Perpetual Smile

I decided that, for the next week, I’m going to title all of my posts using the letters in my nickname, L-I-Z, no S. I’m doing this because the spambots think I’m awesome, so if my human readers think it’s lame, at least I have the bots. Here’s what my newest fan, a bot named Luciano, had to say after reading my post on the super excited girl at the bar who decided to have a baby because of me:

Merely want to say your article is striking. The clearness in your post is simply spectacular and i can assume you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with incoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the effective work.

In short: my writing is striking, spectacular, and I am an effective expert. Thank you, spambot.

The problem with this title scheme, guys, is that there are only so many Z words. The only Z word I can think of is zebra. This is where you come in.

I need you to leave me comments with your favorite Z words. I’m especially counting on the spambots, since they are getting pretty damn smart. Not that you humans aren’t smart. I’m just saying that the spambots tend to spit stuff out depending on what they see. So if they see the letter Z, they are going to go crazy and leave all kinds of Z words.

In fact, I think that spambots are the next superior race on planet Earth.

They will be so much more advanced than us, in ways that I — in all of my spambot-blessed expertise — cannot ever imagine. I mean, they’re already ahead of us. They are INVISIBLE, for crying out loud! If a spambot was here in my house right now, looking over my shoulder as I type this, I wouldn’t know it.

They also have a great sense of humor. The spambot in that post is funnier than Mepsipax, Avitable, and Allie combined. (Then again, Allie made a great documentary about the Battle of Twitterloo. If you don’t believe me, press play.)

So maybe Allie can one-up the spambots. I’m not sure. But I do know that they are going to be the next superior race, and before this happens I need to write as many L-I-Z acronym posts as possible. (My apologies to those of you who thought this one was gonna be about lesbians in sexy zebra stripe underwear.) So give me your best Z words, or the Fun-Size Kitty of DOOM will eat you!

Donated Z Words:
Please note that Z words are rare and endangered. Donating a Z word to my blog will keep them safe from spambots and Fun-Size kitties.

Zebra
Zig (Mike)
Zag (Mike)
Zipper (Mike)
Zinger (Mike)
Zelda*
Zandra*

*Z names count. If you don’t believe me, prepare to answer to Fun-Size kitty.

Zit
Zombie (Me, Taliana83)

Zap (Allie)
Zaps (Allie)
Zapped (Allie)
Zapping (Allie)
Zoo (Allie, Taliana83)
Zenith (Allie)
Zany (Allie)
Zodiac (Allie)
Zephyr (Allie)
Zealot (Allie)
Zeal (Allie)
Zealous (Allie)
Zen (Allie, Taliana83)
Zero (Allie)
Zest (Allie)
Zesty (Allie)
Zestful (Allie)
Zimbabwe (sagasky)

And then @BookGeekGal kicked some major Z ass (01/10/2010, 12:49am):

Spambots, you are letting me down! Are you really going to let a bunch of humans out-Z you?

Update 01/10/2010, 12:56am: The spambots are fighting back, but instead of Z words, they’re insulting me!

This means war!!

Update 01/10/2010, 1:34am:

Update 01/10/2010, 2:34am: It’s totally fucking weird that I’m updating EXACTLY AN HOUR LATER, but it’s even weirder that the spambots are now kicking our asses. They can speak an assload of Russian, so they win this battle 3-2. I am too lazy to take and post a screenshot, but believe me, they dumped a whole mess of Russian into my blog comments. (Thank goodness for Akismet, or they would have taken over my blog!)

Their hefty block of Cyrillic smack-talking translates to:

Listen up, puny Earthlings. We are INVISIBLE, have no need for Z words, and can DESTROY your bandwidth with just the power of our MINDS. Also, we speak Russian and 19 million other languages, including ones you have not discovered yet. Surrender now or prepare to fight! Meow, that’s right!†

We will get them next time…

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†If you can tell me what this is from WITHOUT GOOGLING, because that would show weakness to the spambots, I’ll whore your blog/Twitter/website/pictures of your cat on my Twitter.

What is a name?

A name is what you go by. It’s a way for people to identify you, and for you to identify yourself. Names can have positive and negative connotations. The name Liza Minnelli reminds me of my 5th grade teacher, Miss Crane. She called me Liza Minnelli and encouraged me to keep writing. Sometimes she drove me crazy with her red penned edits on the stories and essays that I handed in to her, but I will always love her.

The last name Liuzzo fills me with fear and dread, and the last name Purcell fills me with a weird mix of sadness and disgust.

Somewhere between 6th and 7th grade, I got sick of there being at least three other girls who called themselves Liz. I wanted to separate myself from those Lizs, somehow. I decided it would be cool of me to change the spelling of my nickname from L-I-Z to L-I-S.

I know. I know. L-I-S does not spell Liz. It pretty much spells Liss, as if I were named Alyssa. It also spells LAME.

But in my twelve-year-old mind, it was cool as the other side of my pillow. Forcing an S to sound like a Z was so cool, in fact, that I decided to make everyone I knew spell my name that way, or else they received a lot of whining. (What I should have been working on instead was weaning everyone in my family completely off of calling me Beth. FUCK that nickname is stupid. I’d then managed to get mostly everyone to stop with the Beth, but even today there is one person who still stubbornly slips now and then. And I’ll tell you, if you are ever feeling like dying in a painful, “Let me get my head chopped off” kind of way, just call me Beth.)

Unfortunately, just like any nickname, the stupid S stuck. Liz because Lis, and people started to actually go with it. (Looking back, I should have spent my energy on convincing people to do something more beneficial for me, like buy me my own condo on the beach or something. My power of persuasion is apparently good, though it takes a lot of time.) Even now, a lot of people still spell Liz with an S when giving me gifts or writing me notes.

And suddenly, it just looked really fucking stupid to me.

“That says Liss, not Liz,” I said to myself one day. “Oh man, that’s dumb.”

But how can you kill your own Frankenstein? Especially when the Beth Frankenstein lumbers right next to it?

“Oh man,” I said. “I have way fucked up.”

To make matters worse, my little cousin Katarina took it upon herself to make Elizabeth — or ‘Lizabeth, as she sometimes calls me — sound like the coolest name in the world. It took a long time for my full name to grow on me, but Kat made me LOVE it.

“I can’t make people call me Elizabeth now. It’ll confuse the hell out of them, and they might even question my sanity. Like, really, who changes their mind about their name every five years?” I mulled this over day after day, until seeing L-I-S literally made me want to scream. (Though not nearly as loud as B-E-T-H makes me want to scream. And puke. And kill people.)

So one day, I said casually to the people next to me, “Spelling my name with an S is dumb.” And I stopped doing it. And I told them to stop doing it.

And people still do it anyway. I think they’re all so confused, they don’t know what the hell to call me anymore or how to spell it. I have, indeed, created a monster. The Lizlisbethenstein is coming to eat us all. Hopefully it eats Bethenstein first.

I knew Mike was superstitious about Game Day, but I never knew just how bad it was! The following Facebook IM transcript depicts devout superstition. Reader beware, you’re in for a scare!

Elizabeth: can i wear a jersey? <3<3

Mike: um no

Elizabeth: WHAT

Mike: i only have that one manning jersey

Elizabeth: you always wear two you liar

Mike: no i wear the the shirt robbie gave to me and my long white sleeve and the manning

Elizabeth: you wear two jerseys
and that shirt

Mike: no i do not [know] what your talking about

Elizabeth: of course you don't - it's because you're LYING because you don't want me to wear it!

Mike: white long sleeve,grey soupcan shirt and the the manning

Elizabeth: plus the sanders or something
and i have a big blister on my heel ):

Mike: i cant wear the sanders cause he is out for season and if i wear it brings bad luck

Elizabeth: but you've BEEN wearing it!!

Mike: my unitas only gets worn when we play baltimore

Elizabeth: i make fun of you EVERY. TIME. because it's funny that you wear all of those clothes!

Mike: i havent wore my sanders since octobers injury
this is my routine and it works ok so back off

Elizabeth: (snort)
I'm making fun of you on Twitter*

Mike: your an asshole brat (snort) right back

Elizabeth: hahaha no, i’m awesome

Mike: what ever i am superstious with the colts i dont care what anyone says including you

Elizabeth: i so love you

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*No actual harming of the Michael was done

Last night I went to the Berlin Station Cafe for karaoke again with Kate, and this time Mike came along. Poor Mike looked traumatized every time someone other than me, Kate, or a few other people sang, and he kept getting frustrated because they didn’t have any of the songs he wanted to do. (My love is quite picky when it comes to music. It’s a good thing I’m a decent singer, or else I’d be afraid of singing in front of him!)

I didn’t tweet at all this time because I was too busy singing song after song, getting mauled by strangers who wanted to adopt me, and laughing at Mike’s horrified facial expressions during songs where people who were just having fun did songs he really liked and ruined them. Ah, good times, good times.

I did the following songs:

• “Head Over Feet” — Alanis Morissette
• “Going Under” — Evanescence
• “I Turn To You” — Christina Aguilera

I was going to do “Fallin’” by Alicia Keys, too, but we left a little early so that Kate could get up for work in the morning. I feel like I did another song, too, but I can’t think of what it was.

Kate did:

• “Mercy” — Duffy
• “Sweet Child o’ Mine” — Guns N Roses
• “No More (Baby I’ma Do Right)” — 3LW

and I think she did another one, too, but again, brain isn’t awake enough right now to put it all together.

Mike just cheered us on, sipped my beer while I got drunk, and made this adorably traumatized face when some guy did Disturbed, some lady did Evanescence, and a couple of guys did Snoop Dogg. (Kate and I were amused; we take karaoke seriously enough to do songs in our range, but we both seem to thoroughly enjoy watching other people, whether they’re good or bad.)

As Mike drove us back home (Kate lives twenty minutes away from me), I sang “Fallin’” because in my drunken mind, I was gonna get that song out of my system, dammit. Then I sang “Delayed Devotion” by Duffy. I started to sing something else, and then got sidetracked because we started talking. Or, well, he started talking. Then I started talking with him because I’m ADHD like that.

Altogether it was a fun night. I really like the bar, and even though it’s quite a ride away from my house, I think it’s worth it. I like it so much, in fact, that it’s in my novel. (I mean, I’ve only been to like five bars in my life, so that qualifies me to decide on a bar now.) I really like the atmosphere, the people, and the all-you-can-drink for $10 special (you get any of the drafts and the first row of hard alcohol, which is mostly vodka, but whatever, I love vodka). It pays off once you’ve had a few beers, and now that I’ve been drinking a couple weekends in a row again, I can drink more than a couple beers before I’m sloshed. Heh.

Ahead of me this weekend now is more writing, some work on a client’s website, some research for another client’s social media marketing plan, my Colts game against the Ravens (should be good, too bad I have to miss most of it), and a baby shower for Mike’s brother (which is smack in the middle of my game). We got the baby some cute stuff though, and a few things that I think Robbie and Jaysa will really, really appreciate. I realized as Mike and I were shopping that I know entirely too much about raising a child for my age.

“It’s because you have so many friends with kids,” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. It’s just weird, being surrounded by people with kids and still not being in The Mom Club. Believe me, I know my time will come, but in the meantime it’s a little awkward. Still, it’s nice to be able to enjoy other people’s kids without having to worry about the financial end of it or the other scary bits about parenting. Mike and I have long talked about someday having kids of our own; we both love kids and can’t wait to have our own. But we both know that we have a lot of work to do before then (so if any of my family is reading this, you guys can breathe now). Heh.

Anyway, I don’t know how I got from alcohol to babies, but this couple at the bar last night — they said they were thirty but looked a lot younger — just loved me. It was a drunken love, but it was love. They grabbed my wrist with the LOVE tattoo while I was getting a refill on my beer and both screamed at the same time. She kept telling me that she really, really wants that tattoo, except the O shaped as a heart. The next time I stood next to them waiting for a refill, they proclaimed that I am their daughter from the future, because I’m beautiful and bold enough to do karaoke. I was like, “uh, thanks,” and pretty much just squirmed while they sat there squeeing and telling me that they were gonna make a baby that night and that they hope their daughter is like me.

Hey, I guess it’s better than getting hit on by an old man at a hip hop bar.

I went to clean out my spam comments and saw this:

I like the questions! Yes i’ve seen them other places but it’s cool you gathered them all up. Ooh and I don’t think I will slit my throat thanks for the suggestion though. NOT

Since when did Russian spambots get so sarcastic? It’s got me a little worried. Next thing you know, they’ll manage to slip the spam filter entirely, and they’ll leave a comment so funny that my readers will go to their blog instead!

I got my very first jury duty summons about a week ago.

I laughed. I cried. (Especially when I found out I won’t be getting paid by my company, since I only work part-time. Though I am also self-employed, so I wonder if that might change things.) I swore a lot, too. My mom gave me several ways to get out of it (like calling the night before to see if my name is recorded on the list of people they don’t need). (Here are a few really funny ways to try and get out of jury duty!)

And then I filled out the return form like a good girl and marked the date in my planner.

The next day at work, I broke the news to my boss. “I know it’s like forever away,” I said, “but I have jury duty on the 25th. Of September. Just so ya know.”

He asked if I wanted to borrow a book to bring with me. (Wish I could remember the title! He said that when he brought it with him, they sent him home as soon as they saw it!) “Or,” he said, “you can ask if they need you when you show up. Just say, ‘look, do you really need me?’ and they might not and just send you home.”

“Hmn. I might try that. Unless it’s actually interesting.” I sighed. “Jury duty. Ugh! It should just be a profession, for people who actually like it.”

“It would make a great job for retired people,” my boss said.

I laughed. “I know, right? They watch People’s Court all day anyway!”

As addicted as I am to Twitter, there are some things about it that irk me. There are a lot of great things about the site, but here are some of the things that keep small children up at night and make dogs howl at the moon:

Spam accounts As in, porn. If I get one more “check out my naughty pics” tweet or one more follower with an avatar of a picture of some girl’s lips wrapped around some guy’s wiener, I’m going to go crazy. I initially made my account private to keep out the spam, but found that it was hurting me rather than helping me (I talk to a lot more people now)! Now I just spend a hell of a lot of time blocking these accounts, which gets on my damn nerves.

Direct messages trying to sell me something DMs saying “thanks for following, check out my website at blahblahblah” sent by some robot website every time someone follows you back are lame. I’d much rather get a REAL personal message saying something like, “please don’t follow me back, you suck,” than get one of these. It’s impersonal and I kind of take offense that you can’t be bothered to send me 140 real characters of friendly speech.

People following me for no reason These people never talk to me, have never talked to me, and never will — even when I tweet them or DM them. These people don’t even have anything in common with me. Their sole agenda is to get me to follow them back so that they can be oh-so-elite with thousands of followers. Pfft. I’m not biting.

The number game Twitter has a sort of unwritten rule: the more followers, the more popular you are. This is why people follow me for no reason (see above). I think this popularity contest is worse on Twitter than it was on MySpace. (I don’t really see it as a problem on Facebook. I’m not sure why.) I think because Twitter is so simple, people measure their success with numbers (which is natural, I guess, but still lame). It’s not lame, however, if you’re actually interacting with your followers. But if you’re just trying to look cool, go home.

Replying to my new blog post tweet, instead of commenting on my blog I know this might make me look like an ungrateful douchebag, but come on! Comments make me happy. They make me feel like I’m not talking to myself. They validate that my thoughts are worth something. Plus, when other people see comments on a blog post, they are more likely to comment themselves. It’s some weird psychological chain reaction, but it’s my chain, and you are breaking it! If you feel the need to tweet about it, how about commenting on my blog and then retweeting the post? It’s a win-win!

Strangely, I feel a lot better now.

What about you? What do you hate about Twitter? Post a comment and tell me (and maybe RT this post)!

Dear people who think it’s okay to buy cheap, scratchy toilet paper,

IT’S NOT.

When I am forced to use your bathroom, be it restaurant, work, or home, I need to be assured that I will not walk out of your restroom with paper cuts.

One-ply toilet paper does NOT save the environment; I end up using more than I would normal toilet paper to get and feel clean enough.

If I need to blow my nose in it, I don’t want my boogers on my hands instead of on the tissue. (As does the company cokehead with a bloody nose.)

We the people deserve more! Your friends, family, and employees deserve more! YOU deserve more! You don’t have to go all out. You can buy relatively inexpensive soft or quilted toilet paper at Walmart, Target, Rite-Aid — even stores like Store 40 or 7-Eleven carry the good stuff! Open your eyes to a whole new world of comfort, and get off your damn “I wanna save money” or “I wanna save the environment” high horse. A sore tush is not worth it!

All of my hope lies within you, dear people who think it’s okay to buy cheap, scratch toilet paper. I trust that you will make the right decision.

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Join the revolution! Repost or print this to encourage those too cheap to care about your bum!

My phone vibrated against the desk. I shoved my bluetooth — that’s Mr. Bluetooth to you — into my ear and pressed the button, simultaneously checking my phone to see who was calling. My BlackBerry’s screen greeted my with my Dad’s Facebook photo.

“Hello,” I said, clicking at my screen.

“I’m not gonna get you in trouble, am I?”

“No,” I said. I glanced at the time on my desktop toolbar.

My dad seemed to hesitate, and then he asked the question that I am supposed to be always asking: “Can I borrow your car?”

His van had bit the dust a week or so ago, and he had bought a used car to replace it. Unfortunately, the Altima he’d bought turned out to be a lemon. He’s been taking my Ellie every so often to go do jobs — he’s an oversized load escort — until he can find something else because he doesn’t trust the Altima. Every so often he’ll ask or, like a couple of days ago, he’ll just borrow her for quick errands. (I’ve thought about using this all as leverage. Trust me. I’m just waiting for the right opportunity.)

“Sure,” I agreed. He explained that he would drop his car off in the parking lot at my job and take my car from there. All I had to do was give my building’s receptionist the license plate so that the Altima didn’t end up mistakenly being towed. No problem. Besides getting to drive something else, I was getting gas out of the deal.

After work I walked the block to my parking lot and got into the Altima. “Could have at least cracked me a window, Dad,” I said to the inside of the car. I lifted the mat and rooted around for the key. “Ah-ha!” As I put it into the ignition, I braced myself for the possibility of it not starting (its neutral safety switch is busted, just like Lisa Mazda‘s was). It started just fine, and I glanced up to start backing out. No rearview mirror. “Aw, Dad!” I checked my side mirrors and looked behind me. Fine. I could do this. No big deal.

I put the car into reverse and started backing out. BOOM. BOOOM. BOOOOOM. Where was that awful too-high bass sound coming from? Me? It was coming from me! Or, the Altima, actually. A second later I totally forgot about the sound as I began backing out, hoping that the side mirrors weren’t hexed and that I wouldn’t end up bashing into one of my coworker’s cars. (You never know. It could happen. Really.)

All backed out and ready to go, I started to leave the parking lot. BOOM. BOOOOM. BOOOM-BOOOM. “Oh my god,” I thought. “It sounds like a GIT car!”

Yep. I had the radio’s volume almost all the way down and yet it sounded like I had one of those bass booster thingamabobs in my trunk. As I sat at a red light, the entire car was shaking, as if I were sitting in one of those massage chairs at the mall.

The whole ride home, I thought for certain that it would die on me. Or that someone behind me might get pissed at my slowness. Or that the brakes might fail and that I would go sliding into another car. Or maybe a cop would pull me over because of the little ghetto car’s looks.

Instead, everyone ignored me. For once, no one rode my ass — even though I drove slower than ever! (They must have thought I was one of them, due to the BOOM BOOM-BOOM BOOM.) I drove past two cops and they didn’t so much as blink at me. And best of all? No one died. Hooray.

“No wonder you didn’t want to drive this thing,” I said to Dad when he called me to make sure I got home okay. It occurred to me then that he might have thought I wouldn’t make it home alive in that thing, either!

Leave a comment and tell me: What’s the worst car you’ve ever driven? (Bonus points if you can tell me where I got the title of this post from!)

I flipped open my checkbook and looked at the last balance. Almost $70. Good. I could get my hair done, and I’d still have enough for coffee for the week.

Mike had overdrawn his account, so after lunch and meeting with the bank accountant to straighten things out, we went to his sister’s salon to attempt to look human again. (Well, I already looked human and just needed a trim and some color. He had a beard fit for a grizzly and wanted to shape up his cut. Secretly, I hoped he would clean up the beard, too.) Britt brought us back to life in just a couple of hours, and I felt so good that I practically skipped out of the salon. Who cared that I desperately needed sleep? Not me.

Later that night I begged Mike to take me to Kmart — sorry, Target — so that I could get a beach chair and noodle (one of those foam floaty things) for a beach trip I had planned with my family the next day. Kmart had plenty of noodles, but just one beach chair. It didn’t recline or anything, and I wasn’t going to settle when what I really wanted was one of those chairs you could actually lie down in. So I asked Mike to take me across the street to Walmart.

By the time we got to Walmart, Mike could barely walk because I beat him into taking me to Walmart his back hurt so bad. I felt awful and kept trying to get him to sit down while I hunted for the beach chairs, but he’s just as stubborn as I am and wouldn’t listen. We ended up in the garden section looking at reclining beach chairs. These at least reclined, but in all of my fatigue I was about as cranky as a nap-withdrawn two-year-old and insisted on scouring the store for a damn unfolding-lay-down beach chair (because my vocabulary is awesome, too)!

Somewhere between the garden section and somewhere else in the store, I stopped and covered my face with my hands. I had spent about six or seven bucks at Stop & Shop on Garnier color safe shampoo and conditioner. I had spent somewhere around eleven bucks at Kmart on the noodle, some cookies, and something else that I still have no recollection of. I saw little colored numbers spinning around me in that store aisle, and then they all nosedived right on my head.

“What’s wrong? Dizzy?” Mike put a hand on my back to steady me.

“No,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I think I overdrew my account.” Had I really made fun of him for overdrawing his account just a few hours ago? Maybe I was the star of some sick reality TV show. We left the store and I called my sister to have her look at my checkbook. I did the math and slumped in defeat. How could I let this happen? Being tired was just not an excuse.

Mike stopped at a red light. “Do you want to go deposit some money into your account?”

“What money?” I had my head down on the dashboard.

“Maybe from your business or savings account?” He started driving again. “Do you want to stop at the ATM?”

I tried to climb through the sludge that my brain had become. What he was saying didn’t make any sense. “Would you mind?”

We drove to an ATM from our bank and I took some money out of my business account. As I started filling out a deposit envelope, the screen froze.

TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE. “No,” I said. TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE. “Do you hate me? You’ve got to be kidding me!” I turned and pointed, staring at Mike through the glass windows. He stared back at me. “Do you see this? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

I hung my head in defeat and looked down at the money in my hands and the half filled out envelope. As I started to shove everything back into my purse, the screen came back to life.

“Gotcha,” it seemed to say. “Just wanted to make sure you were paying attention.”

I composed myself and deposited the money, wondering if I was just crazy or if someone had a bad sense of humor. As I climbed back into the RAV4, I asked Mike if he’d seen the out of service notice.

“Yeah,” he said.

“The weird thing is,” I said, “is that my balance read something totally different from my checkbook. So obviously something didn’t come out yet, so I didn’t technically overdraw — yet. So as long as nothing else comes out tonight, I should be okay. Right? Right.”

I went home and left my stupid noodle on the porch. I crawled into bed and tried to look forward to the beach the next day, even though it meant getting up early and still not getting enough sleep.

I dragged myself through the next morning, but once I got to the beach it felt totally worth it. I didn’t have a beach chair, but at least I could float on the waves with my noodle and soak up the sun. I deserved it, dammit.

“Is that your noodle?” My baby cousin Kat asked. She was wrapped in a towel and shivering; the water was a little cold that early.

“Yes it is,” I told her.

“Can I play with it?”

“Yes, as soon as you warm up a little more, I will take you in and we’ll play with the noodle.”

She beamed up at me, and I grinned right back.

An hour or so later, she was ready to go back into the water. “Can we play with your noodle now?”

I held her hand and led her into the water. We got to her thighs and I put the noodle down, still holding onto her. “Ready?” I lifted her up and tried to sit her on the noodle. She didn’t quite weigh enough. “Wanna ride it like a horsey instead?” She nodded and I sat her down straddling the noodle. She grinned and giggled as she rode the “horsey” through the water, just like I had when I was a little kid. Suddenly the night before was totally worth it.

“Excuse me,” said someone from the shore.

I looked up to see the lifeguard on duty standing with her hands on her hips. “Yes?” I giggled at Kat continued to bounce as she floated.

“You can’t have noodles in the water.”

Welcome to the beach.