Incongruous Captioning

Dinner Cooked by a Viking

            Eating a meal my father has cooked is a little like being the winner, or maybe I should say “victim,” of some dubious sweepstakes prize. “Congratulations!” the announcer says, flashing you a winning, yellow smile, “You’ve won one free dinner cooked by a Medieval Viking!”

            On the appointed day, a knock comes at the door, and you open it to find a surly six-foot man in furs with a bag of disagreeable-looking tools standing on your doorstep. “Come in,” you say, graciously, “The kitchen’s just down this hall,” and you lead him to the stove, thinking that whatever he makes will be something simple, rustic, brawny, and uninformed as he is; a reindeer steak with some kind of Nordic vegetable side, or perhaps you’re overestimating him, and he’ll present you with raw meat on sticks.

            But he turns to you with a stony face, and instead presents you with a mile-long list of sophisticated ingredients and the cash to buy it all. “You go to store and you eat good tonight,” he says in a thickly accented growl.

            Walking through the aisles of the grocery store, you gaze at the list and wonder what a Viking Warrior needs with such materials. “Scallions, really?” you think, “What on Earth does he need with scallions? How did he even hear about them?” You buy it all, anyway, and load it into the trunk, but you’re still half-sure that he’ll end up burning it in the backyard as fealty to Odin.

            When you arrive, he totes in the bags, unloads them, tallies the ingredients, kicks you out of the kitchen, and closes the door. Now, of course, you’re scared of what he might do to the granite countertops, especially when you hear the noises that filter through the door. You hear the sound of something crunching sickeningly, though that may be the bones of the live goat he asked for. There’s sawing, and splashing, and cursing. Sulfuric odors waft through your house. A couple of times, you’re sure you hear a sword unsheathe, but there’s nothing you can do, because the moment you so much as crack the door, he turns from the countertop (and the pristinely executed goat sacrificed upon it) and yells for you to get the Hel out.

            After waiting into the evening, your stomach growing ever more uncomfortably empty, he walks from the kitchen proudly carrying a platter on high. He serves you and himself enormous portions, and proceeds to shovel in the food with his hands, swallowing it whole. What eventually takes you an hour to eat has just taken him five minutes. You take your first few bites, and find it is delicious (imagine that)! “Congratulations, indeed,” you think, “Dinner cooked by a Viking is not a bad deal.”

            After staring at you eating for about five minutes (which makes you profoundly uncomfortable, but the food is too good to stop), the Viking seems to warm up to you, and he begins to tell you stories. They’re all good stories, with entertainment value, and most of them are hilarious, but some of them aren’t quite right for the dinner table, and some of them are disgusting. Thank God you have a strong stomach, but woe to anyone who meets this man who has not. Throughout the night, you laugh and cry, and sometimes avert eye-contact, and the two of you generally have a jolly time, and you eventually fall asleep on the couch watching a gory crime show while he siphons up his leftovers.

            In the morning you wake up, and the Viking is nowhere to be found. The only traces of him are a dented mace underneath your couch; a badly spelled letter thanking you for the opportunity to cook for you, and asking you to keep a lookout for his mace, which he could not find upon leaving your house; and in your kitchen, which you never did get a chance to look at last night, the chaos of Ragnarok. You can no longer see your countertops because every dish you own is piled haphazardly atop them, coated in rotting ingredients, and there is a film of grease over every horizontal surface and every wall. Your trash is piled over and around the can, like a skyscraper of garbage. Every dish towel you own is stuck to the floor or some other surface by the spill it was set there to clean. Your fridge is empty and there are several old coffee cans scattered around the kitchen, the first of which, when opened, contained something unmentionable, the rest of which, you are afraid to touch.

            For years to come, you will look back on that night, and pine for the Viking’s fabulous lamb and scallion something-or-other, but then you will look back on that morning, and think to yourself “Never again.”

            My father does this every single night. 

Marianne Faithfull

I had never seen a picture of Marianne Faithfull until today, so I mistakenly drew her voice:

Instead of her face:

Also, I'm sick right now. I look like Marianne Faithfull's voice. Except I'm not so delighted with the concept of flaying someone.

HALLOWEEN

HAPPY HALLOWEEEEEEEN
CANDY
SUUUUUUGAAAAAAR

I'm ok. I promise I'm SUUUUUUG- OK.

OMFG

I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me. Also I'm not actually breaking up with you or anything, I'm just saying that I've got too many responsibilities to post very regularly. And the Jack Black/Jack White question still stands.

P.S. I'm working on a post, but the pictures are taking a long time.

I wondered...

Dear Jack White,
Do you ever talk to Jack Black? Are you guys friends?
                        Sincerely,
                                   Cara

The first week of school has caused some strange things to happen.

So, you know how I haven't been here writing every day, like I was for a while?

School has started.

But it's not like that. There is no Happy to be found at a school. That's just my "I'm okay" face.

And to be clear, so that I don't just seem like a whiny teenager, I'm going to tell you that I go to a College-prep school that focuses heavily on academics, not just the paychecks of its students' parents. We are expected to take classes that demand college-level amounts of work without any of the free time and flexibility enjoyed by college students. We are not allowed Happy until Thanksgiving Break. 

The reason there is no Happy to be found at school is kind of enormous and vague and blobby. There are a lot of factors. One of them is schedule. We used to have a schedule that was very hard, but miles easier compared to the one they've instated this year. We take seven classes each day, and the break we get in the morning is only ten minutes long, just twice as much as we have to get between our classes. Our lunch has also been cut in half. We don't have a normal Cafeteria. We have what basically amounts to one mall food court restaurant that is greatly understaffed and completely disorganized. Say what you will about Chris Rock, but "If you're gonna give me just thirty minutes for lunch. just hand me a cup of applesauce and a little plastic spoon, 'cause I might as well be in Kindergarten again!" rings true every time I think of it or mention it. Our school day is also now thirty minutes longer, which doesn't make any sense to me. How can they have cut so many things short and ended up with more time?

So, if I seem bitchy (and I know I do), and I lack energy in my writing (I know that, too), and you just don't want to hear about the mundane troubles of my life in a block paragraph with no jokes thrown in (you know you don't), then blame my school. We can't boycott and we can't vandalize. We can't flash mob or organize a movement, but we can get MAD AS HELL ABOUT SHIT.

And now for something completely different:

I fooled you. This actually starts off on a similar note.

This entire week, I've been getting 4-5 hours of sleep every night as a cause of a massive amount of homework. I got even less last night, and when I woke up today, the world had that shimmering, absorbent quality that it gets when you haven't been taking good care of your brain.

 So everything seemed really overwhelming, and by the time I got to school, I was just a walking bundle of nerves.

Then it started raining and thundering, which I was fine with. I walked a shortcut over a field with an umbrella over my head, which I was fine with. Someone with a deep voice yelled "Young lady, you are not being prudent right now!" and I was not so fine with that.

It was Mr. Hude.

Let me preface everything with how much I don't care about this guy, so that you'll realize just exactly how strangely things turned out. I mean it. I don't give a flying fuck about him. I have never formally been introduced to him, I've never taken a class of his, and I never will take a class of his.

Back to the moment:

Yes. He literally said that.

"Well, fine." I thought. "He does have a point." So I walked to where he was, thanked him for warning me, and said I had not realized how close the lightning was. And then he did this:

And that's when I got mad. I thought "I complied with your goddamn request, I was civil because I didn't know you very well, and you're still fucking yelling at me? What the fuck? Even more than that, TAKE ME AWAY? What the hell? That sounds like something you'd say to describe the death of a cat. I feel utterly dehumanized!"
And then, through some tremendous effort of will, I didn't say any of that out loud. I just left, because I don't know him and I don't care.

five minutes later:
One of my friends walked up to me and asked what was wrong. The odd part is, I don't remember being angry or sad, let alone showing it on my face. And when I tried to answer, even though I expected to sound like

I sounded more like

And then I cried for the next hour.

We were having Chapel (my school is parochial), and I sat there and wept silently, like some kind of zealot. I wept because the candles were shiny. I wept because the music was beautiful. The incense smelled good.
The service reminded me of the church my grandmother goes to. We had a new chaplain this year.

At one point, the new guy made a remark in his speech that I have probably heard since the day I was born. "God is in every human being."

Eventually, I got better, but I felt exhausted for the rest of the day. And that's why you need to get plenty of sleep at night.

UPDATE: I would like to amend my earlier statements about Mr. Hude. Senior year, I took a semester of Philosophy under him, and it was delightful. He apparently has some unresolved issues with lightning, though...