Completely fucking terrified

For almost a week now I've been teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

I have no idea why I'm so scared of doctors, dentists, and hospitals. Really, no idea. There was no unfortunate hospital-related explosion in my childhood. I wasn't kidnapped by a mad doctor who wanted to turn me into a super soldier so that I could one day fight in the imminent zombie uprising. Okay, so that last one wouldn't have been that bad. Actually it would have been pretty fucking awesome. My point is that there wasn't even one teeny tiny little marginally traumatic event that might have caused this insane level of fear.

The machines make me nervous, the sterile smell makes me sick, all that goddamn fucking white looks like a nineties movie version of heaven and reminds you that this is where people come to die, and all the so-called professionals look like sociopathic serial killers who are just barely containing their homicidal urges so why the fuck are we giving these people drills and scalpels?

When I was a little kid my parents took me to the dentist and I was so overcome with fear that I kicked and screamed bloody murder until they had to force one of those mask things on me to knock me out. My mother recently told me it was so bad that the nurses thought my parents abused me.

You can probably guess that I haven't been to the dentist since then. For years my mother has been nagging me to go have my teeth cleaned, especially since I started smoking regularly. After several bribes I finally gave in about a week ago, and even then I almost had to be dragged into the car.

The only reason I even agreed to go in the first place was because I was placated by assurances of what a "simple, easy, and painless" procedure it would be. Just a quick clean. Ha! Famous last words.

The dentist put me in something resembling a lunar module and after some deliberation about whether keeping my piercings in would give me cancer or not, and several X-rays later, I was informed that there were eight holes to fill in and four wisdom teeth to pull. Apparently the easiest way to do all this would be to knock me out for three hours and finish it all in one go. The dentist and I clearly disagree on the definition of "easiest".  And it has to be done within the next two weeks because the dentist wants to get in a nice long torture session before going away for the christmas holidays.

Yeah. I can't even begin to tell y'all how fucking terrified I am. And don't even try to tell me that it's not that it's not a big deal, because I have seen way too many movies where someone's soul escapes from their body while they're unconscious and an evil soul rushes in and takes over their life and nobody ever notices and then their real soul is stuck in limbo forever and it's all because some asshole told them going to the dentist wouldn't be a big deal.

Song of the Week: "Hey Ho" by Gin Wigmore

Confession time: I'm kind of a James Bond fan.

Don't look at me like that. My grandfather loved James Bond, and I used to watch the 007 marathons with him whenever they played on television. The point is that I've been keeping an eye on all the Bond-related activity recently, including the Heineken/Skyfall deal and the resulting ad.

You know the one. An ordinary Joe gets mistaken for 007 and chased through a train. My attention, however, was not caught by the icy gaze of Daniel Craig or the epic beard on the guy playing cards (who for some reason is exactly what I imagine Russian Santa Claus looks like). Nope. I couldn't stop thinking about how much I dig that song.

So I took to the trusty interwebs and discovered a lovely lady called Gin Wigmore:

Tattooed flapper chick? I'll bite. I checked out some more things and that's when I came across this piece of fucking awesomeness:

I don't know why I love this so much, but I do.

In completely unrelated news, my exams are finally over. Actually I finished a few days ago, but I've been spending those days doing absolutely fucking nothing and refusing to feel guilty about it. Now that I have some time off, I'll be doing proper posts. You know, the ones that are actually funny? Remember those? I hope you do, 'cause I'm not sure I remember how to write them.


Allow me to fill this post with even more irrelevant crap. I need to thank you guys for being insanely fucking awesome. Your support with the Spoonfeedas thing was great. It's like we're a small cyber army. We should all get cyber uniforms. Something different, but the same, you know?



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UPDATE:
A few minutes ago I found this beauty:



I don't like this video as much as the previous one, but I think I like the song more.

Snail Reloaded: The Return of FrankenSnail

You guys remember Snail? If you don't, you might want to go read that post first.

See how I ended that post telling everyone not to step on any snails? Well, I'm a hypocrite, because that's exactly what I did.

Let me explain. Snail was missing for days, so I kind of assumed that he wasn't going to show up again, and the very fucking night I stopped leaving the light on in the entryway was the night I stepped on him. Grossed out and guilty were fighting for the position of Dominant Emotion, and I fled down the corridor and woke up my grandmother to take him away. She told me that he was still alive, but I thought she was just saying that to make me feel better, and for the next two days I felt completely horrible.

So imagine my surprise when he fucking showed up again, having taken just two days to recover from the Snailish equivalent of a moving mounting squashing him. It turns out that I had only stepped on the very end of his body (his tail?), and when I was done celebrating his return I thought about it for a second and figured it made total sense that he was back, because people are always making creams out of snail gel because of its regenerative properties, right? So Snail regenerated. He's a fucking superhero. I call him FrankenSnail now.

Anyway, my happy vibes woke up my grandmother (or maybe it was me yelling at her), and she put some breadcrumbs right next to FrankenSnail and he actually ate them. It took him like an hour to eat two crumbs and then he was full, and I think we can all identify with that because how filling are breadcrumbs? So filling. Since we're giving him food now I think its safe to say he's officially a pet.

I wanted to take a photo of him as evidence, but he hasn't shown up in a while. I assume he's just out being a badass, probably being chased by chased by angry snail villagers with tiny little snail torches and ants as bloodhounds because his family thought he was dead and when he showed up on their leaf they were all "OMG. BURN THE ABOMINATION!" 

Or maybe he's just taking a few days off to digest all those breadcrumbs. I know I would.   

Song of the week: "Attack of the Hadedas (Fear)" by Spoonfeedas (UPDATED)

Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night, turned on the television, and found this:

The moment I heard "Damn birds" I knew it would be an Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds thing, and I kind of fell in love.

If you've ever seen the film, you'll notice how uncannily accurate the low-tech special effects in the music video are. Also, notice how you get the feeling that the band really likes films like The Birds? Well done to them for poking fun at something in such a good-natured way.

Of course, Mr. Hitchcock had a pretty decent sense of humor himself:

You're welcome. Back to business:

I realize that this is more a Music Video of the Week than a Song of the Week. Of course, I like the song, too. But the music video kicks ass. And I get the feeling that the band knows how insanely awesome their video is. Notice how the music sounds more like a soundtrack in some places, and you can still hear the car door close and the cellphone and such. It's like they looked at their music video and went, "This is awesome. This is REALLY awesome. WE ARE AWESOME. In fact, we're going to have the song play in the background because we're so awesome that we don't even need to sell people on how awesome we are. Our awesomeness sells itself." 

And it did, Spoonfeedas. It did. 

*Here's a link to their website.


UPDATE:  So last night Peter Guthrie of Spoonfeedas (the blonde guy in the video) spoke to me on Facebook. He thanked me for the review and offered to send me free songs and generally exhibited supreme awesomeness. I offered my help in rallying the troops to show support for Attack of the Hadedas, so if y'all want to help out, here's what you can do:

-Email a guy called Stephan. But not, like, any random Stephan. A specific one. Namely Stephan Potgieter. He's from a television station called MK. Just tell him how much you dig the video. Maybe if he gets enough emails they'll play it more. Here's the address: Stephan.Potgieter@mnet.co.za

-Go 'like' their tragically ill-populated Facebook page :http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spoonfeedas/130306230396044
If you do that, say hi, and tell them Misha introduced you to them, just so they know I keep my promises and always deliver the goods (I'm like a one-person mob).

So go forth and be awesome, minions. Go forth and be awesome.

My vampire snail went missing on Halloween. Coincidence? I think not.

I have a pet snail! How awesome is that?

I mean, it’s not like a real pet. Like, I don’t have a leash for it or anything. Maybe I should explain.

So this snail has been coming into our house for weeks. It only ever comes in around midnight and it always leaves before dawn, which leads me to believe it might be a vampire snail. Either that or it just has a really accurate little snail-watch. Also, it never leaves the two square meters of space immediately adjoining our front door. I kind of grew really attached to the punctual slime monster, and I had to keep telling people to watch their step at night and not to kill it, and then I started writing exams and everything went down smoothly, and naturally I assumed that the snail was good luck.

I named him Snail, because I was afraid that if I gave him a real name he would start feeling pressured to be a house-snail and be all domesticated and shit. But it seems that even Snail was too much, because last night while I was studying he never showed up. And I should know, because I stayed up all night and I kept checking.

I felt abandoned, and friendless, and was sure I was going to fail now that my good luck charm was gone.  But then my exam went even better than the exam for the first part of that module and I actually finished before the time was up, and then I got to thinking: Holy shit. All that time, was Snail actually holding me down? I felt betrayed.

And then I forgot all about the Snail debacle because I realized that IT’S HALLOWEEN. I haven’t slept much for the past week and shit’s been so hectic that I hadn’t even remembered the best holiday.

Let me say that again: THE. BEST. FUCKING. HOLIDAY.

For those of you who live in countries where trick-or-treating is a thing, have fun literally taking candy from strangers. I’ll be over here, catching up on lost sleep. Yeah, it’s obvious which one of us is getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop here. (Hint: it ain’t you).

So…

Happy Halloween motherfuckers! Have fun and don’t step on any snails.

Song of the Week

To celebrate the first edition of what I hope will become a regular fixture, I present a double whammy.

This is Die Antwoord. They kick ass.

(Warning: There's a gross part, so if you're not into that sort of thing...what are you doing here?)

Their visuals are fucking stunning. Seriously. Just look at this:

They're pretty fringe, and some folks really dislike them. I think they're hyper creative. The songs really grow on you, too. "Jump motherfucker, jump motherfucker, jump" has been stuck in my head all day. I almost started singing it with my grandmother in the room.

Note: They’re South African, so yay for common origins. The other language they use is Afrikaans.

Examination Procrastination Part 2: Cigarettes and Gunfights

So I still haven’t really buried my nose in the books. I have, however, spent some time making sure that I’m well prepared to enter the Examination Hall Of DOOOOOOOM. We have to present a bunch of identification documents and such to be admitted, and I’m usually very bad at remembering those things. And if I fail, I want to fail because my work was inadequate, and not because I didn’t even get the chance to be inadequate, damnit.

I was going through the examination guidelines and they were all pretty standard until I got to the rule that says that “Smoking is not allowed in the examination venue”. At first I was like “duh”, but then I kind of went “Bummer”, because if they hadn’t explicitly put that there I might have been able to light up if all those fucking essays started getting to me, and wouldn’t that be awesome? Then I started thinking about why exactly they felt it necessary to include that in the list. Had there been recent incidents of people getting up in the middle of an exam to take a smoke break? But then they were told that they weren’t allowed to leave the room until they were finished writing, and then they went like “Fine, then I’ll smoke in here”, and the supervisors went “You can’t do that”, and then the smoker said “Where does it say that?” and  the supervisors said “Uhm…now that you mention it, nowhere, really” and then the smoker didn’t say anything ‘cause he was too busy lighting up like fifty cigarettes and passing them out.

Then I realized that that was just wishful thinking and I got back to reading the rest of the rules.

And then, casually tacked on at the end, almost as if it were a mere afterthought, they inform us that oh yeah, by the way “Firearms are not allowed inside the examination venue”. And I got to thinking, why the fuck would somebody bring a gun into the exam hall? Were they going to hold the lecturers hostage until they gave them the right answers? Also, note that it’s just firearms that aren’t allowed. Other lethal weapons, however, are apparently fine. So I’ve decided that I’m going to rock up for my Theory of Literature exam with a bow and arrow and at least two swords.

My first exam is on Monday. I’m looking forward to writing in a smoke-filled room where a gunfight could break out at any second. Because this is South Africa, and if the room were quiet and peaceful we’d all probably be like “What the fuck? Where’s the noise and the violence and the pollution? I can’t concentrate under these strange circumstances!”

Examination Procrastination

I’m slowly finding out that studying from home calls for a level of self-discipline I’ve never had.

My very first tertiary-level exams start in four days. When I’m nervous about something, I tend to actively avoid thinking about it. So for the past two weeks I’ve pretty much been sitting in front of piles of closed books, staring into space and thinking about anything except Heart of Darkness and Russian Formalism. While this sort of behavior may not be promising on the academic front, I think I have done some serious introspection.

For instance, I’ve managed to figure out why Martha Stewart scares the shit out of me. It’s because she’s just too damn efficient, and it’s not fucking natural. I am convinced that some time in the future I’ll turn on my television and this will happen:

“…Today I we’ll be demonstrating my very own technique for DIY artificial insemination. Ladies, we’re gonna need a mirror for this one. Also, one to two vials of frozen sperm. Personally I like to keep at least a dozen vials stored in the back of the freezer, just in case. And ladies, remember to never keep your sperm for longer than twelve months!...”

And then the next day on the news:

 "In a surprising and rather bizarre piece of news, today a sperm bank was held up by two anxious women, one of which kept asking her victims, at gunpoint, if her balaclava made her look fat. An altercation ensued when one employee realized that the robber's "gun" was, in fact, a cleverly modified hairdryer...."

Great. Now instead of writing about Robert Frost I’ll be writing about frozen sperm. Won’t my lecturers be surprised.

Mildly Amusing Cartoons

I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. I’m not the best artist, but what I lack in talent I make up for…well, by admitting that I’m not that good. I also have a habit of drawing cartoons about things that I find funny and other people find mildly amusing at best. The reason I’m telling you this is because I have decided, against my better judgment and the advice of several loved ones, to set my cartoons free in cyberspace. 

Like the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon says: the trick to good self-esteem is to lower expectations to the point where they’re already met. So now that your expectations are sufficiently lowered, let’s commence with a tiny little roundup.

These first two are the start of a series. I’m planning to do a whole bunch of drawings about this middle-class father and son who are just plagued by all these biblical, seemingly holy things popping up in their everyday lives (Gettit? Biblical? Plagued? …Forget it).

Most of the time when I show this to someone I have to explain that a shrug is both something you do with your shoulders and a ladies sweater that opens down the front.

This last one was actually drawn for my mother, according to her specifications, so the idea really wasn’t mine. (My mother’s dieting exploits are a daily source of laughter at my house.)

This situation has actually occurred several times in real life.