sensing the danger of the situation, she jumped out, then ran to the rear and lined herself up. She grunted for a full three seconds and her sneakers slid back on the asphalt but she stopped the truck in the span of one yard. It was like standing next to a titan. Together, we pushed it up into a safe place, and I put on the emergency brake.
I felt like a child. She caught her breath first and suggested we take a look at the scenic overlook before something else happened. I sucked wind a little more intensely to signal my assent. She took my hand to lead me towards a landing that dropped off steeply. I couldn't tell if she was eager or just impatient with me, and I looked at her like a beaten dog. We came to a stop and looked up together at an overcast sky the color of slate and defeat. These are the kind of things you need to check before you leave.
After much more trouble and a considerable amount of time, I dropped Rachel off at her place and walked her to the door. We had made the return trip in almost complete silence. She opened the door and stepped in. I opened my mouth to say something, I don't know what, but she cut me off and said, "Alexis, you know that all of that was made up and what really happened was that your truck broke down on the highway on your way to school and you ran the rest of the way, right?"
Oh.