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Real life experiences reviewed for your pleasure. The banal, poignant, extraordinary, and oddly specific, all explained by a five star rating system. Submit a review.

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Finishing something after procrastinating for an embarrassingly long time

You’re not someone who plans things particularly well or is adept at time management.  You prefer the low burn of anxiety and self-loathing that comes from dreading the thing you need to do rather than the slightly higher amount of effort it takes to just do the thing.  As time passes you dread and you stew, sometimes being super-productive with the things you don’t actually need to do, other times only being productive at not doing the one thing you do need to do.

Then the time comes when you’re actually in danger of not finishing the thing.  If you don’t finish the thing you’re going to lose your job/have to quit school/ruin Christmas/go back to prison.  In the interest of not destroying everything important in your life, you spend the last stretch of time before your deadline neglecting everything else important in your life to finish.  Your days become long stretches of miserable progress and setbacks punctuated by crying jags.  You aren’t sleeping and are barely eating.  You probably smell like BO.  When the important people in your life try to help, you end up snapping at them because they just don’t live in your head and have immediate access to all the information you need to do the thing and you don’t have time to explain things, man!  Sometimes you find yourself curled up in a ball, sniffling and rocking yourself as you watch the clock tick, paralyzed by the sheer enormity of what has to be accomplished in such a short time.  Sometimes you’re prostrate on the floor surrounded by papers.

But looking your impending doom in the face is exactly what you needed to launch into action.  It took a long, extremely unpleasant cram-fest and a few meltdowns, but now you’re done!  You have averted disaster once again, and your mind is free of both the low burn “you should do this” anxiety and the shitshow of actually doing it!  Sure, it probably would have turned out better if you’d been able to spend more time on this or plan ahead for that, but at least you finished and you won’t have to go to jail.  In actually finishing the thing, you have proven to the world that you are a person who gets things done, albeit in one of the worst ways possible.  

Now go take an anxiety nap.  

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Procrastinating

The thing about procrastinating is.... ehhhhhhhh....

To be continued.

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Submitting a Review to My Sister's Blog

No complaints about my sister, but Tumblr is bullshit.

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Getting sucked down a youtube rabbit hole

You have just found the most brilliant and perfect 30 seconds ever captured on video. It is a kitten that looks like it’s high-fiving another kitten and it does it at just the right time then kinda makes this face like—well, you have to see it to understand. Your friend shared the video on twitfaceinstagrindr and now you’ve watched it at least fifteen times, because oh my god when the one kitten makes that face!? Then you start wondering if there are other animals that high-five, and luckily, there are several recommended videos with promising screen shots. You watch a few mediocre and overly long videos of dogs touching paws and people in furry costumes until you find the most brilliant and perfect 45 seconds ever captured on video, and this time there are pandas. One panda farts, then the other one swipes its paw at it and the farting panda catches it with its own paw so it looks like he gave it a high-five. But then the farting panda falls over and the other one is just like—well, you should really just watch it.

Now almost an hour has passed and you’ve entered the endless arena of panda videos. Pandas sneezing and hugging and gnawing and going down slides and wearing little collars. Most of these videos don't have the immediate reward of the original video, but are fascinating nonetheless. They’re more of a slow burn, and gradually you delve deeper into the science of pandas, their habitat, conservation efforts, behavior. You find yourself watching a thirteen minute video on the reproductive habits of pandas, then—wait—there are twin pandas??

It’s two hours and fifteen minutes later and you’re watching videos about twins in animals and humans. You’re getting a little fatigued, but you’ve just found a video on these twin girls from the seventies who developed their own language because their parents never talked to them and how does that happen? You click around some more and wonder what is a parasitic twin in the title of this one video?

Oh dear god. You should have never clicked that video, but you can’t look away. You wish you had never learned what a parasitic twin was. Does that guy have baby legs coming out of his stomach? Why can’t you look away?! Why are you clicking on another video with—oh my god—are those teeth?! Now it’s four hours later and you’re watching videos of surgeries performed on severely deformed people. Some of the surgeries are long and gruesome, but as you see a little girl smile for the first time after those fatty masses had been removed from her face you find yourself tearing up.

After five and a half hours, you find it, truly the most brilliant and perfect one minute and ten seconds ever captured on video. Have you seen this before? It doesn’t matter, because this is the true gem that you will share with all of your friends on twitfaceinstagrindr and for a few moments it will change their lives. They will remember it and smile when it pops up on their feed again and then a new perfect and brilliant moment will appear and they forget that last one. Isn’t it amazing that we live in a time where everyone has their camera ready to capture the most perfect and brilliant things that happen all over the world and we can actually see them? Through algorithms and clicks something so precious is brought into our consciousness and it’s more intense and pure than anything that we would ever see in our real life?! And our own experiences pale in comparison to this fleeting meme that we’ll forget when the next one appears in a few days?!! ISN’T IT INCREDIBLE AND HEARTBREAKING AND TERRIFYING?!!

Minus one star because life is meaningless.

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Flossing at the end of the day when you messed up literally everything else that's happened

You had big plans for today.  You were going to clean the floors, do laundry, grocery shopping, get ahead on your work, catch up on email, call your mother, go to the gym, make a nutritious meal.  Instead you just didn’t, you sat there, on the couch, on your computer just like you are now.  You didn’t shower.  You didn’t even put on pants until you realized mid-afternoon you had to go outside in order to feed yourself.  Even then, you didn’t put on a bra, you just kept your coat on.  The grocery store where you buy nutritious food was too far, plus you were way too hungry to do all that shopping then have to make something, so you just got a burrito from the place a block away.  You eat it on the couch and don’t even enjoy yourself.  You’re staring at a screen all day, surrounded by your own failure, one voice telling you to get the fuck up and do something and a more powerful voice telling you that doing things is haaaaaaaard.  Then it’s night and your partner is bugging you to turn off the lights soon because it’s late and he has to work tomorrow.  A day is a small percentage of your life and yours is gone.  You’re not tired, but decide to start going to bed anyway, because what can you do.  You take your waste-of-space self to the bathroom and see that tiny, neglected container of floss.  You think maybe there’s something I can not fuck up today, and you feel like a moral person as you pull out length of floss.  No, you don’t enjoy it, but you don’t enjoy being stuck on the internet all day either, and this is for your own good.  You’ve subjected yourself to this small unpleasantry because that is what responsible people do.  No, this is what good people do, real, moral, adult humans.  They have schedules that are color-coded, and they know the days they’re supposed to do the laundry, clean, or grocery shop.  They go to the gym often enough every month that their health insurance company gives them a discount.  They’re in a career where they periodically advance, nurture their creative hobbies outside of work, and maintain a tight-knit group of friends with whom they regularly have dinner parties.   

With this one small thing you did not fuck up, you give yourself hope.  You didn’t waste all of today because today was the day that you flossed, and when’s the last time you did that?  Maybe one day, you too will be grown, responsible, good, even though right now there’s a dull ache in your gums and the faint taste of blood in your mouth.

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Falling down the stairs and landing on your feet

Falling down a flight of stairs and concluding with your feet firmly planted is a mixed experience to be sure.  I was going down the stairs of my building that I’d descended thousands of times before, wearing a pair of shoes I’d worn zero times before.  They weren’t even high heels, just a regular pair of lace-up boots, a little stiff.  Apparently too stiff for me to bend my ankle in order to point my toe downward and land on the next step while my heel cleared the previous one.  My ankle didn’t bend and the heel of my foot caught on the step.  This sent me tumbling down the stairs, past my boyfriend as limbs and those heavy boots clunked against each level.  But after the last step, something amazing happened.  I landed in a squat with both feet on the ground, my arms in front of me, and without taking another step or using my arms, I pulled myself upright.  I’d stuck the landing, like one of those baby Chinese gymnasts!  I was Catwoman!

If you happen to fall down the stairs, I would highly recommend landing on your feet.  It’s never fun falling down the stairs, but landing on your feet gives you more opportunities to play it off.  After you land, you can shout, “Tada!” and either bow or do one of those gymnast, arms up, arched back moves after they land from swinging around on those bars.  Your friends will think you’re an expert in physical comedy, fully in control of all your haphazard movements.  They’ll laugh and think you’re so funny and down to earth for risking your neck to surprise them with that crazy move.  Or they’ll assume you’re a Hollywood stunt actor and secretly wonder if you can introduce them to Mark Ruffalo.  They don’t want to be too obvious about it, so they’ll probably just spend the rest of the night bringing you drinks and trying to impress you. 

Since I’ve only stuck that one landing, my experience can be summarized thusly:

Con:  Falling down the stairs.

Pro:  Feeling like Catwoman.

Plus one star for Catwoman.

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GETTING A FREE SANDWICH!

Whether it’s due to unexpected extras from a luncheon, the generosity of others, or an amazing coupon, nothing quite compares to a free sandwich.  There’s something about biting into bread and meat that you didn’t prepare or pay for that is heavenly.  Best of all is the surprise sandwich.  In the middle of your work day when you’re stressing about how you forgot your lunch and will you have to venture out to find something and if so where and do you have time and should you eat at your desk or not at all, then someone traipses through the room and announces those two magic words:  Free sandwiches.  And suddenly all your problems have lifted.  Even if the bread is a little soggy and the lettuce slightly brown from sitting in a warm room for some time, that sandwich was free, it came to you, and it is your no-strings-attached lunch.

Granted, I have never been poisoned by a free sandwich, and if that were to happen my rating would likely change.  Yes, there is a range in quality of free sandwich experiences, including the one in which you just ate lunch and have to decide will you take it home for dinner?  Will you eat a second lunch in a couple hours?  Will you just eat it now to store fat for the lean winter?  It’s a moral dilemma, but still, one that leads to a free sandwich.  If you happen to choose to leave the sandwich in light of this dilemma, get out, I don’t want anything to do with you.  I have eaten free sandwiches ranging from fresh, warm pesto chicken and arugula on focaccia to hours-old Jimmy John’s half subs, and even so, in my estimation, getting a free sandwich is always a five star experience.