6000onions

Today is my birthday – yeah, yeah, I know, the fourth is always with me, look, my birthday didn’t used to be so annoying until some genius came up with that Star Wars thing about five years ago – but despite that it has been a lovely day and here I am – as of last night actually – wearing the oh so fabulous sunglasses and earrings that my daughter gave me. Not bad, I think, for an old broad, which is something my father used to say after smacking my mother on the bum. Gently, I mean, gently but with gusto, as it were, and then he would say NOT BAD FOR AN OLD BROAD. And right now I agree, because a) I have engaged in gigandorly self esteem building activities over the last couple of days and b) there has been an outpouring of birthday love that has left me all verklampt.

And, on top of that, a Carolina wren has built a nest in that urn that you can see in the picture behind me, the one with the artificial flowers in it. In this nest are five lovely speckled purple eggs, all wrapped around with artificial leaves and some glittery bits & pieces from off my porch – you can often find glittery bits and pieces and pom poms on my porch – and that is pretty damn cool too.

Self esteem building! Yesterday I went to the herb fair at the farmers market with Jodi, came home and proceeded to get the whole garden going, which is to say I dug up and weeded all the raised beds, weeded and tilled the front flower bed, weeded most of the roses and planted all the seedlings and the beans. My butt hurts. However, not as bad as it could have because yesterday, I discovered earbuds. Full disclosure: I had never used earphones (headphones, earbuds, whatever you want to call them) before. No. I am a weirdo. I heard some radio thing and read an article  about how they would destroy your children’s tender eardrums when I was in my early impressionable teens and I never used them or allowed my children to use them. Yes, okay, a weird hill to die on but it was mine own. So it was very exciting for me to get some from my son, put them in my phone and then get Amazon music up and running. Just in case you are unaware, Amazon music does or did this thing whereby they will keep a digital copy of any CD you ever bought from them in perpetuity right there in their Amazony cloud. Which is why I did my gardening rocking out to Dead Prez and the Roches Christmas album. You haven’t lived until you have gotten suddenly hit with A Child Is Born while under the rosebushes in May. But the garden looks AMAZING. And then Audrey and Celeste and Jodi and Jay came by and we drank wine on the porch, discovered the birds nest, ate squash casserole and it was thoroughly wonderful.

Today, which was my actual birthday, I tore out the carpet in the hallway and painted the stairs white.

No, really, I did that. See, my friend the realtor came over a couple of weeks ago and gave me the bad news: yeah, despite living in one of the hottest real estate neighborhoods in the country, my house STILL sucks and I cannot get giant piles of moolah for it. It is just not all that. Boo. I have been sulking ever since but also it has sort of woken me up: if I have to live here for the rest of my life then fuck it, I am going to finally do all the things I said I would do when I moved in seven – 7! – years ago. Thus, I did those two things and soon I will do more. I even bought a book – this book, it is a big bestseller right now and I am a sucker – on decluttering and I’m all on that too (although clutter is not really my problem so much as just basic disgusting grime, glah.)

And then after showering and hanging out briefly with the Queen of Bohemia, who handsomely invited me to take anything I wanted from her house for my birthday (I declined although tempted by the super fabulous Indonesian jacket she has dug up from somewhere and been wearing lately) I met some friends for drinks at the DeSoto and then went with my kids, Jodi and Charles for Korean food at Korea House downtown. I had never had Korean food before and it was delicious and all in all a very very fun night with lots of Vinho Verde and I didn’t fall down despite wearing my once a year fancy high heel shoes. Plus lots of people have called and texted and so it would seem that everyone doesn’t hate me after all, although I cannot imagine why. Probably they should. But I am very glad that they don’t, and also deliciously full.

Anyway, it has been a great birthday weekend. I am sore, I am beat, I am probably dying from horrible weird ass 70s carpet dust inhalation, but my hallway looks GOOD, my garden looks GOOD and my stairs look GOOD.

Like me, the old broad.

Happy birthday to you too – and thank you for the birthday thoughts!

On Sunday Jodi and I went over to the Asheville Darkroom, which is a very cool place that I had been wanting to visit, for their celebratory event for World Pinhole Photography Day.

I had always wanted to experiment with pinhole photography and never done it so I was all excited and it was really fun! They gave us each a “camera” to use and sent us out on our own. I got there a little earlier and so took three images – the first one was a wash, totally overexposed, but I am quite happy with the second and third, above. And now I want to make my own pinhole camera – which is to say, a box with a hole in it, a project well within my mad technical skillz set – and make more.

In other news my friend Adam showed up from Baltimore and proceeded to fix all my gutters, hurrah. He may also have fixed the living room roof leak, let us keep our fingers crossed. And I have not one but two Schrodinger’s Lottery Tickets in my wallet because I have, over the last couple days, found fully $17 in the pockets of various pairs of pants, so I took it as a Sign that I was rocking in the arms of Great Luck and went and got a lottery ticket from the Gas Up. The Gas Up, by the way, apparently no longer sells gas and perhaps should consider changing their name to the Wine Up or Beer Up or possibly Snack Up. Anyway whenever I check the numbers – a fraught experience because of course that transforms a Schrodinger’s Lottery Ticket to just an ordinary lottery ticket – I should find that I am a millionaire and I am quite looking forward to it. But I think I will keep the anticipation going for a while first.

On the way home from work today I saved a family of geese. Then when I got home there was a completely unexpected out of the blue anonymous generous check in the mailbox and holy shit. Just, holy shit. Talk about crazy instant karma: become a goose family crossing guard! It pays super well! HOLY SHIT.

See, I was driving home on Swannanoa River Road and right by the U-Haul, almost at the corner of Tunnel Road, where I have seen a pair of geese before – and even photographed them, or almost photographed them in that I think I got part of a wing, early one morning a couple months ago – I saw a whole goose family hanging out on the side of the road. So I naturally pulled over and parked in the UHaul parking lot so I could take some pictures. I didn’t try to get very close – I am a little afraid of geese after an unfortunate episode one summer when I was like 9 – and I was in the middle of the parking lot zooming in with the phone when I realized that they were preparing to head across the street to the river. The busy street. The very busy, fast, rush hour street.

So I headed to the street as well, figuring that I would stop traffic because although I was afraid that I would get killed I was more afraid that one or more of the geese would get killed while I stood there because I don’t think I could handle that. Another car stopped and a lady got out. “I think we have to stop traffic!” I shouted and she waved agreement and then DAMN we stepped into the traffic and held up our hands and EVERYBODY STOPPED. And the geese walked across the road and we darted back out of the street while people smiled and waved and gave us high fives and one lady yelled “Thank you so much for stopping! They are so cute!!”

It was awesome. I felt like a hero. I have really not rescued many of, well, anything in my life except possibly spiders who I save from the house and put outside. (That is, except in that one Charleston apartment where I put them in the chandelier which ended up after a year of this being the most magnificently gothic draped chandelier you have ever seen, whoo yeah.) I like spiders, however, rescuing them doesn’t really ever make me feel particularly heroic. Maybe it’s because they are so much smaller than geese, even very small geese like these.

ANYWAY. Geese safely on the other side of the road, I came on home and got the mail. Hmm, I thought, what is this, the Give Initiative, probably a charity, handwritten envelope, feel sorry for that intern – and I opened it up and HOLY SHIT, LO, it was a CHECK FOR $500.

This is like one of my dreams, like it is an actual wish and toast that I say and have for years: “Here’s to large anonymous checks in the mailbox!” “I wish for a large anonymous check in the mailbox, with no strings attached that hurts no one and no one has to die for me to receive. (I am careful with my three wishes, yo, I have this shit planned.)”

I never really thought it would come true but, it has. It has.

And I don’t know what to say except, my gods, I am verklampt, I am overwhelmed, thank you, anonymous donor, thank you so much. There are tears of gratitude in my eyes and I am going to use this money thoughtfully: I’m going to use it to make more money – I have plans! Yes, plans! – and when I do, I will, as you asked in your letter, pay it forward.  Thank you so much. I think you may have changed my life and I know you have changed my outlook.

For one thing, I’m never thinking mean thoughts about a goose again.

• I had a yard sale. It was quite fun, particularly since my two best friends and my daughter and her best friend all helped out. And by helped I mean we started drinking bloody marys at 11 am. It is amazing how much vodka helps you deal with the public. In a related note specially to the lady who left a note on my door the morning after the yard sale, why yes, I am ready to hear your offer for my giant terra cotta plant pots which you thought were too expensive at $5 apiece! You’re right, the price HAS changed! I am now prepared to take $20 each for them.
• I was supposed to have a party after the yard sale but I didn’t. Instead, I turned off the lights, closed the curtains and put a big sign on the door that said PARTY CANCELLED TOO TIRED WE SUCK YOU GO HAVE FUN. Then Audrey and Jay and I, feeling retro, settled in with a pizza to happily watch Diva and several episodes of The Prisoner. Fortunately, none of my other friends showed up anyway! Turns out we all suck equally.
• I worked my ASS OFF for the four days preceding the yard sale and then again directly afterwards. My house is still filthy, horrible and stuffed with, well, stuff but slightly less filthy and horrible and crammed than it was before. I, however, am tired. But I’m not afraid of the garage anymore.
• David the real estate agent came over on Wednesday and looked at my entire house. I am now waiting to hear from him to see if I can actually sell this place or if I am fated to remain here forever, slowly crystallizing like Miss Havisham only with more vodka and louder music. He said, and I quote, “Well, Felicity, there are three key elements to real estate: location, square footage and condition. You have location and square footage!” Yeah.
• Home Depot, in a crazy lapse of sanity, gave me a ginormous credit card, so if I do end up staying, I might be able to do something about that condition issue. Or at least I could buy the materials and put them in the living room for a couple of years while I weep a lot.
• In quick news, the iMac died, which has sort of soured me on Apple altogether because, fuck that, my PC is twice its age and still chugging along. I have already spent the yard sale money on a crazy orgy of eating luxurious foods like pizza and subs and also I bought a skirt and top at Ross Dress for Less and a new canister of CO2 for the soda stream and a mandoline so I can make more of the thin refrigerator pickles – these, to be specific – that I have become hopelessly, completely addicted to. And, in other addiction news, psst, hey, kid – why don’t you try out Sim City Buildit? (evil laugh)
• And I think that’s it.

Before I begin complaining – and baby, I got some ‘plainin to do – I want to briefly review the Die Antwoord concert I attended on Monday night.

IT FUCKING ROCKED AND WOULD TOTALLY BE THE BEST CONCERT I HAD EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE if I hadn’t gone to see the Pogues, the Violent Femmes & Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper on the pier in NYC in 1990. Z TO THE E TO THE MOTHERFUCKIN’ F!!!!!

That is all. Except pictures are here.

And now, on to the complaining! So I went out on Monday night and then again on Tuesday night because I am in my early twenties and what the hell, you know, I might as well burn the candle – yeah, okay, I was about dead on Wednesday – but all good, except I came home to discover that there was a nice puddle of water in front of the kitchen sink. My daughter, lying on the couch, said “Oh well I thought Miles spilled something.” Good try at the blame shifting! But you see, if I am in my early twenties than she is only like five, so what does one expect? I opened up the cabinet under the sink to discover that it was, basically, underwater and if the cabinet door had been made of glass it would have looked a lot like the Baltimore aquarium R’lyeh display. I keep cleaning stuff under there, of course, fortunately in a couple of dishpans. The dishpan under the left side of the sink was brim full with water and floating cleaning supplies which did not for the most part mix well with scummy water: goodbye, bartender’s friend, box of anti static duster thingies and some unidentifiable other objects. Yeah. So I cleaned that up, which is what I just love to do at 1:30 am and then on Wednesday I made a couple futile stabs at fixing it, by which I mean I watched some Youtube videos and became depressed and went back to bed.

Actually, it doesn’t look like too difficult a fix, particularly if you have the whole sink upside down on a nice clean work surface and the right tools, just like the calm and unshakable guys on Youtube. If, however, the sink is right side up and you are upside down under it with water and scum dripping on you trying to fix things with, uh, your hands and a small pair of needle nose pliers, it is surprisingly unsimple! I put a note in there that says DO NOT USE and that is where I have left it. I get paid next Thursday and maybe I can get somebody to fix it then. Or just never use it again, which is a big pain in the ass – I have already poured most of a large stockpot of water all over the floor this morning. And this would be a drag, yes, but surmountable if it didn’t follow suspiciously closely on two extremely recent stopped up toilet happenings and if I hadn’t seen the water from the right hand side of the sink this morning well right back up in the left hand side, which leads me to suspect that we might be facing something much worse, much much worse: a real drain issue. In which case I’m completely, but completely, fucked and that is all she wrote.

And as if that were not enough, the fucking iMac is dead and I am typing this on my beloved old Windows 98 desktop, the one an ex built for me in 2004 and another ex rebuilt in 2010, the unkillable machine, old reliable itself. I had been slowly teaching myself how to use the Mac since my brother gave it to me last December and I had put most of my pictures on it and felt like I was finally getting the hang of that whole bassackwards OS – not to mention playing a shit ton of Minecraft which it does do better than this computer – when blammo, it will not start up at all. There was some kind of almighty power surge last night apparently and while here I am, typing away on my antique windows machine, the supposedly reliable Mac won’t even get further than 1/3 of the way along its power starting up line before emphatically dying. And this is the second time it’s crashed horribly in the six months I have owned it. Fuck that and the horse it rode in on, frankly but oh I will miss that big monitor something fierce. And Minecraft.

So, two sucky things – and now I am waiting for the third shoe to drop. Great! There is nothing like a feeling of creeping dread and horrid anticipation to take you into the weekend – particularly one of my weekends which are heavy on the work continuously and light on the “weekend” part. And off we go.

I have succeeded, yet again, at addiction: I have gotten myself well and thoroughly hooked on Sim City: BuildIt, which is an evil little game you can play on your phone, although I think you would have to have better eyesight than me to do that, or you can, alas for me, play on a tablet like the iPad I share with young Miles. This Sim City is slightly different than the one I was addicted to back in the 90s when computer games were oh so new and all, but it’s similar enough that I fell instantly into building obsessively. It’s one helluva game: just like life: there is never enough money to do the stuff you want and when you inevitably fail, everyone hates you! No wonder it’s so addictive! It is, however, even more evil: it’s “free” to “purchase” but like those other masters of addiction Candy Crush or Bubble Witch, they want you to buy stuff in game. Like, I could spend real money to buy simulated money for my simulated town, thus getting my citizens to love me, or I could, you know, spend real money on my real house, thus getting, well, at least the dogs to love me. But fuck that! Fuck, also, spending money in game. I don’t mind paying for a game I want – that seems only fair – but I don’t like being hit up sneakily. So I refuse to do that and that is why my Sims are not all that happy and why, I suspect, I never got to level 400 in Candy Crush. Also, a school costs like 60,000 simoleons and so far I have never amassed more than 16,000 before I give in to their anguished cries and get them something like a police station. The Sims are strangely pro cop but meanwhile, see, in Minecraft I’m building a tower so I can find my way back to the donkeys after I go back to my other house in the village that I’m fixing up to get the saddle I left there. And I’m playing, as usual, pacifist vegan Minecraft, which makes it considerably more difficult because, damn, it sucks to follow cows around waiting for them to fall into lava so you can get some leather to bind a stupid damn book.

Today in a singular feat of procrastination I managed to spend several hours playing TWO video games at once: Minecraft, my old love, on the desktop and Sim City on the iPad. Both of them have day / night cycles so if you time it right, you can never look away from one screen or another. Meanwhile, my house crumbles about me and tumbleweeds of dog hair roll through the living room. Ah, how technology has improved our lives.

Tomorrow night I’m going to see Die Antwoord!!! I will have more beer spilled on me and become terrified by the magic bouncing Orange Peel floor! Big fun! I am totally psyched. It will be weird and weird is good.

I just watched Where the Boys Are with the Queen of Bohemia. She enjoyed it – at least I think so, anyway she giggled a lot – and I enjoyed it, despite the, uh, problematic subtext. But then I have always had a soft spot for that movie, based mainly on the clothes I think, or maybe on the fact that one of the characters thinks she is undateably tall, being exactly my height.

But! There is that problematic subtext and boy, is it ever problematic. This is old news, I know – everybody knows – that the point of Where the Boys Are is to let us all know that girls who drink and have sex will be raped and abandoned in squalid motels and then try to kill themselves inefficiently on busy highways. Then, I guess, they drop out of college – I just want to see my father, sobs the girl in question, my mother and father will tell me what to do! Yes, I just bet they will. After all, the problem couldn’t possibly be that people have been telling you what to do and you’ve been smilingly obedient, could it? Well, no matter. It’s all over for you anyway! Hopefully they’ll stone you right up and down Main Street, you little hussy. No more than you deserve! It’s really kind of an astounding movie.

The guys are all sort of universally horrible, too. There is the guy who gets drunk – the one with the tall girl, who won’t put out – and takes up with the mermaid from the fancy restaurant. Then he yells at the tall girl as she is sobbing on the beach. Well, naturally. I mean, she shouldn’t have sex, because it’s deadly for women, and just wrong, and she’s a Good Girl, but you can understand him getting angry and going for a sleazy ho. Of course she immediately loves him more when he shortly thereafter sees the error of his ways. Hooo boy, I bet that marriage worked out well. Serial infidelity, spiraling alcoholism, hovering on the brink of divorce by 1976 – I think they were friends of my parents! Or maybe they were my parents. Then there is the “boy” – he looks about 40 – who can’t see without his ridiculous glasses, so his new girlfriend (Connie Francis herself, always joking about how she’s not pretty, because having an amazing voice and looking damn good to my 2015 eyes clearly doesn’t make up for not being blonde) says she will keep him in the dark. Ha ha! He is so wrapped up in his music he doesn’t even know what she looks like! Ha ha! Another marriage that ended badly but at least she had a career to fall back on. And then there is the main character, who is Serious and has a High IQ – they actually ask each other about this, her and the Rich Boy. He is Understanding but he also Wants Sex. Does she give in? Not before the credits roll but as they are rolling they are declaring true love, so maybe. Probably not, though, and anyway I predict that their different social statuses will lead to trouble and he will never marry her, or his parents will steal the kid and have it annulled or something like that.

I don’t know, this movie was made before I was born and it is foreign to my understanding. Therefore when I got home I tried to watch Where the Boys Are 1984, but it turned out to be so alarmingly awful I couldn’t even make it 15 minutes in. As I was watching it I was thinking about my generation too, and figuring that if there had been a remake it was probably a slasher pic, because if the cinema has taught me anything, it’s that Gen X girls who hop in cars with guys usually get decapitated. Alas, the remake is not a slasher pic, or even very interesting, and the one star review said that there were lots of really dreary sex scenes. Yes, my generation: by 1984, in that weird little space of time before AIDS and after the sexual revolution, women were supposed to have sex with every single guy they met to show how liberated they were. Then on to the decapitation! Or at least to Porkys. So had it improved? Not so much. Has it now? I don’t know, because nobody has had the balls to make Where The Boys Are 2014 or even 2004 and that is kind of too bad in a sick or at least a sociological way.

Well. Where the Boys Are is still a great great song and the clothes? The clothes are a-fucking-mazing. But don’t take my word for it. You can watch it right here, or at least the first half and there’s a link to the second half on that page. Enjoy!

Well I just made a comment on Metafilter about this but I will go ahead and leave this movie here in case I have never linked it on the blog – look for a much much younger me around the 19 minute mark, goofily hippie dressed with a gold dot on my forehead –  and thus say goodbye to the Queen of Bohemia’s good friend and Deia stalwart Daevid Allen, who died today. I will also by doing this say goodbye to another good friend, Del Negro, who died a few months back and whose son Aureliano I used to babysit for back in those dim and distant days. Watching a generation pass is a sad yet inevitable thing if you live long enough but it’s also the kind of thing you don’t ever think about until it happens. And then you don’t really notice until you’re in the middle of it and then it’s like, blam, one after another, all the people who were the grownups, the adults of your childhood, the ones who ran everything – are gone. Which means, I guess, that you are the grownup now. And that’s really scary. And it is also sad, because damn those were some amazing people and the world is less for their loss. And while I’m at it, add Terry Pratchett to that list. I am sorry to see him go as well. Turtles, I suppose, all the way down.

Well, blog a day, I missed yesterday but I did think of a topic – I just couldn’t manage to get out of bed to write about it. This is partly because I did make it to the eye doctor yesterday and they dilated my pupils, which took hours, literally hours, to wear off and what with the vicious hangover and all, discombobulated me. I did, however, get a new prescription! Which we will get to later but I also drove around Asheville in the rain a lot with my dilated pupils, wearing sunglasses, taking young Miles places and hitting the grocery store and so on. It was weird but the thing that was alas not weird at all was the fact that because Craven Street and that stretch of I think Haywood Street, whatever they call it after it veers west by the Civic Center and heads out past the sheriff’s office and the homeless shelter, are both closed. Craven Street has been completely closed for months now and Haywood Street has been intermittently closed, also for months. These are both roads that I used to take, oh, almost daily, so I have noticed their absence.

Well, why are they closed? They’re both public streets, paid for and maintained by the taxpayers of this fair city (yo! Tax payin’ citizen here, yo!) for the public good, so the only reason they would be closed must be for necessary and important infrastructure repairs! Right? Oh wait. Oh, not in our post modern plutocracy. They’re closed so private enterprises can make more money. Private enterprises which have already gotten sweet tax incentive deals: to wit, New Belgium, which is building a giant brewery and kind of beer drinking Disneyland brewing attraction on Craven and some hotel cartel which is building another high rise giant luxury hotel palace on Haywood, which by the way I imagine spells doom for the homeless shelter.

So, yeah. Let that sink in for a moment: tax money, from people like me, who live and work here and make considerably, oh considerably, less than 30K per annum, which is supposed to maintain those streets that I used and need and miss is instead being used to support wealthy corporations. Well. I do not like this much. I don’t have anything against New Belgium – I miss the picturesque and freaky ruin that was the old stockyard, yeah, but not enough to forgo the real living wage jobs they are promising. I doubt one will go to me, although if I am here I am sure as hell going to try hard, but still, in the meantime, I am pissed off about the loss of Craven Street. I am pissed off in both the particular and general sense because it is not just that I miss my easy route to and from Earthfare and Westwood that I took every damn day just about, but I feel the principle here, whereby everyone gets shafted by the almighty corporate dollar, is Wrong. And when the company in question is yet another hotel, which I fucking guarantee you will not be providing living wage jobs unless you think $8 an hour is living wage, I am even more pissed off.

That was blog post number one! Now, here is blog post number two, in which I get my taxes done.

I went to On Track Financial Services and had my taxes done by a lovely volunteer today. It took like 20 minutes and was totally free and they are an incredible resource and if you do not know about their tax service, which is for those of us who make less than $55,000 a year, which is to say, everyone I know in Asheville, you should call them up right away for an appointment. They are good people doing good things. And I am getting money back, which I had not allowed myself to hope for, and it will be enough, I think, for me to get glasses with that new prescription I got yesterday AND I will even have enough left over to get two more new tires so Batly will be riding sweet and not sliding any more. So, yay!

However! There is always a however, isn’t there? They are running a raffle kind of thing for their clients which I strongly suspect – I do not know – is part of some kind of grant funded initiative. It is meant to make poor people save money and I don’t like it one little bit. I think it is condescending as hell to assume that poor people are going to just immediately blow their tax refund check on, what, hookers and blow? And then to try to get them to save the money with, basically, a lottery – if you open a savings account and put the money in there you could win $500 in six months – is kind of missing the point entirely.

We working poor have a savings account. It’s called Uncle Sam and he disburses our money once a year in the spring, thanks. We spend all year counting on that money for such luxuries as, oh, glasses. And tires. And maybe a vacation, yes, that’s what I used to spend mine on when the kids were younger: spring break visiting friends and family. Now you should look down your nose at me and say, oh, you should save that money yourself and not count on a tax refund. Well, yeah, but unfortunately what happens when you are actually poor is that there is always an emergency and there is always a need for more money, more money, more money and little bits never, somehow, add up to big bits in a savings account you can access: they go to food and sudden high electric bills and car repairs and the thousand and one things that keep the poor poor and getting poorer. This money is not a handout, for fucks sake, it’s my money that I earned. If I want to spend it on hookers and blow, you know, that would be my prerogative. I’m not – god my life is boring – but if I wanted to, well, I should be able to do just that. It is my money that the government has been holding. And now I will get it back and then, in like a month or so, I will be able to see clearly once again, whoo, go me, when I pick out new glasses frames and get it all done: I am ridiculously excited.

Whooo! Let us all pretend it is still Tuesday and be amazed by the fact that WE WON TRIVIA again tonight! Yes! And, what’s more, with two of our strongest team members missing, so it was a total and complete fluke. And also I won the sudden death tiebreaker question, as my friends pushed me up to the front when they called for the smartest team member – which right there is killingly embarrassing – and  I actually knew the answer, which was bursar AND wrote it down quick enough! I was on some kind of freaky roll all night tonight anyway and won an entire round by knowing every. single. answer. about Marvel comics. About which I know NOTHING except stuff I have weirdly osmosed from having friends who read them. Vastly more than I realized I had osmosed, actually, and that is kind of interesting right there.

And Audrey being back knowing all songs and musicians ever and Kyle knowing all space and movies stills and chemistry and computers ever and Jodi knowing all movie quotes and movie stars ever, well, we rocked and won not just a gift certificate but T-shirts! And pint glasses! And mysterious bicycle drinking accessories (it was sponsored by New Belgium) which is nice and all but I want Craven Street back, you need to give me more T-shirts, New Belgium, before I forgive you for the loss of what is / was an every single day street for me. However! Look upon our works of trivia you mighty and despair. We rule the universe of knowing strange and pointless facts. Hurrah!