Friday, September 29, 2006

best birthday gift ever

wow, i just got the best birthday gift ever from the best friends ever! and the best girlfriend ever initiated it!! see below.

**Subject: Fw: URGENT: [Bananarchist]'s Beautiful Corpse/Birthday gift**

you know [bananarchist] loves word games. on the occasion of her
birthday, this friday, we're presenting her with an experiment
in collective story-writing. (this game is actually called "dark and
stormy night," but "beautiful corpse" was more likely to get your
attention, and they're kind of the same thing minus the surrealistic
drawing...or maybe just minus the drawing.)

in addition to being an experiment, this is also a surprise. so,
please quickly ADD 1-2 SENTENCES TO THE STORY BELOW, following the
format given (Your Name: blah blah blah...), and then immediately SEND
THIS EMAIL TO ANOTHER ONE OF MANDY'S FRIENDS. please try to avoid
expired emails or junk mail accounts and try to make contact with
another reliable storyteller, since we have roughly 96 hours to
complete our tale. in order to avoid rampant free-ridership, please
just forward the story to a single person, and check the list of
contributors to avoid duplicates. (if you're stuck and only if you're
stuck, please send this back to NAME_REDACTED@gmail.com .)

on friday 9/29 at 8pm, whoever is in possession of this email should
conclude the story and forward it one final time to
bananarchist@banana.com. here's hoping this works! thanks for playing.

_________________________________________

S. Hsu: "On the morning of her twenty-sixth birthday, Mandy awoke with
a strange sensation in her chest and the distinct impression that
something was different."

R. Kottamasu: "She cast a glance toward her feet but found her sight
line unexpectedly blocked by a pair of hilly protrusions in the
bedsheets."

I. Brito: "She poked one of them gently, gasped and all of a sudden a
second pair of protrusions sprouted from the sheets."

A. Offner: "She clamped her eyes shut and tried to remember: had
there been any inbreeding in her family?"

M. McOwen: "No, she thought, her relatives disliked each other too
savagely to permit any clan tango."

N. Legnani: "Daring to open her eyes once again, Mandy raised the
covers ever so gently, so as not to disturb the perplexing
protuberances which seemed to have a life of their own, and was
mesmerized by the source-- now revealed-- of
her matutinal anxiety."

J. Ryoo: "Indeed, these perturbing protuberances were fuzzy,
gelatinous, green-and-pink-polka-dotted,
rose-laced-with-patchouli-like-a-retired-hippie-smelling,
my-little-pony-theme-song-singing, girating, giddy ANTENNAE sprouting
ever so gracefully from her knee caps. And, yes, they really were
singing (at the top of their high-pitched pipes) the song that
disturbingly goes like this: 'My little pony! / Pretty pony... / Love
to play with her beautiful hair!'..."

DSR Maru: "After groggily wiping her eyeballs, mandy looked a bit
closer at the strange beings that seemed to be emanating directly from
her prepatellar bursa. It was then that she realized that they were
merely lip-singing; the actual perpetrator of the aweful cacophony was
none other than David Bowie, cowering over her bed as if he were
Jareth the Goblin King."

SSR Maru:"'Bowie!' Mandy exclaimed as she fumbled with her bed clothes
startled to be seranaded by her one-time hero. 'Stop that god-awful
noise. What happened to you?' She grabbed the gelatinous antennae and
held them out like flowers to Bowie as a peace offering.
'Uh...s-s-s-sorry...I l-l-l-l-ove you.'"

B. Han: "He quieted. Coolly elegant, David Bowie sat down in the
battered chair next to Mandy's bed. Crossing his legs, he checked his
eye-liner in a small Italian-made pocket mirror and lit a cigarette.
His lighter then lit Mandy's proffered antennae, as an exhalation of
smoke washed over her face."

J. Hoffman: "When the smoke cleared Bowie was gone. All that remained
in the chair was an eyeliner pen and his still-lit cigarette
smoldering through the faded grey velvet. And she looked down at her
knees, and she found that her antennae had shrivelled up from the heat
and that they had turned into wings, broad insect wings like the wings
of a dragonfly, and when those wings started to unfurl she felt
herself carried up and up out of bed and through the window of her
bedroom into the sky..."

D. Ranganathan: "`Strange,' she thought. `I feel so free, so
weightless, despite my advancing years.' `You said it,' said Freddie
Mercury, who was reclining on a velvet couch held aloft by invisible
ribbons anchored to stars billions of light years away. Freddie
yawned and then sang a note so high that glasses across the universe
shattered, disrupting countless dinner parties. `Go ahead, try it,'
he said encouragingly.

E. MacLean: And Mandy couldn't resist. With David and Freddy as inspiration, she too intruded on every dinner party, blind date, and child's birthday party with her serendading voice, and her backup-singing knee-antennae. And her birthday-morning feeling was right: the world would never again be the same.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

mexico photos, finally