How Mario Saved the Butterfly from the Evil Voldemort

The time has come where, no matter how awkward, I have to acknowledge the existence of someone who used to be a fixture in my life but is no more.  This friend and I used to be inseparable until we had a pretty ugly falling out, but it's kind of impossible to pretend we were never friends because we spent so much time together.  Basically, at some point, I HAVE to talk about her.  However, just in case I get really super famous, I've decided to protect her identity, so she's kind of in a She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named category.  Forevermore, I shall refer to this person as...Voldemort.

So yeah, one night, Voldemort and I were hanging out, bored, and it suddenly occurred to us (after a few reminders triggered by our channel surfing) that it was Halloween.  HOLY RUSTED SHIT!  I had almost missed my favorite holiday.  Naturally, we decided to get hoochied up and go to the bar, so I hacked off the bottom of an old prom dress, Voldemort borrowed a witch costume, and I stopped off at K Mart to buy some lame cheap wings and antennae.  Voldemort the Witch and Flutterby the Butterfly were off to get tanked.

Apparently, I had chopped off a lot more of the bottom of my old prom dress than I thought, or maybe men in their early twenties are particularly attracted to women with antennae.  Maybe I was just infinitely hotter than Voldemort on that particular evening.  Whatever the reason, strangers kept buying me shots of Jager.  Now I TRULY HATE Jagermeister, and it hates me right back, but I was a broke ass college kid who had just ruined her prom dress for the sake of drunkenness, so I wasn't about to turn down freebies.

I told Voldemort that I was going to die, that she could have my stereo and my 1988 Paula Abdul Forever Your Girl CD, and that I needed her to close her tab and take me home immediately so I could tell my mother goodbye.  She walked me outside to sit on the curb and vomit out my soul then went inside to close up.  There I was, a shivering, sad, pathetic little butterfly with no jacket because butterflies don't wear trench coats, freezing my ass off and throwing up every 14 seconds.  I was also paranoid.  See, there are these inconvenient laws about being drunk in public, as I so obviously was, and my hoarking was unfortunately being monitored.

I was scared shitless.  These guys were seriously on the war path because I was ralphing on Broadway.  Luckily enough for me, a fight broke out, and the cops had to go break it up, so I didn't get locked up in a dungeon forever with a dragon.  I like to think that the bleeding guy with the fucked up nose took one for the team just to protect me.  Such a gentleman.  Thank you, bleeding guy.  Thank you.  Anyway, I sat there throwing up and freezing and throwing up.  Then it dawned on me.  

After asking one of the random fight spectators what time it was, I realized that I had been sitting outside by myself for 45 minutes.  WHERE THE FUCK WAS THE DARK LORD?!  I mustered up all my strength, vomited again, re-mustered, then staggered inside to find Voldemort. 

After spending almost an hour vomiting in front of cops, the last thing I was expecting to see Voldemort doing when I came in was making pelvic thrusts all up on my friend's boyfriend, who she had pinned, defenseless, against the wall.  He was terrified.  Relief washed over his face when he saw me.  Well, until he saw the look on my face, that is.  I tried to remain calm.

At this point, a dim little spark went off in Voldemort's dim little brain.

I was out of patience.  I stalked toward the door, plotting murder and destruction, and Voldemort followed close behind.  As soon as we made it outside, all hell broke loose.  Apparently, butterflies and witches don't often interact socially because a pretty large crowd gathered rather quickly to listen to the cat fight.  Now, if you've read my blog AT ALL, you know I have no aversion to profanity.  Hell, if you read this sentence, you know it.  The fact that I won't disclose what was said during this cat fight is a sign of how oooooogly our argument was.  If *I* won't repeat the language used in that argument, you KNOW it was gruesome!  Let's just say that, in my mind, I had snatched off her leg and was beating her face with one of her thighs.  Actually, that sounds fun to draw.  Here you go.

Aaaaanyway, incapable of giving any rational reason why she would leave her friend freezing and sick on the sidewalk for 45 minutes to grind on her other friend's man, Voldemort called me a selfish bitch and marched off into the night.  Fuck her.  I stood there for a moment, fuming and muttering to myself like a crazy person, then it dawned on me that my cash, cell, and ID were in Voldemort's purse, so I now had no ride home, no cell phone to call for a ride, no money to pay for a cab, and I was drunk in public so I was too afraid to even ask a cop to take me home.  I was screwed.  Until my hero showed up.

Okay, so maybe he didn't warp through a pipe, but nonetheless, there was Ethan, and he had heard the whole thing, and he was offering me a ride home.  In that moment, I had never loved another human being on the entirety of the earth as much as I loved Mario.  We got in the car, and I immediately resumed my incoherent drunken ranting while Ethan attempted to not laugh aloud at my idiocy.  

I wasn't making ANY sense.  Ethan, probably in an attempt to shut me the fuck up, tried to console me.  

The last thing I remember from that night is almost choking myself to death because I tried to get out of the car without removing my seat belt.  I now understand why butterflies are diurnal.  

Come What May...

My pretty princess friend Jeem has been on here before, but now, my friends, it's time for a real story.  I love Jeem dearly, but that wasn't always the case.  We kind of started off a bit rocky actually.  One day, Melinda and I were sitting around, bored, watching Moulin Rouge and running our mouths, when Jeem busted in the door.

As soon as Jeem saw what we were watching, he immediately settled in on the couch, fully prepared to spend the next two hours with Ewan and Nicole.  Melinda and I kind of raised an eyebrow at him, amused that our muscle-bound "ooooh, I'm so intimidating" guy friend was so into Moulin Rouge, then went back to our conversation.  Someone should've warned us how deep Jeem's obsession with Moulin Rouge went.

I was annoyed.  I'd only known him for a short time, and there he was, all up in my living room, stealing the remote FROM MY HAND and screaming song lyrics to drown out our conversation.  Who did he think he was?!?  I glared at him for a moment, debating whether I should just leave him to be an ass or if I should call him on it.  Option B won. 

I knew Jeem was going to be difficult.  He had assumed his misguided superhero stance.  Yeah, when Jeem thoroughly believes there's zero possibility of his being wrong, he morphs.  He puffs out his chest, sets his feet apart, and clenches his jaw.  Kind of reminds me of a pissed off blowfish.  At this moment in time, Jeem was completely convinced that there was absolutely no chance in hell that I would ever dare to question his Moulin Rouge authority.  He genuinely believed that it was THAT obvious that there simply wasn't any talking during Moulin Rouge.  Ever.  Naturally, I decided to test him.

James was flabbergasted that I even had to ask such a stupid question.  He just stood there for a moment, stunned, fumbling for words. "Because...because..."

I still pride myself on keeping a straight face after such a response.  "James...uh...sometimes it just makes us act like fools, ya know?"  I'm really not sure what was the final straw for Jeem.  Maybe it was that we were still talking during Moulin Rouge.  Maybe it was that I had quoted the music montage to refute his point.  I don't know.  Whatever it was, Jeem did what any muscle-bound, "oooh, I'm so intimidating" grown man would do.  He threw an EPIC tantrum.

Jeem was all muscles, rage, frustration, and a sincere desire to sing.  We decided it'd be best to just go in the next room and leave him alone.  He was kind of scary in Satine mode.  He apologized about an hour and a half later.  Naturally, he had to finish the movie first.

Demon Couch of Doom

I might have mentioned in my previous post that my mom was a bit disapproving of the number of posts I've written that make me sound like I've never been sober before.  I'm actually not drunk all the time.  My friends and I just tend to get into goofier shit when we've been drinking, so those are usually the stories that are the most entertaining.  However, I love my mother dearly, so I figured the least I could do was tell a totally alcohol-free story just for her.  Here goes...

Before Ric and I moved in together, I was living with my mom, my brother, and a bunch of cats, including Bentley, who I brought to our new place a few months after I moved out of mom's.  I know I've probably covered this already, but just in case I haven't, Bentley is a chicken.  I mean he's a few feathers and a beak short of being a real, live, bona fide chicken.  He's afraid of EVERYTHING.

Yeah, unfortunately, my cat doesn't speak English in real life, so there really isn't a good way to explain his fears to him.  If it WERE possible, perhaps moving wouldn't have been quite so traumatic for my family.  Things started out pretty typical with the whole moving thing.  I packed up all my stuff, Jeem graciously agreed to help us do the heavy lifting, we rented a U-haul.  No problemo.  Until the cat saw Ric and Jeem carrying my dresser out the front door.  Normally, he would just go hide under the bed or something if he got spooked, but for some reason, on this particular occasion, Bentley decided that the best thing to do to cope with his terror at things being relocated would be to pee.  While sitting on my mother's couch.  

It's bad enough that he pissed on the couch, but what made it even worse is that my cat drinks A LOT, therefore he also pees A LOT.  Plus, cat piss is probably the worst smelling thing on earth.  Needless to say, my mother was not thrilled.  She tried cleaning it, but to no avail.  It still stunk.  Mom was also afraid that the lingering smell would cause Bentley to come back and pee on the couch again.  So she came up with a "brilliant" idea.  

She put the cushions in a hefty bag, tied it up tight, then put the slipcover back on the couch over her handiwork.  Now, you might be thinking, "hey, that's not a bad idea!  Holds in the smell, protects the cushions if he does it again, pretty smart, Maggi's mom!"  Wrong.  The problem is that there's just no way to keep air out of the bags.  Mom had turned the couch into a three-seater whoopee cushion.  

We kept a couple safety pins on the coffee table because sometimes when you'd sit down, you'd wind up sitting on a big bubble, so you'd have to take a pin and murder the couch in order to get the bubble to pop so that your feet would reach the floor again and you could get back up.  Actually, I was the only one who really had that problem because I'm a munchkin.  Everyone else just murdered the couch because sitting on a bubble isn't as cool as it sounds.  It did make for a fun game though.  My brother really loved sitting down next to someone who was already seated.  This is because he's a big guy, so the air displacement would typically cause one of two things to happen.

It was all well and good for a while, but like all good things, it eventually had to come to an end.  One day, my brother's friend Josh came over to hang out for a while.  He walks in and sits down on the couch.  Poor innocent Josh.  Nobody in my family had warned him about our uh...situation.  Suddenly, the cushion next to him inflates to about three times its normal size.

Mom decided that a couch that terrifies guests probably isn't such a good idea.  And that's how Mom's couch wound up at the road.