Sasha Is a Monster

Just one of those days spent largely sad for no discernible reason.

But, like, how am I supposed to exist blissfully in a world where Tara Reid is currently under the impression that there’s a strike in her industry? It’s like, Jesus, Tara, I have to share a planet with you. Think before you talk. Because those words stumble out of your mouth in their lucite heels and they rub self-tanner and stupid over everything they touch. And before you know it we have an economic recession for the history books. Do you see, Tara? Do you?

I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m frustrated with the overall stupidity of everyone today and I’m taking it out on you.

It just kind of blows my mind sometimes how poorly equipped most people are to, ya know, navigate the world. The wealthiest 20% of this country controls over 80% of its wealth; the wealthiest 1% controls over 30%. Contrast this with the worldwide numbers, where 2% of the world controls 50% of its wealth. In a country with no real class system to speak of and a free, accessible public education system, I think this is less a function of some gross universal injustice than it is a function of most people just being totally ill-equipped to go about the business of procuring money for themselves.

A conversation I had with a friend today who was laid off two weeks ago:

Me: Did you call any of those temp agencies I sent you the numbers for?

Her: No. No, not yet. I don’t want a temp job. I’m tired of just taking any job. I want a career. I want to be on a career path.

Me: Where have you been looking for jobs, then?

Her: Craigslist.

See?

And these are the same people who were happily signing up for adjustable-rate mortgages on homes that they couldn’t possibly afford because some lender told them it would be okay, and now they’re all like, “Help! The mean lenders fucked us over! They were mean!” and it’s, like, since when was your bank responsible for your financial well-being? Is it really so much to ask that you do a week or two of your own research? That you approach perhaps the most important purchase of your entire life from an informed and responsible perspective? It’s not like the universe just figured out last month that there was a problem with these mortgages. Even at the very height of the real-estate insanity, the entire Internet was all like “Dude these sub-prime ARMs are going to end in complete financial ruin for everybody, but specifically for the people who are holding them.” I clearly remember a former Credit Suisse employee in my MBA class, back around 2005, being like “Just you wait two or three years. There is going to be blood in the streets. Up to our knees. And you know what I’m going to be doing then? Buying. Houses.” But it’s not like you needed a damn MBA to learn that buying more house than you could afford was a bad call. But everyone looked the other way. Because they were too lazy to do the research or too greedy to care. And now it’s everybody’s fault but their own and it’s an absolute imperative that we put somebody new in the Oval Office who will look out for the economic best interests of the millions of people who just didn’t feel like doing it for themselves. (And how should we fund this? Why, with money from the people who did. Yay, capitalism!)

And these are the same people who were all too happy to watch Paris Hilton do a month in the slammer for driving a car in violation of parole, after she swore to a judge that her assistants had told her that her license had been reinstated, and the judge was all like “Um, actually, as it turns out, you’re the one responsible for knowing things like that.” And these people were all like “Yeah, Paris Hilton! Eat that shit! You can’t just count on someone else to manage all the most important aspects of your life!”

So, in conclusion, I firmly feel that everybody sucks right now.

become another casualty of society /
I’ll never fall in line /
become another victim of your conformity /
and back down /
because you don’t /
know us at all /
we laugh /
when old people fall”

Sum 41, “Fat Lip”

If the goal is to blow up the Capitol Building during the State of the Union address, and you control all unmanned fighter aircraft in the country, why not just send one of them to do it rather than the whole rigamarole with explosive crystals and sonic-trigger trumpets and tranquilizer guns and Michelle Monaghan?

Ever since I got swept up into the world of celebrity gossip, I haven’t really looked back on the life I left behind. I haven’t missed it, not for a second. I was sick of the low pay, the extensive paperwork, the political bullshit and a military-style management hierarchy, where promotions and pay are based on seniority rather than competence.

Yes, I was a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex, working on secure floors and secure products on a product I was, frankly, quite passionate about: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a next-generation fighter jet involving three branches of the U.S. military and eleven partner countries. It’s precise and it’s lethal and it’s silent. It’ll be the last manned fighter jet the U.S. ever creates, and is, adjusted for inflation, the most expensive military project in the history of known civilization.

And it is so. Fucking. Cool.

This video of a recent test flight just leaked.

Goddamn, I helped do that.

Fucking awesome.

I cannot get this headline to register in my brain sans sarcasm.

I keep trying to get my internal monologue to repeat the words with solemnity, but instead they come out in a high-pitched Texas accent with an ineffectively muffled guffaw at the end.

This is a sentence I uttered, in earnest and in context, just half an hour ago:

“How did you come across a 9-year-old zombie chicken expert?”

It’s one of those moments where you’re like, “You know, I understand that it’s a very large universe, but is it possible that nobody has said anything even remotely like this ever before?”