Wednesday, June 29, 2011

#29 -- Behold, The 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®: A Break-Up Story

"Being in vengeance is like being in love -- you can't be told you're getting revenge, you just KNOW you are."

I broke up with a girl. She didn't reckon I had the backbone, or the wherewithal, to emotionally cripple her in the way she did me. This isn't karma. It's something more callous. It's vengeance.

The next sentence involves the word "ass." Coming out of a relationship, you can either kick it, or suck it. I will not suck it.

She said she was going to make something of herself and I was just treading water with my life. First of all, know that at this point, I have stopped caring about all things when I'm in her presence. You know it -- you know the feeling when that switch that gets flipped. Now I'm quite literally bound by the laws of physics to find everything about her repugnant, lest I sink into depression like her failed-future career as a patent attorney! BOOM! That is verbatim what I said to her. She didn't even realize that not only did I already know she was going to try again to pass the bar and become a patent attorney, but I ALSO already knew she was cheating on me with Dan, her carpool buddy, with whom she also shares a subway pass with.

Dan is the worst name in any language. Try saying, "And the hero's name was: Dan." Seriously, try it right now. Just you try it. See? You try to say it and you just end up barfing your mouth full of vomitus.

She thought she was breaking up with me, but I'd come to the breakup prepared to counter her ending our relationship with a 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®! You should've SEEN the look on her face. It was repugnant. She thought she was just going to reveal her secret plan about breaking up with ME and moving in with DAN and her new career as a patent attorney. I'd been with her for a while and I KNEW I could easily take the wind of her sails, and I ALSO knew that she sucks ass at sailing -- a vain shortcoming that's always bothered her -- so tacking against the wind was COMPLETELY out of the question with her. Her entire  nautical vocabulary is limited at best, so when I said that, "Baby I'm going to take the wind out of your sails and you'll be fucked because you don't know how to tack," she was BLOWN. . . nowhere. Her brain was in the doldrums. I'm awesome at crossword puzzles and I'd come to that brunch prepared.

I drank like 3 cups of iced coffee at the Dunkin' Donuts across the street prior to meeting up with her and I wrote down some notes on a notepad that I'd bought earlier with the change from my coffee. I decided on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance® right then and there. She was going to come and tell me that she was going to become a patent attorney, that I knew. Know what? Fuck her. I'll become a stand-up comedian. I wrote that down and underlined it. What's she going to say to that? She knows I'm funny and she knows that I know that she hated studying for bar the first time, and she knows I LOVE being funny. I'll be pursuing a kick-ass dream -- she'll be backsliding into lifelong career of professional, regretful nitpickery. And she's pissed that her roommate Charlotte always said I was funny and even said I should become a stand-up comedian when I wasn't in the room one time. I know she said that, because I trained their pet parakeet, Toucan Fran, to tell me secrets. Toucan Fran and I are in very good terms.

"Well done, Toucan Fran," I whispered to him, handing him a Salteen. "Yes, yours are the words that shall topple the first domino in my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®."

That was number 1 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. Turn the people in this coffee shop against my ex!

Turning a crowd against somebody else is easy if you're me or if you're like me. You don't even need to be mean about it, they usually do most the damage to themselves. All you need is some money, not even a lot! It's super fucking easy. For example, with money, you can get cheap plane tickets and go places, but before you do, tell people you're going to go somewhere and do something. Public knowledge is the truest knowledge, and rumor is her sexy half-Japanese cousin. Make sure that the person you're telling your plan to will think that it's really fucking stupid-sounding, but make sure uninvolved others are there to hear it too, because it'll sound cool to them. For example, I'll say: "I'm gonna go to Iceland. Bathe in some hot springs. If the mood strikes me after I visit Haukadalur, of course."

Number 2 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance® had already been set in motion. Vacation in Iceland. My ex didn't believe me, but when I pushed my bought-and-paid-for Iceland Air ticket across the table to her, she started denying it. Like I couldn't do it? Please, the seeds are already planted. Dudes eating brunch with their girlfriends were already pulling out their iPhones to see how cheap tickets to Iceland were. My ex looked fucking dumb saying going to Iceland wasn't a good idea. She wanted so much for me to be unhappy. I will have none of it. Fucking with people is easy if you take something impractical and make it awesome, which is what I did with my time in Iceland!

It's a beautiful country, by the way. I took pictures and I sent them to her new address when I got back to the U.S. I borrowed my grandmother's old camera that I gave to her for Christmas in 2002, and I included that fact in the note I sent to my ex along with the pictures. It wasn't a digital camera either, it was an oldish, but still really good-quality film camera, so the actual for-real photographs that I mailed to her of me tacking against the wind while sailing off of the coast of Reykjavík with Jóhanna and Flóki made her concede how awesome my time in Iceland was, thanks to the pictures I took with my grandmother's camera.

That's number 3 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. Help HER family members get jobs. It's the most thoughtfully hateful thing you can do to somebody. Her younger brother and I play Mario Kart Wii online all the time and he just graduated from RISD. Well, guess who works in HR at a design firm downtown? Charlotte! She's already refused to talk to my ex when she called to ask for help on getting her brother an interview. But Charlotte and me are super-close now ever since we got drunk on kick-ass maitais at the Cheesecake Factory a little while back. BOOM! My ex's little brother got the job offer this morning, he sent me a video message from his smartphone of him celebrating in the elevator after the interview. Now, even after the breakup, my ex's family knows how kind I am. Her mom is already refusing to buy her a plane ticket home for Thanksgiving! Her brother's already been put on a project at the job doing logo design for a Chinese flower company that specializes in genetically-engineered lilies.

That's number 4 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. I learned about flower arrangement. Why? Because girls love flowers but don't know SHIT about arrangement methods.

A girl might know how to speak a second language or be really good at running or yoga or be a really good cook, which are all NORMAL things a guy coming off a break-up might pick up to get back at his old girlfriend.

See, girls don't know ANYTHING about flower arrangement, so when my professionally-arranged piece shows up in a local magazine that I know she reads because I re-forwarded it to her new address, it drives her crazy. She doesn't know if it's good or not because she only speaks French, cooks chicken cordon'bleu, sits in a full-lotus position, and runs half-marathons. Talk about BORING!

I found these reactions to be kinda trite. They exude a deliberate, inorganic sadness-aura. Why be so predictable? Being in vengeance is like being in love -- you can't be told you're getting revenge, you just KNOW you are. Remember your Palpatine and let the hate flow.

My security and self-confidence annoys her so much it makes her menstruate early. It's satisfying, but really fucking gross. Here's the real great part: flower arrangement is FUCKING EASY.

I also told all the girls in the seminar class that I got into, wherein I learned what little there actually is to know about flower arrangement, that I'm color-blind, so when they realize how amazingly put-together my display was, it drives them fucking WILD. All I did was Google color-blind and figured out all I needed to know about what colors look like what to somebody with the affliction.

"What? Green? No, I see something darker, something closer to what you might call 'blue.' " Then I tell them that my ex was a cocktease and always left me with green-balls.

"Wow. Sounds like she sucked ass."

"Yeah. She did. I'm getting over her though."

That's number 5 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. I convinced Dan that HE was color-blind. They don't have their cable modem hooked up yet at their new place, so when he went to Starbucks to get a wireless signal, I got a bunch of my buds together, and at random intervals, had casual background conversations about how the way Dan was dressing suggested that he might be color-blind. Then my friend Spike, who graduated magna cum laude in computer science, fixed up some kick-ass fake websites with some unproven research on color-blindness. We Google-bombed the search terms for his site and associated them with color-blind searches. Dan found them no problem when he Googled it, and BOOM! Dan now thinks he's color-blind.

So now Dan thinks he's color-blind, his Internet isn't hooked up, I enjoyed my time in Iceland, and my ex's family is neglecting her during the holiday season. Not good enough. Too many of her friends still like her.

Logically, step 6 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance® is simple: deprive her of sleep on the week of Saint Patrick's Day. There's nothing worse than a malnourished grouch on Saint Patrick's Day. This is a little tricky, but I basically remove all substances from her life. Aspirin, ibuprofen, Ambien, caffeine, alcohol, vitamin-C supplements, sugar, all of it. It just involves replacing all the pills with placebos, the coffee grounds with decaf, the sugar with salt, and the alcohol I'll just steal from her.

I was debating hiding metronomes in her apartment to wake her up at random intervals during the night and I liked the idea that I had, so I did it. I already installed auto-run features on her laptop and work computer so they randomly turn on and off be it day or night. How pissed does that make you when you computer shuts down for no reason? Very. I can actually activate these background-routines on her computer from my phone with the supporting app I wrote, so I'll know when she's sad and I'll know when to laugh.

Come Saint Patrick's Day, she's a wreck. She'll be utterly repugnant, and yet, it DOES. . . NOT. . . STOP. She'll want to do hair-of-the-dog, or drink an Irish coffee or some shit. No. I don't let it happen. Keep it up, swapping everything out. She'll hate the sight of smiling faces, scowling constantly at drunks, and she’ll be so upset that eventually, dehydrated and exhausted, she'll collapse. Sober, she'll be taken to the hospital on Saint Patrick's Day, and nobody will be able to come and get her because a) we hate her for being whiny and annoying and pouty all day, and b) we'll all be too drunk to drive over there. Hope you enjoy getting felt up by puke-soaked forty-somethings, Honey.

Finally, step 7 in my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance® is to convince her that she's been indirectly responsible for the death of a homeless guy. This is easy. On Halloween, I'm going to have one of my friends that she doesn't know dress as a homeless guy. It's a common costume, it'll work perfectly because she's looking for a pity-fuck by now. When she asks who he is, he'll be from out of town, and nobody will know, so I'll start spreading the rumor that he is, in fact, an actual homeless guy. He'll deny this when she asks, and despite the fact that he smells like spoiled fruit, they’ll hook up. Then he'll go back on his word, adamantly confirming that he is entirely homeless. His story will be something like: he dropped out of school after his parents died and he blew his trust fund right after it came out of escrow, and now he's homeless at a very young age.

This will gross her our, and she'll kick him out of the building where the party is, thinking that he's lying, that he's playing a joke on her. He'll crawl into a doorway and make sure that she watches him go to sleep, and she’ll go home. Now, the next day, the host of the party will release a statement on Facebook saying that it was a great party and all, but demand to know who let the homeless guy in? First, she'll be grossed out that she hooked up with a real-live homeless person, who is still just one of my friends from out of town that owes me a favor. I gave him a ride to the courthouse so he could fight a speeding ticket and then bought him an iced coffee outside the DMV while he got his license renewed, and now that he’s helped me with this, we're even.

Pay it forward, people.

The real coup de grâce though is that the host of the party, another one of my friends, will begin to complain about a smell outside his window, occasionally updating his status or Tweeting, or wherever. Finally, it will be revealed that the smell is coming from a corpse. We take a few pictures out of his apartment window with a gurney and ambulance that we borrow with the help of some buddies at med school, my "homeless" friend, still in costume, sorta bloated and very dead. Autopsy reports suggest that he's actually been dead for about a week, passing away on the night of Halloween.

So not only did she hook up with a homeless guy, but her cruelty and disbelief that he was in fact homeless, resulted in him getting dead.

And that’s my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. I would say that you should have heard this coming, especially since I was actually planning it while we were still "together," but you're a repugnant stump, and you're as deaf as a haddock, so you get what you deserve. One last bit of constructive criticism: it isn't the light, you look bad no matter how and where you stand.

Die alone.

 
-- Ghost Little
on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

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