A Surprising Pop of Positivity

If you read even semi-regularly, you know that we’re not the sunniest people in the entire world. You could generously assume that our devastating humor comes from a dark place, it’s a coping mechanism as we deal with our deep seated issues in a decently productive way. You could more realistically assume that we’re just pretty fucking jaded for twenty somethings, and blame it on our upbringing/the state of the economy/our codependent relationship. Pick your (our?) poison! Regardless of the reason, it’s true that we’re not often brimming with optimism and love for our fellow man. But it can be exhausting spending so much time wishing people were better, you know? And we sleep the troubled sleep of the hopeful, despite our insistence that we’ve thrown in the towel on Everyone Ever.

So here we are, two desperately underemployed and underutilized young adults stuck in a place that prohibits us from starting our Adult Lives and Careers and Establishing Independence and things like that. You know your life is fucked up when your greatest joy in a week is that the token Self Righteous Christian from high school got knocked up by a dude whose “job” is online poker. So we’re changing shit up. We’re moving away and starting new things, and we plan to worry about paying rent instead of when we’re going to get out of this dead end situation. It’s nice to focus on whether we should put on ten pounds as a buffer for the poverty diet we’re about to endure, or if we should just let said diet run its course, leaving us looking like city waifs instead of tourists.

So, in the spirit of new things and sharing personal shit with you, dear reader, today we’re going to send you things that make us happy. Things that pull us out of the depths of despair, or just make us chuckle. Use them wisely! (That means frequently and with vigor). And don’t get used to this happy tone! We’ll be back with snark on snark on snark on Friday. Probably.

The Sound of Music

If you hate this movie, you are a Nazi. That is all. “I hate musicals, it’s so long, blah blah blah” NO. This entire film is a work of art, Julie Andrews is a force of nature, you’re a fool. The dialogue! Her voice! That part where the Captain gets all choked up singing “Edelweiss” before they flee “ALL the way to SWITZERLAND?!”? It makes us happy from start to finish, even the sad parts. Watch it when you’re doing just fine, watch it when you’re melancholy, watch it when your life is in upheaval. And enjoy that goddamn goat puppet show like the child you are.

Anya probably spent her lifetime allotment of her mother’s patience listening to this song on repeat.

“If I fits, I sits”

The more we see, the funnier it gets.

Somewhere along the way, this phrase got lodged into our vernacular. Not typically purveyors of the millions of cat pictures and videos on the internet, Anya literally woke up one day and had this dumb phrase stuck in her head. Now, every time we need a completely out of context giggle, it sends us into hysteria, no pics needed. No explanation for this one, folks, but we hope it works for you too.

British accents

"I'm just like any other regular mum."

If you haven’t figured it out by now, we may or may not be extreme Anglophiles. What began as a childhood obsession with Julie Andrews (see above), has grown and expanded into an enchantment for all things British, beginning and ending with those glorious accents. We love every damn ridiculous one of them, from prim and proper Lady Mary to scruffy little Eliza Doolittle and all the absurd Gwyneth and Madonnas in between.

Watermelon

The Fruit Demon of Deliciousness

Honesty time: Anya is a frequent puker. And a marathon puker. Some would consider vomiting a desirable way to deal with stress (better than eating your way through like six cookies and a Taco Bell meal in twenty minutes), but it’s not GREAT. And the only food that she kept down after a particularly nasty fight with the Stress Demon of Upchuck was...you guessed it, watermelon. Yes, watermelon has gotten us through some dark days...and you thought this one was going to be a paragraph extolling the vodka soaked virtues of a watermelon keg on a summer’s day, didn’t you? Sorry, not sorry.

Puppies (particularly of the corgi variety)

ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THAT FACE, CORGI?

Goddamnit. Look at that thing. You can just imagine how long we spent scouring the internet for a pic of a Corgi puppy. “Wait, there’s a couch full!” “That one is SLEEPING!” “Look at this costume!” “HE’S WINKING” etc. etc. etc. When we see one in real life, we become dangerous. Like knees giving out, pray to god neither of us are driving, dangerous. See Anglophilia above, for a partial explanation.

Witty puns

“You're an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top, and careful, Cherry, 'cause I'm the king of pop.”

None of the entries on this list (except for perhaps the watermelon one) should come as much of a surprise to you, this one being no exception. We always appreciate a well-placed pun and perfectly executed one has the ability to knock us out of commission for an entire afternoon (See: “NUNAVUT” tweet). Admittedly, you could make the argument that this is almost always a self-congratulating circlejerk of us laughing hysterically at each other (or to each other at ourselves), but... can you really blame us?

Sunshooooine

We all have seasonal depression (we, the denizens of Not Florida or California), and a bright day cheers us right up. Sure, they’re not made to order, and sure, we have a fifteen to twenty degree difference in temperature preference, but that Vitamin D really does do wonders for our mood. Plus, WAY more corgis outside in the sunshine. Plus it’s watermelon season, plus we can do our over the top Spike and Dru British accents. Really tying it all together here!

U Mad, Bro? A Compilation of the Most Ridiculous Things That Inspire Anonymous Internet Fury

Alternatively titled “We Don’t Comment and Neither Should You” or “Facebooking Lawyering: Never A Good Idea” (See “The Sequel: Facebook Evangelizing, Even Worse”)

Unless you look like this.

First of all, don’t you think we should be in charge of writing titles for theses? Just take a quick pass through our Archives and tell us we wouldn’t be great at that. Unfortunately, this is a relatively recent skill, and we’ve turned in more papers than we’d like to admit with just “Title” typed in at the top, waiting for a burst of creativity that never came. How sad. However, let’s turn from the emotional problems of our academic past, and focus instead on the topic of today’s article: things people get really goddamn upset about on the internet that they wouldn’t dream of touching in person.

What’s that you say? “But Anya, Paul, isn’t that list absolutely endless? Isn’t the anonymity of the internet almost wholly responsible for the slow decay of modern society? Haven’t we all agreed that that’s how the kids these days are bullying each other?” Yes, sure, the internet is a double edged sword, the one ring to rule them all, with great power comes great responsibility. But we’re not here to tackle those kind of topics. Those literally are thesis material (holla Master’s students! We’re here if you need us, drop us a line if you need a title, or want this one), and we’re more the sort to make mocking lists.

Per usual, our realm of expertise is specific.

As people who spend a fair amount of time online (like WAY too much), we’re pretty experienced in the ways of online forums/comments sections/etc. As people who exist, we’re totally guilty of confirmation bias, in that we seek out articles and sites and discussions that support our beliefs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our strongest beliefs are centered squarely on some of the most controversial issues, which means a guaranteed load of bullshit by the time we get to the comments section. YAY.

Things like women’s rights, abortion, gay marriage, and whether or not we should care about the Royal Baby are things we expect to be hot button issues, with vitriolic fights between the right and the correct. You can visit any page that so much as mentions these issues, and read a series of tired arguments and quickly devolves into name calling. In fact, like fights with our parents, we might as well not even have them anymore, since we’re freakishly good and predicting exactly how the conversation will go, down to the turns of phrase.

“And then she’s going to make passive aggressive comments about your life decisions.”

But there are other, stranger forces at work here. There are things on the internet that make people into monsters, tear relationships asunder, turn perfectly normal (?) people into vicious trolls the likes of which the undersides of bridges have never seen. Why people choose to be so personally offended about things that are so obviously none of their business is really surprising to us...haha but really. If you’ve read much of this blog at all, you’ll have noticed that we’re pretty sassy and pretty hard on the general public. We just so badly want to everyone to get it together and be decent to each other! And no matter how snarky we seem when we’re taking out our fury on our poor little keyboards, we assure you that we are actually very pleasant in person. Sure, we have our fair share of anonymous internet fury, but we’re not directing it at specific people, demanding their ritual sacrifice for having naturally blonde hair or following the paleo diet.

But we would totes turn some of them into rats.

We’re not firing off emails to our legislators full of incomprehensible punctuation and a very evident lack of research on the topic at hand. We’re not leaving nasty reviews on Yelp because we don’t understand basic veterinary medicine (holla at the lady who was mad that she spent money on antibiotics and her kitten got better so she “obviously didn’t need them”!) or restaurant etiquette (holla at the guy who had passive aggressive fights with a three year old and seated himself next to us at breakfast last weekend!). As much as humankind tends to drive us crazy, we do operate under the premise “innocent until proven guilty and then also benefit of the doubt in case you’re having an especially bad day”.

Here are the things we have found that the denizens of the internet cannot read about without instantly turning into dickheads of epic proportions:

1) Vegetarianism (or Vegans, or really any kind of specific diet)

If we have to read “PETA = People Eating Tasty Animals” or the pseudo science of why meat protein is actually essential to our diets one more time, it will be just another day. Or how STUPID the Paleo diet is because OUR ANCESTORS ACTUALLY ATE X,Y,Z AND EVOLUTION GUYZ”. On the flip side “I will be laughing as all of you meat eaters die horrific deaths from heart attacks and cancer because I will never get sick or go to tell because of my respect for LYFE”. Stop the diet shaming! At least on the internet.

You’re all this guy.

We’re sorry everyone is so goddamn annoying, but shut.the.fuck.up. Eat what you’re going to eat, don’t eat what you’re not, and stop making everyone’s life decisions about you. WHY DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE PUTTING INTO THEIR BODIES? Literally we could not give two shits about strangers using heroin, why would we get on their dicks about carbs?

2) Talking during movies

Yes, we shit you not, the number of casual death threats over talking during movies is actually astronomical. Anya is a movie talker, and will never stop doing that. Her inability to stay silent during movies is something everyone around her has to either enjoy or put up with. HOWEVER, she would never do that shit in a movie theater unless it was empty or full of people that were being so inconsiderate that her “movie talking” morphs into “Can you honestly please shut the fuck up?” to the teenagers behind her. No one likes a loudmouth at the movies, let alone the cell phone answerers, the shriekers, and the children crying. Does that mean we have to summarily execute these people? No. Calm the fuck down and just get management to throw them out the movie.

Unless it’s this hot mess, then loud scoffing is allowed.

(To be fair, this type of inconsiderate behavior is often not an isolated trait, and if these people are just generally breaking the unspoken social contract, we support execution).

3) Breast feeding in public/any type of parenting shit

“If you’re not a mother you CAN’T POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND” “I give no shits about your feelings, this is a NATURAL PROCESS OF FOODZ FOR MY BAAAAABY”, etc. Unfortunately, the Great Kate Wait has given rise to the number of articles about our least favorite thing: children. Doubly unfortunate: the mommy bloggers are out in force, reading these articles and showing their “tiger stripes” or “mama bear instincts” by being incredibly judgmental and shitty to everyone who is not a parent/wants to go out to eat in a child free environment once in a goddamn while. Let us just say, they are setting a terrific example for the next generation of entitled, self obsessed, the entire world must bow down before my very specific preferences assholes they’re raising. THANKS.

We know this list could be endless...what ridiculous shit have you seen on the internet that made you go “really?”?

[Fake Kate Photo by Alison Jackson]

Weird Shit You Googled to Get to Our Blog

Okay, guys. We’re glad that you found our special little corner of the internet. Like, it’s great. We’re glad that you’re here. But some of you Googled some pretty goddamn bizarre shit to get to us, from ‘LOL wut?’ to ‘WHAT THE FUCK!?’. Perhaps we shouldn’t judge too harshly, with our own lurid history with the Google search engine, and, to be fair, some of these searches are quotes from Minds Melding... but let’s get real, we’re judging the fuck outta you. We hope you enjoy a secret look into the life of our people and your peers.

“bad behavior of queen's corgis”

So. Naughty.

“fertility vase of the ndebele tribe”

“libertarians being called domestic terrorists”

“is stannis a hero” (The answer is no.)

“stannis submissive in bed”

Probably not.

“did joffrey baratheon feel guilt?” (The answer is also no.)

“still sleeping with his wife” (Who?? Mysteries abound.)

“daenerys targaryen boobs gif”

“daenerys boobs all”

“daenerys second sons naked”

“game of thrones dragon queen titts”

“daenerys targaryen tit”

“daenerys targaryen tits gif”

No tits here, guys!

“would stannis ever marry daenerys” (hmm...again no.)

“motherfuckings joffrey baratheon”

“joffrey needs his ass kicked”

“robb stark puppy” (awwwwww *sniffle*)

“joan mad men iron throne”

Can you imagine?

“some elderly negro woman”

“bob benson ‘are you a homo?’”

"ted's infatuation"

“did betty draper really gain weight?”

Do you mean January Jones? Ha, please!

"much older woman"

We close with the largest source of hits from Google searches to our blog:

“trust no one”

Time Thieves

Is nothing sacred to you people!?

We are now going to turn to something of a serious subject, at least something that is bound to get us seriously testy.  We will admit that we’re not spending every second of every day working as hard as we possibly can. Sorry, that’s what happens when you pay someone weaksauce wages to do a full time job functions with no benefits. We take our full lunch hours. Sue us. The thing is, while we aren’t taking required breaks, we’re doing our job. All the time. You know, forty hours a week, like you’re supposed to when you have a goddamn job. If you think we’re bitter about our underemployment in a vacuum, you might be shocked at the depths of days-old office-coffee bitterness we’re about to reach given what everyone else in the office is up to. Strap in.

Here’s the thing:  Contrary to what you might believe from our online personas (and the above statement), we’re excellent employees.  If you’ve read any of our Overheard in Office pieces, you might realize that we don’t actually have to put that much effort to truly shine here.  We also have the joy (luck? poorly-paid pleasure?) of being at the bottom of the totem pole at our organization and because of our relative unimportance, we’re able to remain a kind of a neutral unit and keep ourselves out of most of the dirty departmental office politics.

Office politics!?  Blech.

Being unimportant also has its disadvantages beyond the pathetic pay grade. Because we have no real say in anything that actually matters at work, we’re often sucked into every uncomfortable, lengthy, and bullshit filled conversation that our “superiors” don’t want to share with their actual co-workers. They think they can interrupt our work because we’re twenty years younger and can’t say no. It’s a really healthy dynamic, obviously.

Welcome to the complex world of Time Thieves.

Another hour of my life wasted chatting about dead relatives. Great.

The thing about Time Thieves is that they’re not all bad.  Some of them are actually great, in terms of both person and timing. When we’re stuck at our desks waiting for those last excruciating twenty minutes to pass until lunch, when we’re waiting for our attachments to load at 3pm and we need a distraction from our Junior Mints craving, we welcome a weird chat with a weird co-worker. “Fodder for the blog!” we say to ourselves, open up the Overheard in the Office Google doc, and settle in to take some notes. For you, our readers, we will sit through the umpteenth retelling of No Boundaries’ sorry tales of love lost, friendships with flavor, and craft shows. We will nod silently as Troubled Temp details her medical woes. We will smile through gritted teeth as That Guy talks about his children.

But. BUT.

God help those Time Thieves when they are stealing OUR time instead of company time.  When we’re about to take our daily lunch walk (to maintain both our figures and a healthy distance from the building while we rampantly talk shit), do NOT stop us three feet from escape into the fresh air to ask about our weekends (and by ask about our weekends, we mean ask us about our weekends solely for the purpose of creating an opening for yourself to blabber on about yours). While we’re on afternoon break, we’re not available to help you figure out something you should have been able to do for the last decade (lookin’ at you, Microsoft Office). And for all that is good in this world (puppies), don’t be the fucking asshole that wants to chat until 5:20pm because you got in late and have to stay late.

All/Only thing that’s good in this world.

WE WORK FOR AN HOURLY WAGE, SIR. WE STOPPED GETTING PAID TO LISTEN TO YOUR BULLSHIT TWENTY MINUTES AGO. But how can we escape when we’re trapped in a cubicle, door blocked by a neverending stream of shit talking? Not to mention the fact that it’s almost always this awful mixture of inane chattery, shit talking about management, and thinly-veiled intolerance (context: the perpetrator whose long-winded conversations led to the invention of time thievery terminology is known to blast Rush Limbaugh from his office).  If we’re really unlucky, there’s a dash of sexual harassment on the side. Or should we say the cherry on top. Wink. (We put you through that because it’s an example of the caliber of cleverness involved in said harassment.)

Time Thieves: Check yo selves. Make your idle chatter and involve us in your Game of Thrones level subterfuge while we’re on the clock, not while we’re clearly trying to cherish the few minutes each day we desperately need to help us decompress after our last interaction with you.

Thanx.

HMS Corgi

Full disclosure: we have regular conversations about the Queen and her corgis. The Quorgis if you will. And by regular, we don’t mean normal conversations that would arise betwixt normal people if, say, one of them makes news by producing Dorgis with Princess Margaret’s daschund, or upstaging Daniel Craig (RIP Monty). Nay, by regular we mean that at least twice a week, a discussion will come back to the Quorgis.

For example, despite the fact that we work in a public building full of notoriously nosey coworkers, and amidst a very opinionated sector of the public, Paul’s computer wallpaper is a stately photo of the Queen in her younger years, walking through a garden with her pups. Classic, black and white, fairly treasonous in our part of the country. We recreated Living Room
Bed  (more on this later) to stay up and watch the Royal Wedding in style, and speculated about which, if any, or the corgis would be invited. Would the Queen throw her weight around and sneak a furry companion into the reception? (Yes, but we’d never know)  Would those bastard Dorgis be allowed in or even near Westminster? (Ha! Never.) Would Will and Kate receive a puppy from the royal line as a wedding gift? (They don’t deserve it.) Could there be a better gift?! ( No!) Would we rather have an invite to the wedding or a corgi puppy from the Queen? (Ha. Ha.) Questions that quite literally kept us up that night.

So when we got to work last week, Paul and I fell immediately into deep discussion of all things royal, and naturally the herd of adorable that follows HRH Queen Elizabeth around.

I know those Dorgis were an unplanned pregnancy, but goddamn they’re a hybrid made in heaven

The conversation quickly went in the direction of absurd (shocking?), but in the midst of the absurdity arose my *genius* theory about the Queen and her pack. I’m pretty convinced that the Queen probably has a Corgi for every member of the Royal Family, and she spends time with them instead of hanging out with her actual relatives. Believe me, that sounds like paradise from where I’m sitting. I imagine she has a mischievous little gingery one that she always has to scold for taking off his collar and running around the gardens naked. Probably a really thin delicate Dorgi with long, silky brown hair about whose fertility she was deeply concerned. One that was once the most handsome of all, but is now losing hair in weird patches, but is somehow still the best bet for leader of the pack. A pair that kind of look alike, with giant ears and woebegone faces that she basically ignores. Then again, there probably isn’t a Camilla corgi at all, ouch.

Of course I can’t just leave it at that, so then I starting wondering if the other royals know about their Quorgi counterparts, or if she maybe has some sort of voodoo magic involved so she can fatten Kate up by feeding Dorgi Kate, or if Harry gets an earful thousands of miles away when she yells at the gingery pup. Do they have special protection? Do they live in the Corgi Room? Does she dress them up for holidays in a color scheme that is echoed by the actual Royal Family? Which one mauled Princess Beatrice’s dog?

Will and Kate? Nah.

I also think it’s fantastic that they are reportedly completely awful, spoiled creatures and everyone hates them except her, but people are too afraid to scold them for fear of her displeasure. As the owner of a couple of very unruly ferrets, I can totally get behind her attitude of “don’t touch them! they don’t like that!” snappiness combined with the expectation that everyone dotes on them the way she does. The Queen and I are basically twins. And I’m sure she would let a kindred soul hang out with her pack, right? Would totally move to England to be the royal Quorgi caretaker, and provoke the ire of every single other employee by doting over these monsters as much as she does.

I obviously need to purchase this as part of my uniform.

I’m going to give her a break for not reining them in, since it’s really the only way the woman is ever allowed to be even borderline rude to people. If I had to be perfectly composed all of the time, I would love to live vicariously through my pack of dogs and their bad behavior.

For more check out this glorious corgi slideshow.

-Anya

[Photo Credit: David Dyson, Camera Press / Redux]