[Peek-a-Foo]
shut yo mouth.


the only thing worse
than bad memories
is no memories at all..
[dismemberment plan]


4.26.2006  

Oh My LORD.


This morning, as some of you may know already, I had an interview with the cool folks over at The Onion for an internship this summer.

It went off with a rough start -- even when I first got there, I felt really retarded, clomping through the office in heels, disturbing all the people hard at work. Everyone else seemed to be mincing around in little slipper-like footwear, silently hovering above the floor. Plus, I got there about 15 minutes early, so I had to sit up at the front with the (very nice) receptionist with my thumb up my ass, sweating bullets.

Then, it was go-time. I sat with C and P at a large table in the back, slowly accumulating a nervous mustache of sweat, as they looked over my resume.

They first asked me about my experience at my school paper. I immediately shot off a response about my very first article, and how dumb it was. Then, I got into how it was on Gawker.com, and how they poked fun at it, which was a stupid thing for me to do. "OH fuck, oh fuck OH FUCK," flashed through my brain. I didn't want to be seen as an incompetent writer!

I tried to recite what Nick Denton told me when I met him recently: "The only thing worse than being in Gawker is NOT being in Gawker."

Except, when I tried to get it out, it came out as a series of native clicks, trills, and whistles: "They say, you know, that, um, the worst thing about... the thing worse than not being on Gawker is..."

And what made it even WORSE is my savage-like brain was on red alert. "DO SOMETHING TO DISTRACT THEM, YOU FOOL!" was what my brain kept screaming at me. "DO SOMETHING!"

So I reached down to the floor and rummaged through my enormous bag, trying to find something to momentarily distract them with. I only found copies of my resume, two issues of The Plague magazine that I worked on, and my keys. Fuck!

I momentarily considered dangling my keys in front of them like people do with babies, but luckily, I realized I wasn't exactly dangling a piece of yarn over an adorable kitten. I was at an interview with my dream company, and I was losing it. I'm sure they were wondering what the fuck I was doing, rifling through my bag, mid-sentence. Maybe they thought I was going to do a magic trick or pull something out of my Mary Poppins bag.

"Okay wait. Let's just start over (I barely restrained myself from doing that weird, awkward rewind noise here). How's it going?"

After this, I felt a little better but still fucking dumb as shit. "I'm not nervous AT ALL," I blurted out, which made me feel even dumber.

But surprisingly, after that that brief fiasco where I started speaking in tongues, it went okay. I told them how I originally suggested putting penises all over an issue of The Plague and how I had once inadvertently found myself involved in a sex ring (both were met with somewhat blank looks). I told them that the funniest thing I've seen online recently is that video where Japanese girls with pork chops taped to their heads are attacked by a Komodo dragon.


(Go ahead. Click on it. I won't be offended if you take a break in the middle of my post to watch it.) :)

They told me that some things an intern would be responsible for is running little errands (which I seriously love doing... I LOVE GOING TO STAPLES, you hear me, Onion???) and I barely restrained myself from divulging to them my love of baking little cutesy cookies for the workplace. I didn't even shoot in a comment about my 95+ wpm or how I love being the office bitch to be flogged by all at will. I didn't want to overdo it and frighten them.

Then, they asked me what I expected to learn from the internship, which caught me off guard. Damn! Instead of saying something witty about how I was looking forward to seeing Joe naked in person (I hear he drops his pants at the office a lot), I vaguely mentioned how I want to work with "professionals who know what they're doing" (C said, "Maybe this isn't the right place for you") and that I want to learn how to "be funnier." My god, I am such a fucking douchebag!

I'm glad they didn't ask me "What does the Onion mean to you?" -- a question I thought of an answer for in advance. I was going to say, "Well, it's sweet, flavorful, makes me cry (because I'm laughing so much), multi-layered, and... crunchy." Yeah, I'm lucky they didn't ask me that.

However, believe it or not, I made it through the first gauntlet, and I'll find out next Wednesday if I will be hopping on board with The Onion or not.

If they don't remember me for my sweet color printouts of my resume (thanks Eric), then they'll definitely remember me for leaving behind a extra large, heart-shaped butt print of sweat on the chair I was sitting in.

Sweet!

I'm glad they told me this, or else I would have been forced to use my exit strategy -- cutting up an actual raw onion, rubbing the pieces all over my eyes, and crying while screaming, "LOOK WHAT YOU'RE MAKING ME DO! WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME!?!"

Things that people suggested I do, but am glad I didn't:
  • "Do that Sharon Stone leg crossing thing from Basic Instinct" (- Tod)

  • "Just be smooth. Like my man J. Timberlake" (- Tom)

  • "don't dress sexy. these are all dorks from wisconsin. and they're jaded dorks. which is dangerous" (- John)

  • "They're going to ask you what you want to be doing in a few years. My standard answer is, 'Taking a nap'" (- Donnie)



So please, pray for me, friends. Pray to Jeebus for me. Keep your fingers crossed, and ask Jeebus for me to have a chance at The Onion, and also for me to find a lost, adorable puppy to take home and keep. I've already thought of the perfect name for the puppy: Professor Applesauce.

Thank you all for sending me advice, encouragement, thank you Kevin and Ryan (former/current interns) for all of your help. If you see me in the near future smoking crack behind a dumpster, then know that I didn't get the internship and that it's your fault (yes, yours and yours alone!) for not praying hard enough, you filthy heathen!



 .: posted by patreesha :. @ 3:54 PM



. . . . .


4.24.2006  

Low is Nice.


I had this peculiar habit when I first started playing the piano when I was 5 or 6 years old. I'd always play songs a full octave lower. It just sounded better to me, in a way -- more soothing. Notes way at the top of the keyboard were tiny, voiceless plinks, high-pitched, desperate whisper-screams. Like shards of broken glass.

As years went on, it became apparent that I just took well to low-octave instruments. In high school, I was somewhat of a seasoned band geek, and played the bass drum in marching band during my freshman year. There was something about the thud. thud. thud., the deep resonance within this six-ton drum strapped to my chest that felt better to me than the light, machine-gun-like spatter of the snare. Listening to the slow, deliberate beat coming from me -- the beat that the entire band followed -- was powerful to me. Like the sound of a heartbeat.

A year later, sophomore year, I again chose to take up an undesireable instrument -- a beautiful, gorgeous, shining brass tuba. It was a torrid, brief love affair I had with this sonorous body. To me, the tuba was like a large, sexy, morbidly-obese black woman encased in a golden enamel. For several months -- almost a year, I was smitten; I had found my BBBW. It hung on me, its golden curves pressing down on my shoulders, wrapping around my chest -- and I clung back, desperate, breathless with love.

With the beautiful instrument wrapped around me like a thick, sexual, musical snake, I blasted my breath into it, sometimes to the point where I blacked out and saw dots. I became second-chair tuba, and would have been able to play the solo of "If I Only Had a Brain," (from The Wizard of Oz -- god knows why this was part of the Christmas/Hannukah band concert) had Jay Shapiro, a senior and first-chair tuba, been out sick at the holiday band concert. But alas, the night when our parents showed up wearing festive sweaters embellished with knit Scottie dogs, Jay was in good health -- and my moment to shine was overshadowed by the long-haired, multiple-piercing-ridden, gargantuan 18-year-old man with fingernails painted black, playing my song.

This year, I picked up the cello again, this time with me wrapping my legs around the gigantic instrument (instead of vice versa as with the tuba) -- after a 13 year hiatus from the instrument. I first started playing it when I was around 8 years old, but gave up shortly thereafter because I wasn't holding it right and I kept getting cramps in my neck and my right leg kept going numb. I just wasn't ready for it.

But now, my new instructor, a goofy but painfully precise Chinese man (who said to me after our last lesson, in broken English, "I rike when you wear skirts, especially mini-skirts" [awwwwwk-ward]), positions me in exactly the right way and for 30-minute-long stretches, I can play like a fucking wind-up monkey with cymbals.

What convinced me to start playing the cello again, after 13 years of being frustrated with the instrument (I distinctly remember beating my child-sized cello years ago with the bow, trying to kill it because I hated its guts so much), was I kept waking up from strange dreams with the deep, resonant sound of cello music in my brain that was begging to come out.

I hate high-pitched noises.

I hate them.

In middle school, a boy named Mo (who I didn't know then, but later became friends with into high school [Hi Mo!]) said, "Want to hear the most annoying noise in the world?"
"Okay," I said.
"NNNNyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!" he said, bleating like a lost sheep. Again and again.

Years and years ago, when my mom and I would carry large laundry baskets down to the laundromat, I remember feeling hatred for all the piles of sickly-hot, scorched clothes we now had to fold. I particularly hated socks, but being the nuisances of the laundry pile, the socks were always left for 8-year-old me to fold. And while we folded, the old, rusty machines would squeal as the washing drums spun faster and faster, into a loud scream.

And on top of that, my mom would sing in a high, piercing soprano. She'd sing church hymns, in soprano, in Korean, not giving a shit who heard her or who looked at her funny. And there I was, sweating in the hot, sticky July weather in a dirty laundromat, face red with embarrassment, folding itchy, rough socks, hating myself and hating everything around me. It doesn't surprise me that most murders happen during the summer months. Maybe the murderers had to fold hot, itchy socks, too.

During my elementary school years, when my friends would call me at home, my mom would start singing hymns in the kitchen in an opera-style soprano. My friend Emanuel, in particular, would always say, "Wow, your mom sings so nice. Tell her I said she sings nice." But to me, the soaring vibrato was what would occasionally jar me awake in the morning, with the backup vocals of a deafening vaccuum cleaner, rendering me unable to drift back into the peaceful sleep I so deserved, filling me with the prepubescent rage of being pierced in the brain with bright rays of sunlight and the merciless drone of the singing-vaccuum. "Fuck you, vaccuum," I'd say as I punched my koala pillow case with unbridled fury. "... FUCK! YOU!"

I hate high-pitched sounds. If it were up to me, I'd fall asleep the the sound of distant foghorns lowing at sea (minus those pesky, peckish seagulls ruining everything). There is something about foghorns that is so deep, so mournful, so hopelessly lost, so hopelessly far away.

But out there, somewhere, someone is listening and waiting, hoping for whoever is on that ship to come home again.



 .: posted by patreesha :. @ 9:20 PM



. . . . .


4.06.2006  

Well, I Find This Rather Outrageous...

... Yes indeed, I do.


Last month, I wrote a paper for one of my journalism classes. It was about how some potheads will not quit smoking even though there's going to be a ban on smoking in all NYU dorms starting next semester.

And, well, I have this problem where everything I write for my classes makes me sound like a fucking douchebag. So not surprisingly, my paper reeked of suck.

So it was a little embarrassing for me when I arrived at the school newspaper (where I work as a copy editor) and the features editor suddenly told me that my crappy article was going to be printed in the paper the next day.

I heard the managing editor read a few select lines out loud with disgust. She turned to someone next to her and said,
"Do you think pot is the 'collegiate odor of apathy'?"
"Is that for your column?"
"Yeah." (At this point, I said from across the room, "Hey, I wrote that!")
"Hmmmm. I like it."

Though it got the approval of that guy, my shitty article certainly wasn't a hit otherwise. It got horrible comments, and apparently, at the newspaper budget meeting, people were talkin' smack about it.

Not only that, but the morning it came out in the NYU paper, the ginormous Gawker.com picked up on it and pretty much pantsed my article, called it a nerd, and punched it in the glasses.

I felt so shitty about this crappy article that I wanted to take a dump on the paper and fling it into my own face.

But the next day, the features editor sent me an email that he received:


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ed Shepp
Date: Apr 3, 2006 12:45 PM
To: features@nyunews.com

Hello.

This is for Patricia. It is in reference to her article about the NYU 'Pot Palace.'

Patricia,

I found your article so engaging that I had to create a recording of it. I hope you enjoy it.

Beep!
E


Okay. The recording is funny as fucking shit. I've uploaded it here for the time being, so give it a listen.

The brilliant person who recorded it, Ed Shepp, apparently has a radio show on WFMU 91.1 and plans to air it next Friday sometime between 6-7pm.


How fucking ridiculous is that?


My shitty article was hated universally, featured on Gawker.com, and now has been recorded and will be on a radio show!

I still can't figure out whether I should be mortified, proud, or just incredibly happy that there is a sophomore at NYU (one year behind me) who has the same first and last name as I do, and will probably take the heat for being such a shitty journalist.

Sometimes life is just dandy, isn't it?


***
P.S. By the way, I've applied for my DREAM internship at The Onion, so please everyone...

Pray for Mojo.



Please pray especially hard, because I think I screwed my chances by un-professionally including the word "cunt" in my cover letter.

Stupid, STUPID, STUPID!

Wish me luck!

UPDATE:
Since The Onion has showed me zero love since applying (though I will remain patient and hopeful!), I've also sent out annoying emails out to a few more kick ass places.

Pray to Jeebus for me!!!!



 .: posted by patreesha :. @ 1:16 AM



. . . . .


4.01.2006  

So, I'm an April Fool.


If you checked out patreesha.com earlier today, you were probably as surprised as I was to see my site in an unusually hyper-sexified state.

I WAS HACKED!

Or, "h4x0r3d"!!!



^^ In case you missed it. ^^


I'm not going to name names, but I figured out who it was once the initial homicidal rage passed...

... And, well, it was this man:



Yikes!!!



 .: posted by patreesha :. @ 3:21 PM



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