I Don't Know You

Helga Pataki: A Quick Theory.

Let me lay something on you, and tell me how it feels:

If you’ve ever watched Hey Arnold you are aware of the regular stash of stock characters the show employs whenever group scenes are needed. They tend to repeat characters, and some of these stock characters have even been supported in their own brief plot-lines. However, one tends to stand out from the rest.

Helga Pataki, one of the main characters, is very rarely not in an episode, and it is also equally rare to see her out of normal, everyday fatigue: a pink dress with a single, wide, solitary salmon/coral pink strip around the base, a white sleeved undershirt, white, nondescript shoes, and her blonde, pig-tailed hair outfitted with a matching pink bow. Since pink is a color that is hardly used in the series, Helga is very easy to spot with a quick, fleeting glance.

That is, unless you have a crowd scene.

She does not have a name, but Doppleganger is a combination character of Sixth grader Connie (face and hair wise) and Helga Pataki (clothing wise). Although there are a score of these type of characters, none have been assigned such a circumstantially iconic color for the basis of their wardrobe. This girl essentially looks like what Helga could be, if she were incredibly vain.

She can represent one of three things:

1) A commentary on the conflicting duality of cartoon women: where a woman can either be stereotypically beautiful and her only purpose is to be admired or she possess an unparalleled personality that completely renders her void of any ounce of attractiveness.
2) this character discovered a split in the space-time continuum and she is Helga from a parallel dimension (this also can be a personificiation of Freud’s theory of the Super-Ego).
3) Helga’s Dad was running around on her mom and had a secret love child. As Big Bob only views Olga as an individual worth his time, he is unable to view his two younger daughters as separate beings. Although he provides for his secret love child, he buys duplicates of everything and divides them up between his younger daughters (hence the same wardrobe). If his love child was older, this might explain why the doppleganger is “better” looking (aka, no eyebrow); her aging has nurtured the development of vanity.

Let us sleep on this and return to it at another time, as I am sure there are plenty of answers out there.

I refuse Little Debbies.

The minute I find out I possess a fructose intolerance, Hostess files for bankruptcy.

   

Correlation does not imply causation.

When I was three years old, my mom sent me to this preschool in located up the hill from the downtown area of a somewhat snooty town. My mom’s best friend had sent her older daughters to schools in the surrounding area, and my mom was trying her best to get me streamlined into the same programs. This particular program was meant for four-year-olds, but they program had not received many girl attendees. Wanting to avoid a prepubescent sausage-fest, the program heads started looking for underage girls. The entire situation was quite sexy.

Despite some age discrepancies (two months in toddler years equated to about 15 years in adult age; the makings of a child summer-winter pair-ups), I became best friends with this girl named Alia, and later a girl named Karen (who is just being mentioned for posterity’s sake; this story hinges on the inclusion of Alia). Alia and I were for all intents and purposes inseparable, until we had to be separated because we sat at different tables. I was very well behaved, I was not about to raise a stink about something like that. Anyway, we were able to yell across an acre wide play yard, so we doubted that we couldn’t shout across a tiny-ass classroom.

Because Alia and I were busy being friends, we hardly noticed the girl attempting to drive a wedge between us. Her name was Jessica, and she sucked. I mean, she was terrible at trying to manipulate Alia into becoming her friend. That was her first flaw right there, thinking you can only have one friend. Seriously, she’s a dumb fuck. We would have to circle up and sit around the edge of the carpet during story time, and this dumbass would sit next to Alia and then look at me like she outsmarted me. Clearly that was never the case because I would just sit down on the other side of Alia and Jessica would look surprised at the fact that I figured out that people are 3D. Seriously. Dumbass.

Anyway, after story time the entire class would go running outside to play. It was a tiny, blurry, snotty-nosed mob would move en masse, almost seamlessly. It was actually a beautiful site, like watching a group of pigeons flying in circles, not knowing where to go.

One day, after sitting down next to Alia, the teacher blew her whistle (which I’m sure didn’t help diffuse the running aspect of getting to the play yard) and we all got up and started to dash outside. I was running, free and wild, never acknowledging my own mortality or the limitation that has been placed on my days, when all of the sudden I was down on the floor. I felt liquid fill up my mouth. I spit, and out came a mixture of blood and spit (80/20, I say), and in the middle of the newly shaped puddle were two teeth. I thrusted my tongue forward and noticed a gap. They were my teeth. I looked up; I was next to corner of a wood table.

I started bawling, and all of the sudden have my mouth opened by a teacher, like she thought I was a dog refusing to take my medication. I am not sure what happened after that. I remember at some point I was sitting in the lap of one of the teachers as she read to me. Karen and Alia sat next to me the entire time, and once everyone returned back from recess I saw Jessica sitting by herself. No one talked to her for a while after that. It was incredibly sweet.

I found out later that the school tried calling my mom, but didn’t leave a message. My mom picked me up at the normal time, saw my new deformity, and ripped the teachers a new one. She took me to the dentist who said it wasn’t worth trying to put them back; they were baby teeth. So for the next 4 years I would be without those 2 teeth.

That still isn’t as bad as that teacher from Skokie.

Our 2011 “Les Miserables” Cast:

Taylor Swift - Eponine
Anne Hathaway - Fantine
Amanda Seyfried - Cosette
Hugh Jackman - Jean Valjean
Sasha Baron Cohen - Mr. Thernardier
Helena Bohnam Carter - Mrs. Thernardier
Russel Crowe - Inspector Javert 
Eddie Redmayne - Marius

   

It’s like they just thought of every single person they can think of who wasn’t attached to a new project. This will not end well. DID WE LEARN NOTHING FROM NEW YEARS EVE?!

Truths.

     

Guy Fieirritating: “Now, I need to figure out how I can Guy-i-fy this recipe.”
Alex: “Make it worse”.

   

Boom. Roasted.

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

This is embarrassing; the first question I am asked is posed by an automated entity.

Rude.

Does anybody remember that show Everwood?

   

That was a piece of crap, amirite?

   

According to Google searches, they are trying to define it as a home make-over show with lots of carousels and bad copy and past montages.

   

America, fuck yeah.

The Bionic Rail-Lady

I was riding a pretty crowded train back home from work. I was lucky enough to have a seat by the exit, especially since I like to watch that awkward moment when the train doors open and a little secret battle ensues between the people trying to exit and the people trying to board. I myself employ old basketball stances: my legs slightly parted and planted, and arms near akimbo as I anticipate the people behind me upping their assy-ness to 11 by shoving their way past me to be first on the train. I get their early for a reason, lady.

So the train arrives at its next stop. Most of the people on the train had been maneuvering themselves to find the correct exiting position, eager to win their own personal disembarking battle. However, there was a girl right next to the doors who had polio sticks. It was clear she was incredibly disabled, which made me feel twinges of shame for sitting in a chair, and success for not needing to sit in a chair. Regardless, she was utilizing those canes (the ones where you rest your forearm in these cradles and grip the top of the stick with your hands as you shift your body weight from cane to cane) and pretty well, I might add, especially since it is incredibly difficult to maintain your balance on subways, even if the car is completely packed with people.

The doors opened, and the girl was the first person to exit. She was moving a bit slow, but whatever, fuck you, she’s disabled. No one was paying that much attention, really, except me; I was watching her every move like a goddamn hawk because I appreciate a good underdog-fight.

Suddenly I saw one of the girl’s canes disappear between the train and the tracks, and her body fall down with an arm still in the free cane-cradle, almost like someone shot a leg off of a newborn baby giraffe. She starts screaming and making these ungodly, terrifying sounds, a cacophony that caused everyone else on the subway to start shrieking.The girl was bawling, “PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T LET THE DOORS CRUSH ME, PLEASE”, as the conductor began telling people over the intercom to move their junk from blocking the exits. Two men who had positioned their bodies between the doors starting screaming profanities at the conductor, who started screaming back; these new sets of screams coupled with the shrieks of the train, the wails of the disabled girl, the panicked cooing sounds from the woman trying to help the girl to the feet, and the high-pitched static that might have been a home-made rap tape was unlike anything I have ever experienced.

It was unparalleled, as if every mythological deity had communed and decided to compact the most undignified, gut-wrenching, ear-busting sounds known to man in a way that revealed horrifying truths to everyone who was damned to hear it. Homes were destroyed, families torn apart, children abandoned by the side of the roads, white fish consumed with red wine, all as grieving mothers were instructed to shake it, shake it you grieving bitches, shake it.

Eventually the girl made it off the train and now I need therapy.