Or is my attention span getting shorter?

Do I have enough education to do anything with my life that isn’t related to film or that could possibly be practiced somewhere other than in Los Angeles?

Am I justified in feeling increasingly panicked every time I consider that I’ve been making the same amount of money in each and every job I’ve held since entering the industry?

$10,000 doesn’t seem like much, but is it enough debt to prevent me from saving up for a fucking haircut?

What does it mean that I’m now dealing with just as much anxiety as I was when I got my medical marijuana prescription?

Someone point me in the direction of the nearest lottery to be won, please.

The everyday visits to the coffee shop.

The decreasing number of holes and safety pins in your clothing.

That you have suddenly become a “filmmaker” and act like it’s the best thing ever and that your knowledge on the subject is vast and unassailable, when you have not worked in real production or with real filmmakers.

It was porn, for Chrissake, and I don’t care how much actual dialogue is in your film. It’s goddamn porn.

Oh, let’s not forget that you’re now freaking out about having met Thom Yorke.

And tonight, tonight is the kicker. Suddenly you, who probably gave herself a mental blue ribbon for having finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, is going to a bar to read Bukowski. Bukowski, of all people. Is Bukowski even more than a Modest Mouse song to you?

It’s all clear to me now. You’re becoming a hipster. I have no idea how or why, but now you’re on the straight track to Portland.

My every nerve is crying out for justice. I want your stupidity laid bare before a jury of your peers. I want everyone to know what a conniving, uninteresting, attention whore you are. My college degree insists on it, screams for vindication.

And this is all that will result from my anger. Just a passive-aggressive blog post. But I do hope you choke on it, and I mean that sincerely.

Inevitably, after it’s been thrown away, never again to be seen, I have pangs of guilt. WHY?! Why the guilt? So stupid. Ads don’t have feelings, and I don’t have a particular nostalgia for my teens. I just need a moment of cold, callous logic to actually pry the thing from the fridge, or the wall (Oh, the walls–I have far too many movie posters that don’t belong in my bedroom. I only ever saw Trainspotting once, dammit.),  because I know that I’ll end up regretting it at some point, and it’s better for it to be thrown away than stashed in a Doc Martens shoebox underneath my bed. Or on my walls or fridge, for that matter.

I should probably also take this time to note that I can scarcely throw a pen or pencil away without a brief yet intense moral dilemma about whether or not I should get rid of it. Will I use it? What if it’s disappointed in me? What if it never finds another home?

Meh, this is how it goes. Eventually I hope to be rid of my emotions entirely, especially when dealing with bric-a-brac. There’s no room for love in decorating.

I know a lot of people who would opt for a gun in a one-on-one conflict with a hostile person, animal, or immobile object. I see their point. Guns kill things. They’re small enough to be able to carry them in a concealed manner. Some guns are pretty nice looking, too. But for me, a gun is simply not satisfying enough. No, not at all.

People who know me or who have been around me for some period of time lasting more than 72 hours have already heard me speak on this subject and are fully aware of my preferences when it comes to weaponry. It seems to me that nary a week goes by that I don’t remind myself that I really do need to buy me one of these and keep it in my car. And not two seconds after I say this aloud, my boss inevitably says, “I really think you shouldn’t.” I believe she’s worried for the people that I might choose to practice on.

What is this weapon, you ask? Well, I’d love a cricket bat. Just because cricket does seem a little more obscure and European, not quite as everyday as a baseball bat. Although a nice, aluminum baseball bat would also be pretty great.

I think that very little would be more satisfying than having some asshole come up to you in a threatening manner, actually threaten you, essentially open the door to a beating, and give you cause to reach into your back seat for a large piece of shaped wood you affectionately call Nigel, whereby you can either threaten the ruffian back, or you can go ahead and take a swing. Just think of how completely delightful it would feel! It would make the most sickening THWACK! I also sort-of like that you can keep going to town without killing them in an instant, and that a bat doesn’t need reloading.

I really must get me one of those.

This really pisses me off. The word “hate” cannot even describe how much I abhor the asslicking involved in way too many people’s workplaces, especially mine. I hate not being able to call a fucking tomato a tomato, and this office politics thing prevents me from that, through some kind of peer-enforced guilt system. What I hate most, though, is that there are people that LOVE the politics. I have one particular person in mind, but fuck, practically everyone I work with goes home and lights the candle under the spoon and shoots fucking office politics up into their veins, then collapses in happiness on their leather couches, basking in the awesomeness of what they perceive to be power.

And I suppose that it is power, the ability to make God-awful decisions without being chided by anyone, despite the fact that everyone knows better. In fact, the dickwad protected by politics even knows better, but he does it because he can. And so does the other guy. And by the time all that bullshit makes its way down to my end of the chain, I’m swimming in bullshit up to my ears and, as Igby put it, drowning in assholes. Every day I see ten grasping, poorly reasoned, completely childish decisions get made, and I exchange a knowing glance with my coworkers, move the mountains that need to be moved to make way for said decisions, and allow the hate to build within me. I really wish that we lived and worked in a society that required and encouraged us to question everything, instead of forcing us to be cowed by an idiot because he likes playing the game.

I think that once I make my desperate bid for freedom from The Industry, I will do my utmost to try to find work in a field that does not rely so heavily on office politics. Perhaps as a three-card Monte vendor, or a professional layabout. Surely somewhere a company exists that isn’t run by morons.

Fruit flies are not necessarily disgusting creatures, unless you count laying eggs in food as disgusting. I even bred them my senior year in high school for a genetics project for AP Biology. I even know their Latin name: drosophila melanogaster.

The principal problem with fruit flies is that they practically breed overnight. By the time I thought I’d killed all of them, by the next day, there were more. And they never stopped showing up. In a week’s time, I killed about a hundred. I got very good at it, but I think that some of them adapted, because they got harder and harder to kill. My roommate practically moved in with her boyfriend because they were ever-present in her room. I had had plans to bomb the place, but it seems that it is not recommended by the higher authorities.

So I set a trap for them. Some wine in a bowl, a piece of Saran wrap over the top with a hole poked in it. Overnight, seven died a drunken death. I was very enthusiastic.

I didn’t see another one for several days until just two days ago, I saw a familiar speck streak across my line of sight, very near my open can of Dr. Pepper. “Goddammit,” I thought. “God-damn-it.”

And there you are. Fruit flies are evil. No, they do not wreak destruction, nor are they ugly or loud. But because they are, I must hate them. Eternally.

I happen to interact with such a dog almost every day. It’s hard to say what grosses me out the most about him. First and foremost, he stinks. The fact that I have almost stopped noticing the smell is an indicator of how long I’ve been around it. Second and grosser because tactile gross is way worse than olfactory gross, when you pet him, it feels like you’re stroking an untreated skin cancer patient’s arm. It’s all knobbly and icky and there’s barely any fur to cover up what I can only imagine are liver spots and…grossness. I can’t really contemplate this for much longer, it’s beginning to affect me.

Oh, and the voiding the bowels thing I mentioned above also applies to said dog, to the horror of all.

Other animals–old horses, old sheep, old goats, old ducks–do not, in my experience, become so terribly repulsive when they reach extreme old age. They get slower, they aren’t as energetic, but they definitely don’t get that disgusting quality that very old housepets get. Which is one of the reasons why I think I will resist owning an animal for as long as possible. That, and the shedding fur thing. Gross.

- Gay Prius-driving recyclers (this is definitely the most offensive hate on here, as I’m certain almost all gay Prius-driving recyclers have T1 internet connections in every room of their expensive West Hollywood condos and will bad-mouth me at the gym, but I’m counting on obscurity to shield me from being outed. I do work in WeHo, after all)

- Harry Potter fans that refer to the author as “Jo”

- Aspic

- The term “reaching out” as used by office people, i.e. “Thanks for reaching out,” instead of “Thanks for calling” (See my Welcome! post)

- Flavor Flav

- Words spelled with Ebonics in mind (I should blog about how much McDonald’s slogan pisses me off)

- Receiving work-related emails that have no punctuation or capitalization

- Spencer from The Hills

- Miss J from ANTM

- Booking travel for other people

- Producers’ assistants

- Cockroaches

- Applebee’s

- Summer

- Uggs and Crocs

- Popped collars

- Guidos

- Britney Spears

- Anything banana-flavored

- Plain yellow Post-it notes

- Bluetooth headsets

- Glitter

- Mazda Miatas

- PT Cruisers, ESPECIALLY the convertibles

- Bush

- Palmdale

- Potholes

- Pineapple

- Crime and Punishment

- Tess of the D’Urbervilles

- Sin City

- Epilogues

I’ve checked with our accountants and my paycheck hasn’t been sent to them yet . . . can you get in touch with whoever you need to to sort this out . . . it’s been weeks and I still haven’t been paid . . . I know you’re on top of this, sorry to be a bother . . . get back to me when you know where it is.

What’s worse is that the people that overuse the ellipsis don’t do it every once in awhile, they do it constantly. So every email from them is torture because they refuse to adhere to the conventions of normal punctuation. Each email makes them seem like a slow-thinking dullard who is pretentious enough to associate the ellipsis with being well-written, and therefore they come off like a total fucking prat every time they rattle off another missive.

Then there’s the guy that constantly puts smiley faces at the ends of his emails. That’s right, I said HIS emails (although I would venture to say that this is more often than not something that occurs more with females than males, but my personal plight is with a straight (!) male). Somehow, the inclusion of or at the end of each and EVERY email I get from this person makes me feel like they’re not taking me seriously. So each email I send, no matter how great the importance or work-related the contents are, I get back a response that makes it sound like I asked to go to the fair this weekend, and my daddy told me “Sure, sweetheart. You can go to the fair. ” Gosh, now I’m creeped out by my dad. This has sparked some kind of weird Electra complex reaction. Is it not clear, then, that the emoticons create nothing but spite and sexual confusion?

There are literally hundreds of aspects of The Industry that I have grown to despise in the past years, all of which I will strive valiantly to list on this blog. However, it is important to spread these things out, so let’s tackle one of the big ones: Kirsten Dunst’s teeth.

Allow me for a moment to sully your screen with this image:

The horror!

Unlike most moviegoers, I don’t mind her acting, and she’s generally cute. But the teeth are enough reason to hate. I’ve hated for lesser slights. I think that the only moments in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (my favorite movie) that I even remotely disliked had to do with the fact that Kirsten Dunst was smiling in the scene.

I have a theory that Michel Gondry only included the skimpy-clothed dancing scene to make up for her canines, but I think that my theory is refuted by the mere fact that we also had to see Mark Ruffalo dancing in his underwear. It balances out the hotness, and then we’re left with the teeth.

Can anything be done? Can she be held down and have braces forcibly attached? Could someone bribe Invisalign to hire mercenaries to right this grievous wrong?