Come on, get your rocks off, I'm gonna knock your socks off

Just got back from a fun-filled weekend in Norman, OK. (No, you didn't read that wrong. Fun things CAN happen in Norman--you just have to look really hard for them.) Elliot and I have now seen each other for three weekends in a row, which means the next two weeks without him will be all the more difficult. Admittedly, the reason we're seeing each other so much isn't only about missing each other; it's to give us time to "talk." So we've been talking quite a bit, which is good, but draining. I'm not really sure right now how things are going to turn out, but for the moment I'm happy, and that's good enough.

So what happened in Norman that was so fun, you ask? Well, Elliot and El Giles had a rockin' party that went until 5 in the morning (or later for SOME people *ahem*). I'm happy to report that I made it all the way until the end of the party, due to a scrumptious disco nap I took around 10. I always fall asleep before the fun has ended, and then I have to hear the next day about all the great things I missed. Those of you who are Dave Attell fans: just think of: "Duuuuude...you shoulda hung out." Not only did I stay up just as late as Elliot, I was also the sexual star of the party: EVERYONE wanted to make out with me. Okay, by everyone, I mean Chalkthis, LauraSkills, and Ingrid. Oh, and Elliot, of course. That's four people! I only made out with Elliot, because we have this whole stupid not-cheating thing [eye roll], but if I had been single I would have had some hot girl-on-girl action all over the place. LauraSkills was dressed as a slutty school girl, Ingrid was dressed as Jane (replete with skimpy leopard-print outfit), and Chalkthis was dressed as a girl with big boobs (the costume was very convincing).

Since I'm tired and I want to go to bed, I am going to reprint something I wrote on Coatney Jo's blog a few days back that I was especially proud of (of which I was especially proud). I wanted to share it with a wider audience. This was written in response to a recent scandal revealed about Oklahoma senatorial candidate Tom Coburn, which involves a recording of Coburn complaining about "rampant lesbianism" in Southeastern Oklahoma. It's so bad there, Coburn alleged, that they only let one girl go to the bathroom at a time. I thought I would share my story in response:

My Story
This is a serious problem, you know, not just in Southeastern Oklahoma, but also in Northeastern Oklahoma. At my high school, I used to nearly rupture my bladder freshman year because I would try to keep from going to the bathroom during the day. A group of rampant lesbians was always waiting in there to grab whoever came in and force her to receive oral sex. Finally, one day I had to go so bad that I just had to risk it. Well, sure enough, I was cornered by a gang of rampant lesbians and was forced to receive cunnilingus from half a dozen Sapphic hoodlums. After that, I stopped avoiding the bathroom--I think more out of fear than anything. I was afraid if I steered clear of the bathroom they would find me after school. I mean, that was probably why I did it--it's hard to remember, I was so fucked up then. For three long years, I endured this horrible bullying, sometimes three or four times a day, if I could get enough bathroom passes. I'm not sharing this story to scare all of you, I just want you to realize that somewhere right now, some young Oklahoma girl that you love might be trapped in a bathroom stall with a rampant lesbian. What do you want, Oklahoma? Do you want to eat pussy, or do you want Tom Coburn? It's not a hard choice.

Happy Halloween, folks. If you missed Ingrid's party, you missed me dressed as Tom Cruise from Risky Business. That's right--you know the scene. I definitely went without pants.

College is like a puzzle, and we make the pieces fit.

Or so went one of the pathetic slogans that my officemates tried to invent for my funding brochure. As the marketing coordinator, it is my job to come up with recruitment literature for stduents and parents. Recently, a new topping has been added to the cake: I am to make a "funding brochure" to send to potential donors, such as foundations, rich old ladies, and Bob Saget.

Easier said than done. On the one hand, we are incredibly lucky to have the sponsorship of a successful corporation in Houston. This corporation not only provides us $50,000 a year to run our program, they also provide us free printing and graphic design. On the other hand, the printing takes 600 years and the graphic designer sucks. His idea of a brochure is one which features lots of poorly colored, mismatched clipart combined with glossy fake photos of generic students. Therefore, I have taken up the burden of designing all these brochures myself, even though I have free professional help just waiting to heed my every wish. Surprisingly, I'm fairly talented at graphic design, despite my lack of experience. It takes me ten times longer to design even one page than it would someone who knew what he or she was doing, but when I'm finished, the final product is actually pretty good. Or so I thought until E (formerly pierced co-worker) saw the cover of my funding brochure design.

The cover features a puzzle, some pieces of which are green in various shades, and some of which are pictures of our students. The effect is quite lovely (IMHO), and the idea is that our organization is to fill in the pieces of the incomplete puzzle of the students' futures. When the funders open the brochure, they will see the complete pictures of our students' faces, smiling and happy as they ready themselves for college. I spent hours and hours on just the cover, tweaking and moving things a hundred times until they were just right. I had listend to E drone on and on about all the different grantwriting workshops she had attended, and had sincerely tried to take her rambling advice seriously. She took one look at the cover and immediately started criticizing everything about it, without saying even one kind word about what I had been doing all week. She didn't like the colors--because it was green, it reminded her too much of St. Patrick's Day. Because there was nothing else resembling St. Patrick's Day on the brochure, I can only assume that anything green in the world automatically makes her think of St. Patrick's. After about 20 minutes of pure, uninterrupted criticism and haughty advice from someone who has never made a brochure in her life, I decided to leave work early.

What happened between us is something I'm sure has happened to all of you: we both had a vision in our minds of something yet unmade, and once it was made, we found out that our visions were different. This is something graphic designers have to deal with all day long; inarticluate morons who ramble on about their visions while the designer keeps revising and recoloring in a vain attempt to read the clients' minds. Here's the trouble with me, though--I ain't a graphic designer. I don't have to painstakingly create E's vision (which involves--you guessed it--stupid clip art), because I'm not working for her. I've decided to go into work tomorrow and give her two options: she can a) write the brochure content and leave the design to me, whether she likes the final product or not, or b) try to relay her vision to the graphic designer, who will then send her ugly designs that once again fall tragically short of her vision. The benefit of option a) is that I get to tell her to leave me the fuck alone and do something that I enjoy without her input. The benefit of b) is that I get to watch her go back and forth for weeks with our graphic designer until she bursts into hysterical tears. I can hardly decide which road to take.

A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.

Courtney keeps insisting that I update this thing, which means one of two things. Either she a) loves my blog so much she can't live without it, or b) she's like me and has a list of blogs that she keeps in her favorites folder and goes through every day, and with each passing day becomes more annoyed when the same damn entry comes up over and over again (ahem, Gavagirl). At any rate, I'm back and better than ever, if only to say:

They had never met. They were like two hummingbirds...who had also never met.

Seriously, the four people that regularly check my blog (no, you're not one of them, Elliot) should take heart; when I was at work at 11:30pm last night, it suddenly occured to me that I'm going a bit over the edge. Not many people in my office seem terribly interested in making our organization a success, so no amount of work I could possibly do on my own will affect the ultimate outcome of our program. So, I've decided to go back to the system I had in college: become immobilized by the sheer number of things to do, and then do none of them. As my work life goes to hell, I will have vast amounts of time to blog.

No, my dear friends, all is not well in Zion. We're spinning out of control and I can't find any way to get us back on track. The mission of our nonprofit is to help low-income high school students gain admission to college, and that's the one and only thing that we're not doing. When I look around at work, I see an intricate farce; everyone is "playing office." We have meetings, lunches, conferences, evaluations, calls, memos, you name it. But we don't actually accomplish the organizing principle of our organization. Our seniors have terrible attendance, our junior curriculum is so dull and abstruse that the students are bored to tears, and we found out today that a large number of the school counselors despise us and want us out of the school. Admittedly, that last part isn't really our fault. Apparently the counselors don't like it when we reveal their complete incompetence when it comes to college counseling. The method they use to counsel the students seems designed to leave the students with the idea that the best way to get into college is to wipe their asses with a blank application and send it in. So when we contradict their advice to our students by saying such revolutionary things such as, "Actually, you do have the take the SAT to get into college," their resentment grows.

So I'm trying to figure out what to do. I can request a transfer to another project, but that's a very difficult decision to make. I wouldn't have traveled all this way if I weren't committed to the people I'm serving, and to abandon the organization now might leave everything worse than I found it. However, I only have one life, and to waste a year of it while simultaneously living in poverty is not something I'm willing to do. Being a VISTA is a sacrifice, yes, but the sacrifice has to be for something. The noble thing to do would be to work ten times harder to make the organization better instead of leaving it in its sorry state, but as I said before, I'm beginning to feel like the amount of work I put into things is irrelevant. I'm only one person, and no matter how hard I've tried to point out the problems we have, no one seems willing to admit that this whole thing is close to blowing up.

Well, this entry has been a big downer, especially since it's my first one after a long time. Shall I leave you with something more cheerful? Elliot just came to see me this past weekend to celebrate our two-year anniversary. In lieu of flowers and candy, he got me a sweater and I got him a pair of pants. I found the exchange incredibly romantic.