edith zimmerman

Huge news: Last Friday I was at the bar with my coworkers and it got pretty crowded. At one point I looked over and there was this guy there, alone, and because there wasn’t any room to sit down he was standing, one foot up on an untapped keg and an elbow on his raised knee, reading a Chuck Klosterman book. He was also jauntily drinking a beer and wearing a newsboy cap. He stood like that for about an hour, just reading his book like everyone in the 1800s used to do everything, one leg up on a barrel. “See here, Lukey.”

I almost double majored in drawing, did you know? You can buy this drawing for $20.

You know how sometimes you have those dreams in which something vaguely normal but really depressing happens, like your dad died or an animal is going to come out your butt, and you feel really very seriously upset, and you wake up and it’s so amazing and such a gift that it was just a dream?

Last night I had two nightmares: the first one I was hiding on a roof in the middle of the night from the killer who was throwing frisbees with razors on their edges on me, and I had to crouch and put my hands over my neck so I wouldn’t get beheaded, but that was more of an adventure dream because it turned into a horror mystery movie at camp.

But the much scarier and more upsetting dream was one in which I was confined to my bed in Cambridge (where I grew up), but sometimes I would get up and stagger around my room, and the problem was that within the past week I had grown 10 inches, but in weird places like my forearms and my torso and my shins, so I looked like a spindly Tim Burton cartoon or a praying mantis, and all these doctors kept coming in and saying I was like a monster.

At one point I was looking up into the face of one of the doctors and I whispered to him, “But I’ve been 5′6″ for the past ten years,” and he looked down at me and said, “Not anymore.”

During another part I said, “Well at least I’m really skinny now, right?” And it was kind of a joke to make the mood a little lighter, but then one of the doctors shone a mirror on me and said, “No, you’ve actually become much fatter,” and it turns out he was right.

Gross title

No problem, click here to do something other than read the rest of this.

When I see a toilet seat that’s up because a male used the public restroom before me, it’s technically unnecessary to lower it because I’m not going to sit on it anyway. But I do lower it because I’m concerned that if someone goes into the bathroom after me and they see that the seat is still up they’ll think I’m a transsexual and that I have a secret penis.

Recently I’ve been trying to break this habit because it’s dumb, but instead I’ve just been lowering a lot of toilet seats with my shoe. I try to do this quietly, however, in case the next person in line—who doesn’t know that the seat was up when I went in—thinks that I am in fact lifting the lid because I am a transsexual with a secret penis.

Anyway, did you guys see that Times article about how it’s helpful for a woman to get on her hands and knees when she’s pregnant and especially when she’s about to give birth? And that it’s helpful for the farmer to wear knee-high rubber boots when he pulls the baby out?

Babies! Can’t live with them inside your body forever, can’t live without them living inside your body for a little!

Last night my roommate Eric noticed a mouse crawling up the back of a chair so he screamed. We picked up the couch, which it was staying behind, and beat around the sweatshirts and bags back there with brooms and shoes, but it didn’t come out. And then everyone started screaming and I was turning around to see where it went, and then a little soft whisper lingered on my bare foot and I looked down and shrieked “it’s on me, it’s on me, it’s on me, it’s touching me, it was on me, it was on me, it was on me” and pranced and slapped myself all over. And sweat. Then Bridget put on boots and we all screamed while we went after it under Bridget’s bed. Finally it came out from under a clump of clothes beneath her shelves and we all screamed and I slapped at it with the Swiffer and maimed it, and then Eric delivered a series of death blows. Here’s a picture of Bridget posing with it.

[I removed this entry because it was retarded but left the picture because it is great]

My roommate Eric just told me about how he left a bag of potato chips out on the counter earlier this week, and then the other day he opened it and started eating them. Then he noticed that little pieces of chips were falling out all over his feet and he was like, What? I’m not dropping chips. What’s going on? Then he noticed that there was a hole in the bottom of the bag because a mouse had eaten through it already. So he threw the bag of chips away and went into the bathroom and MADE HIMSELF THROW UP.

Is this what normal people do?

Two completely straight-faced young men were sitting motionless on the train today, and each of them was listening to one of those ringtone songs on his cell phone/electronic device on repeat. Both songs were played with equally terrible quality, like those commercials where “a real song” is playing, but then someone picks up the phone and you realize that the awesome jam is really just someone’s phone ringing. Anyway these guys were sitting 10 feet away from each other, each slouched in his seat, and I was (almost) the only other person on the train. There was no acknowledgment of the situation from either of them whatsoever. They just sat there playing “Where Brooklyn At? Where Brooklyn At? Where Brooklyn At? Where Brooklyn At?” and “Can I Buy U a Drank, Shawty? [Let’s talk money, I talk back, crunk juice bottle, Oakley shades]” on their respective machines over and over and over for (almost) 10 stops.

There was (basically) one other person on the train, an old Asian man, and I tried to make eye contact with him so I could make an expression like “this is funny!” but he wouldn’t look at me.

It used to say “Free Coke” or “Play Again,” but now the Coke stuff just has codes under the cap, and I throw them away. But today I did what they told me and went to mycokerewards.com to redeem my prize. First you have to register for mycokerewards.com, and I noticed that it was possible to say you were born in 2007, so I chose that option, and then the website denied me from proceeding because I wasn’t 13. Then I tried to reload the page, but the site remembered me and how I wasn’t 13. So I had to open another browser and try again, and by this time my computer was going really slowly, about to crash. But with perseverance I registered, which involved about one million (1,000,000) steps, and I entered my Coke Rewards code, which gave me 3 points. I don’t even know what that means because I closed the screen immediately. The whole thing took me a half hour. I’m not sure why I’m writing about it. It reminds me of when my dad couldn’t stop laughing about how on the back of the Q-Tips box it said, “Visit our website at www.qtips.com!” and he was like, “Q-Tips has a WEBSITE! Hahahahahah! Show me the man who visits the Q-Tips website!” (www.qtips.com)