The Many Adventures of Lisa January: The Gym, Part 1 – Getting There

The Many Adventures of Lisa January: The Gym, Part 1 – Getting There

Dear Readers,

Last night, I ate too much dinner. 

Like, way too much. I ate enough food to feed at least 18 starving children in some poor African country for an entire week. I was at that point where you really only have three options:

1.             Puke

2.             Sleep

3.             Die

After not much deliberation (puking smells gross and I am not ready to die, check back with me during finals week though) I decided to go with number 2. Sleep. So, I went straight to bed, with one caveat; I promised myself I would go to the gym the next day…………I knew this would be incredibly difficult so I even prayed to God to give me divine strength:

The next day I woke up, not so happy. I knew I had to go to the gym, but there was one really big problem:

I didn’t want to.

I decided to speak to God again:

But then he was like…

And then he stopped talking to me.

COME BACK!!!!! I screamed hysterically for a few seconds because God had abandoned me. But then I thought: God may have a point. Maybe I should try talking to myself, like crazy people.

I have to admit, I was really afraid to talk to myself. What if my ‘self’ (let’s call her Selfy) was really mean and like a drill sergeant and is all, “GET YOUR ASS UP AND GO TO THE MOTHERFUCKING GYM!!!” That would totally blow. Okay, take a deep breath and just talk. You can do it…

Me: Self, I have a problem.

Selfy: Oh hey wassup?Aite, shoot.

(So far, so good. And apparently Selfy is kinda ghetto).

Me: I am sitting on about 234,293,058,304,982 calories from dinner and my arteries would appreciate it if I went to the gym, but I really don’t want to.

Arteries: PLEASE, LISA! JUST GO TO THE GYM! FOR USSS???!!!! PLLLLELEEEAASSSSEEEEE!! (They start weeping pathetically uncontrollably).

Me: SHUTUPI’mnottalkingtoyou!

Selfy: Whoa, whoa, everyone chill. Why don’t you just get in your gym clothes to start? That way you will start the process of going to the gym.

Me: Baller idea, Selfy.

Selfy: mmmmhmmmm.

So, I got in my gym clothes like a pro.

Then I updated Selfy that I would do a bit of homework first, and let myself acclimate to my spandex.

She said that was fine.

Then I said I needed to start my laundry.

She said that was fine.

Then I said I need to send a few emails.

She wasn’t super happy about that but said it was fine.

Then I said I needed to go get my laundry.

And then…

Selfy: Uhh, Lisa.

Me: What?

Selfy: So, are you still gonna go to th-

Me: No.

Selfy: Yes you are. Lisa, go.

Me: No.

Selfy: LISA!!

…Lisa?

…..Liiiiiisa?????????

Me: Shutupihateyougoaway!

Selfy: STOP BEING A LAZY-ASS AND GO TO THE FUCKING GYM!

….

Me: I can’t.

Selfy: What do you mean you can’t?

Me: I’m getting a cold.

Selfy: You’re lying.

Me: I’m on my period.

Selfy: No you aren’t.

Me: I was on my period last week and I’m still tired and cranky and have cramps.

I didn’t want to go so badly my heart was crying. I knew Selfy was right, but my damned pride and utter laziness wouldn’t let me up. I tried one more thing…

Me: I’m tired, I think I’ll just lay down for a-

Selfy: GET THE FUCK UP!!!!!!!! (louder than I have ever heard any sound ever.)

Now that my fear of a mean ‘self’ had been realized and solidified, I got angry and didn’t want to speak to her ever again. Even the sight of her started to make me rage. I also was getting tired of being yelled at. So, with a ferocious scowl, I got up and left her in my room. Meanie-butthead.

But now where do I go?

Uh oh. I have even less excuses than ever before; I have finally left my dorm room and I’m in my gym clothes. Selfy probably planned this whole thing: that sneaky bitch.

Okay, fine. I can play your little game. I’ll go to the gym!

I was already an all-star, a real OG, a grade A hardcore badass, just for deciding to actually go to the gym. So, with my new found motivation that was bred from spite, I started off…

During my walk, I ran into a lot of people who were like, “are you going to the gym?” and I was like, “Yeah.” And they were like, “Good for you!” and I was like, “I know, I am really disciplined.”

Finally, after a long journey filled with encouraging tunes made up on the spot by me, I reached my destination and felt even more like the badest motherfucker ever alive!!!!!!!!!!11

THE END….

Of PART 1!!!!!

Get ready for the next part, coming soon!

Love,

Lisa January

The Many Adventures of Lisa January: Life After College?

The Many Adventures of Lisa January: Life After College?

Dear Readers,

When I went home last break, I was bombarded with scary adults who were very concerned that I had no idea what I was going to do after college.

Adult: “Lisa, what are you gonna do after college?”

Me: “Ionno”

Adult: “Well, do you have any ideas?”

Me: “Something fun.”

Adult: “Fun?” Adult patronizingly chuckles. “And what would that be?”

Me: (I already said IONNO!) “Join the circus? Become a CPA?”

Mrs. Adult thought I was giving her attitude, but to be completely honest, I still haven’t even accepted that there is an ‘after-college.’ I’d been trying not to because as soon as you do, you can never get back to the state of oblivious bliss. Kinda like as soon as you realize there is no Santa, or Tooth Fairy or other fantasy constructs. It's devastating as shit. But, it is true and at some point I will have to get something called a ‘job' to make monies. Although some people would look at this and get RAGE (like I normally get from everything) I have decided to take a positive outlook on this inevitability of my life. Maybe, if I am able to find the right ‘job,’ then I will have more fun when I am an adult and stress won’t turn my hair gray as quickly! Yay! In fact, there may even be more than one right ‘job’ for me out there. I started to get excited about my many prospects and naturally, went to the internet to explore.

To my great surprise, something sparkling and glorious came up: QUIZZESS!!!! I didn’t know you could take a test and the internetzzz would tell you what to be when you grow up! How cool! So I clicked on one of the quizzes, refilled my diet coke and fearlessly got myself ready to figure out my future.

I submitted my test and in those few seconds in which some algorithm was calculating my overall worth as a human being, I was so nervous! Like, what if something comes up that I really don’t wanna do but my mom wants me to?  THEN I HAVE NO EXCUSE! ‘Cause she’ll be all: “the quiz told you can become a doctor,” and I’ll be like: “No.” And then she’ll be mad at me. And then I'll feel bad b/c 'maybe I can become a doctor' and now I'll have to live with the guilt that the internetzzz says I can be a doctor but I don't want to be one and am thus making Mom mad. Finally, after 2.365 seconds, my results were in!

FUCK THIS QUIZ!!!!! This is bullshit!! OH NO! The RAGE is coming on! Quick, think of a happy to calm you down. Come on Lisa, damnit, think! Uhh, uuhh (luckily, at this exact moment, I got a text…which means I am popular. I felt better). But still. This quiz is dumb. I can do so many more things than that. A fashion model would be cool I guess, but then I’d be stuck at that fucking salad bar for the rest of my life and would have to give up delicious things like onion rings. No way Jose. Then, all at once, it hit me like a piece of shining, golden, fluffy idea that had fallen out of the sky. I will make my own quiz! A quiz just for me. So I opened a word document, made a quiz, and took that shit.

I am totally a quiz master! I got all ‘yes’s! Then, I looked over my responses and using my very on algorithm, calculated my results:

I AM SOOO TALENTED AND GREAT!!!!!! Look at all the cool things I am totally meant to do!  I was very pleased with myself and my new prospective careers and no matter what, I knew I would be greatly successful and pwn on bitches and people with lamer jobs all day long. I can’t wait for ‘after college!’............…I take that back. But at least it isn’t looming so dangerously and scarily and intimidatingly, anymore.

I showed the results of my quiz to Mom who said that I was dumb for creating my own quiz because the results were only things that I thought were cool or things I’d recently seen on reality TV shows. You know what, Mom, doctors are total noobs and if I want to be a Wild Animal Trainer/Domesticator I CAN DAMN WELL BE ONE!!!!!!!!

This experience has taught me 4 things.

1.   There are a lot of cool things to do after college, like being President.

2.   Online quizzes that try and find a career for you totally suck!

3.   Anytime a quiz you take gives you a bad/wrong/rage-inducing answer, you can always just make your own that makes you look like a badass-superstar-champion-woman.

4.   Thinking about onion rings makes me really hungry.

If you have any more ideas for ‘jobs’ for me for ‘after college,’ please let me know! And don’t worry if you don’t know what you are doing yet. Just don't let any mean internetz quizzes tell you that you can't work for the mofuckin' FBI. (But if it does, make your own quiz and put it as your top result - like me!)

Love,

Lisa January 

The Many Adventure of Lisa January: General Rage Reflexivity Reaction

The Many Adventure of Lisa January: General Rage Reflexivity Reaction

Dear Readers,

After my incident at the salad bar, the head of dining services contacted my mother and told her I should get checked out for anger disorders. So, immediately my mom called me and said, “Lisa, you need to go to a psychiatrist.”

            “No!”

            “Yes.”

            “You can’t make me!”

            “Wanna bet?”

Never threaten my mother. She called Campus Security and Supervisional (real word?) Services and bribed them to come and take me from my room, kicking and screaming, to the psycho-office. She said that if I told them that ‘I had a laser beam gun that I could zap them into oblivion with if they came towards me,’ that I was full of shit and not to take me seriously. (Which sucks ‘cause that is exactly what I said and they all laughed at me which made me feel embarrassed and stupid. Thanks a lot, Mom).

At the office, Dr. Stern had me look at Rorschach inkblot tests to evaluate my anger.

“What do you see in this one?”

Dr. Stern scratches his beard, squints at me and tries again.

“And in this one?”

It is starting to get hard for me to contain myself. I know I probably do get angrier than most, but I can’t show them that! If I show them the slightest bit of rage, they will lock me up forever and ever like a fucking leper! I’ll be an outcast! A pariah! Must. Maintain. Composure.

Dr. Stern chuckles to himself, squints again and then, smirkingly says

“What about this one?”

GAAHH!! Oh shit. Now he’s gone and done it. How the fuck did he know?! I HATE UNICORNS?! HAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTEEEEEEEEEEEEE THEM!!!!!!! Those smug little bitch horses with fuckin’ sticks on their heads like they think they’re the shit! They are like reindeer that have been castrated on their heads but the castrator got too bored and left 1 dumb horn up there. And they prance around like life is so fuckin’ flowery and I just want to take chain saw and saw off their weak, dumb, shiny, stupid, mutated antler horn!!! RAGGGEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

I’m panting like a horse, sweating like a pig, screaming like a banshee, biting like a wolf and angry like a fucking 19 year old girl with a rage problem. FEEL MY WRATH UNICORN BITCH!

After I have completely demolished the picture of the unicorn, which I am pretty sure my mom told him I hated so that they could set me up (I AM A VICTIM AND I HATE EVERYONE! Oh, and thanks again, Mom, for sharing literally everything about me to everyone. Suuuuperrrrr cool of you.), I started to realize what I’d done. The jig is up. I am doomed. I will now be labeled as weird and doctors will perform experiments on me like a lab rat.

Dr. Stern speaks: “It appears you have General Rage Reflexivity Reaction, or GRRR.”

Well that is ironic. You mean I have “GRRR!!!!!!!!”? Like the sound a lion makes? EVEN MY DISORDER IS ANGRY AND AGGRESSIVE!! HOW CAN I EXPECT TO FIX MY ANGER IF EVEN MY ANGER IS ANGRY?!

Dr. Stern: “To fix this problem, we generally prescribe some sort of drug, but I fear with your extreme case, that may not be enough. So, I would like to propose a different method. What do you think?”

            I mean, am I even allowed to say no? I hate that. When adults ask you questions even though you have no choice in the matter but they ask you out of courtesy, pretending you are a real person but actually you are still totally in the limbo between child hood and seniority so they want to meet you half way by deluding you into thinking you have free will, but actually, you don’t. So I just say: “Sure.”

Dr. Stern: “Well, I’d like you to try and come up with at least 10 things that make you very happy. That way when you get angry, you can think about these things; hopefully, your strong spirit will pull yourself through any rage you may face.”

This sounds dumb. But okay Mr. Doctor Man, I accept your challenge. I’ll make a stupid fucking list of pretty, nice, fluffy things and I’ll quit my mofuckin rage like it ain’t no thang. You’ll see.

BACK IN MY DORM ROOM:

Okay, here I go. Imma make the best list of happies ever. Good bye Rage, hello normal-people feelings!

I could only get to 8 before I started to get frustrated. Frustration is like the sister-in-law of Rage. So before I knew it, I was pulling on my hair, screaming, crying, biting, anything to express my deepest Rage. It’s not that I don’t have 10 things that make me happy. I have a KA-JILLION things that make me happy! I just couldn’t think of them all and I got discouraged… Anyway, I called Dr. Stern screaming:

“I CAN’T THINK OF 2 MORE HAPPIES AND I FAILED YOUR ASSIGNMENT AND I AM ADDICTED TO RAGE!”

Dr. Stern assured me that this process of controlling rage will take a while and that I need to be patient. He says it’s okay that I only have 8 happies for the moment, I can always add more later. This made me happy! So I wrote it on a post-it and stuck it to the list:

There is hope yet! Mom says she is proud of me for trying to work through this. She says that I am very brave to confront such a scary thing. Dr. Stern says that as long as I keep thinking of happy things and adding them to my list, I will start to feel less rage. He also told me to try and draw my rage so that I can talk to it out loud and tell it that ‘I am in control now and Rage’s turn running Lisa’s life is over!’

I decided to draw Rage as an upside-down chocolate ice cream cone because when this happens I feel Rage…a lot. And I always imagine the ice cream cone looking up at me being like, “How dare you drop me you ungrateful twerp! Now you have no ice cream, have wasted $2.50, and I will melt to death! Are you happy now?!” And then I get even angrier that my ice cream cone is yelling at me. It’s bad news.

 Dr. Stern also says I need to stop using the F word so much because it fuels my hatred. I told him it was my favorite word and to say I’d even try to do that would be a complete and total lie.

In the end, knowledge is power. Now that I know I have GRRR, I can take my steps to keeping it under control. I will never be cured of GRRR. It is something I will struggle with my entire life. But I can learn to live with it and not flip the fuck out in the dining hall anymore, or at least as often… I’m not making any promises…

Until next time, if you have any happies to add to my list, let me know! I still have 1 more to go!

Love,

Lisa January

The Many Adventures of Lisa January: When the Dining Hall Salad Bar Passive-Aggressively Attacks

The Many Adventures of Lisa January: When the Dining Hall Salad Bar Passive-Aggressively Attacks

Dear Readers,

I need to tell you a story. It is something very dear me and although it singes my heart to think about, I owe it to student-kind to recount this fateful event.

Let me start by saying that the dining hall salad bar holds a lot of power over my mood and general well-being. However, I solidified this realization yesterday when 3 things…just 3 simple, little, seemingly insignificant things didn’t go my way and I crumbled, from the very core of my soul, into absolute and utter hysterics. The salad bar can do this to you. You approach it with low blood sugar, already making you vulnerable, and all you need is for there to be no more kidney beans for you to start pounding your chest like Tarzan, screaming ‘Imma fucking burn this place to the ground!!!!!’

This will be hard for me, but it is important to share my story so you can prepare yourself for the future and hopefully not become such a devastatingly destructible victim, like I am.

         I walk into the dining hall and try to be extra nice to the nice lady who will be swiping my meal card (Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, I always say)…

 (Note: I haven’t eaten for 6 hours so I am hangry – hungry and angry – and I am NOT messing around). I approach the salad bar and low and behold…

1. There are no big bowls for my salad… My heart sinks into my empty, gurgling abyss of a stomach. What do I do now? Use a fucking plate?! ARE YOU JOKING!??? Do you know what happens when you eat salad on plates…?

Okay, so that was the first problem. Enough to get me a little ticked off, to say the very least. But alas, I maintained my composure, strong-willed that I am, and persevered. Unfortunately, what happened next made it even worse …

   2. I am a prisoner! Trapped, against my will, behind a girl that evolved directly from snails. 

I don’t even know how she is taking so long; It literally doesn’t make any sense. Not only are her general movements in slow-motion, but she painstakingly scrutinizes everything, like ‘hmm, do I want artichoke hearts on my salad today? I like them, but maybe not today. Hmm, well, maybe I could just…hmm, okay, okay ,okay *giggle, giggle, teehee* I guess I’ll take two artichoke heart segments. Hmm which ones should I take…?’ She does this for every one of the fucking ba-jillion toppings!!! KILL ME! And, just to reiterate, I am still phenomenally hangry and I could go on and on and on about ways in which I want to inflict pain and everlasting disfiguration upon her, but…

Yeah, I’m kinda a wimp. I just let the Rage Monster boil up inside of me so when it is my turn to scoop the corn, my hand is twitching so bad, corn flings all over the counter and straight up into the air, some landing in my hair and some on the plate of the boy behind me. “Ahh! Sorry!” I scream, my tension is so high right now, the only volume I can access is subsonic boom. Great, now I’m the psycho-path when really it was all her fault for standing there and meticulously inspecting each sliced black olive before gently placing it on her bed of spinach. It’s a fucking salad! Not Jenga!!!

As you can tell, I am sufficiently pissed off. First, I have to use a plate but now, I may not even get my salad until the apocalypse has already swallowed us all up, in which case this would be my last meal and all I want is MY FUCKING SALAD!!!!!1111 Whew, deep breath. We aren’t even to the worst part yet. I knew this was going to be hard for me. But I am a warrior and tell this story, I must.

So, I go through the line, behind the tortoise stuck in molasses, Slowly McSlowerson, and finally come out on the other end with my plated salad. (Note: I will not dedicate an entire bullet point to this, but I would just like to say that while observing the toppings, 4 additional things really irked me, and maintained my hanger.

A.  There are no more carrots (a salad without carrots is like a walrus without his tusks, miserable and lame).

B.  The feta cheese has spilled over into the peas and I HATE FETA CHEESE!

C. They accidently refilled the eggs in the beets bin and now all the eggs are magenta and smell like dirt.

D. The spoon for the cubed ham is missing and people are using the spoon for the vegan beef strips for the ham. WHAT THE SHIT IS A VEGAN BEEF STRIP!!!!

Anyway, I get to end of this pathetic salad bar, and you will never guess what happens…

1. They are out of vinegar….

THEY ARE OUT OF MOTHERFUCKING VINEGAR!!!!!! GODDAMNIT, WILL IT NEVER END!!!! 

      At this point, FUCK the salad! I’d rather starve to death than just use oil. I’d rather barbeque and eat that girl in front of me or gnaw my own arm off than just use oil. I am totally and completely losing it. I don’t even hold it back but belt out a salad-bar-shattering scream, so loud, a dining hall attendant has to come up to me and ask me to ‘not do that.’ Fuck you, lady! You don’t know me! I may be potentially dying from rage and you want me to ‘keep it down?!’ NO! This was the salad that broke the camel’s back. It was either vinegar or starve. So, I summoned all my dignity, courage, integrity, practicality, intellect, and I chose…

                                                                 ...starve.

As you can see, the salad bar has a lot of control over my emotion. I’m really not sure how I can fix this and I’m really not sure what I can tell you to prevent this. Awareness is probably the best solution, for through awareness, we can all learn the dangers of the salad bar. And I can only hope and pray that this never happens to you.

PS: If you see that girl that was in front of me, kick her in the shins, tell her it’s karma and then run away. She won’t be able to catch you. Thanks.

Good Luck, Brave Diners!

Love,

Lisa January