15 years in 10 bullet points

I´m not one for memes but this one I like, cause I get to obsess over my past. Found it on Fned´s site, read hers here.

Supposedly, I should sum up the last fifteen years of my life in 10 bullet points, so here goes.

1). 1993 - 1994= sophomore/junior in High School/ Hell. This time in my life completely sucked. I had braces (didn´t fix anything). I had zits (still do). I had no boobs (still don´t). So what´s the difference between then and now? Now I don´t give a shit.

Finally got asked to one of the stupid school dances that are designed to make fragile teens feel even more awkwardly pathetically inadequate than they already are. Got asked to the dance by super hot basketball star. Then he dumped my ass for some chick at our church. Jerk. Quit going to church.

2). 1995= Graduated High School/Hell. Discovered mind altering substances of many kinds. Hung around crowd that was so calculatingly un-hip that if you weren´t as un-hip as them, you were a total sell-out. Everyone was in a band and we would all stand around like idiots listening to the shitty music at underage shows (ok, some of it was good, but not half as good as we pretended it was).

3). 1996 - 1997= Happiness starts. Met my handful. Happiness short-lived because then, had my heart ripped out, chewed up, crapped out, stomped on, and finally hit by lightning by one of these guys (you'll never guess who. Watch long enough and you'll see him). He broke up with me probably because of my emotional, sexual, intellectual, social and musical retardation. But he never said it in so many words, cause he was too nice and was also one piss poor communicator.

Happiness sort of continues anyway vis-a-vis the consumption of way too many drugs and alcohol. Roommates had traveled through Europe. Europe? What? That sounds like fun. Ok, I´ll go. But before I leave, I think I'll have a brief love affair with my best friend. This helps get over nice bass player man.

4). 1998= Enter Spain. Wow, this feels like Disneyland. Seville is the caricaturized version of Europe, the replica of the Spain I had in my head, only better. Dropped out of school and started teaching English. Met my husband at La Carbonería. He was wearing a Pearl Jam t-shirt and his hair was long and curly enough and he was completely wonderful in his insanity. We were both sad and lonely and clung to each other like flies on shit.

5). 1999 - 2000= came to my senses and decided I needed to get the eff out of Spain and finish my degree. Moved back to Arizona. Lived alone. Loved living alone. No one took out the trash? My own damn fault. House clean? Yup, thanks to me. Had lots of phone sex with my boyfriend that was a million miles away.

Worked at an Irish Pub where the owner verbally abused all of the waitstaff but loved me and would beg me to go gambling with him, until he finally pissed his pub away. Like a loyal employee, I would go.

Managed to graduate with a degree in Religious Studies, a Certificate in Latin American Studies and a Minor in I-Don´t-Know-Why-the-Hell-I-Went-To-College-Cause-I´m-Never-Gonna-Get-A-Job-With-This-Shit.

6). 2001 - 2002= Moved back to Spain as an illegal immigrant and moved in with my (now) husband. Fought like assholes, mainly over him not doing jack shit around the house and me being a miserable bitchy girlfriend. Besides that, lived VERY well, on VERY little money. God, Spain was the shit in 2001.

7). 2003= Got married. I was only 25. Applied to grad school, got in and moved my Spanish husband back to the states. He hated it because no one understood his jokes, but, hey, we were happy spending 24-7 together and I would piss myself laughing at his jokes, cause they were damn funny even though nobody else got it.

8). 2004= Felt like the biggest fucking moron on the face of the planet in grad school. Had my ass reamed with feelings of total inadequacy on a daily basis. Questioned every single day why I was putting myself through the torture of the self-realization of cerebral ineptitude. But for some damn reason, I loved it. Felt happiness being surrounded by people with mild intellectual curiosity. Had my hand held by my husband while I shat myself from fear of scholarly leprosy.

9). 2005= Passed my Thesis defense with no revisions. Then put said thesis (i.e. my heart and soul) on bookshelf along with my masters degree in Sociology to collect dust and haven´t looked at them since. Moved back to Spain and joined the ranks of people in the real world that need to actually work and earn a living and leave fantasy-credit-card-land behind.

10). 2006 - 2008. Turned thirty. Began to feel the dull persistent pain of homesickness. Put my husband high up on my list of People I Blame For All The Shit That´s My Own Damn Fault. Beginning to discover that everything I ever thought I knew about myself needs to be scratched out and re-drafted in its entirety. Kinda too soon to write about this stuff. Wanna know what happened? This, this and this, oh, and this. I'm not liking this bullet point much.

So that's the last 15 years of my life in 10 bullet points. Ok, I need a nap. Hope you don´t need one after reading this.

-Bluestreak

Cause I´d rather be pimping than working

Ok, this is my final attempt to help Ghost of Keywork get votes for Hottest Blogger, besides I´m well out of material for the week, and bored as hell at work. If you haven´t voted yet, just hop on over and vote. We could help this well-deserving hottie win a trip to NY (he is, after all, paying his debt to society).

If you are like me, and are more into personality as opposed to looks, consider the following statements he has made in the last few days in the blogosphere, which swept me off my feet with his grace and charisma:

"How does this Mormon-With-Lots -Of-Wives thing work? Do I have to be Mormon?"

"Well, I haven't killed anyone yet, so I would say the detox is going well"

"Tired of doing something 'just because'? So was I. Know what I did? I snagged a couple of ankle monitors and now I do things because I 'have to or I'll go to jail for 90 days'."

"Violence in trees is a big turn on for me too."

"I guess I could have just cut to the chase and said, 'I want to fuck a cartoon, I'm a dork'."

"...I could have Jesus giving me a foot rub and people would still know that I'm no good."

"...I think I´m tearing up. Kidding, I just got maced by a librarian."

"Look, my panties, you've bunched them up."


So come on, friends, get your vote out for Key, one day left. If you hadn´t noticed, I voted for him cause he makes me piss myself laughing. Oh, and cause he´s hot in uniform.

Good luck, Key.

-Bluestreak

Keep it in your pants old man

You may recall how I told you about how everyone around this place does everything at the same damn time? It´s like Spain has one collective herd mentality mind and they get together each morning and vote on whether they should scratch their balls first or put their slippers on before getting out of bed.

So it´s August, and if you live in this city, that means "NOT EVEN GOD" IS WALKING THE STREETS, as the Spaniards say. This city is a ghost town.


Ghost town= chances of some dirty old man with plaid shorts and sandals whipping out his dick at you manifold exponentially.

So I walk these lonesome streets, you know, because I have to fucking work in August like a schmuck (and yes, I´m bitter), unlike every other person that lives in this place, who is currently at the beach right now eating an ice cream cone (I swear they are all eating an ice cream cone right now, it´s clockwork around here). This means that if you are unfortunate enough to have to walk the streets in August, everyone that passes you is a potential pervert prepared to whip out his chorizo surprise for your benefit.

It hasn´t happened yet (maybe I´m not as old-man-dick-whip-outable as I´d like to think). Although I did see a man peeing in a bush and when he saw that I could see his exposed genitalia, he didn´t seem to mind a bit. But admittedly he didn´t whip it out for my sake, so he doesn´t count. He´s just an asshole that pisses in the street (the street pissing epidemic in Spain is deserving of it´s own post so I´ll save it). But the potential for whip-outage is always there and I see it in their perverted eyes.

It´s like they are pissed cause they aren´t at the beach either and so whoever they pass is going to either see their dick or fear they might.

-Bluestreak, avoiding old man wiener for a few more days.


p.s. if you didn´t vote for Ghost of Keywork yesterday as Hottest Blogger, do so now here. He has reconsidered his hot-awareness strategy by posting a military picture of himself, which might not be for you, but it´s better than old man dick, so vote. But it´s still the house-arrest-anklets that get me.

"La sombra quebrada de una farola" by González-Alba from flickr
"Barrio Sta Cruz" by Jose OHM from flickr

Relief? Oh, and whoring.

I quit my other job today. Not the whore-job, but the other one, where I pretend like I know more than fuck all about microalgae.

Suddenly I have...oh my god...is that?...free time? Um...what? Time to keep my toenails looking like they are appendaged* to a normal humans´foot? Time to throw away chocolate boxes and other such clutter that has colonized my domicile? Time to question why I´m whoring myself out for money to the highest bidder at my regular job (well, actually the only bidder that showed up for the auction)? Time to make my life resemble Groundhog Day a little less? Time to not just pretend like I´m going to go to the gym and actually cook the poultry mutha fucka in my fridge like I did yesterday? Time to wash my hair? (Washing it feels like a tiresome bitch right now, as does quitting smoking, which should be description enough to tell you what my hair smells like). Time to call family members? (Uh oh, I have to remember that sometimes family members actually read this). Time to spend the money I no longer have?

Time to wish I was elsewhere?

I´m not used to all this time. It´s agobiante. This afternoon with all this free time, I´m going to do what I do best; Nada. As in, nadadamnthing.

By the way, speaking of whoring people out, I thought I´d whore out my new blogger friend ghost of keywork, cause the dude really needs to win a trip to NY and I´m not about to stand in his way. You may recall how I feel about going to NY (so I may as well spread a little NY karma) You´re supposed to vote him as the hottest blogger here, which is hard to contest because he´s the only person I know with the balls enough to A) post a real life picture of himself and his house-arrest-ankle-bracelets on his blog and B) call himself hot after doing so. He deserves some kind of award for that, right?

-Bluestreak

Photo by monkeyc.net from Flickr

*yeah, i know that´s not a verb. So what?

Grad School: I don´t talk about this much cause I try to suppress this shit

A friend of mine sent me this article from salon.com. The author, a T.V. reviewer does a fine job of comparing prostitution to what the majority of us have accepted and know as the daily cubicle grind. That is, get it up the ass by The Man in exchange for money.

I am currently trying to remember when the precise moment was that I decided to stop idealizing my future and just deal with the life-sucking reality of needing money.

Could it have been at midnight on my 30th birthday, by chance? Could it have been the day I defended my MA thesis but for some reason let the door hit my ass on the way out, because I could not spend another day of living like a damn leech?

The pull. Have you ever felt it? This fucking academic pull. The pull is the thing in my brain that teases me telling me I quit something I was somewhat good at. I quit that outlet for all of my brain energy that actually produced something tangible and real and above all, worth it (the creation of knowledge), that I now use to decide which pumps to wear to work and which lame report no one will ever read I´ll put together for some dumbass in H.R.

I know, I know. 95% of the what is produced in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences ends up in the stacks bound and never to be cracked open again until some schmuck thinking there might be a job for him in academia goes to write his thesis and finds that shit again, buried under a giant pile of "knowledge". An enormous chunk of what goes on in academia is intellectual masturbation, mutual intellectual masturbation (I´ll cite your pointless study in my next journal article that no one outside our esoteric jerk circle will read, if you do the same to mine. Aaaah. That feels good.)

I know all these things.

But I feel the pull. It´s the same one I used to feel for travel.

I feel this pull because I know that in the context of those circle jerks, some people really get off, I mean, they really create something worthwhile, that even the jack-offs all around them are contributing to or are at least contributing to the environment that allows them to do so. So maybe I don´t mind being one of the mediocre ones, if I´m part of a process that I believe has worth.

But then there is that annoying bug inside my brain that brings up the point that maybe I quit because I could not cut the mustard. Ok, those bastards in academia did scare the living hell out me when they demanded a coherent argument when I had no possible way to formulate one (ignorance is not bliss in grad school, it is called humiliation). It also scared the hell out of me that all of the professors in my department had degrees from the Ivy League, so where the hell did all the state University PhD´s go to make a living?

Thoughts about going back arise when I stop thinking about the practicalities of money, mortgage, life, kids, responsibility. I start thinking about it when none of those things fulfill me or seem to have a glimmer of hope to fully do so. But even in the crazy ivy tower world, it is a rat race. The University only lets you stick around if you are producing good shit.

And this is where I ask myself the scary question: am I capable of it? Answer to self: Oh fuck, maybe not. And then I go home, watch a stupid movie, wake up the next day and go to work. At least if I was a prostitute I wouldn´t have to get up so damn early.

Time for a change.

-Bluestreak

"Reality tag" by Scoobymoo from Flickr