“’Scuse me, is this seat available? Mind if I take it?” He puts his hand over the top of the chair that was next to mine.

“No, go ahead.”

He pulls the chair, sits in it, and looks at me.  “You thought I was going to take it, huh? Ha ha.”

“Oh wow yeah, you got me,” I looked at him, couldn’t help but glance at his teeth.  They were like baby teeth, almost jagged at the bottom and his little baby canines were pointing towards each other. Creepy I thought. I then tried to focus on my paper, to insinuate to him that I wasn’t interested in talking, or in him for that matter.

“Name’s Tim,” he puts his hand over my paper suggesting that I shake it.

“Tiff,” I shaked it (ew). I try to look at my paper again.

As I was thinking about what to write for my paper, clearly not wanting to converse, he starts to fiddle with my keys that were on the table.

“I just want to take your keys, go to every car in the parking lot and try to open them.  And once I find your car I’m going to take it to the pound.”

(^He either said that, or  “I’m going to pound it”.  Not sure, was too weirded out to remember the exact quote)

“Oh…wow,” That’s all I could think of at the moment, I mean, what can you honestly say to that? I was at loss and was actually starting to get scared for my life.

“Ha ha I bet you think I’m a real funny guy, huh?”

“No not really…I was thinking of something else,” I really, really wanted this Tim guy to go away but without being an ass. “No offense, but I have some work to do so I really can’t talk to you.”

“W-w-wait wait, you seem like a very interesting person–and I’m sensing a really good vibe here,” He scans my body, meticulously, with his psychopathic pervy eyes from head to toe, toe to head. I cross my arms, hoping that it would somehow shield him from checking me out, “I want to talk to you, get to know you more.”

“Well…eh if you bump into me again on campus you can say ‘hi’,” I shrugged, “that’s the best I can do for ya.”

“How about I call you?” He leans in forward.

“I don’t think my boyfriend would like that.”

“But we can be just friends.”

“Still, you’re a stranger to me, I just met you a minute ago, I’m not going to give you my number.”

“We’re just friends.”

“We’re not friends, and I don’t want you to call me.”

“Is it because you’re insecure?”

With a louder, border-line booming OH NO YOU DIDN’T tone, I responded, “Insecure? It’s because I’m not that trusting, and I would never give you my number anyway because you’re coming on too strong,” I’m sure people in the library heard me.

“Fine, I’ll let you do your homework.” He walks away looking rather pissed, like a little girl who didn’t get the barbie she wanted.

After that incident I finally had the chance to do finish my paper in peace…ish. I was actually very much paranoid the whole time. As I writing, I was expecting the weird fucker to come back and attack me from behind, pulling a chunk of my hair out just so he can make a hair doll and masturbate to it everyday.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen, but yeah, he’s a creepy little sucker ain’t he?

*Note to self: Never try to use Wordpress on your Sidekick.

So where was I? My garage. Last time, I wrote about how annoying it can be to live in a garage with my parents.  This time, I have something new to stress about…the weird and unexplained things that goes on in here.

First, my mom’s 400 dollars went missing.  The weird part is she never loses anything, especially 400 bucks, and she said knew where it was.  Then again, I’m not the one who lost the money, so I can’t tell you how certain she was.

Second, I bought a headband and that went missing too.  The weird part is I never wore it.  It has always been sitting in a basket on top of the vanity desk, until three weeks later, I woke up and automatically noticed that my headband disappeared.  About two days ago, I found the headband just under my bed.  How did it get there? I’m not sure, the only people who are here besides me are obviously my parents, but they didn’t take my headband.

Third, after I had written the last entry, I turned off all the lights and went straight to bed.  Later in the day, my mom had told me that she was woken up in the middle of the night because the lights were on.  The weird part?  Light switches were on.

And today, my dad told me he was woken up just last night because he heard my feet shuffling and claimed that I was walking back and forth way too much.  Again, the weird part, it ain’t me! (/queue scary music)

So what could be the cause of all of this?  I’d love to say that I’m in a haunted garage, but my parents have been really freaked out lately, so I wouldn’t want to scare them. “Haunted” also makes it sound intriguing and scary, but since I’m someone who watches the show “Ghost Hunters” religiously, I’ve learned that before you can call a house haunted, you would have to find a more logical explanation(s) first for the weird occurrences.

The only “logical” explanation I can think of really at the moment is somebody’s doing it in their sleep.

Out of the three of us living in the garage, the one who has the most and only witnessed cases of sleepwalking (or sleep dancing, I’ll explain later) is…

(/hangs head in shame)

Yeah, it’s me. If sleepwalking were to be a talent and/ profession, I’d have a legitimate resume for it.

Well, wait, whatdoyaknow! I do have one:

(click for bigger size)

My parents would be proud.

Nothing.

Instead of turning the knob, I wiggled it, then turn and push, wiggled, then turn and push.

Nope.

Still, finding it rather entertaining to be stuck in a bathroom, I unleashed the MacGyver within me by trying other various clever of ways to get the knob to turn thus opening the door.

Nothing worked, and that’s when I knew I was really stuck in the bathroom…and I wasn’t MacGyver.

Since I knew the guys who were working on our house was right outside of my bathroom, I was debating for two minutes whether I should cry out for help or not. I really wanted to but I was too embarrassed, I also didn’t want to disrupt their conversation. Yes, I know, I guess I’d rather be stuck inside of a bathroom (which mind you is about the size of a port-o-potty, possibly smaller) sniffing what smells like ass all day, then to disrupt their break.

Sweat started to bead on my forehead and my heart began to race as I shook, yanked, and pushed the door knob. Five excruciating long minutes began to pass and progress has not been made.

I could feel the blood leave my face as I braced for what was to come: Slowly suffocating in my own after-shit smell while the workers were smoking and chit-chatting just a few feet away from me. I went delusional, the thought of simply knocking on the door and then saying, “Hey guys, I’m stuck in this bathroom, can you please try to open it? kthx” was still out of the question, my composure and patience were entirely thrown out the window, and I started to attack the door with ruthless abandon.

I was grunting and moaning while ramming into the door repeatedly with the side of my arms. Few minutes later, tears started to blur my vision; I decided to give my arms a rest by switching over to my legs, and while all of this is happening, I can hear the workers talking about where to eat for lunch. Being trapped in a small, windowless bathroom is one of the most terrifying things I have ever experienced. To me, it felt like I was in a coffin standing upright which happend to have a toilet in it. Eventually everything, especially hearing them talk about lunch, was just unbearable for me so I surrendered and gave out a loud and boisterous, “YEEELLPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!”

Someone on the other side of the door ask, “Are you…are you stuck?”

“Yes.”

He opens the door like any other door that doesn’t have a fucked up doorknob, and looks at me with caution as if he was expecting me to attack him and then steal his wallet.

“I was hearing stuff, but I thought it was…never mind,” he chuckles and then begins to study the doorknob.

I walked passed the rest of the guys and none of them were making eye contact with me. Probably thought I was a crazy person for air hugging the air after coming out of the bathroom.

Feeling a bit traumatized, I went to my mom right after and bitched about the door and how I was stuck inside for over ten minutes. You know what she did? She laughed. Not only did she laugh, but she ROFL’d in real life.

“Dude go away, your food sucks,” I pushed her away (rolled her away might be the more appropriate term) and she was still laughing at me. Meh, I love my mom, and I love air.

There are three different types of girl gamers…sort of.  The first one can be found anywhere, including my Steam friends list.  They’re all exceptionally different but have one thing in common and that is to have fun and play a game, as it should be.

That’s the first type, awfully broad, but whatevez.  The other two types, on the other hand, are both painstakingly narrow! I’ve surprisingly witnessed and heard so much of it that I’ve decided to segregate them from the original group entirely and turn each of them into one cohesive character:

The Zealot (sometimes referred to as The Feminist Gamer) – “You just got pwned by a GIRL! Yes, a GIRL!”  The Zealot is a gamer who has a vagina and you bet your hp that she’s damn proud of it. Her MySpace, Facebook and Steam page bears the insignia of “GIRL GAMER” and she’ll go to great lengths to remind the gaming community that she is a GIRL GAMER by joining-or worst creating biased fan clubs, communities, and/ cults exclusive to other gamer girls, potentially building this terrifying, never-ending empire of zealots.

The Zealot is usually a veteran gamer, who apparently lived a hard knock gaming life demanding equality and respect in the gaming world. In the past, she was regularly shunned, belittled, and sometimes insulted by male gamers (predominantly made up of her older brothers and cousins) for simply being a girl gamer…which explains a lot.

But what the Zealot doesn’t know is how times have changed.  Girl gamers have already proven their worthy and competence, thus earning most of the respect of the guys.  To be overly and overtly proud of being a girl gamer is akin to being a proud female painter; it’s retarded and convinces everyone that female painters are in some way inferior to male painters.

The Chosen One (usually in multi-player/team games) – While the Zealot encourages more girls to play video games, the Chosen One wants nothing more in life than to to votekick all of them off but herself.  And unlike the Zealot, the Chosen One is more likely to be a newb.

When the Chosen One started playing video games, she thought she was the only special girl gamer who existed within her continent due to the overwhelming number of gamer guys that have given her the attention she had always craved for.  That is…until…another girl gamer joined in on the game and then another.  Typical girl gamers would react with excitement and relief when encountering their first girl gamer, but this had only brought darkness, rage and jealous tendencies to the Chosen One.

The Chosen One will do anything in her power to votekick off another girl gamer while ingame just so she can feel somewhat special and unique again, being the only girl gamer in a game of all male players.  She will either ignore the other girl gamer throughout the game and weep afterwards, or ragequit and weep should she fail at votekicking her competition off.

Last weekend I headed to the gas station which ended up getting a little bit packed. I parked behind some guy’s car, who was in the middle of pouring gas, but as soon as he was done, he decides to clean the inside of his car! He’s taking junk out and putting them into the trashcan. After waiting for an extra four minutes I realized the man has a shitload of shit to throw away and wasn’t planning to leave anytime soon, so I looked for another spot, and from where I was looking, it looked empty.

I drove to that spot only to find a fucking gawddamn car hogging up all the space because his car was parked exactly between two pumps sitting beside each other. I waited for a whole minute and a half, looked at the car’s owner, and he looked at me, but looked away as if nothing was wrong. Before I could ask him to scoot his car up a little further so I can pour some gawddamn gas, the man who was cleaning out his car was gone, and his spot was available.

I drove back to my original spot and finally was able to pour gas. As I was waiting, I noticed that it took a little bit longer than usual, two seconds later, the gasoline starts to overflow! And when I mean overflow, I mean there was fucking fuel shooting out of the pocket, and it was getting all over my legs and feet. Now this was pretty weird because when you’re pouring gas and the tank gets full, you should hear a click and everything automatically stops, right? But mine didn’t, it kept on going, and LOTS of it.

I’m not panicking at the moment, I took the nozzle out of the filling entry and it’s STILL running. Remember the scene in Zoolander where the guys were having a gasoline fight? Yeah it looked something like that. Except only one person was holding a running nozzle, and I did not have orange mocha frappuccino that day.

Turns out that the latch that locks your handle so it could run by itself, was jammed, and I wasn’t able to unlock it. At this point, I’m panicking like a little bitch. I drop the nozzle and run inside to get the cashier, as the running fuel continues to spread throughout the floor like a fucking disease.

“Dude my thing is overflowing, you gotta help me, there’s gasoline everywhere!” These weren’t my exact words, I was too nervous and too scared at the time to remember what had actually happen.

The cashier man looks at me with a blank face, then in his heavy Mexican accent he belches, “Wath do you think you’re thrying to pool aye? You theenk iz funny huh? You theenk iz real funny!”

Oh my gosh, he doesn’t believe me.

“No, no, no, it really is. You gotta check it out, my thing is overflowing! It’s everywhere on the floor!”

After a few desperate attempts of convincing the cashier that I got Old Faithful running right outside of the store, I’m like fuck it, I bolted out and noticed a man at my station, trying to turn off the nozzle which I had failed to stop.

When he finally got it to stop, he said, “You better go now, someone might drop a cigarette!”

Taking my savior’s advice, I sped off, fast, before a cigarette could even be lit. Hands were trembling like a leaf, feet reeked of gasoline, and couldn’t stop thinking about the terrorizing thought of pouring gas again.

Last year I met a guy on MySpace. Let’s call him John. John liked watching my YouTube videos (I don’t have them anymore); he also liked reading my blogs since he found most of them to be “raw”, abrasive and direct. Because of that, we then started to exchange messages on MySpace and talked on AIM for a bit.

He was going to fly to Los Angeles to visit his friends there, and since I live about 45 minutes away he suggested that we meet up. He seemed pretty cool. He was smarter than most guys I’ve encountered, and he was funny and interesting, mostly in a vulgar condescending sexist way, so I figured, “Sure why not?”

The day that he arrived to LA was the day before I leave to Boston and New York, obviously we didn’t have much of a choice to pick a date. So during the only day in which we were available to hang out, I brought a friend along, and he did the same. We met up at the beach, and things are already off to a bad start.

I couldn’t get him to open up. I asked him questions that never made it to a full on conversation. I threw in random jokes and funny comments here and there in attempt to break away from the awkward tension. But something seemed off about him. The way that he played with his thumbs, the way that he sat in his chair, and the way that he glanced at other people made it appear as if he was simply waiting and expecting something else from me, something specific. I just had to find what it was to unravel the John I knew online, but I never did. I gave up anyway since he made no efforts either.

We ended the day with an awkward and unsatisfying taste left in my mouth (and probably his too) but luckily, we both had vacations to look forward to. So that weird and uncomfortable incident I had to endure was moved to the side… I had a gawddamn vacation to enjoy.

When we both got back from our trips we eventually talked about it. I told him that I was disappointed when we first met up. He felt the same way, and the reason being he was expecting a different side of me, and he didn’t get it.

Oh…so he was expecting something else.

We talked some more and I later found out that he was anticipating meeting the bad-mannered-cursing-like-a-sailor-who-is-pissed-off-at-everybody Tiff like he reads in my blogs and watches in my videos but ended up with the Tiff who is completely normal and slightly dorky on occasions because she spouts her favorite movie quotes and laughs at her own jokes.

So the point of the story is: If you meet me in person and expect me to tell you to go fuck yourself and everybody else in the world because I’m supposedly angry and abrasive all the time, then you would surely be disappointed.

Why?

Because I’m not socially retarded. In “real life” I’m pretty nice, polite, and likable. I’m not blunt. I don’t creep people out. I try to avoid confrontations. I treat everyone with respect. I don’t freeload off of people’s food. And I certainly don’t go off on a tangent listing my aversions then go into detail on why they piss me off unless you ask for my opinion.

Sometimes I do swear. Sometimes I say “fuck” more than Orange County people say “like” but it really depends who I’m talking to and how comfortable they are with my use of profanity.

My writings can sometimes be different from the way I am perceived in person because I usually don’t describe what I do on a day to day basis (unless something funny/weird/interesting happened, but my life is pretty much normal). That shit bores me and I’d probably end up typing myself to sleep if I wrote how I walked the dog and then studied for a Biology test while eating Mac n Cheese.  When writing, I tend to pick out the ones in which I have fun writing about.  I write for myself and I let everyone in.  I do it at my own pace. No expectations. No courtesies. No politeness. Just me.

However, I AM bringing this topic up right now because my stuttering has gotten a lot worse, and that’s pretty weird. Pretty freaking weird.  My stuttering has always been consistent. I’ve started ever since I could remember, and it has never gotten worse, nor it has ever gotten better…that is until recently. If I did my math right, it moved from 5% words a day, to about 10-20%. Also, “w-wuh-wedding” now turns into “wuh-wuh-wuh-wuhhhhh-wedding”.

Not only has it gotten worse, but also I can’t speak Vietnamese without stuttering severely and I can’t say things that start with a “W” sound in English. I can’t even say “one”.

Last night, I went to bed but couldn’t sleep because I was so concerned about my speech problem. So during the night, I sat upright on my bed and decided to say a couple of sentences to myself that started with a “w” sound just to see if I can go without stuttering, and boy was I wrong.

I tried to say my home address, but could never quite get passed the very first number of the address because it started with a “one”.

“Yes, my address is wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwone.”

Hahah oh noooooooooooo!!!! Gosh, I found it so entertaining and pathetic at the same time, I kept on laughing, plus I’ve NEVER been THAT bad before!

Now before anyone tries to give me advice, I’d like to point out that thinking about the word first and then saying it carefully, is not the solution. It’s like telling a handicap to think about walking, and then have them try to get up and walk. We don’t stutter because we don’t think before we talk, we’re just incapable of saying certain words at a certain time.

I hate it, and my family always does that to me. When I’m in the middle of stuttering, someone, SOMEONE will always say, “Stop, and think about what you’re going to say. Calm down.”

Dude, I’m not in a rush so shut your fucking trap! The best way to help someone with a stuttering problem is to shut up and let him or her finish trying to say the word, no matter how painful it looks.

Well anyway, last night, I found a way to prevent most of my stuttering. I just have to contort my face, especially my lips, and say the word in a combination of a Mexican accent and Count Dracula’s. Sure I may look funny as hell, but shit, I don’t stutter, AT ALL!

Also, because I usually don’t stutter when I sing, I can also get into like, a rhythm when I’m talking.  It’s not singing, but it’s definitely close.

Isn’t stuttering just plain funny? The cause of it is just a huge mystery and the ways to hide it is just baffling. Why do I stop stuttering when I’m singing?  Or why do I stop stuttering when I make funny faces and talk with a ridiculous Hispanic-Count Dracula accent?

Sincerely,
Tiff

I also noticed that my things tend to sell if I’m in the picture (duh), so I’m thinking, man, if I just hold a Styrofoam cup of paper clips and a used travel size shampoo and conditioner, and then post it on ebay, would anyone bid on it?

To quench my perpetual thirst for answers, I decided to google “weirdest ebay items” and found out that, and I shit you not, some belly button lint is currently up for bid for $170.00 so far.

So yes, I’ve come to the conclusion that someone, at least one person, in this wacked out world we live in, will purchase my Styrofoam cup of paper clips and used travel size shampoo and conditioner. I may not get a lot of money out of it, but somebody will actually use their time to bid on MY piece of junk, and of course, little money is better than no money.

But I’ve got a better idea. When I’m done selling my real stuff (stuff that a lot of people would want to buy), I’m going to take a picture of myself putting gum in my mouth, chewing it, taking it out and putting into a Ziploc bag…because you know why? I’m going to sell it on Ebay. I swear.

I’d just love for someone to purchase MY used gum. Honestly, who the hell can say, “Yeah, I sold my used gum for five bucks on eBay..pfff.”

I’d like to be that person.

So research shows that we are subconsciously more attracted to people with symmetrical faces. I am not one of those people, but if I did have a well-proportioned face it would look something like this:

The left photo is based on the right side of my face, and the right photo is my left side.

After some careful deliberation, I’ve decided that the left side is my good side…yeah that’s the crip side. HA!! I crack myself up sometimes. Ok not funny. Anyways, it’s kind of adorable, in a freakishly Star Trek kind of way, but check out the raunchy photo on the left! Shit guys, you’re telling ME that I’d get laid if I’d looked like that?

I think I’ll pass and stick with my original, asymmetrical sex face.