6.29.2010

Inaugural Worst Of Netflix: Grace

Excerpt from Meg’s and my TGI Friday’s business meeting on Friday:

Meg: We need features.

Me: Chemical Element of the Day.

Meg: No, too incredibly boring.

Me: Bowel Movement Fridays.

Meg: We already more or less do that.

Me: We could see if Evie…

Meg: That fucking prima donna gets NOWHERE NEAR this project.

Me: Okay, how about I write reviews/recaps of terrible movies and call it “Worst of Netflix?”

Meg: Sold.

From the mailer sleeve: “When an accident takes the life of the unborn, 8-month-old fetus inside her, Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd) insists on delivering the stillborn child – only to discover that the baby is alive and heinously hungry. Before long, voracious baby Grace spurns milk and forces Madeline to slake her insatiable appetite for blood.” Rated R. 1 hr. 24 min. 2009.

I already have a question: delivering the stillborn child as opposed to… keeping it in there?

The movie opens with a shot of an industrial fan, cuts to blood dripping on a foot, cuts to a cat at a window. It’s artistic because it’s bizarre. The shot then cuts immediately to a couple having ostentatiously boring sex. They’re barely moving, and the woman is staring blankly over the man’s shoulder making a mental shopping list. The man grunts and rolls off, the woman draws her legs to her chest, and then opening titles are shown over the sound of a fetal heartbeat as heard on ultrasound. FORESHADOWING AT TABLE SIX.

A family sits at a table being passive-aggressive; the couple we just saw in bed and one set of their parents. The young husband is pretty cute, but we know from earlier that he has a disappointing ass. The mother bitches about vegetarian cuisine and midwives, setting up an Uptight Older Generation vs. Freewheeling Young Liberals Who Eat Tofu And Go To Midwives dynamic. And we’re at the midwife’s. You can tell she’s eccentric because there are a lot of colorful cushions on the sofa. A young Lesbian offers cookies in a wooden voice and goes to get the midwife. Why on earth did they write that part in? “Needed: chick with 12-year-old boy’s haircut to say two sentences with no intonation. Union only.”

Midwife: “We keep the focus on you and your baby.” As opposed to Birth For Dads, the Oklahoma City midwifery that offers hot wings and classic Super Bowls on the big screen while your wife goes to the hospital by herself. We’re reminded that the midwife is “kooky” by a shot of a grimacing Aztec figurine on the coffee table. “You think childbirth hurts? Nothing like having your heart ripped out and offered to the sun.”

The husband and the midwife spar over the midwife’s qualifications; turns out she trained in “a dozen Eastern modalities, in Nepal, Thailand…and I have an M.D. from Columbia.” “If you’re having birth problems, I feel bad for you, son; I got 99 Eastern modalities but Feng Shui ain’t one! (Hit me.)” There’s a brief discussion of Madeline’s medical history, and then cut to TV screen showing a cow being butchered, then cut to Madeline pouring soy milk into a bowl. Because, you know, soybeans are people too. She unwraps a brown paper bundle marked with an illegible note to reveal a raw liver, finds a dead mouse on the porch, and composts the mouse. Fucking hippies.

We then cut to the couple at dinner. They have a vapid conversation about how She’s A Hippie and He’s Not. The husband, whose name we don’t know but looks like it should be “Cecil,” is waaaaaaaay less attractive when you see him up close. After name-dropping an imaginary Seven Sister, “Amesley,” Madeline folds over in pain all of a sudden, and we go to the ER. The midwife and various doctors have a turf war:

Midwife: What are her levels?

Doctor: Tuh?

Midwife: Tell me you checked her levels.

Other doctor: Let’s check the levels.

15 seconds later, the “levels” appear, (turns out they were on a sheet of printer paper just offscreen) and it turns out she has a gallstone. You know. Her levels. We ran them through the thingometer and the diagnostinator.

So now the couple is driving home, a hiss is heard, the airbags go off and the car crashes - in that order. We don’t know if her husband lived – presumably yes, because the car hit the trees on Madeline’s side, but you can never tell – and Madeline goes to the midwife’s. Midwife and Random Lesbian have a conversation revealing that Madeline is going to deliver in three weeks, despite the fact that the baby died in the accident. Random Lesbian thinks this is stupid, to her credit. She’s emerging as my favorite character. A brief, barely coherent scene with the husband’s parents reveals that the husband died, and that his name was Michael. The car ran off the road into a stand of thin birches at about thirty miles an hour, and the airbags deployed before they even hit. I’m not clear on how this killed a grown man.

Madeline goes to a baby store, a clot or something falls from the general area of her womb, and she falls to the floor. Cut to her giving birth at the midwife’s SURROUNDED BY RANDOM WOMEN. You know what I find comforting when grieving and in pain? Four strangers. The baby is born dead – in a pool, of course, with a dramatic plume of blood. The midwife steps out, since propriety dictates that bereaved mothers be left alone clutching their dead infants, and when she comes back Madeline is breastfeeding the “alive” baby.

The midwife visits Madeline and Grace at home, and there’s a long, stilted conversation. The most interesting part of this is that we see that Madeline’s bathroom door is made of stained glass, an oddly festive touch. She also watches documentaries on animal cruelty while cooking:

Madeline: It’s like a vegan horror movie.

Really? Because I thought that role had been filled by Killer Tomatoes Eat France, but what do I know?

Madeline brushes Grace’s hair, Grace starts to cry, Madeline composts the brush (fucking hippie), as an ominous calliope version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D rises and swells. A newborn fussing? She must be a vampire. We then go to Grace’s room later that night and see a fly crawl up her nose.

A lot of “ominous” stuff happens without much direction. Michael’s mother is still sad. The cat shits on the floor. Grace smells bad. Grace oozes blood. Grace’s body temperature is 93.3 degrees. Grace attracts flies.

Pointless revelation! Midwife and Random Lesbian are lovers; Midwife and Madeline USED to be lovers. Hey-o! Too bad I have no investment in these characters. I do wonder if they intentionally made Madeline a LUG stereotype. We get to the inevitable scene where Grace is being breastfed and chomps down on the tit. Cut to Michael’s mother fondling her own breasts. You know, whatever. It’s not a horror movie without a tit shot – if the tit belongs to a grieving mother who, though approaching her autumn years, has held up well, who am I to judge? Cut to Madeline peeling her bloody nightgown off her bitten breast. (How does a baby with no teeth yet bite hard enough to make a wound that bleeds freely?) Grace shows a strong preference for the bloody breast.

Now Madeline is at the grocery store. A couple pints low, she listlessly throws some “homeopathic remedies” into her cart, since vampirism is traditionally cured by flowers and rainbows. She buys some steaks, squeezes them out, gives Grace a bottle of blood, and composts the meat. She comes back in to find Grace twitching; she leans over her and – of course – Grace vomits the beef blood into her face.

Michael’s mother asks a psychiatrist to declare Madeline insane so she can raise the baby. Neither of their faces is visible because of the strong afternoon light coming through the windows behind them. The psychiatrist is drinking milk out of a rocks glass. Sure, why not? That’s what good crystal is for. Presumably the milk is symbolic of something, but damned if I know what.

Stuff keeps happening. Vampire baby sucks blood. Madeline calls the midwife but Random Lesbian won’t deliver her rival’s messages. The doctor shows up and does a physical on the badly anemic Madeline, and there’s some chit-chat about breast pumps. She kills the doctor and feeds Grace his blood. By now, Grace has almost entirely become Little Shop of Horrors.

The mother-in-law, whose name is Vivian, we finally learn, shows up and Finds Out Everything. She and Madeline kill each other, as they had always hoped to, and the abruptly suspicious midwife performs a Deus Ex Machina and finds little Grace in her grandmother’s arms, reaching for the blood from her neck wound.

So, of course, Midwife and Random Lesbian buy a caravan, dye their hair, and raise little Grace as a road baby. Using “science,” they can keep Ransom Lesbian’s “levels” high enough to feed little Grace. Unless:

Random Lesbian: She needs more now. She’s teething.

And our last shot of the film is Grace reaching hungrily for RL’s chewed-up breast. The closing titles, like those of any movie about a child, are accompanied by a woman tunelessly singing a lullaby.

This movie is a lot worse than it should be. The script is bad, but I’ve seen worse. The cinematography is actually very good, but it’s like putting a silk gown on an irregular mannequin you fished out of a Dumpster. You can only make it so attractive. The whole thing is played completely without humor. The hippie mother composting everything, the sharp-tongued mother-in-law, a woman whose baby is a vampire going to the store to load up on herbal supplements – this could have all been played with some grim humor without making the film “not scary.” As it stands, the characters just kind of… do things. There are a lot of interesting things a filmmaker could do with a vampire baby, but we’ll have to wait until the next movie to see what they are.

Grade: B minus

Recommended for: The patriarchy

Not recommended for: New mothers with babies who are very light-sensitive and drink only fresh human blood

Highlight: Note that watching all the animal cruelty documentaries enables Madeline to expertly butcher the doctor.

Best excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on the movie: "Some scenes portray a tender mother-daughter relationship while others involve erotic lactation and cannibalism," and the revelation that it is not RL but Madeline in the final scene. In my defense, she had dyed her hair.

A quick thank you (& happy birthday Becca!) (& happy belated birthday Helena!)

Hi. You have a more substantial Tulane Chris post coming your way later this morning, don't worry. I just wanted to hop on and say a quick thank you to Lara.

My finances have been understandably tight since getting fired, but in the past few months, shit's gone from "touch-and-go" to "considering moving back in with my parents". I haven't really discussed how bad things are with anyone (including my parents) because money is awkward, but just to give you an idea of what things are currently like, I'll let you in on two things:

1.) I swear to god, I just applied to be a Ghosts of Georgetown tour guide. A job which requires period costume. (Although for 100 bucks a pop plus tips, I'll gladly segway around Georgetown in a hoop skirt and a sombrero and be honored to do it.)

2.) Earlier tonight I couldn't figure out how to wrap my sister's oddly shaped birthday present and the double-sided tape wouldn't work because it's too humid, so I burst into tears. That's how I dealt with that situation. By crying and crying and crying. And we're not talking like a few errant tears here and there either; I'm talkin' like openly weeping on the floor in a sea of wrapping paper and dirty laundry. There was a surprising amount of rolling around involved too, which in retrospect was probably a poor decision considering I had a pair of scissors floating around...

The unexpected death of my computer a few weeks ago really put me in a horrible position. (It turns out that blogging without a computer is kind of hard. LOLZ! HOW KNEW?!) But that's where Lara swooped in and saved the day. Lara's leaving DC in a few weeks to go to grad school at Parsons (also the reason why I've been saying up late at night listening to The Cure and cutting recently) so she got a new computer and sold me her old one with CS3 tonight for super cheaps. Although I spent literally every single treehouse dollar that the merch store made buying it (must.....not.........explode.............), I know she could have sold it for considerably more on Craigslist or ebay, but didn't because we're homegirls and she wanted to help me out. Also, she came home early from a bar on Friday night to re-format the merch files I lost on my computer. I mean, Christ. Talk about above and beyond. I guess this means I have to officially forgive her for getting drunk and hitting on my dad. Ugh. Fine. I forgive you Lara. You're welcome.

So snaps to Lara for essentially saving the blog. I would have been pretty darn fucked if I had to buy a new computer, you guys, let's not lie. Plus, lord knows Lara is a fellow struggling artist slash grad student (a whole other level of poor I wouldn't dream of exploring) so I appreciate her bowing out of some money just to help a friend out.

In conclusion: I will suck your dick for ten-dollars and Lara is my hero.

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6.25.2010

What a Shitshow

Before we get to Chris' postT.G.I. HAGMAN!!!1

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As of 12:13am on June 25, 2010, Larry Hagman is...alive! Just let it all wash over you.

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To Torrey, the Tulane grad who commented on my post the other day: I have a frighteningly blurry memory of hitting on someone named Torrey/Tori/Tor-E at the 2004 Beaux Arts Ball. If that was you, I AM SO SORRY, it was an open bar and I was 19. Hopefully it wasn’t you and we can still be friends. If it was you… I was real drunk, so you didn’t miss much.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome my dad to our readership! He started reading a couple of weeks ago and proceeded to send me an email with the subject line “Meg” about how funny he thinks Meg is. What he doesn’t know is that I tell Meg funny things Dad says and she thinks he’s funny. It’s all very Parent Trap. I talked to Dad recently and he said something about how “it’s all funny, but as a parent occasionally it’s more information than I particularly…” so I’ve devised a code for everyone’s comfort: if the first few sentences contain any of the phrases “rim job,” “tampon cannon,” “fecal vomit,” or “scrotal catastrophe,” the rest of the post will be vulgar. I will also announce at the beginning of each post referencing any drug or alcohol experiences I may or may not have had (totally did have) that it’s a Drama in Real Life! Post.

I resent Meg’s trying to fob off the weird onto me during the ash discussion. I fully intended to blog about that same conversation but Meg, having the blog password and all, was faster. If she wants to risk grandparental scolding from beyond the grave, so be it, but I’m not trusting her with my ashes. At this point, I don’t even trust her to have me cremated. She’d probably just drag me into the yard and throw a tarp over me, or surreptitiously put me in Evie’s litterbox and hope I went out with the next scoop. So, for my loyal fans, both of you, here is what you must do with my ashes: If Adrien Brody is still alive and reasonably pleasant to look at, rub my ashes onto his nude body. If not, sneak my ashes into Snake and Jake’s in New Orleans on Dollar Schlitz Night and divide them equally between the ashtrays and the sofa cushions. This will be easy, because every night is dollar beer night.

So… diarrhea. I think it’s hilarious. Here’s my algebra:

(Feces x Desperation) + Embarrassment =
LOL!!!1

I told Meg I planned to try to write a diarrhea post and she said, “Oh, I had diarrhea yesterday!” It’s the great equalizer! Not everyone gets drunk and goes home with someone who turns out to have one ball (TAMPON CANNON, DAD!) or drinks so much they vomit twin streams of pre-bottled rum and coke out their nose their first day in New Zealand (scrotal catastrophe!), but everyone has diarrhea. Screw hearing a child’s laughter or falling in love for the first time; the true universal human experience is taking the stairs at a gallop and throwing an elderly man to the floor in a race to get to the toilet in time. Fistfuls of Immodium at the bus station.

So, in the interests of opening up and building a closer relationship with my readers, here is my best personal diarrhea story. Picture it. New Orleans, February 2010. A young graduate student travels to his favorite city to watch their team play in the Super Bowl. A kindly stewardess offers him a chicken roll on the plane. He eats it, not knowing it is RIFE with contagion.

So, I get to New Orleans and all is great. Celebrations, whatever. The game isn’t for a couple of days. The next day, we all go out to get Po-Boys, when the Feeling strikes me. The Po-Boy place does not have a toilet, forcing me to caaaaaaarefully jog two blocks to a coffeeshop, buy some juice, and proceed to… you know. I assume it’s just travel disarray and go on about my day.

So we went to the movie theater, and I shat myself. We were casually walking along, excited about seeing the movie, and THERE IT WAS. No warning or anything, just straight-up shat myself.

If the Super Bowl had not been the next day, I would have just killed myself. I would have died at home and my friends there, unlike MEG, might at least have rolled my corpse into the lake. However, I had a game to watch.

I realize I just might be able to class this one through. I ran to the bathroom and… you can imagine what I had to do. The only really awkward part was throwing my underpants away in the big trash can, but her I had an ace in the hole: I was in New Orleans. In any other city in the world, throwing your underwear away in a Megaplex bathroom is cause for alarm, even hostility from passersby. In New Orleans – hell, everyone’s had those days. You’re more likely to get a sadly sympathetic smile and a murmured, “Lord, I had a day like that last week…” It takes more than feces-streaked boxer-briefs to stand out in New Orleans.

So THANK GOD, the movie was sold out and we left. I peeled off the two closest friends of mine in the group and told them I had something important and private to tell them. They are a pair of Cajun siblings whom I’ll call Butter Legs and Smashbone and two of my favorite people in the world. Since they already knew I was gay they must have thought I had cancer. They very kindly took me home with only minor giggling, although I had to make them postpone a trip to the liquor store until they dropped me off. My exact words were “Guys, I don’t want to be all ‘I have diarrhea’ about this, but…”

So, I spent a night shivering and feverish on the couch watching “Mad Men” with our host’s belligerent girlfriend. I was sick enough that I couldn’t completely tell her apart from the show, so I’m not completely sure if there’s a really critical pre-school teacher on the show or not. I do feel sorry for a pre-school teacher who doesn’t pity people who have Had Accidents because she has a short career in front of her.

I got up in the morning to giggles. “Chris. Chris, do you feel better? Chris. We bought you Chinese food.” Specifically, they had brought me a Pu Pu platter.

“Chris?”

“Butter Legs?”

“Remember during the playoffs when you said that if the Saints went to the Super Bowl you’d shit yourself?”

“Yes.”

“And they’re at the Super Bowl?”

“Yes.”

“And you shat yourself!”

“Yes.”

Premonitions do run in my mother’s family, and somehow it seems oddly appropriate that mine should specifically be attuned to bowel movements. So, the rest is history and the Saints won. Now, every time Butter Legs has diarrhea, she texts me because “it reminds her of me.” This is funnier if you realize that Butter Legs is small, very pretty, and generally a fairly demure Southern lady. She makes pepper jelly with her aunt, always writes thank-you notes, and uses diarrhea as a reminder to stay close to friends.

So, if any of you still had me on a pedestal and thought I was glamorous, rest assured: I put my pants on one leg at a time, and then I shit them.

6.24.2010

God damnit.

Mother of god. As per usual, I curled up in bed with my laptop last night, wrote a post, left it open and in edit mode so I could give it the old read-through this morning before work and went to sleep.

Then I woke up this morning, rolled over and saw that Evie was passed out on the keyboard and her various little kitty bits had deleted the entire post and replaced it with:

;afjfhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

And because blogger autosaves your work every other minute (bless its heart), that is what's here to stay. And I'm already late for work. So, I leave you with the following:

1.) I am going to buy a Bobby Flay cookbook, pick out the most delicious recipe in it, put the charcoal on, whip up a light, citrus-based marinade and grill that god damn cat until she is medium/medium-rare.

2.) I just got the following email from my dad:

Hey Meg. Just checking in. We went to Dingle yesterday. Saw a strange note on the map. Huh?

How are you and Evie doing? Have a good day at work. Are you and Chris speaking tonight,

Miss you.

Love,
Dad

PS: please remember to clean out Evie's box. She will appreciate it. And so will we on Saturday night.

BAHAHAHAHAHA...I forgot that I wrote James' above Dingle on my dad's map. Oh LOLZ. Sometimes I sneak up on myself...

3.) If Evie can manage to delete today's post, I'm sure she can figure out how to scoop her own box.

4.) To answer my dad's question, yes, Tulane Chris and I will be speaking tonight at ihatemy9to5.com's Behind the Blog panel, so come check us out! It's from 7-9pm at Affinity Lab on U Street and Dan from Prince of Petworth will be moderating.If you are going to come (and I don't know why you wouldn't) I think ihm95 would like you to shoot them a quick RSVP email to ihm9to5@gmail.com so they know how many chairs/PBRs to get.

See you guys tonight! I'll be the one wearing an Evie stole...in 100-degree weather...to prove a point.

6.23.2010

Where's Neve Campbell when you need her?

First and foremost, I'd like to address this comment from yesterday's blog post:

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"A white Patrice." I can honestly say that that's the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me in my entire 25 years of life. Like online, in person, or other wise. So thank you for that.

Next on the agenda: WHAT IN THE FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCK?!?!!?!?!? Can I please share with you what is going on right now slash today as a whole? Because today has been the spookiest day of my entire life and shit's only getting spookier by the minute:

1.) I'm still housesitting the haunted old McBlogger place, by myself. (Except for Evie. And the pet/family cemetery across the hall.)

2.) I heard a strange noise coming from the garage this afternoon that sounded like someone dragging trash cans around. How did I choose to deal with this situation? By physically clinging to Evie's hindquarters for dear life and watching five episodes of Bridezillas in a row to distract myself. I don't think she appreciated it, but I sure as shit did.

2.) There was a bad storm this afternoon and the power went out for a substantial amount of time. I mean, for fuck's sake...

3.) Directly after the power went out, an unknown number called my cell phone. I answered thinking it might be my parents, BUT THE PERSON HUNG UP. (...'Eh. That doesn't sound nearly as terrifying as it actually was. Time to editorialize.) AND AFTER THE PERSON HUNG UP, I GOT A TEX MESSAGE SAYING THAT I WAS GOING TO DIE TONIGHT. (That's more like it.)

3.) Tulane Chris and I were chatting tonight about his visit this weekend and he for some reason brought up the urn with my grandfather's ashes in the room across from mine. I corrected Chris that my grandfather's ashes aren't actually in an urn at allthey're still in the FedEx box that the crematorium sent us. 15 years ago. This blew Chris' mind, which in turn blew my mind because I'm aware that this is kind of an unorthodox treatment of human remains, but it's not that weird, is it? I mean, what's the difference between an urn and a FedEx box? They're both perfectly fine containers. "Meg," Chris said sternly, "You know what my childhood was like. And even I think that's weird." Bold statement, sir. Bold statement, from a bold man. But more-so, it got me thinking, what if my grandfather is pissed off that we never scattered his ashes or put them in a proper receptacle and now he's going to haunt the living eff out of me this week and/or seek revenge?!

That's when Chris proposed that during his visit, we scatter my grandfather's ashes quote, "someplace really nice." "Yeah, we're not doing that Chris," I told him, "I don't think my parents would appreciate it if they came home and asked me what we did this weekend and I said, 'Oh nothing special. Went to the blog panel, hung out, saw a movie, scattered grandpa Bern's ashes on I-95, you know, the usual.'" "I didn't say on I-95; I said someplace really nice."

We eventually met eachother halfway and decided that while he's here, we'll haul out the old FedEx box and say a few kind words together. Apparently this will "genuinely make Chris feel better" and put any haunting concerns I have to ease. Too bad Chris doesn't get here until Thursday afternoon, which means I have tonight and tomorrow night to survive alone. Which should be interesting.

4.) Considering this is the current view from my bed:
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5.) And you know what doesn't make it any better? The fact that Evie's been sitting next to me in bed, tensely staring at the door for the past half an hour.
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I can't decide if she's trying to do me a solid by being on the look-out or if she's getting back at me for all the Bridezillas I made her watch today by making me think her heightened feline senses see a ghost. Knowing her, it's probably the latter. Bitch.

6.) My parents have this spooky-ass painting hanging in the front hall, facing the front door:
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Every time I glance towards the front hall at night, I see that guy's reflection in the window and think there's a 200-year-old Flemish man on the porch ready to shove his fife up my ass.
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Which is when I simultaneously have a stroke and soil myself. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

7.) As I started this writing this post (with old Quiet Paws McGee sitting next to me, staring at the door like it's on fire, mind you) I heard a loud bang outside that sounded like a straight-up gun shot. "Welp, I'm going to die tonight." I thought. I kissed Evie goodbye, regretted not wearing something more dignified to die in (...my "Big Peckers, Ocean City, MD" t-shirt and that's the ballgame) and prepared to meet my maker. And then I heard the bang again. Followed by a familiar fizzle sound. Which is when it clickedthey were fireworks going off.

Now, here's my question: WHAT SORT OF SICK FUCK SETS OFF FIREWORKS AT 12:47 ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING IN A QUIET SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOOD WHERE YOUNG, BIG-PECKERED GIRLS ARE HOME ALONE WITH THEIR NEMESIS CATS AND CLOSETS FILLED WITH FEDEX BOXES OF LOVED ONES, SCARED SHITLESS?!?!?!?! WHAT. IS. WRONG. WITH. YOU?!

And now my lips are chapped and the nearest chap stick is in my mom's room. Which I'm scared to walk to. So if I die tonight, I leave you with the following:

1.) I'm scared

2.) Hold me.

3.) I still haven't forgiven Suzy Soro.

4.) I want my gravestone to read, "Meghan Catherine McBlogger. 1985 - 2010. Daughter, Sister, friend, White Patrice."

That is if my parents don't cremate me and throw me in the closet with the rest of the family...
 
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