Mouse Trap

Please enjoy this wonderful tale from our guest blogger “Matilda”

What you don’t know about mousetraps………..

It is not every day that one enters a conversation about mousetraps, however do not be fooled my friend for this is no ordinary mousetrap I speak of.  At first you may think I am talking about the rather unpleasant solution to city pests that can find their way into your apartment… and for some, Shiloh, this can bring about thoughts of fear and disgust after one such trap tarnished said persons really cute gold flats…

But you are in luck because THAT is not the kind of mousetrap I am talking about.

I am sure you are all familiar with the popular American past time played by young singles; the cat and mouse chase.  Well my mousetrap is the conclusion of this game.  There are many versions of “cat and mouse”.

Some of my personal favorites are:

1.    The guy who leads you on – In this version a guy who has absolutely no intention of entering a relationship with you will string you along giving you just enough attention to sustain the glimmer of hope a relationship could bloom but provides enough opposition that it ensures the chase is still alive and well.
2.    The overeager dater – Now I am not an expert on this version, seeing as how I tend to stick with #1 most of the time.  However, recently I have met a few #2’s, and these are the worst of all!  This is the guy that is WAY more into you than you are into him (i.e. Shiloh:Tom).  Simple strategy here ladies.  No chase.  Move on.
3.    The gay man – Another frequent offender.  This guy is a combination of #1 and #2.  He is really excited to spend time with you and gives you tons of attention; however through no fault of his own, he is leading you on with every move he makes.  Trickier to identify than the previous profile #3 reveals its hidden strategy:  DENIAL.  Many women will waste precious playtime with this man because he is being incorrectly filed into a different number.  Again I say move on!

Up until last summer this is pretty much the make up of every relationship/pseudo-relationship I have ever had.  But then something fantastic happened.  #4 walked into my life.

You guessed it ladies.  #4 is Mr. Right.  Now #4’s don’t really exist in their natural form, they all take on the persona of another number and are coaxed out through a mousetrap.  My #4 played his share of games.  You see he was a #1 originally.  However, after a year of chasing, this cat trapped her mouse.  After a three-month stint of excommunication, my spring was sprung and the trap was set.  My emails were suddenly being returned, dates were being planned, and the glorious music of early morning booty-call text messages was gracing my cell phone yet again.

Now this next part of the story is one that I am not so proud of.  This is the part about how I set my trap.  I should tell you that my mouse has relocated from one of our southern states.  Knowing that the Sox were playing his home team several weekends ago I went to stubhub.com and spent close to a week’s salary on a pair of tickets.  This was a risky choice because I was unsure that he would come, actually I was unsure I would even garner a response from him, but the appeal of Red Sox summer and a little white lie about receiving the tickets (free of charge) from my company was too enticing to pass up!  Game day turned out to be beautiful!  We met at Fenway and ventured out to find our seats.  When I say that they were obstructed I am being polite!  They should not even have seats where we sat they view was so bad.  However, this did lead us into an afternoon of conversation and re-kindle.  I pulled out all the stops however when we parted later that day I was overcome with a feeling of failure.  Although my feelings were still strong for mouse, I felt like he had taken the afternoon to tie up loose strings and get closure from our relationship.

Fearing the worst I told myself to move on.  I promptly joined match.com.  After a few days of being “winked” at by some of the most genetically unfortunate men I have ever seen in my life I was feeling really romantically frustrated.  Then it happened.  My shooting star.  I got a call from my mouse asking to go out for breakfast.

The rest is history friends.  I was engaged the following weekend.  Moral of the story:  Don’t lose hope.  Mice are everywhere.  You just have to set a trap to catch the right one.   And don’t fear if you trap some not-right ones.  Mice have a high tolerance to pain and they need a few pinches here and there to keep them in line.

 

it happened!

the infamous giraffe necklace has gone on sale!:

though $99.99 is till ridiculously expensive for this plasticized bauble, I have to say it is (as predicted) growing on me. Mainly because of the pretty, smoky gray beads. That viscous little giraffe I could live without. Maybe at $79.00? Unlikely but stranger things have happened. I did do a complete 180 on Kate Hudson after that adorable InStyle article about her a few years ago. That was before the whole Owen Wilson thing.

 

.EDU

College email is something that you take for granted.  It’s always ready to give you your facebook updates, tell you when class is cancelled, warn you that your library fines are going to prevent you graduating, etc. 

 .EDU is an emblem of pride worn at such times like when the woman at the JCREW counter askes for your email addres…”Um… Yes. Of course I would like 6 emails a day about Jcrew Sales, arrivals, crew cuts and new Italian leathers! My email is Shiloh.pitt@USC.EDU (upsidedown smile).  This simple interaction is a personal victory, casually proving my self esteem a reminder that a. I am enrolled in college and b. that to this stranger, I MIGHT be very brainy and intelligent.

So how long IS too long to continue to use my college email account?? Here is some background info: I went directly from undergrad to a graduate program at the same university. Diploma number one was a successful accomplishment but I had to finish my masters degree credits with a summer online class that was completed about two months after graduation.  As you might imagine I was not the Universities most responsible student and paid little attention to deadlines and degree progress. So when it was time to graduate the records office lacked a clear understanding of my the degree path my “studies” had taken me. From being a transfer my sophmore year to several major changes, I probablly could have convinced them I had earned a PhD (ok not really at all. This statement is so far from true. I am lucky they ever issued a diploma at all – let alone two of them).  Here is my point. All my friends at USC got a strongly worded email from the Univeristy that their .EDU accounts will be terminated unless they swiftly activated their “@.alumni.usc.edu” account.  This was a shocking moment for all soon-to-be graduates. Wow. I am graduating. YIKES.

Now, I never got this email and I still have yet to see anything remotly close. I continue to get updates about Campus Crime and Class enrollment dates. I get emails about student surveys that “Need My Help!” so they can write their masters thesis. Even invites to speakers and other campus crusades sending the word out to the masses. While I happily ignore this steady stream of junk mail I have to wonder? What glitch caused my email address to be slighted from the Account Termination doomsday email? 

I know what you are thinking and I was thinking it too. Naturally instead of addressing the “Did i ever really graduate” issues, I simply stewed in my own anxiety convinced I had never actually met the requirements to be an @alumni.edu!!

The pride I used to feel with my .EDU email address changes quickly to  shame and embarassment when you are 25 years old. As I spell shiloh.pitt, my legit alumni friend gasps and says “You still have email!?”. 

Most people don’t suffer this plight because when they graduate a diploma quickly arrives in the mail. I will save the whole story for another post, but lets just say Angelina and Brad must be so busy with adopting children that they “missplaced” the diploma envelope soon after it arrived via US MAIL. Luckily – a year later - USC has REISSUED my diploma, so I know for sure I am a graduate living a sweet life as an @usc.edu. Like a plane crash survivor or a gun shot vicitim, I feel like I have a second chance at life.  This email account might just be my second chance at college. Maybe one day I open that RE: Blogging Seminar Rescheduled to Thursday nights, email and go right on ahead and enroll. Maybe this time around I will get something more out of college than an email account.  

 

heartshaped stumblings.

Well, I am back.

You can remove my face from milk cartons and those little black and white cards that flap in the wind on bulletin boards outside post offices. And until the next time that my real job swallows me whole and spits me out into a raggedy, caffeine-soaked, LCD-burned quivering mess that requires 5 days of non-stop sleep and devouring Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches to fix, I am newly dedicated to filling your minds with unnecessary items to purchase, eat and also to write about stuff that bothers me, which is most things.
To celebrate my triumphant return, here are some things I am happy about:

Summer Fridays. My company is one of the kind few who believes that pretending we will be allowed to take every other Friday off to “work from home” is a benefit! I won’t argue though, because I consider these an inalienable right, and am determined to spend every other Friday from here to Labor Day planted firmly in the sun, be it outside my apartment in sweatpants with laptop, or in a boat off the coast of Cape Cod. That’s it. Embrace the jealousy. (You can rub this back in my face when I spend the vast majority of them right here in my florescent box).

Sigg Water Bottle Crisis Solved. I was at EMS the other day and broke down and bought one of these Sigg water bottles.

They only had the most HIDEOUS one ever.

I convinced myself it would be okay and drew on it with a Sharpie until it was somehow worse than before.

Four days later, I bought a TOTALLY ADORABLE one at the gift shop of the gym. This isn’t it, but I couldn’t find one that looked like it, and I thought this one was also very adorable. Just not as adorable as mine. I will now give my old one to the boyfriend, Kingston, who will be forced to cart it to work with him under the guise that I care about his hydration and am not merely trying to assuage my consumer guilt.

LOST Finale! Oh my gosh. I don’t even have words to describe my excitement. It’s sort of like Christmas and your birthday rolled into one, with the excitement and sense of the imminent receipt of great gifts, followed by emotional crash at the long summer months Lost-less.

“But, Harlow,” you say, “unlike Christmas and your birthday, you will not have any gifts when LOST is over.”

Well you would be right. Unless you count two blown retinas from watching so much awesomeness and a whole pile of sweet, sweet knowledge as gifts, which, obviously, I do.

That’s all for now.

 

JCrew Final Sale Sneak Attack.

So many posts about JCrew lately. It can’t be helped, they are very newsworthy.

I am sure JCrew devotees know about the latest online sale strategy–the Final Sale. Now at first the Final Sale phenomenon was a fleeting, occasional deal. Once in a while, JCrew would take their sweet markdowns and mark them down EVEN more on one condition. You buy this item without trying it on and its yours–no exchanges, no returns. NOW the sale is 24/7 Final Sale, no relief.  I swear this has become a new form of gambling. You would wait and wait to see if the price of your fave sale item would drop without getting sold out, then when you saw it go FINAL SALE you would wonder–can I fit into this FOR SURE. Am I CERTAIN this color isn’t ugly? Sometimes for $19.99 you are willing to risk it. Sometimes JCrew would even double down with additional incentives–20% off final sale. Why, that item is like $17.234576 now! WHAT a deal! And your gambling trigger finger would click “Checkout”, only to have your wide-leg cords in “Deep Surf” arrive and look more like “Syracuse-purpley-blue”.

In-store sales are a totally different game. They are straight up pricing, racks of stuff to try on–of course not everything is there but, what you see is what you get. Imagine my delight when the very blue Joelle blouse loved by Harlow was at my local JCrew, in my size, AND all sale items were extra 25% off! I had TOTALLY avoided the Final Sale online gambling debt!

So I thought. When I got to the register, the chipper salesgirl informed me that since it was an extra 25% off, it was Final Sale. WTF?! Sneak ATTACK! Now, online I would slink away and leave my shopping bag open for days due to my compulsive returning. But what can I do in person? I interrogated the sales girl about why the Final Sale exists. Her reply–cause they are such great prices, they want to clear merchandise.

That doesn’t help my Syracuse pants, girl.

 

Cancerous Water Bottle Snobs/Smokers: a follow-up rant.

As a follow-up to Shiloh’s Water Snob post, here’s something I would like to break down for some of the employees in my building:

May or May Not give you cancer over an extended period of time.

Will most likely give you cancer and a long, painful death.

I fail to understand how people who spend so much time forwarding cancer propaganda emails and preaching to me as I swig from my bottle of Hidden Spring Vermont Spring Water that I stole from the leftover treats in a conference room, can then skip outside and take a quick cig break by the handicapped entrance.

Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

p.s. Earlier this week I was starting to resign myself to the fact that I am going to have to get one of these water bottles.

Being a hypochondriac (and non-smoker) I have a heavy, guilty, time-consuming fear of cancer. And I can’t bring my Crate and Barrel Bedside Carafe (AWESOMEST THING EVER!) to the gym. The adorably sized juice glass would rattle around in the cupholder. DUH. So I asked Shiloh what I should do and here was her wise response:

Umm do you really need this? Wouldn’t you rather just have a nice new Jcrew cardigan and cancer than this strange bike messenger type water bottle?!

Plus don’t you want to have cancer with the rest of us? I mean when we all have it…you are going to want to have it too!

So if I do get one, please don’t think I’m a water snob. I’ll just have to find another way to get cancer, that’s all.

 

random wondering of the day.

How much sushi does one have to eat to develop mercury poisoning?

I felt it was time for a new source of anxiety for my hypochondria. So I did a little research which included reading various news articles by questionable sources and agreeing only with the ones that said it was okay to eat as much sushi as you want.

This made me feel a lot better:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows little restraint in its use of inflated statistics regarding a false dynamic between eating fish and developing, say, cancer or various neurological disorders. In fact, the numbers used by the EPA are so fraught with overkill that, notwithstanding some glutton with an uncontrollable appetite for fish, there is no conceivable way one would die from having consumed sushi or cooked seafood that contained trace amounts of mercury.

Yay! Now I’ll be happily on my way to grab some salmon avocado rolls to-go!

 

Facebook Force-Feed.

Facebook, you are amazing.  We all know this.  The stalking possibilities are endless. Suddenly I have the ability to know what someone I went to high school dresses their child in.  I know people are fans of Wawa.  I know they are having a bad day.  I know that their favorite quote is so stupid that it should not be put on the internet.  I know they frequent websites where they can download images of cats doing stupid sh*t (please tell me why do these exist).  You are a crucial weapon in the daily battle of procrastination.  I applaud you, Facebook.

However,  you are constantly coming up with ridiculous ploys to waste more time on the site.  Its incredible, really.  I don’t want to know what SATC character I am (see Shiloh’s earlier post), I don’t want to Superhug someone, I don’t need to see what Videos someone loves.

However, your latest invention is the best of all.  Starting this week, I noticed that my News Feed page now includes a little column called “People You May Know.” Umm Facebook.  These people fall into 3 categories:

People I do not know and do not want to know.
People I know of but would NEVER. FREAKING. FRIEND.
People I know, decide to “Friend”, and who will wonder wtf I am friending them.

As you can see, all of these situations are extremely awkward.  There is a reason I am not friends with these people already. CLEARLY.  Why are you doing this Facebook?  Do you want some random person that once ignored me on campus to get a Friend Request from me?  Do you want me to meet people I hate? Do you want me to feel that heinous awkward cringe as I hit “Submit Friend Request”?

I hope you don’t want these things, Facebook.  I love you but I hope you want the best for me.

 

Dumptown Crossing.

Dear Boston,

What’s the deal with Downtown Crossing. I meeeean, i understand the history of this old “department store district” and that is cool. But now it looks like the park threw up after a night of drinking. Are you going for a Yin and Yang feeling Beacon Hill on one side, Downtown Crossing on the other?

A Scenario: I am a tourist. I just flew into Logan and excited to see the city. I look at the T map and think, Hmm where to stop? State Street? No. Government Center? No. Charles MGH? NO. Downtown Crossing? Sounds Great! I lug my bags onto the bus that takes me to the silver line where I struggle on to the red line. What do I get when I pop out from the underground? This??? A ratastic CVS an old Macy’s and a HUGE empty building. This Is Downtown Crossing??? I would turn around and go home. All the way back. to Russia.

Can we risk that type of word of mouth about our city!? These tourist are going to go home to Russia and tell all their comrades that Boston is a dump. We are in real trouble here.

Sincerely,

Shiloh

 

heart shaped clarifications.

Since the whole point of this blog is to share things that are awesome (so everyone gets to try them) and things that are not awesome (so we can avoid them), I thought I’d share some things that I do not find awesome.

Some things that are not awesome are the phrases and misspellings I consistently come across at work. Let’s explore.

Misspellings.
Everyone misspells things. I know this. I misspell things too. A lot! Spell Check is mean, and it has turned our natural spelling instinct off, so we would type “teh” all day if it did not auto-correct for us. However, I find these two examples to be the hardest words for people to spell correctly in my day-to-day email life.

1. It’s: Ridiculous

It’s NOT: “Rediculous.” As in, “It’s ridiculous that you think the word “ridiculous” has an ‘e’ in it.”

There is no “E” in “Ridiculous!”

2. Definite and Definitely.

I see ‘definitely’ consistently misspelled to have a random “a” or “e” in it: definately, definetely. The word “finite” is right in the middle. Maybe just type “finite” and then stack the other letters around it? Just trying to be helpful.

If you are in need of further clarification, there’s an entire website dedicated to this particular issue: http://www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com/

Phrase Misuse and Overuse.
This hatred stems back to the Belligerent Plague. This illness hit my alma mater during college. It became a way to describe how drunk you were last night. “I got belligerent last night!” Did you? Were you “belonging to or recognized as a state at war?” No? Did you become “inclined to or exhibit assertiveness, hostility, or combativeness?” If so, maybe you were an angry, combative drunk, in which case you were perhaps belligerent. If not, you weren’t belligerent. You were just drunk. Unless, of course, there is another definition for “belligerent,” where it means “I wore madras pants, bought shots on my platinum AmEx, danced with my arms up, ordered Domino’s, threw up, and passed out on someone’s couch.” If so, my b.

1. “We have a call in.”

If I call you with a question, and you don’t get back to me, and then I call again later to check up on it, just say: “I called the client, but I haven’t heard back.” Or, tell me the truth and say you haven’t done anything. That’s fine.

But unless you are calling NASA, or you’re a member of the CIA contacting another covert agency, please don’t say “we have a call in.” It makes you look pathetic and that makes me sad.

2. “Circle back.”

This came out of nowhere and took over like a foreign species destroying a fragile ecosystem. Just do not say this. Say, “I’ll talk to her.” Or, “we’ll regroup in a week.” I really can’t talk about this anymore, it’s making me too upset. Please just do not say it.