When you blame squirrels on your mid-life crisis

     Tonight, I walked into my kitchen to see my dad sewing little hats on stuffed squirrels. Last week he ordered stuffed-squirrels online. Not taxidermy shit, but like teddy bears. Yesterday he went shopping and found little hats and stickers to decorate them.

       And now on a Friday night, I come home to witness my father going through a mid-life crisis. He already spends hours every day doing jigsaw puzzles. The singular image of my father, that will last for years, is of him looking down at a half-finished puzzle every time I walk by the dining room. Whenever my friends come over they like to sit down with him and try put a few pieces together. Then they realize that the 2,000 pieces of the blue sky look exactly alike.
     The squirrels, with the little hats, are part of his Halloween costume. Every year my parents go to the same Halloween party. I used to go with my parents when the Halloween still meant trick or treating, now I spend Halloween like all other adolescents. This years theme for the Halloween party is "welcome to my nightmare". My parents number one fear is being attacked by squirrels.

Queue the stuffed squirrels, the hats with the skull and cross bones, fake blood, the adhesable scars. Last night, my mom walked into my room looking for a headband. Thirty minutes later a squirrel was attached to it.
                                                                                                
Once my eyes fully captured the sight of my dad delicately pinning a cowboy hat onto a squirrel with his sausage-link fingers, this is the conversation that followed.
Me: You are so fucking weird.
Dad: It's called being creative. What are you dressing up as? Probably something stupid.
(I open my mouth to answer, but he interrupts.)
Dad: You must be dressing up as boring girl. You've worn the costume for seventeen years.
Me: (laughter) Fuck you.
Dad: Your mom is acting the same way. When I asked her what her biggest fear was, she said it was her children getting hurt. How lame is that? Who the hell wants to dress up like their dead or injured child? So I came up with this idea.
Me: Of you being eaten alive by squirrels?
Dad: There's actually a story behind it. Do you wanna hear it?
Me: Oh hell no.
(exit to bedroom)

This squirrel is going to rip you apart.

Happy Halloween. 

I should be bird-dogging chicks at Coney Island

I have no idea what that phrase means, but it sounds perverse and fun.
Let me toot my pity whistle for a second:
         On Friday my doom awaited me: a calculus test, second period. I had studied; if that means attempting a problem and then doodling expletives as an answer. I was walking towards the classroom that housed that calculus test, when my name was called over the intercom, "Carmella Mingo is needed in the counseling office." Like Micheal Jackson, I pivoted around and then, like a geriatric, I slowly walked towards the front of the school. The orthopedic steps were taken to stall as much as possible. In the counselor's office I fixed the mistake on my college application. I could have left, and made it back in time for calculus, but the counselor asked a question.
            "So how is it with your friend?" 
        Oh right, I remembered, my mom told my school counselor about the guy I'm dating. I just love her. Under normal circumstances I would have circumvented any conversation and I would have promptly skirted out of the room, but I had a calculus test to skip.
         I had an hour and a half of girl talk..the hour and a half it would have taken me to complete my calculus test. Now here's the self-pity part: I am taking the test tomorrow and I have to study for it.

I am a generic teenage girl that listens to pop music on the radio. (Hey hipsters reading: fuck you <3)

these are the songs I am obsessed* with 

    *obsessed in this case means: switching radio stations every 2.1 seconds, in hopes of getting this one particular song. In the case of said song coming on the radio: scream fit, ear-bleeding volume, and a performance worthy of broadway in the confines of my Honda. People at red lights stare...and maybe point and laugh. 

Rihanna- Only Girl (In the World)

The video is average, but the song is fist-pumping fabulous-nessss

Like a G6
the term 'slizzard' is totally my thing 


(and for you hipsters) Die Antwoord
this is of them just spitting it. this is dream me.


and this completes life
KID CUDI (featuring my loves: ratatat and MGMT)

* I'm sorry my little devil has a penis. It was meant to be a tail, honestly. Yesterday I left the computer for ten minutes and came back to my mother asking, "What's with the wiener?"

Love you mom!

Power-thirsty bitches

Today, our senior class, all 252 of us, has assembled into the shape of a 2011 on the football field. No, our senior class does not organize activities like flash mobs, red rover, or duck-duck-goose. Although we totally should. It's time for that aerial photograph with the senior class in the shape of the year they are graduating.

(This kind of formation. Ewww stock photo, I know)

Football coaches are parading around shouting orders and addressing members of the student body as, "Hey you--in the green shirt! Move! To the side!" (I think there are like nine football couches at our school, all who walk around on stout legs and only know how to shout)
All the students idly stand around and gossip. They all stand with a hunched backs and talk with their mouths open wide enough that gum falls out. I wish the distance photograph could get these kind of details.

(This is a sampling of my senior class. How...upstanding...)

The principal stands over us, like Zeus, in this tree house looking thing. For all my writing finesse, that's the best way I can describe it. I have no idea what purpose it has, other than a girl lost her virginity there on homecoming night. So, the principal is glaring and waiting for the senior class to slowly assemble itself into the number 2011. When we are in place, the principal grabs at the air and looks around confused. He was reaching for an invisible camera that he never procured, before hoisting himself into a tree house. Of course, it wasn't his stupidity...it was mine.
Without searching for me in the crowd he bellows out my name, "Carmella Mingo!"
I think I was delicately touching a pimple on my chin when the entire student body turned to me. I stepped out of the formation.
"Where's your camera?" Zeus shouted from the sky.

The principal meant the yearbook staff camera. I, representing the yearbook staff, had no idea I was fucking responsible.
"The batteries are dead," I shouted.
The principal precariously climbed down from the tree house, and beckoned for me. I walk forward, passing the entire student body. My friend and fellow yearbook staffer, Alice, joined me.
He barked at me in two short breaths, "what batteries? Where is it? Can we charge it?"
"It's a rechargeable battery, and the camera doesn't have a wide enough lens to cover the aerial photograph," I said seriously, while trying to contain a smile. Alice had a similarly hidden smile.
Before the principal left in a huff and puff he turned to both of us and said, "This. is. about. to. turn. into. an. utter. disaster."

It was absolutely fabulous. Alice and I turned to each other and shared the same look.
"Do you feel so powerful, all of a sudden?" I asked.
"Oh my god, I do! It's like the principal needs us to fix his problems."
I nod. "And we can't even satisfy him."
"I feel like I could run a mile."
"I feel like the bitch behind the scenes. Or the spy. Yes, a spy."
"We're power thirsty bitches."
We gave each other a high five, and returned to the student formation.

Sometimes I want to blog about my exciting life (I have fantasies of being a superhero like Lisa Ling or Martin Luther King Jr.), but this was the highlight of my day.

Cowboys can do calculus

Blogger tip numero uno, before being an attention whore, is posting regularly with good content. Right now I am trying to catch up with real life, and then focus on being a blogging drone.

Real life is calculus.
Calculus makes me want to light a cigarette in the middle of class, and say, "Fuck it. I'll just be a writer."
I don't actually smoke, but I think it makes a statement. Like when I fantasize of casually smoking a cigarette halfway through the SAT and saying to the classroom, "I've already got a publishing deal, and I don't give a shit about cancelling all of your test scores." I'm not that mean actually; that's why I fantasize. I am so polite that I will finish the SAT with a dull pencil, save standing up and loudly sharpening it.
But calculus is nearing my breaking point.
I'm already sassy enough to take daily naps, and loudly ask for the time every four minutes. When class will be over in twenty minutes, I begin a countdown. Right now I am blogging, watching the first season of Modern Family, and facebook chatting--not doing my calculus homework due tomorrow.

How beatnik of me!

This is fantasy me.

I enter the calculus classroom like a cowboy, ruthless without a care in the world. I pull the gum out of my mouth and stick the slimy wad under my desk, with everyone watching. The teacher begins the lesson, while I stretch my legs over my desk, pull my cowboy hat down over my face, and take a mid-morning nap. As the teacher lectures about derivatives, asymptotes, and limits my brain magically absorbs it all--like one of those retarded sevants. When the teacher lifts my cowboy hat to ask me the answer to a calculus question, I politely take my hat back and answer, "the limit does not exist." The teacher gasps and mutters, "damn geniuses." The classroom stares in awe. I have a solid poker face; I can't even grin after my victory. Deciding it's time for lunch, I reach under my desk and pull out a sizzling steak. You guessed it--right off the grill. For the rest of class I chomp unabashedly on my Texas beef.
This is real me.
Staring at my homework and getting a panicky feeling--which means clutching my chest, hyperventilating, and pacing my room.