there's your problem

I generally discuss my drug problem pretty candidly and nonchalantly--I've never felt that, despite the fact that I have it to begin with, it was causing any serious problems. I don't do it nonstop, I don't do it excessively, and I go very long periods of time without doing it without any trouble. So, yeah, to me my drug problem isn't quite as bad, at least in comparison to the things that made doing drugs sound like an attractive option to me. I tend not to talk about it like it's a huge problem because for the most part I don't think it is one.

Having said that.

This is actually seriously starting to worry me.

I've never had a stellar memory. But lately (within the last two years or so) I've noticed it getting worse. I used to just forget appointments and things, not know the date, forget names. Then I started forgetting things that had happened recently--much more recently than I'd ever had trouble remembering before. Not only am I now forgetting things after just a few minutes, I'm also starting to literally forget things while I'm still thinking of them. It's hard to explain what this feels like but basically what happens is I'll be thinking of something--thinking about a movie or TV show--and then think about things related to that movie or TV show, and in a matter of seconds I can no longer remember the movie or TV show I was thinking about. Sometimes I don't even remember that I was thinking about a TV show or movie. I know I was thinking about something but I can't remember what it was and this happens so swiftly and so frequently (many times a day) that I'm starting to become a bit concerned.

Apparently short-term memory loss is a side-effect of opiate use.

Now I'm starting to wonder what I've gotten myself into...

a sign of the times

True story.

Teen pregnancy was something of an epidemic where I used to live in Maryland. It was kind of tragically common for girls as young as thirteen or fourteen to get pregnant and give birth. It wasn't at all unusual to see girls waddling around the halls at my high school with their big pregnant bellies getting in the way. While hardly the majority, it was still common enough to be unremarkable when it happened.

The school curriculum required a 'health class' credit that featured one unit on sex and pregnancy. The only teacher in school who taught that class--whose name I don't remember, so let's just call her Mrs Med--was a married woman in her mid-fifties who, by choice, never had children. She was very well-informed about everything but couldn't speak from experience when it came to pregnancy and childbirth. This isn't generally a problem in any subject--you don't expect someone teaching a history class to have witnessed historical events firsthand, or an English teacher to have written the books. But when I took that class, two girls piped up during the lesson on childbirth and argued with the teacher that their own experiences with pregnancy and childbirth were different than what she was talking about.

Yeah. So many girls kept getting pregnant at that school that a sex ed teacher knew less about it than some of her students.

Holy mindfuck.

how did I do this before??

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be approved for a Mirena IUD by my doctor. (It is ridiculously hard to get any kind of long-term birth control, especially for women and especially-especially for women under thirty. For reasons that make me rage too violently to want to take the time to explain now.) An  IUD--intrauterine device--is a type of internal contraceptive that lasts several years and doesn't require you to remember to do anything special, like remove or replace a vaginal ring or a sticky patch or take a pill. Which I could never remember to do because I am incredibly absentminded.

The progesterone IUD I have, Mirena, lasts five years. Copper IUDs last ten, but also do things like make your menstrual period worse and heavier and last longer and your cramps are more painful, which is exactly what I was trying to stop from happening. Mirena also comes with the perk of occasionally stopping a woman's period completely. Which mine did. I haven't really had a period--at least not like what I used to--since 2009. I do get a very short and light one that lasts just a few days and is mainly just mild cramps and spotting, but I only get that about once every fifteen months or so. So it really doesn't count and isn't anything I have to worry about.

Except that sometimes I do.

Whenever it happens I feel miserable. It's not anywhere near as bad as my pre-BC menstrual days (I had to go on the pill at sixteen to control my erratic, debilitating periods), so I always feel kind of like a wimp. I used to weather worse than this all the time! Why am I so miserable now??

I have no idea how I put up with this shit before I discovered how wonderful birth control was.

you're not being as covert as you think

I haven't been to--or even read much of anything about--the other Disney parks in the US or in other countries, so I'm not sure whether this is their practice everywhere or in some places or if it's just something they do in Orlando. But anyway. EPCOT represents a big chunk of the park itself and is designed to appeal to older kids and adults. And a big part of that is called the 'World Showcase', which is divided into eleven smaller areas that are all more or less the same, each with a restaurant, a shop, a stage for shows, and a small museum. Each areas represents one of eleven different countries so all the shops and things focus on that particular country.

Disney actually got really into the idea of trying to provide as authentic an experience as possible, so each of the twelve 'Showcases' is staffed by people who are actually from those countries. (Mostly college kids studying abroad or taking part in the Disney program.) It does well to make the whole experience pretty fun, and they're naturally very good at answering pretty much any question anyone might have about their homeland.

All of these people speak English very well, but when talking to one another they often revert back to their native languages. Probably because it's easier and more comfortable, but I know for a fact that some of the time they're not speaking English so they can speak a bit more freely in front of the tourists without getting into trouble for saying something offensive.

Unfortunately, this approach only works if the people in earshot don't understand the language. Which mostly they don't, except sometimes they do. My family were hanging around Italy's souvenir shop and two of the employees were teasing each other good-naturedly in both English and Italian. The man, again only in jest, threw up one arm and smacked the bicep with his other hand. This sounds stupid to most people reading it, but it's actually a very rude gesture in Italy. Sort of like the middle finger in the US.

Being Italian, though... my mom knew. And she scolded him a bit. You could tell he definitely did not expect that to happen.

triggered!

I have an incredibly, abnormally sensitive gag reflex; I've only ever known one other person who had a worse one, and hers was so bad she had a prescription for muscle relaxers to control it and needed to be sedated at the dentist. Mine isn't quite that bad, but it's still pretty bad. It responds to physical prodding, sticking something down your throat, like everyone else's--but it doesn't take a lot, and it's really hard for me to hold it in if it's set off. Those throat swabs at the doctor's office were a nightmare for me since I inevitably fought like hell and then puked immediately on contact. Sometimes on the doctor. It got so bad that my mom used to have to promise me $5 a go if I managed not to puke. I don't do that anymore, but only because I'm better at not throwing up when my body wants to all the time--not because my gag reflex has improved.

Like other people, my reflex is triggered by other things as well--certain smells, the textures of certain things in the mouth, the sight of things like slimy bugs that I find visibly repulsive. It also gets triggered by the tastes of certain things, though this seems to largely have abated as I've gotten older. The thing that gave me the worst trouble trying to stomach when I was a kid?

Tylenol.

Children's cold remedies almost always seem to have the same chemically, furniture-polish-esque cherry flavouring that I could never, ever manage. I just couldn't stand that taste when I was a kid. Taking medicine was another battle for me and my parents--not only did I know it was going to taste awful and I was going to get sick, I knew I'd also be in trouble for it because my parents invariably blamed me whenever something went wrong. They thought I was throwing up on purpose for attention.

There are no words adequate to convey just how violently repulsed I was by cherry cough medicine. To this day, anything that smells remotely like that--including cherry sodas--makes me want to hurl. I hated it so much and was so desperate not to have to go through it ever again that I actually learned how to swallow pills whole like adults when I was eight years old.

Yeah. I've spent 75% of my life taking adult medication because I had such a sensitive gag reflex that the taste of the 'kiddie' stuff made me vomit uncontrollably.

It comes with perks though. It means I almost never bitch at the pharmacy that the pills are too big for me to swallow. And it also means that when I have to take multiple medication or a large dose, I can bang down a fistful of pills in one go without much of a problem. And I can dry-swallow, but I hate doing that because it feels weird.

Also, it's probably pretty fortunate that the boything doesn't like blowjobs. If he wanted me to do it and I tried, it would probably end in me getting immediately and spectacularly sick all over his junk. Which I'm pretty sure would have put him off blowjobs for a while anyway.

...you'll do that??

I have to put this behind a cut because it's all basically a discussion of my sex life.

wow, what a difference

So, I've been watching 'Snog, Marry, Avoid?' again (I love that show) and the difference in appearance between the fucktons of makeup and no makeup/natural makeup is sometimes pretty shocking. This one is one of the more extreme ones, an egotistical little Italian woman called Martha

Fast forward to about 6.57 to when she starts taking off her makeup if you just want to see what I'm talking about. It's a bit painful to watch the whole thing, she really is incredibly self-absorbed and just doesn't seem like a really great personality in general. I wouldn't want to hang out with her--the prettiest people get really ugly, really quickly when it turns out they're rotten people.

This girl is 21 years old but with all that makeup on she looks like she's a lot older--she could easily be in her thirties or forties and trying too hard to look young. Not only is she one of those people who looks nothing like herself with all her makeup on, but she actually looks decades older than she really is. It's a very obvious, measurable change to the point where, were you not aware of it, you'd think it was two different people. She's incredibly pretty and quite shockingly youthful. Her features are so soft and rounded and youthful that she looks like she could be as young as thirteen or fourteen!

She also looks kind of surprisingly like me.

I still wouldn't want to snog or marry her. I'd avoid her. She seems like a real bitch.

memorable

I don't remember how or when it started, but it was something of a tradition in my parent's neighbourhood for yeeeeears to celebrate a friend's birthday with what became known as the Flamingo Gag.

It was actually something almost exclusively done to adults--it was occasionally done for young people but it was more fun to do it to people of rather more advanced years. Because the entire prank consists of sneaking into their front yard while they're not home (or in the middle of the night) and planting the number of pink plastic lawn flamingos in their yard as they were old. So if you were turning fifty there was the very real possibility you were going to wake up to find fifty plastic flamingos camped on your lawn.

Apparently it's a prank that's sometimes used as a fundraiser, especially for schools and churches and clubs, because it's totally harmless and even the victims think it's funny. When money is involved, it usually goes something like this: a note is taped to the door stating that you've been pranked (in case there was any other realistic explanation for the fact that you had a fuckton of flamingos in your yard), and offering you the option of paying $1 to have them removed, $2 to have them removed and put in someone else's yard, and $3 to have them removed AND put them in someone else's yard AND buy you immunity from future flamingo attacks.

Semi-related: I hate baby-talk in general and it annoys me when anyone who isn't a baby uses it. But when I was learning to talk my family still lived in Florida and flamingos were a common sight. Apparently I was crazy about flamingos but couldn't manage the name quite right and called them 'fingos' instead. Sometimes I have to stop myself from using that word even now just because it's cute.

a few things

Firstly, the content of this video is so sufficiently weird that neither I nor anyone in the comment section seems to have noticed that the woman in the grey cardigan is wearing a see-through skirt. Seriously. Go to 3.27 and have a look. It's not like it's even subtle or anything. Her knickers are probably visible through it from low earth orbit. I know now, of course, but it's pretty embarrassing how many times I saw the video before I noticed it.

Second, I'm in the middle of 'Twelfth Night'. It's taking ages because I have to read slowly and carefully around all the archaic language. But this one thing keeps happening over and over again throughout that I don't understand and isn't even something I remember popping up in any other play. And it's that people keep giving Feste the Fool money. I don't know if they're tipping him or what, but I kind of want to go through and count how many times people pay him. Clearly I am in the wrong business here.

Third: nudity glitches in the Sims are fucking hilarious. Especially when the player has the nudity mod that gets rid of the pixel-censor and just makes the Sims naked. It's not really as fun and cool as it sounded a way back when I first heard about it when the game was released--it sounded so illicit and awesome back then but naked Sims have no genitals or anything, like Barbies. Then again, at the time I was a sexually insecure hormone bomb of a twelve-year-old without access to porn OR the internet. And also happened to be up to my eyeballs in heavy doses of psychiatric medications that all came with disconcertingly long lists of sexual side-effects. So even featureless naked Sims were appealing to me. Nudity glitches aren't the most common glitches, but they're one of the funniest because of the often totally inappropriate situations. Most of the time it involves a Sim glitching after a shower and not putting their clothes back on, and they go about their daily activities in the nude. Sometimes the command to change clothes (for work or a special occasion) fixes it, but just as often they just stay naked until they're good and ready and will go to work and on dates and shit naked. And then there's the random naked people who turn up at weddings and parties and funerals and really ridiculous places like protests and campaign fundraisers. It's always a bit funnier when they're not totally naked. Like in this picture, in which a young couple shares a tender prom kiss while a stranger is jogging pantsless through the frame:

Somehow the presence of a top and shoes alongside the naked butt crack is fucking hilarious.

painted lady

So having been watching 'Snog, Marry, Avoid' for ages now, I'm paranoid I wear too much makeup. I don't wear orange fake tan, extensions, and pounds and pounds of makeup like the girls on that show--but between that and girls getting kind of ripped on in internetland for wearing too much makeup (I am guilty of saying that shit) and especially wearing makeup and pretending they're not, I'm worried I probably wear too much. To make myself feel better, here is an unretouched picture of myself as I intend to go to work. This is how I look almost all the time. Nothing special, no extra makeup, no photoshop, nothing at all different from how I look any other day at work. Well, except that I tried a couple of new colours.

Awesome grainy webcam pictures and all.

So apart from the weird light (it looks kind yellow/green for some reason, maybe reflection off the trees outside my window or something?) and the fact that my eyes look brown instead of green like they actually are, that's pretty true to life. I feel like I probably wear a fuckton too much makeup. I'm wearing:

Tiny bit of tinted moisturizer and some powder. (I have foundation but haven't been wearing it lately.)

This light metallic pink creme blush/colour... thing... that I thought looked cool and decided to try. It smells like sugar cookies.

A bit of red/brown eyeshadow on my eyebrows because I plucked them too thin last time and also I don't want to look too conspicuously like I'm not a natural red.

Blue/green eyeshadow and white to highlight.

Dark brown eyeliner, mostly on top and just a little smudge on the bottom. Otherwise I look like a sleepless zombie.

A new lipgloss. It's silvery pink. The colour is called 'Fairy'. I literally picked it up just for that reason alone. Fuck yeah, fairies.

No mascara or anything, I didn't feel like it. I'm out of the clear stuff anyway and when I wear black or purple I tend to look like I have falsies on.

So that's all of it. Looking at that list it looks really excessively hugely long. Geezis christ, maybe I DO wear too much makeup.

Probably.

the apple doesn't fall far

I seem to be able to hold a person's romantic or sexual interest in me regardless of how much of an ass I make of myself. Or how stupid I look. Or what ridiculous shit I say. It sounds like unadulterated ego here, but that's as best as I can describe it--people who would ordinarily not be too keen to pursue someone who appears to be that fucking weird are still interested in me when I've done something so dumb and bizarre that most people would just walk away.

And I think I got this trait from my mom.

When she was in college the drinking age was still eighteen. At a party one night, smashed off her tits, she was helped into a friend's car by a well-meaning young guy called David. She thanked him by vomiting on his new shoes.

The next day he called her and asked her out.

Yeah. Like a boss.

the ghost of shamefulness past

Confession: I used to write with a recurring Mary Sue.

People who write know what that means--especially fanfiction, though it happens in all genres to some degree. 'Twilight', I'm looking at you.

A 'Mary Sue' is a colloquialism within writing communities for a poorly-written author-proxy character who is perfect and faultless and everyone loves her. She's usually everything the author is or wishes they could be. Mary Sues are beautiful, intelligent, witty, mysterious, and often tortured souls. They often have unnatural features like cat ears, wings, tails, colour-changing eyes, or unusual hair colours. They usually get paired with main characters on whom the writer has a crush.

Mostly they're written by young writers, pre-teens and adolescents who have only just discovered the joys of writing and who haven't yet grasped how to write well-rounded and believable characters. Some are written by adults, but mostly it's a younger thing.

I wrote one. Back when I was about eleven or twelve. And she actually stayed in my mental roster for a good few years.

Her name, I am embarrassed to admit, was 'Tigress'. Sometimes she was called 'Tiger'. She had black hair and green eyes. She also had steel wings and a tail and was the half-god child of a divinity. And she had magic powers. And everyone fell in love with her.

I'm so glad I don't do shit like that anymore.

so exactly what part of this is the weird part?

Boything wears a collar. I realize from an outside perspective this makes me look like a dangerous psychopath--even from my perspective it looks pretty fucked up. But he does it and he quite likes it. Don't ask me why.

And he wears it so much that people are kinda used to seeing it.

Which is why he turned up at a friend's house sans the collar one day and everyone there was actually surprised to see him without it. And was asking him why he didn't have it on.

So what's weirder here? That he wears a collar, willingly, and wears it so often that everyone got used to seeing him in a dog collar? Or the fact that everyone got so used to this particular bit of weirdness that the day he didn't wear it attracted attention?

I don't try and answer these questions anymore. I don't think I can.

insider information

My mom is a teacher, though she didn't go full-time until I was almost out of high school. Because of this I have known a lot of teacher friends of hers--none of whom were ever teachers of mine, though my senior year science teacher was the husband of a teacher-friend with whom I had interacted socially before, which was awkward.

So I feel totally justified in saying this:

Teachers are much more sadistic than you think. You know how you would sometimes have a moment of rational thought when fuming silently that your teacher was being a dick on purpose, that voice in your head (and probably a similar voice coming from your parents) that said you were imagining things and they weren't being mean just to be mean?

That voice is lying to you. It might just as well be offering cake for all the truth in it.

Not that teachers often bully students for giggles--though some do--but that they assign projects and work that they know will be complicated and frustrating and time-consuming. They inflict surprise tests. They sit you next to people you hate. That kind of shit.

One big one I remember was multiple choice tests. Remember when you took those, and the answers would seem to have a pattern? If they went 'A, B, C, D' over and over or a bunch of answers in a row were all the same letter, you panicked because you thought you were getting all the wrong answers. Because how would they do that on purpose? Wouldn't it just be a careless mistake? You don't want kids guessing right, after all!

Yeah. They were doing that shit on purpose just to fuck with your head. They might not have been laughing out loud but inside they were having a serious incidence of giggle incontinence. You can bet your silent panic in the classroom was the subject of dinner stories for years after.

twice as embarrassing

Almost no one ever likes their yearbook pictures, and with a good reason: yearbook pictures are terrible. I seriously think they recruit yearbook photographers, passport/driving license photographers, and mugshot photographers from the same art school--probably called something like 'The Greater Northwest University of Excessively Unflattering Photography'. They just seem to have this remarkable talent for being able to bring out each and every one of your worst features, including ones you didn't even know you had.

In short, yearbook pictures suck.

Either sophomore or junior year in high school, there was an error with my friend's yearbook picture and somehow the only photo they had was one in which she was caught laughing and blinking at the same time. Not a good look for her, or indeed anyone else. So they re-took the photo and used the new one, but apparently never bothered to edit and proofread the yearbook before they sent it to publishing, because my friend ended up having two photos in the yearbook, side by side--including the mid-giggle-blink picture.

Poor Denise.

all the work, none of the glory

On a roll tonight--on with more nonsense, this time about history and fashion!

A lot of people are probably aware that purple is a colour often associated with royalty--because for a time it was actually illegal to wear it unless you were royalty, or at least a very high-ranking noble. Not that the law mattered much, since the dye was hard to make and time consuming and could make only very small quantities at a time, it was extortionately expensive, making it unattainable to all but the wealthiest people.

Easier to come by, but still expensive, was a versatile blue dye made from a plant called 'woad'. It could be made much more efficiently and in larger quantities--it's woad dye in various intensities that you see over and over again in abundance in Medieval tapestries. For a time the sumptuary laws (the laws dictating who could wear what) even prohibited certain people from wearing this colour.

Despite the fact that the dyemakers specialized in making a product available only to the richest of the rich, they were never especially popular people in their communities. The process of making both dyes was notoriously pungent, and in a world without regular bathing the pigment and smell tended to seep more or less permanently into the hands and clothes of the dyemakers. Woad purportedly smelled of really strong cat urine; purple dye was made by grinding the shells of murexes, a tiny sea snail found only in parts of the Mediterranean. (Phoenicia was for a time famous for producing and selling purple dye, because they had the best access to them.) Purple dye was even more malodorous and smelled like extremely rancid fish.

I don't know whether or not the smell stuck around after it was soaked into a fabric. I wouldn't be surprised if it did and people were just willing to put up with it or try to ignore it--it's not like it's at all strange for people to put up with a lot of terrible shit in the name of fashion. Do you honestly think anyone wore huge elaborate wigs, hoop skirts, picadills, or lead face paint because they were comfortable and easy to wear?

It's a bit interesting to think that the people who created a product available exclusively to only the richest people were so shunned and avoided by everyone else because the much-sought-after product they made smelled so terrible.

if you do this, I judge you

So, yeah--little things sometimes annoy the fuck out of me, way disproportionately to the actual inherent level of obnoxiousness. I don't even know why, they just do. My pet peeves just seem to be especially peevish. One of the things I hate most? People who type or write digits for certain numbers instead of just typing out the word.

I learned this in school, but I honestly don't remember when or from whom. I'm reasonably sure it was an English class of some kind but that would be pretty obvious. I'm not even generally predisposed to wanting to cling so devotedly to something I learned in school, but for some reason I've decided that this is an immutable fact of the universe so it pisses me the fuck off when people don't obey my preferred set of rules.

Anyway, one of my teachers declared that the 'right' way to write numbers was to actually spell the word out for numbers up to twenty--and also that you should write out thirty, forty, fifty and so on. Only for numbers greater than that was it acceptable to use actual numbers. And I follow this rule steadily, even in online chats and text messages and shit. (I also correct people's spelling in text messages and IMs and emails. I realize this makes me obnoxious as fuck.)

Because of this, it really annoys me when people write something like, 'the dog just had puppies, there are 4 of them!' instead of 'there are four of them'. It pained me even to just write that example there. I wouldn't want to take the time to write seven thousand, three hundred, and ninety-six instead of 7396, or even fifty-nine instead of 59--but it isn't that hard to write 'two' or 'eighteen' or 'sixty'. And I find it very visually jarring and extremely, pettily frustrating when people do it.

Yeah. I'm sure this is why I turned to drugs and have high blood pressure.

this is why the internet loves cats

Dog Logic:

You should try and eat everything you find on the ground or that the humans drop, regardless of whether or not it's actually food, because if it turns out that it isn't edible after all you can always throw it up later in the human's bed or on something expensive.

normal? not me...

Friend says, "The words 'eyeball tattoo' are the two most uncomfortable words in the English language."

Normal person response: "Wow, you're right, that is pretty disturbing and squicky."

My response: "Yeah but I bet I can make you feel even more uncomfortable with other combinations of words and will attempt so to do, by saying things like, 'urethral fisting' and 'anal hook'."

Sometimes even I think I'm fucking insane.

The Profane Poet

When I was reading Shakespeare in school, I never enjoyed it like I do as an adult--and one of the main reasons was because I found the arcane language difficult to read and understand. The copies of the plays that we used in school had the play itself printed on only one side of each page; the facing page contained footnotes explaining the use of words and phrases that have changed or disappeared from the vernacular all together, but even that didn't help 100% of the time.

But I've moved past that as an adult. It has nothing to do with getting older and everything to do with learning--and thereby understanding--a language that has changed drastically over time. And being able to understand the language led to my other main reason for enjoying Shakespeare: I get the dirty jokes now.

Plays in Jacobean and Elizabethan England were startlingly raunchy affairs. Surviving texts show a wealth of profanity and sexual innuendo that we in the modern world would be pretty squeamish around. The only reason Shakespeare's work isn't heavily edited or challenged is because most of the R-rated content is written in a way that is no longer obscene. Other playwrights used a lot of swearing, some of it graphic--plays had lines like 'I fart at thee!', 'A turd in your teeth!', and 'Shit on your head!' Shakespeare seemed uncomfortable with doing this and at that time his plays would have probably been considered somewhat prudish in their lack of profanity. But what Shakespeare lacks in swearing he more than makes up for in dirty jokes.

I was reading 'Twelfth Night' and came to Lady Olivia's insult to Malvolio the weasel, in which she asks him if he's tired of 'self-love', which basically means she called him a wanker. Then she accused him of being diseased, the implication obviously meaning sexually transmitted disease. The next character that speaks, the Fool, makes reference of Mercury--on the surface this is an allusion to ancient Roman mythology, but it would have been an extremely dirty joke to the audience at the time because mercury was often used as a treatment for... syphilis.

Yeah. Shakespeare was seriously multi-talented, but his specialty seems to have been 'being a pervert'.

Stay classy, O Bard. Stay classy.

minor shit

So, among the rather more detrimental and uncomfortable and upsetting ramifications from the overwhelmingly negative circumstances of my upbringing, I have a couple of silly ones. Some are habits that I picked up because it my parents, others were meant to cope with other authority figures like teachers.

Now, I get kidney stones. A lot. A few times a year. It is incredibly, insurmountably painful. They're a pretty common medical condition but it's typically found in elderly people--who are more likely to have a high-sodium, high-cholesterol body makeup that assists in forming stones. It's really unusual in someone my age who otherwise has healthy kidneys and I actually had my first one at sixteen. That's insanely young. Most likely it's the result of just not drinking enough. Of anything. (Newsflash: you don't need eight glasses of water a day, you will actually know when you are dehydrated and need to drink, and other liquids and most foods that aren't water still give you fluid intake.) I still don't drink as much a day as I do. I keep myself chronically dehydrated. There are days where I have just a single glass of water or juice and no other liquids.

Obviously this is not a good thing. It never ends well for me. But I think I know why I do it.

My high school implemented a lot of its rules with a nearly Gestapo-like zeal. I'm not saying rulebreaking should be tolerated universally, but it just isn't okay to enforce the rules to the point of ludicrousness. I got a detention once because when a teacher asked me how long my skirt was in the back--school rules dictated they had to be fingertip length but I have a very large backside so skirts tend to be a bit shorter in back than in front--and I answered, 'I dunno, I can't see the back.'

One thing they hated a lot was... people going to the bathroom. A lot of people have clockwork bladders. Within a certain time period every day, following meals or something, you just have to go. Teachers didn't like this because they always assumed you were going to cut class. Some teachers even handed out limited bathroom passes per semester. Two was pretty common, and I don't know anyone who has to pee just twice over the course of several months. They hated it when you asked during class, to which they tended to respond, 'You should've gone before you got here! You're interrupting class time!!' But they would literally lock you out if you turned up a nanosecond after the bell rang--forcing a lot of kids to have to explain 'unexcused absences' from classes when they get phone calls. So no matter when you thought it was going to be safe for a toilet break, it never was.

Anyway.

To combat this I just tried to make sure I didn't have to pee in school. A feat I accomplished by not drinking. Anything. At all. All day. Often without eating as well. I dunno about anyone else, but if I'm busting I can't think of anything else until the situation is remedied. I kept myself chronically dehydrated just so I wouldn't incur the unfair and unjustified wrath of my teachers.

I still do it.

It sucks.

Call Yourself Something Normal

Things bother me that have no business bothering me. But nonetheless, they bother me.

One thing I hate: 'creative' baby names.

I totally understand wanting your kid to be a Yuuniekke Ayuhnd Spaeshul Lyttull Snoeflayke (TM) and make them stand out from the crowd but they're much more likely to be a boring-ass run-of-the-mill accountant than they are to be Janis Joplin or Picasso. They are going to disappoint your expectations for being cool and quirky and unusual. Get the fuck over it. And stop giving your kids stupid 'krriiettievve' names that are spelled and pronounced totally different ways because you just basically sentenced your kid to a life of hating their name, explaining to everybody how to spell/say it, and looking really really really stupid. You look stupid as well, for calling them that. Having a weird name is something that always sounds cooler than it actually is. Some people grow to embrace creative names. Most don't. If you want to change your own name from Mary-Anne Smith to Sunbeam Moonflower Jyydynne Ayydnne Antosequandriquae Shioddunnieton that's totally your prerogative. I think you're a dingbat but you're presumably a grownup and are making your own choice. Don't saddle your kid with a name like that. They will not thank you for it. They just look stupid.

Don't name your kid Aiden or any of its derivatives. Don't spell a common name a 'new' and 'creative' way. (Like Myykkieale, or Gienuphuerre, or Jhueiymzze for Michael, Jennifer, or James.) Nevaeh (IT'S 'HEAVEN' SPELLED BACKWARD, AREN'T I JUST SO CUTE??) is not a good name. Skylar isn't a good one either. And for god's sake step away from the letter Q. At this rate, there are going to be eighteen kids in any given elementary school class with names like Hieaydyynne and Skyueyllurr and the 'weird' kids will be the ones called Sarah or Travis. You are not cute or interesting or creative or unique or fun. You sound like you took one too many bong hits during labour. Knock that shit off.

Trust me, your kids will thank you.

okay, I hadn't planned for that...

A lot of working parents leave their kids with a nanny or sitter or something before they're old enough to be in school. Never mind what you might be inclined to think of people who foist off a chunk of their parenting responsibilities onto someone else, it can have some unintended and sometimes just plain strange consequences. Most commonly, a child might bond more with the hired help and become more attached to them than their own parents. Or the child can pick up some bad habits.

I think a lot of people who hire nannies and sitters for all-day childcare for an extended period of time are at least vaguely aware that these possibilities exist. Sometimes they even try to negate them by making a point to spend time with the brat whenever they can. Or keeping a close eye to make sure no one is learning something objectionable. You can prepare for that shit.

But I'm not sure anyone would even suspect this would happen, let alone be able to prepare to deal with the ramifications.

I briefly knew a girl called Dawn, who happened to be white as white can be, whose mother was a single parent, meaning she was the sole provider and couldn't stay home all day with the baby. So she hired a nanny. It just so happened that the woman hired was Chinese and didn't speak terribly much English. Dawn was exposed to Chinese much more often than she was exposed to English-speakers, so naturally she picked up the language.

But she didn't manage to pick up English.

In the end, Dawn ended up having to take English instruction for her first few years at school because she happened to have been left with a sitter who inadvertently taught her Chinese. She even had a hard time communicating with her own mother.

By the time I knew her, she spoke perfect English. But I thought it was a bit weird and a bit interesting that this even happened. It would never have occurred to me to think of that as a potential consequence.

It had its perks, she told me. She could go to Chinese restaurants and order in Chinese and engage the staff in friendly casual conversation. Part of why she did it was because she always thought it was a bit funny how surprised they often were that this very not Asian chick spoke fluent Mandarin.

fashion =/= style

So, I've been around for a while. I have access to the internet. I've seen all kinds of fashion trends, past and present, that I thought were silly. Crocs were ugly, but fortunately those became associated with ugly stupid people and NO ONE liked them. Capri pants and cropped-length pants don't look good on anybody, especially not short people--unless you are very tall and slender and have really long legs, you are not going to look good in capri pants. Huge baggy clothes with pleats in strategically chosen places make everyone look wider and dumpier than they really are. Pajama pants should not be worn in public.

You get the picture. Some fashions are just stupid, okay?

But I've never actually really actively despised a fashion trend before. That is, until recently.

We already know how I feel about sandals, yeah? I fucking hate them. No one should wear them. But of the sandals I don't like, the new fashion sandals are especially hideous. You know the ones. Gladiator sandals. They have lines and straps arranged in a way that flatters approximately no one. Criss-crossing along the sides, a big decorative strip on the top of the foot. They have ankle straps that cut off the leg at a very awkward and unappealing place that makes the leg look shorter. The zillion straps, the awkward solid cutoff, the ubiquitous big clunky central line that serves no purpose and is always ugly. They're terrible. No one should be wearing these. I never imagined I would see a shoe that managed to simultaneously incorporate a fuckton of material, yet have such inadequate coverage. Sandals are shit anyway, but these particular sandals are the worst.

I can look at trends I don't like and go, 'Well you look really stupid like that, but you'll eventually figure that out in the next ten years or so once that shit is out of style.' Gladiator sandals, however, are something I just actively hate. Not even gladiators look good in those fucking things. They're definitely too severe and too awkwardly constructed to look good on anybody.

Go get yourselves something that doesn't cut you off at the ankle.

And while you're at it, get rid of every pair of sandals you have. You can keep one or two pairs of cheap flip-flops but you're only ever allowed to wear them to a beach or pool.

I really feel weird, I work at Old Navy, famous for its cheap plentiful flip-flops, but I fucking despise flip-flops. They should be illegal. All sandals should be illegal.

Quackers

Usborne is a company that publishes children's books for kids just learning to read. They're really popular in England but I haven't seen them anywhere else.

There was a running gag in the Usborne books that appeared in every picture in every book--somewhere hidden in the illustrated scenes, was a rubber ducky. The duck was the 'mascot' or something of Usborne and it was kind of like this extra fun little thing kids could enjoy.

So it totally made my night and gave me serious nostalgia when I found this picture of a young geisha:

Look at the top left side of her head right above that green thing.

IT'S A DUCKY!!

It seems really weird that a profession as serious and almost sacred as geisha, here's a touch of flagrant silliness. With all the rules dictating how they can wear their hair, what makeup they use, and what colour and style kimono and obi they can wear, it seems a little incongruous that they'd be okay with someone placing a rubber duck into their elaborate and impeccable hairdo.

I kinda hope it was intentional as a kind of joke. I'm pretty certain it isn't but that doesn't make it any less funny.

Bad, but not bad ENOUGH

I don't know what it is, but I seem to have a knack for developing mysterious physical maladies that are painful and flare up frequently enough to be a bitch to deal with, but that aren't bad enough to really trigger any kind of medical panic on my end. Or if I do, they never seem to have a readily available explanation. Never mind my cough and my knees, let's talk about my indigestion.

Actually I'm reasonably sure this is a problem that, if not caused by, then definitely aggravated by eating irregularly or not enough. But it also comes when I'm otherwise totally fine, and it doesn't always come when I'm hungry. So I have no idea what it's all about.

But yeah, I get indigestion. It's anywhere from a mild burn to an intense searing pain in the back of my throat that feels distinctly like it's caused by acid or something--it's definitely nothing like a sore throat, but I don't know how to describe it. Sometimes it goes from my throat to my chest. When it's at its worst, it's so intensely bad it makes my ears hurt. Have you ever had an itch in your throat that almost feels like it's in your ears? Yeah, it's like that, except it's incredibly painful. I've asked a few doctors about this but no one has ever been able to give me a clear answer. Since it doesn't really disrupt my life, I'm not inclined to bother with it since I can control it with some regular OTC heartburn medicine.

But it's still a bitch.

Can You Say That on Television?

The closest I come to speaking another language is being reasonably well-acquainted with American and British vernacular. The two are hardly mutually incomprehensible so even in my most optimistic moments I can't honestly think of it as knowing a second language--just knowing two dialects of the same language. Even so, I'm still acutely aware of the fact that there are a lot of things that get lost in translation. One of the things I've always been aware of but never given much thought to (or written about) is the fact that some words that sound dirty on one side of the Atlantic don't sound that way on the other. And vice-versa.

Take 'bum bag'. That pouch people wear around their waists, especially tourists? In the US it's called a 'fanny pack' but I can't bring myself to call it that. Not only was I taught first to call it a 'bum bag', but in the UK the word 'fanny' is a vulgar slang term for female genitals. No, I'm not lying.

'Fag' in the US is a really terrible slur and one for which you will earn a lot of disapproving scowls. In the UK it's a cigarette.

And then there's 'winklepicker'. I'm not honestly sure how common a term that is in the UK but the first time I saw the word, I thought it was probably sexual or derogatory in nature. Or both. It's actually just a kind of black ankle boot with a long pointed toe.

When you fuck up in another language it's usually understandable and excusable, even as it makes people uncomfortable to hear it. English speakers don't have that excuse.

dressy

When I was in school in Yorkshire, all the kids changed clothes for PE so we didn't get our uniforms dirty. (I have no idea how common or not that actually is in English primary schools because I've never bothered to ask.) Changing clothes for gym is normal but usually not until middle or high school. The school had no locker rooms so we all changed together in the classroom. I suppose at that age there really aren't many differences between boys and girls. I didn't grow up to be a rapist or axe murderer and neither did anyone else, so clearly it didn't do any harm.

Anyway. For some reason, instead of leaving our uniforms in a pile on the chairs or tables, a trend arose for us to actually dress our chairs. Probably because people reflexively drape blazers and coats and cardigans on the backs of chairs--we just went all out and put all our clothes on our chairs. Tights and trousers went over the front two legs, blouses nad shirts on the back, skirts usually sat on the seat, and our shoes on the front feet of the chair.

That's just weird.

Eventually it was specifically banned. We weren't allowed to do it anymore. I wonder if that isn't still in the rules of that school--students are not permitted to dress up their classroom chairs. If it is, I bet some kid will find it and wonder what the fuck happened for a rule like that to become necessary in the first place. Well, kiddo, it's because back in the early 90s a bunch of kids kept wasting school time dressing their chairs up for PE.

the name game

My dad had a weird habit when I was growing up.

First of all, neither my brother nor I had familial nicknames growing up. No 'Pudding Pie', no 'Kitten', no 'Pumpkin'. For one thing, my name is one for which there is no accepted shortened or familial version, like 'Nicky' for 'Nicole' or 'Sam' for 'Samantha'. My brother is named 'James' and I think the only diminutive of that name is 'Jim', which my dad ATTEMPTED to call him. I say he 'attempted' it because every time he said it I'd get very angry and correct him in exasperation, 'THAT ISN'T HIS NAME!!' I'm sure it was because I had no idea Jim was a nickname for James and didn't want my dad calling him the wrong name, but to be honest I really have no idea why I disliked it so much.

So, yeah, no pet names.

Sort of.

When I turned thirteen, my dad started calling me 'Teenager'. Obviously because I was one, but I still don't know why he decided to call me by my age. Anyway, I was 'Teenager' for years. I can't honestly say I was really attached to the nickname but I did expect I might have it forever--kind of one of those silly ironic nicknames like calling a huge fat guy 'Slim'. Then shortly after my nineteenth birthday he informed me that he was going to stop calling me 'Teenager' because I wasn't going to be one anymore.

I was a bit disappointed. I don't even know why I was.

And, true to his word, he never called me 'Teenager' again after my twentieth birthday.

irrelevant

I think more or less all of us, no matter how much we may think we're not that shallow, are hung up on appearance. Our own and other people's, and especially women's. Even really, really professional people do this, without knowing they are. Even people whose job it is to focus on how our minds work. Like psychiatrists.

A couple of years ago I had some psychological testing done to determine whether or not I might have had a learning disability of some kind. Since I have such low self-esteem, I tend to latch onto whatever I  can use as 'evidence' that I'm as dumb as shit. One of the ones I latched onto the most was that I was a shitty student in school and struggled tremendously with any math beyond very basic. My skull jockey eventually persuaded me to undergo testing, in hopes of helping me understand that my shortcomings were due to factors beyond my control that had nothing to do with being stupid. A learning disability would explain how an otherwise intelligent person did poorly in school.

In the end, it turned out I don't have any learning disabilities at all. I really am just stupid.

I still have a copy of the psychiatrist's report and one very small passing observation has struck me as unnecessary and kind of bothersome. In addition to pertinent information about me--things that would influence the results of the test--for some reason the doctor felt the need to point out that I was 'an attractive 22-year-old woman'.

Being 22 and a woman could have had a hand in my mental health, but being attractive doesn't have a thing to do with it. I don't mind being found attractive. I don't even mind when people tell me. But it seems really superfluous here and sort of inappropriate to have mentioned. Why does it matter what I look like? The problems are going on inside me, not out.

appeasement

The first time I lied to a guy and told him I loved him was when I was nine or ten years old. The reason I lied to him was to stop him from trying to seriously hurt me.

Kids develop territorial crushes on each other quite young, and like adults they sometimes don't take it well when the feelings aren't returned. I attended a co-ed theatre camp that summer and two of the boys developed crushes on me that led to rivalry. Most of it came down to, 'Which one of us do you like best? It has to be either me or him', which is bad enough as it is because it left me no option to turn both of them down. And it put me in the position that, no matter what I answered, someone was going to get pissed off.

One of the boys--I actually remember his name, it was Tod--heard from some other kids that I'd admitted that I liked the other boy best. (I never said such a thing.) Tod didn't like this. Tod got very jealous. Tod reacted badly and decided he was going to punish me for not choosing him. While I was swinging around on the monkey bars on the playground, Tod marched right up to me and demanded to know if I preferred the other guy. I told him I never said that, but he didn't believe me.

That's when he grabbed me by my legs and tried to make me fall to the ground.

I don't like falling so the situation led to panic very quickly. He didn't let go, and said he wouldn't until I picked him over the other guy. In fear for my own safety, I told him what he wanted to hear. I told him I liked him. I didn't like him. I just didn't want to break my neck.

This satisfied Tod and he smugly let me go with the stern warning, 'You better not change your mind.'

I've read that some women who have been assaulted--sexually or physically--will tell their assailant that she loves him and that she's pleased with what he's doing. They do this in hopes of appeasing them, the theory being that a happy assailant it less likely to become more violent. This isn't exactly rare. People assault other people over jealousy and rejection all the time--and a lot of the time it's a male-on-female violence.

But I think there's something seriously wrong in the world that these behaviours happen in young kids. Not only has a boy learned that it's okay to try and hurt someone if they don't do whatever you want, but a girl learns that the only way she can avoid it is by playing along even when it makes her uncomfortable.

Not cool. Just... not cool.

but I want it! (or: small change)

I've developed a really stupid habit at work that carries almost zero payoff for doing something that, if discovered, could cost me my job.

I steal pennies.

I don't mean to say that I plan on making myself wealthy by stealing pennies from work. The pennies I'm after are Lincoln cents that the US Mint stopped producing in 1959. They're called 'wheatback' pennies (or just 'wheaties') because the tail side face was two sheaves of wheat and the words 'ONE CENT' instead of the Lincoln Memorial. When the Mint stops making a certain piece of currency, it doesn't recall them--instead they remain in circulation and are still perfectly valid. In fact, every currency minted in the US at any point in its history is still legal tender, even when it's no longer being minted. And because coins are much more hard-wearing than paper money, they last decades and even centuries, which means that if you are sufficiently lucky and look hard enough, you can find coins that date all the way back to the Revolutionary War. And you could still spend it. I don't know why you would want to, since they all have a collector value many times their face value.

So anyway. I steal wheatback pennies at work because I collect coins and I think they're kinda cool to have, even though whenever I express surprise and excitement whenever a customer turns out to have a wheatback penny and doesn't have any idea why it's such a big deal.

My dad was the one who got me into collecting coins and he had an impressive collection of dozens of wheatbacks. (Including the rare steel pennies minted for a year in 1943 so that the copper could be used to manufacture the munitions needed for the war). He told me that when he was a teenager he used to go to the bank and buy sacks of pennies (banks will let you trade in any legal tender for any other legal tender, including pennies), something like 1000 of them at a time, and he'd comb through it for wheatback pennies before going BACK to the bank and re-depositing the pennies. He said that as time went by he found fewer and fewer of them and it was because people like us kept snapping them up out of circulation.

He's probably right.

The same goes for quarters from between 1976-1977 that also have a different design on them. They were made to celebrate the two-century anniversary of the Revolutionary War and instead of the eagle, there's a minuteman playing a drum. Which is why they're called 'drummer quarters', Coin collectors sure are an imaginative bunch when it comes to names, aren't they?

When I can, I replace it with my own money, but for the most part I'm not especially worried that someone might see my register being off every now and then by a few cents and conclude that I was stealing pennies. For one thing, who would steal a sum of money that small? This is something that happens maybe once every week or two so I don't think it's consistent enough for anyone to get suspicious.

If I get caught I would probably be in big fucking trouble.

But I really, REALLY want those wheaties.

It bears repeating that impulse control is NOT one of my strong suits.

new horizon

Another moment from childhood that served as a milestone in the progression to maturity:

When wait staff at restaurants stopped offering me kiddie menus and crayons.

In my case this took a bit longer than most people since, as I've said, I have never looked my age. It was sort of offensive to my mature young-adult sensibilities--meaning I was an insufferable adolescent who thought she was above 'childish' things and was practically a grownup--when I was still being offered crayons and paper placemats with games on them until I was well into puberty. I don't quite know when it happened, since it was something that happened gradually--fewer and fewer hosts thought I was a little kid until eventually none ever did at all--so I don't know if you can even call this a milestone since it wasn't a single event.

Sometimes it's a bit sad to know you're officially too old for something fun just because you're an adult. I always feel embarrassed to admit I love colouring books and still buy them occasionally, because it's not okay for adults to do it. Of course, I do it anyway and just don't tell anyone. The worst things are the ones that are not only socially unacceptable but also physically impossible. I remember my disappointment when I realized I was too big to play on climbing frames at parks or fit my enormous hips through a tire swing.

I don't mean to imply that I don't want to grow up. It's just a sad moment in life when you realize that childhood is so far behind you that it's completely inaccessible to you now.

another problem

I'm kind of discriminating drug addict. Some people will take whatever consciousness-altering substance they can get their hands on. Personally, I don't like doing that. First of all it's not safe, which I realize is a bit like saying I habitually drive without a seatbelt but don't speed because it isn't safe. I'm still doing a really dangerous thing, and if things go wrong I'll be just as dead as the result of one as the other. But you can never be completely sure what's in what other people give you or how you'll react to it, so I stick with what I know just because I don't want to end up in that situation.

Second, I don't like how everything makes me feel. I'm an insomniac and have depression, two conditions that put me in a position to obtain sedatives legally. But I don't like most sedatives. I don't like the way they make me feel, which is that I'm being played in slow motion and am carrying a lot of extra weight. I don't actually like feeling tired. If I'm going to drug myself to sleep, I want to get high doing it. Which is why I prefer the narcotic and hallucinogenic drugs. Lunesta is okay but I prefer Ambien. People hate that one because it causes blackouts and blank spots for long periods of time. And it does that to me as well. (True story: before we got together and at a time when I was in such a severe depression I was taking a near-lethal cocktail of alcohol and sleeping pills, I apparently masturbated loudly on the phone with the guy who is now my boyfriend. I have almost no memory of it happening, and the parts I do remember feel vague and foggy like the way you only vaguely remember a dream. I really only have his word to go on that it happened at all, but he wouldn't lie about something like that and it's something I would do.)

My drugs of choice aren't sedatives or psychoactive. I just like the rush from narcotics and narcotic-based sleeping pills. So I don't go after anything else, because I don't want to. Which I guess is SOMETHING, right?

I don't have constant access to these things anyway. Because I'm too cautious and too chicken to do anything but obtain them legally, most of the time I DON'T have them because I can't get a prescription. Either my insurance isn't going to allow me to refill or it's too close to the last script and the doctor will become suspicious. And when I do have them, I don't have them long. This is mostly owing to me having no impulse control (why wait when I can get high RIGHT NOW??), and also because I have ludicrously high drug tolerance. The last time I was in the hospital for kidney stones I got a shot of morphine and hardly hiccupped. Three to four times the dose does for me what it does for normal people.

Right now I'm just making do with OTC. All OTC sleeping pills that actually work (i.e., aren't 'homeopathic') have diphehydramine in them. That's the stuff that gives the loopy feeling to Benadryl and NyQuil. I never really totally liked how the stuff made me feel--it's one of those makes-me-feel-heavy-and-slow chemicals--but it's better than nothing and taking as high a dose as I do gives me a bit of a lift. It's an unbelievably huge dose though. Anywhere from 250-500mg. For comparison's sake, the amount in a typical dose of NyQuil or Benadryl is 50mg.

Yeah. It's like that.

milestones

I'm pretty significantly overweight as an adult, but for most of my life I've been much smaller and lighter than my peers. Until late in high school, I was just generally a scrawny little kid. As a result, my childhood archnemesis was movie theatre seats. You know, the ones that fold up when no one is in them? Those. Unless I sat on the very edge and had the advantage of leverage, it was a long fucking time before I could sit in one without it folding up on me. Which, being me, I almost never remembered would happen and so every trip to the movies saw me helplessly squished into the folded-up seat like Wile E Coyote. Sometimes more than once. It was a great moment of triumph in my life when I realized I could finally sit like a normal person without ending up human origami.

Of course, that was still in the days before movie theatres with 'stadium seating' were commonplace so it didn't matter because I was still too short to see over the people in front of me.

thanks, Ma

Years ago I knew a guy whose birthday was December 31. This isn't by itself remarkable but he was born at something like 11.45pm--he told me that his mother had to be induced and since it was really late on the last day of the year, the hospital staff offered to stabilize her a bit and give her an epidural and then wait a bit so she could have the first baby of the new year. (Apparently people actually do this if they're RIGHT on the cusp and have any reasonable control over when the baby comes.) His parents thought about it very briefly but ultimately refused and chose to just induce and have the kid. Why?

"If we have him now, he's tax-deductible for the next year."

Well shit. I dunno what it feels like to find out your birthdate was dictated by how much money your parents could save off you, but I would probably laugh and cry at the same time.

thanks for sharing

I don't know why I remembered this.

When I was in high school, after a dreary and icy and totally depressing winter some of the teachers could occasionally be talked into holding class outside as long as they could make it look like it was an actual part of the lesson. Even though we never did anything except wander into the woods.

On one such occasion a guy in my earth science class interrupted the lecture to ask, 'Does anybody mind if I go use a tree?'

Just goes to show how totally weird my life has sometimes been. You have to be pretty darn weird to pee in the woods within just a few feet of all of your classmates getting a good look at your dick, and ask the teacher out loud and completely unashamedly in front of the whole class in the middle of a lesson. I don't know what this says about the kind of people I went to school with but it doesn't strike me as being a terribly common thing to do.

this is awesome

I don't know how I haven't mentioned this before, considering my runaway commentaries and total lack of verbal filter. Especially because it's possibly one of the funniest fucking things ever and one of the few fond memories I have of my dad, who is otherwise an emotionally distant abusive fuckbag.

One thing he and I have in common aside from DNA and a surname and impressive unibrow is Bugs Bunny. We both fucking love Bugs. It's one of the few things we can sit down and enjoy together and this was the foundation for one of the few genuinely enjoyable things we did together.

All cartoons have orchestral musical scores, both original and other people's. The National Symphony Orchestra, an otherwise extremely serious classical music organization people aren't generally inclined to associate with frivolity, does a tour called 'Bugs Bunny on Broadway'. It's a live orchestral concert set to a background of classic Bugs Bunny cartoons. It's hilarious. If it's in your area, I highly advise you to go see it. Especially if it's being held at a venue with a liquor license.

The funniest part of the show I went to was the the conductor--remember, of the National freaking Symphony--admitted that he cannot listen to the song 'Ride of the Valkyries' without picturing that Bugs Bunny mock-opera. And hearing 'KILL THE WABBIT, KILL THE WABBIT, KILL THE WABBIT! *bah-dum-dah-dah-DUMM!*'

The same goes for the 'Barber of Seville'. My dad's dad was a particular anti-fan of this one because he hated cartoons but loved classical music and he felt like it was violating a serious piece of music.

There's also a similar orchestral concert that plays the scores from popular video games. It's called 'Video Games Live' but I haven't seen it.

Now I have that song stuck in my head.

Kill the wabbit...

NOM

I'm not sure whether or not this provides any kind of explanation or clarification with regard to my many, varied, and flagrantly obvious problems, but before I was born my parents spent a few years breeding pythons.

I'm one of the few people I know who isn't afraid of snakes. Not just not afraid of snakes but I genuinely like them. They're freaking cool. They can't fetch a ball or play with a bit of string and they're not really built for cuddling, but they're fascinating to watch. Plus there's no poop to clean up. My dad got his first pet snake as a teenager in the 70s. It was a reticulated python. He named her Monty. Oh yes, he went there.

So because my parents were so comfortable around snakes, I've always been comfortable around snakes. In my parent's neighbourhood I became known as that girl who will remove snakes. Except for the occasional copperhead--which is rare and distinctive--there are no venomous snakes in that area so there wasn't any danger in me picking them up and carrying them half a mile to release them into the woods.

Before we got our dog, we actually had a pet snake for quite a few years. It didn't have a name but it was a common black rat snake, which I think are related to the common garter snake and don't grow very big. He found it hanging from a light fixture in his office and everybody was freaking out even though it was just a baby snake--barely thirteen inches long and skinny as a pencil. He took it home and we kept it as a pet for four years.

I don't know what this says about me either, but my favourite thing with this snake was watching it eat. Most people give their snakes frozen mice or something that's already dead (partly because watching a snake strangle live prey is probably pretty disturbing to most people, and partly because live prey can fight back and potentially harm or even kill the snake), but my dad always bought it live baby mice. He got them from pet stores. They're called 'pinkies' and are newborn mice still hairless with their eyes closed. It was like watching Animal Planet in real life, watching the snake eat. When it got older it graduated to baby mice with eyes and hair but even at its biggest the snake was maybe four foot long and as big as a garden hose at its fattest point.

People think I'm weird because of this. They're probably right.

I'm supposed to know this, aren't I?

I always feel like something of a failure as a person because I am a grown woman but have no idea what it is my dad does for a living.

I've mentioned it before and I do kinda sorta know what he does. He's a computer programmer/engineer and whatever it is he does with those computers occasionally entails being hired by governments and defense contractors and shit like that. But I really don't know any specifics at all.

This has always been the case. My parents both worked for Grumman Aerospace (in the 80s and early 90s and before it became Northrop Grumman), and I'm vaguely aware that they had a hand in some parts of the space program and the actual technology itself, but beyond that I have no details. And the reason I don't have these details is because for as long as I can remember, my dad's job has been one that he is not legally permitted to discuss outside of work.

I'm not joking here. I have never once been to any of the places my dad worked because he's always worked in the kind of places where unauthorized personnel will be arrested on the spot.

Actually, this is one of the few things in my life I have been able to identify as being extremely weird without anyone having to tell me how weird it is. There's a lot of shit that featured regularly in my reality that was always unremarkable to me--because it's part of my everyday life--that I later only found out were unusual when I casually mentioned them in conversation and everyone within earshot stopped to stare at me like I was completely fucking deranged. In this case I was aware that my situation was unusual, probably in large part because it sounded ridiculous to me as well.

Since it's just a facet of my reality, I tend not to think about it very much but every now and then I'll realize just how bizarre it sounds when I can't offer anything but a vague half-answer to the question, "What does your dad do?"

I have no idea what he does, and if I ever found out the CIA would shoot me.

probably

There's an actual fancy medical term for laughing so hard you pee yourself. It's called 'giggle incontinence'. It isn't a big deal and isn't cause for any medical alarm. Except when it is, because then it could be an indicator of multiple sclerosis.

famous

Even though it's not something I actively brag about, I am distantly related to Billy Joel. He's a cousin of my maternal grandfather on his mother's side, but they only met maybe two times as children because my grandpa's mother was disowned by her obscenely wealthy Jewish family for marrying a poor Italian immigrant. (It was not a love match--it was her way of rebelling against her parents because in the 20s that was pretty well how you pissed your parents off if you were a woman because there were so few options open. You just married someone they didn't like, and marrying outside your class and religion, especially in New York, was a major cultural no-no.) But the family resemblance is pretty fucking obvious. They look like brothers, Billy Joel and my grandpa.

And this same grandfather shares a name with a very very famous baseball player for the New York Yankees that was once married to Marilyn Monroe. They are NOT, I am sad to say, related. But my mom said she used to use it to get into clubs for free. She wasn't lying about who her dad was, she just wasn't telling the whole truth.

Six degrees separate most people from other people so being related distantly to a very famous person is a lot easier than it sounds.

I went to high school with a girl whose great-uncle was actor Gregory Peck, best known for his role as Atticus Finch in the film version of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. And to prove this, the girl brought into English class, as we were reading that very book, the pocketwatch Peck wore in the role for the movie that was willed to her family when he died in 2003.

Of course this girl was a horrible person and impossible to get on with so nobody was really impressed.

not good

Sometimes I think my drug problem might be a bigger problem than I'm willing to admit.

I like to pretend I'm as responsible about it as it's possible to be--I don't buy of the street, I don't drive or go to work or do anything potentially dangerous while high, and I give myself a 'ration' in order not to overdo it--but in reality the fact that I have this problem at all indicates a complete lack of responsibility on my end. And I suspect I'm a bit too cavalier about it and one of the biggest red flags is the fact that I don't worry about overdoses.

Years of pill-popping has taught me my own tolerance levels, and while my tolerance level is extremely high precisely because of this--it takes up to four times the dosage to do anything these days--I still sometimes occasionally overshoot it. It's never deliberate, and it's never by very much, but it does happen. But it doesn't actually bother me that it happens because I know what to expect and it's never an overdose by a significant enough margin to cause any real problems aside from the ones I cause by banging down pills in the first place.

What happens is that I throw up. And that's normal. It's actually a good thing, believe it or not. A dramatic full-system-reversal is the body's way of dealing with something it can't handle--if you didn't do this, you would be in danger from anything dangerous you ever ate. The body's first defense against this is to just get rid of it, which it does by expelling it violently from the nearest orifice, which is what makes us puke and get the runs.

Obviously overdosing is extremely bad but you have to pretty excessively overdose in order to require anything but a place to vomit and some ginger ale. The body is pretty good at keeping out the things it doesn't want, and you'll be violently sick long before you're in serious danger.

So I don't worry about overdosing. I try not to do it, but since it's never a huge overdose I don't see it as something I need to worry about except for getting to the bathroom on time.

half a point

My high school began at 7.15 in the morning and most people were already there by 7am. Not everybody can muster the energy to act like a person that early, so students nodding off in class was something of an epidemic. I'm one of those people whose brain doesn't get out of first gear until lunchtime and I was an absolute fiend for falling asleep during my morning classes. Some teachers took it personally and tried to wake me up, others just let me sleep because they couldn't be fucked to bother.

In chemistry class my junior year I was especially prone to falling asleep, which is probably why I did so badly in it. The teacher generally didn't like it when I did but on one occasion he was so impressed with the position I'd adopted crammed into my little desk that he decided I deserved the nap.

I was sitting with my legs crossed Indian style on the chair, my left elbow propped up on my knee, and my head resting on my left fist. He later told me he was both amused and impressed by the fact that I managed to adopt this position and stay that way while sleeping that he didn't have the heart to try and wake me up.

you DO that??

So, I've occasionally had to wear makeup on parts of my body that aren't my face before for shoots because some of the modelling work I do is nude or at least topless. Most of the time there's no problem with this but towards the end of the summer last year I had a tan for the first time in years (and I tan very dark and very quickly so the tanlines become noticeable almost immediately), and tanlines don't look really good on camera so to minimize the appearance I ended up having to, well, powder my bosom. It was weird. It's not something I would elect to do if I wasn't getting paid to do it. And it stained my shirt and bra, as well.

I recently found out that some women actually do this. Like, just generally. They get dressed up for the club or whatever and they powder their boobs to make them look bigger or nicer or whatever.

Why would you do that? I had no idea anybody did this at all except in the context of a photo shoot. But apparently some women do. And so do some men.

I just don't get it.

psst!

I only started wearing makeup a few years ago so obviously I'm slow in learning the tricks. But here's one I have learned.

If you're lucky like I am and have really long eyelashes naturally, mascara is kind of superfluous. And thank goodness for that because the mascara brush and I only started getting on in the last two years. Anyway, fake lashes and mascara are totally unnecessary for me. Sometimes I wear it anyway but that actually makes me look like I AM wearing false ones. I found a happy medium though.

Clear mascara.

They do actually sell this and it doesn't have nearly the same dramatic effect as black or brown do. Sometimes you find it marketed as 'eyebrow mascara' or something but it's just a clear gel and does the whole 'separate the lashes' thing without making you look like a drag queen.

Of course I still really want bright purple mascara. Because why the fuck not, and PURPLE.

WHY DON'T YOU FOLLOW MY RULES??

Every now and then a character I've cultivated will take on such a well-developed personality that they essentially become their own people and are no longer under my control. Like raising children: eventually they just mature to where they want to do things their own way. It happens mostly with characters I've written for years but occasionally a relatively recent one does it. Naomi is only a few years old but has more personality than most of the others. She won't do anything she doesn't want and it's slightly insulting to be writing a scene and hear this voice in my head going, 'I'm not doing that, go fuck yourself!'

Stop disobeying my rules, goddammit, you're making me look bad!

Very, very occasionally this will also happen with characters who are not only comparatively recent additions but are also minor peripheral characters. Bex and York, for example, are a set of twins who have featured in bit parts for years but never played a major role. Nonetheless, they developed into their own people.

And, like sometimes happens, they started doing shit I not only never intended them to do but that I also find extremely objectionable.

For some reason, Bex and York decided they were going to have a creepily inappropriate close bond. Not normal twin behaviour but behaviour that suggests there is something very squicky and very wrong going on when I'm not in the room. Possibly because of a mental block on my end and possibly because they're being sneaky about it, I don't actually know whether or not anything is or ever has been going on between them but that doesn't make the clear indications of 'twincest' any less creepy. Or less obvious.

They even hold hands in their first official picture.

I'm not completely sure I even want to know what's going on just as long as I don't ever have to look at it.

Bonus writer!fail: I don't even know who is who. They're freakishly identical. Their ears are cut because they had a very sadistic governess as children who got fed up with confusing them and their place-swapping pranks, who did it so she could visibly determine who was who. But I don't know. York might be the one in the dress.

I get it from him

Dressing strangely seems to be something of a genetic thing in my family. Not strangely as in Lady Gaga, but strangely as in dressing in ways that are easily misinterpreted by strangers. I love pleated skirts and plaid, and I look very young--alone plaid pleated skirts are unremarkable but it makes me look rather like a high school girl.

I recently found out my late grandfather had a similar habit.

Many eons before Steve Jobs would become famous, my grandfather frequently wore turtlenecks and sport coats. First of all, nobody looks good in this combination. Not even Steve Jobs did but nobody had the balls to tell him because he was worth more than you and your entire family combined. But it made him look like something he wasn't. Catholic priests don't have to wear the collar all the time, everywhere they go, but tend as a group to gravitate towards a shirt-and-jacket dress code.

Which is why everybody mistook my grandfather for a priest.

People at my parent's wedding were going up to him and kissing his hand and calling him 'Father'. Every few minutes my mom had to explain to the curious that no, they did not invite the priest to the reception (most people don't do this in NY), that the man was her father-in-law and please stop confessing.

At least I know I'm not the first person in my family to have this kind of habit. I expect I'm not the last either.

superfluous

One of the most useless catchprases of the twentieth and 21st centuries is 'bringing sexy back'. This phrase is completely redundant. Why does anybody need to 'bring sexy back'? I wasn't aware it had ever left. Sexy isn't missing. It hasn't gone anywhere without leaving a note. It isn't hiding. Sexy is undergoing some kind of identity crisis for sure, but it's still here. Stop saying that someone or something is 'bringing sexy back'. They aren't. They don't have to.

excessive

I've mentioned this before, but I'm a huge wimp. Everything scares me. I especially hate horror movies and can't even watch the ones that are so bad and campy you can see the sipper on the costume and members of the crew accidentally wandering in and out of the frame casually scratching their genitals with one of the plastic mannequin arms scattered around the area to give off an appropriately apocalyptic and gory atmosphere. In the end they all make me have to sleep with the light on. Even things that aren't scary scare me. I've even given myself nightmares just reading the plot of a horror film. And I've done this twice, because I am clearly not smart enough to learn from my own mistakes and avoid situations that invariably end badly for me.

But the degree to which I'm scared of ridiculous shit is hard to communicate. And overstate.

As a child I had a cute antique rocking horse that I liked playing with during the day but that scared me at night. It scared me so much I used to make my mom put a blanket over it so I didn't have to see it.

And in one of our old houses, my bedroom had curtains that frightened me in the dark.

Seriously. Rocking horses, curtains? If that's not a good enough reason to be embarrassed by yourself, then I can't fathom how you could justify it ever!!

awesome story

Another cool story about my ancestry.

My mother's maternal grandfather (my great-grandfather on my mom's dad's side) was born in Italy and emigrated to the United States in the early 30s between WWI and WWII.

Why?

Because for twenty years he wrote for an underground political newspaper in which he openly criticized Benito Mussolini and his regime.

He fled in fear of his own life, heaving behind his family and friends, and never returned.

I like to think stories like this suggest I might have a genetic predisposition for being wordy and a compulsive writer. He did something amazing with his words. Maybe I can too.

sensing a trend

Funny coincidence here.

I've known a small handful of men who ranged from extremely effeminate to full-on MtF transexual. I don't know if I just happen to know a lot of exceptional cases but except for not falling into line with what is typically thought of as 'male' or 'masculine', they almost all had one specific trait in common:

They had enormous dicks. And I mean porn-big. One of them would occasionally get lightheaded if he got a hard-on because of the sudden rush of blood away from his brain. Literally.

I'm not saying that being gay or effeminate has anything to do with penis size or vice-versa, just that it's an awfully specific thing to have in common with each other. I wonder if there's any kind of correlation between the two.

how did this happen?

While I'm tremendously accident prone, I don't often get hurt in ways most other people do. I mean, I have my share of spills and papercuts. And those obnoxious mysterious bruises that seem to turn up seemingly out of nowhere and at random, in places you would prefer to know how and when you suffered some sort of trauma.

So I'm not a stranger to hurting myself. I'm just really good at hurting myself in ways most people would never even think about. I've never broken a bone, but I sprained my ankle falling off my porch. I once needed stitches in an accidental self-inflicted stab wound in my knee that I got while trying to chop the head off of a 'My Little Pony' with a utility knife to customize it.

One of the weirdest ways I ever hurt myself was two years ago, when--upon my brother leaving for school and finally allowing my the opportunity to really get down to it--I gave my bathroom a thorough cleaning that involved bleach. The bathroom happens to be a completely internal room in my parent's house--it's smack in the middle of the second floor without sharing any outside walls where you could put a window--so there was no way to properly ventilate it. I ended up breathing so many bleach fumes that I managed to give myself a nasty case of 'chemical pneumonia', a pneumonia-like respiratory condition caused by chemical burns instead of a virus.

It was probably the most miserably ill I had ever felt.

(don't) call me Ishmael

I've never liked my name. I've always had a problem with it, often for opposing reasons. When I lived in the UK I hated my name because I didn't share it with anyone else. I was always jealous of peers who happened to share the same name. It made me feel even more like I didn't belong, which I felt already because I was American and my parents had American accents. When we moved to the US, the opposite was true--suddenly there were lots of girls that shared my name, and that fucking sucked, too! My name is so common that there was hardly a year when I didn't share a classroom at least some of the time with at least one girl who had the same name. And usually a boy who had the same name's masculine variation.

The name never suited me, either. I don't even like how it sounds. No matter what accent says it, I hate it. And it isn't even a name from which you can take an abbreviation or a nickname or diminutive. It's just... there. And I hate it.

I used to really want to change it as soon as I was old enough to do so, but by now I've lost interest in doing that. I don't hate my name any less than I once did, I'm just too lazy to want to go through the whole process and in the end it'll be more trouble than it's worth to try and adapt people who know me by this one to calling me something else.

It seems like I put up with a lot of shit I don't like out of a total unwillingness to make any effort to fix it.

hohshit

Way back in October I managed to injure myself fabulously without having any idea how or why it happened. I fell off my porch and severely twisted my right ankle. I don't have any idea how or why I managed to do this--I was just standing by the door one minute and the next I was a crumpled heap in the dirt and yelling extremely unladylike words. Not a single clue what happened in between.

Anyway. It was an extraordinarily painful injury and the next morning I limped off to the urgent care clinic where I was diagnosed with a sprain and given crutches. (Which I didn't use for long on the grounds that I was so graceless and clumsy on them that I was most certainly going to hurt myself even worse than I did falling down to begin with.) It improved but it never got totally better and has been sore off and on for the last few months. I either keep re-injuring it, or it never healed properly at all. I think it might just never have healed, and I also believe that I was misdiagnosed and had a fracture that probably needed a little more care than it was given.

Of course I went to a friend's house today and his two extremely excitable huskies tripped me. Now my ankle hurts a whole fucking bunch and I think I really re-injured it this time.

I plan on ignoring it but it's pretty eye-crossingly painful.

in retrospect....

Another one of those things that was normal to me until I found out it was weird first requires an anecdote.

I don't like to talk about it but I am technically a 'Southern Belle' because I was born in Melbourne, a small town about thirty minutes from Orlando. In the 80s it was still pretty much a swamp and there was nothing within miles, so in order to get anywhere or do anything my parents had to drive closer to Orlando where tehre was actual civilization. Since, again, most of the area was swamps and golf courses, it was possible to see the giant monument at EPCOT from a fair distance. So it was something I got used to seeing, this giant golf ball.

Except that once we moved to England, we lived very near an Air Force base called Menwith Hill that also happens to have a very similar feature:

The resemblance is uncanny. I don't actually know what purpose the one at Menwith serves. I'm not even completely sure what EPCOT's is, either, but I think it might be 'Tomorrowland' or something.

Anyway. I just thought giant golf balls were a feature of every town. Like post offices and schools.

As it turns out, they don't, and I'm really way weirder than I'm even aware of.

lights, camera

People of a certain sociopolitical bent are prone to pointing out how the mainstream media subtly promote racism by casting minorities in few roles and casting them as less sympathetic characters even when they do.

On the one hand, yes tehre is some subtle racism at play in a lot of modern media but this isn't exactly a new thing, nor is it done for deliberately malicious reasons. Sometimes it's just a product of the times. A lot of the time it was considered totally acceptable at the time of filming.

English actor Richard Barthelmass played a kindly Chinese immigrant in London in a 1919 early silent film called 'Broken Blossoms', alongside a young Lillian Gish. The character, called Chang, is actually a very sympathetic character. He is very kind and generous despite the disappointments and hardships he faces as a foreigner in early 20th-century London and only once in the entire film does he do anything bad at all--and even then it's just to defend the Lillian Gish character with whom his has fallen smitten. (He shoots the character's drunken, abusive father shortly before he administers the assault that kills her.)

But as good a character as he is, they still apparently couldn't be fucked to get an Asian actor to play an Asian character. Richard Barthelmass is as white as his name suggests he is and looks slightly less than nothing at all like a Chinese man. Barthelmass apparently chose to remedy this fact by squinting for the entire 90-minute run. Nobody thought there was anything potentially insensitive about any of this. There were no overt ill intentions. It was just the product of a time and place where racism was a social norm.

It's still a cute movie, though. Well, sweet and sad anyway. I knew how it was going to end but it still made me choke up at the end. It's also one of those very old films that has outlived its copyright protection and is public domain, which means it's available online for free should you want to have a look at it.

And before you can ask, yes, this silent movie also scared the fuck out of me because it was silent. There isn't a single element of horror or suspense in this entire film but the lack of sound coupled with the exaggerated makeup and body language is still enough to creep me out. Even Lillian Gish did. Especially Lillian Gish did. And I have a massive girlcrush on that woman.

the times

Times change, obviously. Things go in and out of fashion, bad habits are discovered to be robustly harmful, taboos are dropped or acquired, stereotypes evolve. So it's not in any way surprising that some of the shit that featured commonly in your childhood are completely unknown to the next generations. It's as unrealistic to expect acceptable norms to stay the same as it is to expect fashion to stay the same. But sometimes I find out that things I thought of as being completely normal are nowadays considered extremely dangerous or inappropriate.

I know some of the shit I did is dangerous. When there were to many kids for the number of seats available on our admittedly severely overcrowded bus, my fellow school bus riders and I would instead crowd into the seatless 'emergency exit' space or sit in the aisles. Obviously this is a dangerous situation just waiting to happen and we were all very fortunate we weren't hurt.

I also gather that wandering an enormous, endless sprawling forest unaccompanied at a time when cell phones were very uncommon and unreliable even if you were rich enough to have one. My parent's area is fairly rural and partially protected as a state park, so the surrounding area is extremely dense with woods. There weren't terribly many well-marked trails and it went for miles in every direction, so it was possible to get really lost if you're like me and have no sense of direction and lose your bearings. But my parents let me play tehre whenever I wanted, even though it was full of rusting cars and old metal drums and poison ivy and lyme disease-bearing ticks. This is how I found out I am unusually unreactive to poison ivy: because I spent forever wandering through it and I never once came down with a rash. I'm sure I am allergic to it (that's what the rash is, an allergic reaction), just that I haven't had the requisite exposure. Also, fun fact--you can get poison ivy rashes in your lungs if you burn it. The oil on the leaves responsible for the reaction is vaporized and you breathe it in through the smoke.

But one thing I found out recently was considered really 'dangerous' until it was no longer necessary was the practice of bringing healthy children to play with children afflicted with common one-time childhood illnesses (the kind you typically get only once, like chicken pox or measles) in order to expose them to it and get it over with as soon as possible. Apparently this is extremely bad, but I remember clearly how happy all the parents were when my brother and then later I had it on our respective birthday parties because it meant all the guests who hadn't already gotten it were going to come down with it and they could just get it over with.

I guess it makes sense but I had no idea this was so strongly discouraged until recently.

DIAGNOSIS: you're fucked

Today I am going to scare the fuck out of you again.

There's a peripheral nerve disorder called Guillian-Barre Syndrome, sometimes also referred to as 'French Polio'. What does it do? It paralyzes you from the feet up. Quickly. It can take a few weeks or it can take a few hours, but it starts with numbness of the feet and climbs upward until you're completely paralyzed.

GOOD NEWS: It's rare. Really rare. Just a few thousand cases of Guillian-Barre are diagnosed worldwide every year. Most doctors go their entire careers without ever once encountering it. You won't get it.

BAD NEWS: It's SO RARE that any doctor or emergency room you see once you realize you have a problem won't even think to look for it. Sometimes they haven't even heard of it. They won't think of Guillian-Barre until you're well and truly fucked, like when it gets up to chest level and stops you from breathing.

But don't worry, that tingly feeling in your feet is nothing to worry about.

Probably not.

Most likely no big deal.

Sleep tight.