Japanese emoticon stamp is too cute for \(^o^)/ [Techgear]

Another doodle from one of my co-workers.  This one’s by Monico, who’s a really rad artist.  Check out some of his stuff at his website.

“So, you did it. You found the girl. She’s pretty, she dresses like a cross between a grandma and a hooker…”

– Hipster Wife Hunting

I have two roomates, so, to protect the privacy of one roomate, I’m going to implicate both roomates and not tell you which one of them is on Match.com.   But, I’m pretty sure you can guess which one.

Living with someone on Match.com is a lot of fun.  You get to laugh at browse profiles, scope out local hotties, and, when you’re roomate’s not looking, you can even send winks to your favorite dreamloafs — who will then send your roomate creepy messages in all caps, much to your roomate’s dismay. In short, Match.com is kind of like facebook, back in the glory days before everyone’s profile was set to private.  Unlike facebook though, you can see when other people have viewed your profile. This means that your roomate with a Match.com account won’t think it’s as funny as you do to lurk around the site clicking on profiles and flipping through awkward vacation, party, and hugging random children pictures.  Cut to: the most brilliant solution ever –

So you know how Match (we’re on a first syllable basis with the website in my apartment) has those commercials that profess “it’s free to look” as random awkward vacation, party, and hugging random children pictures zoom across the television screen? Well, guess what, it is free to look.  This means that just anyone can sign up for a user name, search for, say, men ages 23 -33, and profit from the results.  You don’t even have to fill out a profile or upload any pictures! The only downside:  Match.com will start sending you daily e-newsletters that you can’t figure out how to opt out of. But you’ll grow to get used to the daily routine of waking up in the morning, eating breakfast, watching Saved by the Bell re-runs, checking your email inbox, and deleting the message titled New! Daily Matches from Match.com! After about a year, it will become a non-issue.

Some things are still kind of an issue almost a year later.  Like, for example, my staggering lack of legit employment.  Sure I had my restaurant job, and the temp agency was getting me assignments from time to time, but resisting the urge to spit on the food of rude tourists, and cold-calling strangers from a tiny cubicle all day were not exactly what I thought my $45,000 dollars a year college tuition was paying for.  Granted, I know that two years out of college no one is waking up for the morning commute to their dream job; we’re all slaving away with little personal gratification.  Yet, I can’t help brooding over the fact that for the most part, although currently clinging to the bottom rung of the Career Ladder, my peers at least have a foot-hold on their future careers.  I, on the other hand, am blindly driving down a road of successive short-term jobs, each one culminating in a mud streaked DEAD END sign.  And, for as many, “once the economy picks up, and companies lift their hiring freezes, you’ll start seeing some progress” and “it’s just a hard time for everyone right now” your gainfully employed friends will consolingly hand out, these platitudes won’t change the fact that you’re sitting in a tiny cubicle cold calling construction companies in Dallas, trying to trick them into taking a survey before they hang up on you.

This is my reality, one gray, cold January day.  This is what it means to “get an assignment” from a temp agency.  Although, I feel I should confess that I wasn’t actually sitting in a cubicle.  I was actually sitting in a glass box on the 30-somethingth floor of a pretty important office building in downtown San Francisco.  My assignment really was to cold-call a bunch of random companies in Dallas, on behalf of a consulting firm, to try to get a feel of the roofing market in Texas.

“How are you at accents? You might want to try out a fake Texas accent if you can.  Apparently that helps, sometimes.” My supervisor for the day, a young, fresh-faced little cherub face of a fellow named Jim Meadows*, helpfully recommends as he closes the glass door behind him, trapping me in the tiny glass box.  But it doesn’t help, and, in fact, I’m pretty sure badly faking a Texas accent just results in faster hang-up times.  I’m not positive though.  Perhaps a consulting firm would like to test that out sometime in the near future?

Four hours, 576 phone calls (I kept count), five successfully (one kind of made up…) completed surveys later, and Jim Meadows knocks on my glass cage.

“Hey, so, I just got an email from my supervisor, and he said to stop the cold calls. ” He opened the door a little wider and stepped into the room “so, I guess you can go home.”  I stared up from my excel spreadsheet, stunned.  I can go home? I simultaneously wanted to hug Jim Meadows’ little cherub face and burst into tears.  I settled for a nonchalant “oh, wow. Excellent. Thank you.” instead.

Jim Meadows smiled and held the cage door open for me.  In the bright flourescent lighting of the hallway not obscured by glass doors, I realized Jim Meadows was really very cute.  He had a sweet little boy’s face — the face of an angel? And a really unaffected, charming demeanor.  He also smelled vaguely of the Chipotle he had had for lunch. Turns out Jim Meadows had graduated from college the year before I had.  He wasn’t working his dream job either, but someday, he hoped to have his own consulting firm.  He smiled, and his dark cherubic eyes actually twinkled a bit.  No, like, legit twinkled. I decided I liked him.  Maybe even as more than a supervisor.

“Oh hey, do you need to get that time sheet signed?”

I did.  I rifled around in my purse for the time sheet my temp agency had given me.  Several seconds of rummaging revealed no time sheet and the vague memory of it sitting crumpled up on my bed.

“I guess I forgot to bring it, but I have an electronic copy I can just print from my email.”

“Okay, no prob.  Here, let’s go back to my cube, you can just print it off my computer.”

“I don’t usually go back to my supervisor’s cube on the first temp assignment,” I wanted to say, but did not, for obvious reasons.

His cube smelled like Chipotle too, but instead of being gross, this only made him more endearing.

“Okay, here ya go.” He signed his computer onto the company internet network, then gestured that I could have a seat at the computer.  He hovered close behind me, and I could feel the heat from his body on the back of my neck.  Kind of thrilled, I signed on to gmail, waited a few seconds for my inbox to load, and that’s when I saw it.  Only new message in my inbox.  Bold font.

New! Daily Matches from Match.com!

It happened so quickly it might as well have been in slow-motion, for both speeds would have had the same result of me sitting there too stunned to move, but totally aware of the fact that angel-face Jim Meadows and I were not going to ever go back to his anything — cube or otherwise, ever again.

“Oh, huh, that’s weird.  How’d that get there?”I quickly clicked away, but the damage had already been done.

Jim Meadows totally thinks I’m some spinster 23-year-old lookin’ for love in all the wrong online places.  I quickly printed out my time sheet and raced out of his Chipotle cubicle.  It didn’t seem worth it to explain myself.  The truth might have actually been even worse — it’s not that I have an actual account on match.com, it’s just that I like to creep on strangers’ profiles, looking at their awkward vacation, party, and random children pictures! I’m not looking for love, I’m just looking! Those commercials told me it’s okay to look!

Well, actually they never told me it was okay to look, they said it was free to look.  Little did I know that “free” comes with a price.  In this case, dignity.

“Why people ignore the ugly things in life but within this they are missing the beauty that lies under the rotten fruit!!!!!”

— Alexander McQueen, 1969 – 2010

To:

From: thedith

Re: Where Were You the Day You Learned John Mayer Has a Racist Penis?

dude, i know. this shit hit the internet fan. nice early morning (Pacific time) catch, mel! even my mom sent me a link to a huffington post article about it.

chill out everyone, john mayer doesn’t have a racist penis, he just has a slutty one. and a stupid mouth. what is new here? didn’t we know this already? plus, in a strange perverse way, all this racist penis/big mouth chatter actually kind of makes me want to do john mayer? how weird is that? i mean, at least he’ll give me 5 vaginal orgasms then make me an omelet in the morning. racist penis or not, i’m down with that.

- thedith
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Melsanie  wrote:

best headline ever?

Stephanie Tanner

The middle Tanner child on Full House, also the most stylish.  Sure, the Olsen twins would grow up to give birth to BoHo Chic/Looking Like a Homeless Baglady in the Ohties, but in the 90′s, it was alllll Stephanie.  And that side ponytail.

Saved by the Bell Girls

The year was 1992, and let’s face it, there were no more fashionable girls on Saturday morning tv than Jessie Spanno, Kelly Kapowski, and Lisa Turtle.  They were hot, and they knew it.  Entering beauty pagents, starring as swim suit calendar pin-ups, and even forming their own girl group, Jessie, Kelly, and Lisa participated in so many extracurricular activities, they probably needed their own yearbook.

The best thing about the Bayside babes? A fashion icon for every style. Jessie, with her acid wash jeans, clunky boots, and blazers, favored the Boyfriend Look.  Kelly, a fan of high waisted skirts, babydoll dresses, and body suits was the ultimate Girl Next Door; and Lisa, the fashion risk taker of the bunch, wasn’t afraid to experiment with berets, bedazzled denim, and leggings as pants.  Zack Morris, eat your heart out.

Six from Blossom

Blossom may have gotten the show title, but Six, her fast-talking best friend, got all the good clothes.  While Blossom was wearing fisherman’s caps with flowers on them (we get it, your name’s Blossom, Blossom…) Six was rocking rompers, cut-off shorts, and ombre prints before we even knew what ombre prints were.  She also had an affinity for chokers, which is a 90′s trend I’d be okay with not coming back…

Angela Chase

This one was so obvious, I almost didn’t include it, because it seemed too easy.  But, I liked the use of layering in this picture, so I thought I’d give Angela a shout-out.  Plus, for better or for worse, My S0-Called Life is entirely responsible for that whole using Kool-Aid as hair dye trend.  Again, let’s uh, hope that’s a trend that stays firmly in the decade from whence it sprung…

Moesha

Admit it, if you were a girl in the 90′s, at some point you experimented with baggy pants and babydoll t-shirts/bare mid-drift shirts.  You can thank Moesha for that.  Our girl Mo also loved bold prints, sassy one-liners, and bold hair accessories.  But perhaps the thing that truly elevates Moesha to 90′s fashion icon, is the fact that she didn’t have traditionally classic good looks, but she had a great attitude, great duds, and she knew how to work it!

Kate Moss

Kate was a teenager in the early 90′s, so she’s still eligible for this list.  And why shouldn’t she be on it? Didn’t you have a pair of Calvin Klein jeans in the early-mid 90′s? What about a CK Jeans t-shirt.  Yeah, I thought so.

Teen Hearthrobs

Devon Sawa, Andrew Keegan, Ryder Strong, JTT — believe me, I could go on — back in the 90′s their pretty little mugs were everywhere.  These dreamloafs pretty much dominated the narrative of who you were crushing on in 4th grade.  As such, the perfect 90′s guy wore plaid flannel button downs, some type of workboot/combat boot, shiny hair enshrouded his head like a halo, while his floppy bangs always landed in such a way that you could never really see his eyes — all the better to never know exactly what he was thinking.  We loved emotionally unavailable guys in the 90′s.

The beginning half of the 90s saw charming boy-next door types like JTT and Devon Sawa.  Boys who just wanted to hold your hand and maybe give you a peck on the cheek.  But as the 90′s progressed, so did our curiosity, and heart throbs became edgier, like Boy Meets World playboy Ryder Strong, the often shirtless  (and, let’s face it today’s child porn sting operation bait) Andrew Keegan, and the emotionally unavailable, terminally brooding Jared Leto.  Hubba, Hubba!

Cher Horowitz

Well, I mean, I almost don’t have to explain this entry on the list.  But, in addition to sending the hems of skirts far above the length my school’s dress code deemed appropriate, Cher introduced us to Contempo Casual, Coolio, and slang that’s still ubiquitous today.  And hello? She got to make out with Paul Rudd before any of us even knew we wanted to.  Trendsetter.