My Friend

is an internet sub-D list celebrity! It's Michael Goldberg!

His blog has been linked to by a site that has access to a large group of 14-year-old boys and therefore has found his target audience.

We befriended him lo these many years ago at GW for that very reason.

All I'll tell you about Goldberg is that he was involved in a very cruel yet very hilarious-in-hindsight prank involving me and my stuffed penguins.

OH yeah, internets, that's something embarrassing about me.

Hello, my name is katastrophe, and I am a girl who

a) still has stuffed animals (I know, I know. I'm THAT GIRL)

and

b) I have a penguin "thing". A collecting "thing". It's a problem. I know.

I was 18 and just finished taking my first college exam. I was over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived, and recovering from what would then be a pattern of pre-exam anxiety attacks that would grip me for about half a day, and only eventually let up a few hours after the exam when I could finally nap.

I came home to my freshman-year dorm room to find my door slightly ajar.

I FREAK.

Yes, we all sort of kept our doors open. It facilitated the borrowing of things and the notes to leave. But this was unusual. I ran up to my room and burst through the door. To my horror, I found my stuffed animals swinging by nooses around their necks from the ceiling, in some sort of stuffed animal suicide pact.

I gasped. I looked to the floor.

Strewn beneath them were all my class materials from THE WORST CLASS EVER THAT I TOOK IN COLLEGE: Attitudes towards DEATH AND DYING.

Yes, that's right. At 8am Mondays and Wednesday I got to learn about death, which was not limited to grief, psychologies of death, cultural attitudes towards death, and types of death. The professor collected funerary photography and shuffled about the campus ensconced in floral mumus and a morose air about her 400 lb self.

Back to the penguins-- which were gently swaying with the heat coming out of the vents, their glass eyes looking past me. It was like someone knew I was coming, and gave the penguins a good shove so that I would find them swinging. There was a suicide note, but I was too overcome to read it.

This was the icing on my panic attack cake. This was my 18-year-old breaking point. Before bills, job interviews, housing concerns and sort-of real life dicisions. These penguins were with me from a very early age, and are the closest thing I have to a security blanket. I had flitted around the backyard with one tucked under an arm on some sort of imaginary adventure as a child, snuggled with them to help me fall asleep as an awkward kid, and clutched them while I cried when high school boys broke my heart.

I did the only thing my exhaustion would let me do. I burst into tears. It was funny exactly 72 hours afterwards, but it was a great joke to return to. A la "It's not like she hung your penguins or anything! god!"

I think I let Goldberg have it for like, two WHOLE years. My tears weren't the desired outcome, and the culprits immediately tried to make me see the humor in it.

The college humor.

So have a heart. Visit CollegeHumor.com and click the link "banging the queen". Yes, that's what his blog entry is called. He's also linked at right, so checking him out that way is probably easier. In fact, bookmark him and read often.

He really will cream his pants if his site meter stats get any higher, so help a guy out who is living at home and going to law school IN NEW JERSEY. He could really use those nerd-rays of sunshine.

Let me say that again: HE IS LIVING AT HOME AND GOING TO LAW SCHOOL. IN NEW JERSEY.

Have pity, click on through.