regionalisms

There are certain regionalisms I freaking hate more than anything else in the universe. More than any other US accent, I fucking hate the Midwestern accent. If nausea had a sound, the US Midwestern accent would be that sound. It should be set on fire and destroyed.

Principally among this accent is the word 'pop' used in place of the word 'soda'. That's bad enough without the way they say it. 'Pop' is disgusting enough without being long and drawn out several seconds as the word 'PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP'. Bonus points for saying the name of the state 'Wisconsin' as 'Wees-KAAAAAAAN-sin'.

These sounds make me violently sick.

bad boy

At the tender age of twelve, Charles Whitman of Florida became one of the youngest Boy Scouts ever to attain the rank of Eagle Scout.

But Whitman is principally known for a completely different achievement. On the first of August in 1966 he ascended the clock tower at the University of Texas campus and shot people at random from its observation deck. It was ninety minutes before two police officers were able to get into the tower to subdue him, shooting him when he turned his gun on them.

He killed fifteen people and injured 32 others. The observation deck of the UT Austin campus remains closed to this day.

emotional

I tend to get really attached to fictional characters in ongoing series, but even when horrible things happen to them my reaction is never more than, 'OHMYGOSH THAT IS SO SAD!!' I don't cry at movies or at the end of a long-running TV show or book series, even though the loss of a much-loved character upsets me probably more than it should. In the end I'm just not someone who cries much.

But I have cried once over the death of a fictional character. Exactly once. It was the first time I'd done it and will probably be the last.

I cried when Dobby died in the last Harry Potter. I don't even know why. And then when Harry makes him a headstone that says 'Here lies Dobby, a free elf'... yeah, okay, it got to me.

Changing the Goalposts

The internet changes you. I mean it changes everything about the way you think and learn and entertain yourself. It also radically redefines your expectations for certain things. Chiefly, it makes you learn to very carefully select words and habitually brace yourself against a potential for an unintended onslaught of pornographic material of a genre you weren't even aware anybody in the world got a boner to. (Like adult-babies or 'vore'. No, don't look that shit up.) Back in the days of encyclopedias and library reference sections, there wasn't really any way you could accidentally find yourself knee-deep in extremely depraved PTSD-inducing porn. The internet is a whole 'nuther ball game. You have to be very careful and even the most cautious search queries can dump some really fucked-up material into your lap.

So, yeah. The internet changes you.

These days I consider it a success if I go looking for something I only partially remember in any detail and Google finds me exactly what I was looking for without returning any porn in the first page of results.

But hey, I'll take what I can get.

big number

Here's a couple more 'a million of...' calculations. The only reason I can do them is because they're so unsophisticated--they don't require any complicated equations or symbols.

A million ounces is 31 tons, or about the weight of five and a half large African bull elephants.

A million fluid ounces is enough to fill a 22-by-34-foot swimming pool to a uniform depth of five feet. Twice.

(And a million gallons? That's enough to fill two regulation Olympic swimming pools.)

A single gram weighs about as much as a paper clip. Multiply that by a million and it's the same weight as a vintage Volkswagen Beetle--carrying a driver, a passenger, a poodle, and groceries.

incentive

Question.

Americans in particular seem to be pretty into making movies that take place during the Second World War, quite possibly because it was the last serious war the country actively participated in for which they're entitled to feel proud and aren't on the receiving end of a lot of criticism about interfering in another country's business for no reason. Not all of these movies require an actor to portray Adolf Hitler--a lot of them get away with recycling old file footage and news reels--and even the ones that do don't always even show the actor's face.

But sometimes I wonder: how do casting directors entice people to willingly play the part of one of the twentieth century's most universally loathed baddies? I've never paid much attention to the inner workings of the film industry, but are the actors portraying Hitler even often credited by name? Do people have any apprehensions about playing Hitler in a movie? Is there extra money involved if they can find someone willing to do it, or is the desire for stardom so intense that people are willing to be recorded for posterity as one of the most evil genocidal villains of all time?

Can't help but wonder, you know?

mental pictures

I've never been a religious person--even during a short span of my life when I was young and identified as 'Christian', I don't think I really seriously believed in god any more than I believed in Santa or the Tooth Fairy--so it doesn't make much sense for me to even have this mental picture. But, have it I do and even though I'm just about as atheist as they come I don't feel a shred of conflict or cognitive dissonance.

Anyway.

Whenever I think of the Judea-Christian god--the only character in the Abrahamic religions not depicted as a person in religious art or statuary; Muhammed gets a body, though not a face--I picture a person in my head. And as long as I can remember, it's always been the same person.

This guy, the priest from the wedding scene in the 1989 Disney 'The Little Mermaid':

Yeah. The little guy in the weird hat and the glasses.

That's what the god of Abraham always looked like in my head. That's how he still looks, even though I don't believe in it. 

keepsake

I'm not close to anybody in my family. For the most part they're nice enough people--dysfunctional, definitely, but nice enough--but I don't get on famously with any of my relatives because they're just very different people and we don't have much in common. That's how I was with my paternal grandfather, as well, but he was kind of my favourite inasmuch as it makes sense for me to have a favourite. I wasn't any more compatible with him than anybody else, but he was the most interesting of my relatives. He had the weirdest, coolest stories and did some of the strangest things. He once put his dining room table out of commission for almost a whole year by using it to assemble a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco. The only big enough surface besides the floor was the dining room table. When he finished, he mounted it on his ceiling (duh!) and there it stayed until the house was cleaned out.

When I was seventeen he died of pancreatic cancer--I'm the oldest grandkid so I have the most memories of him, and since I was older I got to pick something from his house as a keepsake.

So I chose the unicorn.

My entire life my grandfather had this unfinished cross-stitch replica of a unicorn tapestry. Since it was a printed pattern (where the finished picture is printed right on the fabric and you just have to fill it in with all the colours), the image of the unicorn was always there even though it was only about half finished. It just reminds me of him because it was always up on the wall and I always saw it.

When my dad brought it back to Maryland with him, it wasn't in its frame so I could see it had been dated--he started stitching it in the 70s, ten years before I was even born. My dad even found the rest of the supplies (Gramps wasn't a hoarder or anything so I've no idea why he would have saved them), including the original pattern and thread.

But I couldn't bring myself to finish it. The way it 'should' look to me is unfinished. Completing it would be almost blasphemous.

I do want to put ONE stitch in it though, just so it's properly mine.

troubled youth

My mom is a teacher. She teaches special education in a middle school, where the students range in age from eleven to fourteen. If you happen to know a lot of teachers like I do, you'll be aware that this age group is incredibly difficult to cope with. They're full of hormones, unlike primary school kids, but unlike high-schoolers aren't compelled to buckle down and behave by the looming prospect of graduation, college, and adulthood. This is bad enough as it is, but on top of that my mom's school also has a very large demographic of students with serious behavioural problems, even in the mainstream population outside the special-ed kids. It basically takes an already difficult age group and makes it worse, resulting in outrageous misbehaviour. Within the first week teaching after being hired, a student threw a chair at one of the other teachers and injured her enough that she needed back surgery.

Over the years I've become pretty desensitized to all but the most extreme stories, but these two stuck out in my mind the most. And they're pretty outrageous--they have to be to grab my attention like this.

She once saw a girl showing her tattoo off to her friends--a child too young to even drive a car had somehow found a way to get a tattoo. Since no tattooist in their right MIND would work on anybody under eighteen, it was certainly some cheap and dirty back-alley tattoo artist. Which is not only really illegal but also really, really dangerous. You can get any number of infections or diseases from a dirty tattoo needle. And remember, NONE of the students were any older than fourteen. Not only did she get a tattoo, but obviously her parents were either oblivious and didn't notice or completely apathetic and didn't care. That's insane.

Two or three years ago there was a big to-do in the school involving child protective services and the police. A seventh-grade (twelve years old) boy turned up at school drunk. Not disoriented or discombobulated, but actually over-the-legal-limit-in-adults drunk. He managed to get his hands on some fairly potent alcohol without his parents knowing and brought it to school, where he shared it with another student who also failed a police-administered breath test.

It's astounding how little parental supervision these kids have. There are no words for how fucked up this shit is.

way back when

Making up for the last few days worth of silence by making a zillion posts. Actually this is something I've thought of quite a few times but, like all my weird little thoughts, never bothered to commit to paper.

It might just be a cultural bias talking because I've been brought up at a time when these things had very negative connotations, but... I can't really honestly believe that there was EVER a time at ANY point in the past when CLOWNS and MARIONETTES were considered wholesome, enjoyable entertainment for children. My entire life I've never seen a clown or a humanoid marionette (animals are less creepy) that wasn't abjectly horrifying in appearance, even when it wasn't trying to be scary and long before I even knew they were associated with cult classic horror films and shit.

Could just be that I live in a post-'IT' and post-'Chuckie' world so clowns and marionettes seem completely different. But I've seen pictures of both from the days before they were horror staples and they still look pretty spooky to me. (I did a research paper in high school on children's TV shows and looked up a picture of 'Howdy Doody'--that goddamn puppet gave me nightmares for three days.) I don't believe for a SECOND children ever enjoyed either one.

It's probably no coincidence that psychiatric drugs were invented around the time 'Howdy Doody' came on the air. Call it a hunch.

Real-World Numbers

I'm not normally a math person. I hate numbers, so much that I'll write numbers out over using digits unless the number is more than three digits. (Writing 'eighty-nine' instead of '89', for example.) But every now and then I'll get the urge to work a simple calculation out purely for the fun of it. You can blame my senior year science teacher for this--in an effort to show us how big a number a million is, as well as how much BIGGER a BILLION is, he asked if we would be willing to sit at our desks for a million seconds for $1000. I was the only person smart enough to try and figure out how long that really WAS, and it came out to eleven and a half days I decided it might be worth it as long as I was allowed to get up every few hours to pee. Then he asked if we would do it for a BILLION seconds for $100,000--which ended up being a trick question because a billion seconds is over thirty years. That's a huge disparity!!

Since then it's been sort of weirdly entertaining to me to find out how much of X you would need for Y result--usually having to do with, as in the original exercise, demonstrating the mind-boggling size of millions and billions.

Today I worked out a few involving the comparatively modest million.

If you joined Facebook the day it went online on 4 February, 2004, you would have to have posted 343.7 updates a day, every day, for the last eight years in order to have racked up a million updates. It averages out to one update every fifteen seconds around the clock nonstop.

Assuming everybody lives--let's arbitrarily say--a very respectable eighty years, you, your children, your grandchildren, AND your great-grandchildren combined will not live for a million days. Combined you would only have lived 116,880 days.

A book containing a million pages of bible-paper-thin paper would be over eighty feet thick, or a third of the length of a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet.

Maintaining a speed of 55mph (the 'national speed limit' in the US), it would take you seventeen minutes to drive one million inches. It's 15.8 miles. A million feet would take almost three and a half hours--it adds up to 189.4 miles, or slightly more than the distance between Tallahassee, Florida and Montgomery, Alabama.

Tangentially related: you get an extremely skewed perception of distance depending on what you were exposed to. An old joke goes, 'What's the difference between Americans and Europeans? Americans think a hundred years is a long time, and Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way.' Many of the states west of the Mississippi are bigger than whole COUNTRIES in Europe. If England were a state, it would rank 32nd in size; Ireland would be 42nd. Only Germany, France, Poland, and Sweden would be in the top five. It can be something of a huge shock to Europeans coming to the States for the first time to realize just how ENORMOUS it is.

To put it into perspective, there is more distance between Washington DC and New York City than there is between London and Brussels. There's more distance in Florida between Miami and Tallahassee than there is between London and Frankfurt. Yeah. Pretty trippy, huh?

School vs Reality

I don't really think about it much, but there are a lot of rules and practices that were an unquestioned and integral part of my schooldays that don't apply at all in the real world. In fact, they seem really bizarre in the real world and I don't really even know why they were so important in school. Nobody ever questioned them and most people have probably forgotten them completely by now (unless they're teachers themselves), but when I think about them they just strike me as having no practical relevance.

One of them is being required to answer questions 'in a complete sentence' on assignments and tests. I don't know whether this is universal or not, but it was something I had to do from the time I was old enough to be answering questions that required more than a yes or no. Basically it means that you had to answer by restating the question--so if the question read, 'What a three reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire?', the answer would have to be, 'Three reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire are...' And if you didn't do this, it was marked incorrect even if the answer was right. Which is really dumb, because it doesn't gauge whether or not you've learned the material--getting the question right depended on your ability to consistently comply with an arbitrary 'rule'. This just... doesn't happen in the real world. When someone asks, 'What time is the new Harry Potter playing at the movie theatre?', you don't reply with, 'The movie theatre is showing the new Harry Potter at...' All you do is give them a time.

It's not something most people are inclined to give a lot of thought to, but it's still completely bizarre.

unexplained and uncomfortable

Something really weird happens to me sometimes. For the last few months it's been happening way more often than it usually does, but I've been experiencing it since I was pretty young.

It's hard to describe, but basically I will become intensely aware of my surroundings and myself, and for some reason it all feels completely weird and alien. Not unfamiliar--it's not like I forget who I am or where I am or anything, just that everything feels... surreal. Like I'm not supposed to be here or something. I really don;t know how to describe it, which is frustrating, since I don't know if it ever happens to other people or if it's unique to me or a really rare neurological disorder or WHAT.

I kind of feel it right now, sort of uncomfortable and weird and completely alien.

It really is the strangest thing...

household names (that don't belong to your household)

You don't really see this tactic anymore in advertising--I can't even remember the last time I heard it in a commercial or read it in a printed advert--and there's a good reason for it. Up until maybe fifteen or twenty years ago, ads of all kinds would refer to the product in question as 'becoming a household name'. The obvious desire is for the product to become such a fixture for everybody that it becomes a part of everyone's household--everybody's life. And even though it's great to have a popular product on the market, around the last half of the twentieth century the manufacturers and owners of certain brands discovered that 'becoming a household name' wasn't all it was cracked up to be.


Turns out that when a particular product becomes so commonplace and such a fixture in everyday life, it becomes the generic term for anything from any brand. This doesn't sound so bad, but when that happens the brand name actually loses its protection as a trademark. You know how in most movies, TV shows, books, and other media all the immediately recognizable products are referred to under a different name (often deliberately derivative of the real one it's meant to parallel--like, for example, Bill Amend of 'Foxtrot' fame frequently referred to a popular chain of coffee shops as 'Coffeebucks')? It might seem like a little silly joke but the reason they do this is because to mention or show a real product from a real brand with a trademark name still protected under the law costs money.

A brand that becomes generic--widely and universally used to denote any similar kind of product--can legally lose its standing as a brand name and its trademark is no longer valid. You find something close to this in parts of the US, such as the Midwest, where people refer to sodas or carbonated beverages of any kind as 'Coke', even though Coke is a brand name and most people don't use it that way. It also exists in Britain, as well, where the brand name 'Hoover' has become not only the generic term for a vacuum cleaner of any kind but also to the act of vacuuming itself--'hoovering'--and even sometimes used to describe other actions that bring to mind a strong suctioning action, such as saying somebody who eats very quickly as 'hoovering their food'.

So becoming a household name isn't actually that good of a result in the long run for a particular brand name. Thermos, Vaseline, and Escalator were brand names for 'insulated beverage container', 'petroleum jelly', and 'electrical moving staircase' but lost their trademark protection. Jello is threatened as a brand name and may also lose its protection as the generic 'gelatin dessert'.

Which is why nobody talks about being a household name anymore. It can kind of screw you.

and an addendum...

Remember cookie dough ice cream? I used to want to pick the bits of cookie dough out and bake them in the oven and get itty bitty cookies out of them. No way am I the only person who wanted to try this.

I used to live in the county north of Washington DC--Montgomery County, in Maryland--and the local newspaper in my area at some point took to referring in print to it by the abbreviation 'MoCo'. Around high school I found out that the word 'moco' is Spanish for 'booger'. And there's a huge Hispanic population in that area, as well. Well done, Gazette. You basically called it 'booger town'.

And if you can't negotiate a parking space than less time than it takes to build a standard-issue cathedral, YOU ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO PARK THERE.

customer disservice

I don't often have to deal with too many customers who behave badly enough that they'd fall into the category of rude-to-service-industry-workers who should be shot. And I'm relieved about that. But every now and again one of them appears at my till and my faith in humanity shrivels a little bit more.

First thing you have to know: the store where I work has a 90-day return policy to get a full refund. But we'll take stuff back long after the 90 days have expired, only not for the full price and instead for the item's current (significantly reduced) price which is rarely more than $3. You don't even need the receipt and within that time period we can look up the transaction in the system in order to give someone back the price they paid for their purchase. In short, it's really easy to bring shit back to our store and get at least a partial refund for it.

Today a woman came in to return some stuff. It was from June and there was no way anybody was going to let her have the full refund and when I informed her that I could only refund the way lower current price, she was livid. She ranted about how she couldn't keep track of her receipts and it took her since then to track the receipt down, so how the hell was I not going to justify scamming her like this?? Yelling at me, snapping at me, claiming the return used to be six months (which it never was, and even then she was still too late because June was seven months ago) and what the fuck was the problem, the guy at the Huntington store lets her do shit like this all the tme--and then she pulled out the big guns. She told me her mother was in the hospital dying of cancer. And she kept mentioning it, saying that she was with her mom in the hospital all the time while she was fucking dying and on and on--and the way she was talking didn't sound like it was at all genuine.

Even so, I told her there was nothing else I could do. She made one last attempt to guilt-trip me by saying, "I wish I could just show you some proof my mother is dying of fucking cancer and I'm fucking with her 24 hours a day."

I never doubted her insistence that her mom was sick and dying, so this was completely unnecessary as well as being a flagrant guilt-trip. Caring for a cancer-stricken relative is extremely stressful and painful, but that doesn't give you the right to act like a complete asshole and snap at people. (That's not to say I never do it--I do it all the time--but at least I know I behaved like a jerk once I'm back to normal again.) It really was extremely fishy, the way she was talking about the whole thing. It just didn't seem right. I suspect she might have been lying to me just to make me feel like shit on the off chance I'd break the rules for her out of pity.

Lying and saying a close relative is fatally ill just to get a store refund that couldn't have been more than $20 even with the full price makes you a horrible person. If she did, she deserves to  get run over by a truck.

back in my day...

I did some writing today in the cafe across from work during my break. Bringing my computer to work would be a really stupid thing to do and asking for trouble, so I just keep a few pieces of regular lined paper in my back pocket and do it the old fashioned way and type it up when I get home.

A few tables away from me was a group of high-school-age girls giggling away and being way too loud, as girls that age are apt to do, and naturally their cell phones were glued to their hands and constantly in use.

Since I am a certified nutjob, I took these two completely unrelated things and from them managed to come up with an equally unrelated question:

Do kids these days still pass notes in school?

No, I'm serious--do they?? Cell phones have become so common that it's almost harder to find someone who doesn't have one, even among children. Passing notes was an integral part of my school days. It was so normal to me and probably to everyone else whose school days predated the popularity of cell phones--but I don't know whether it would occur to a generation of teenagers who have grown up with cell phones. It seems so inevitable to me, to get a message to a friend not immediately near you by writing it down and secretly getting it passed over while the teacher's back was turned, but it might have only seemed like an obvious thing to do because we were familiar with the idea of words written on paper travelling from one person to another. Kids today have email, and text messages, so would they even think to pass notes in school?

I wonder... 

bad, but not bad enough

I could probably write an entire encyclopaedia about the various things and behaviours and misbehaviours in life that annoy the crap out of me, and an entire volume would probably have to be dedicated to that certain awkward set of obnoxiousness that's definitely annoying enough to drive you nuts if you're around someone doing it, but not so annoying that you're justified telling a total stranger to knock that shit off. You're left barely able to tolerate it (especially bad if you're, say, in an airplane or some other confined space where you can't get up and leave) and can't tune it out, but you can't make yourself believe it would be anything but a total dick move to hit the offender with your shoe.

Like this. This is annoying enough to be a big problem, but not something you can call a total stranger out on.

In a queue, or an elevator, or some other place where a group of people have to stand still and close together and wait for a bit, there's nothing quite as awkward as being next to somebody who has just let loose a chemical-warfare-calibur fart. The kind you could use to strip wallpaper. My eyes were watering and I knew which guy had done it but it's not something bad enough to excuse you yelling, "HOLY FUCK, MISTER, DID SOMETHING DIE UP THERE??"

You know what should still be appropriate for adults? Time-outs. It seems like, in the adult world, you have only two options for dealing with a problem--you can take it extremely seriously, which requires you to act responsibly and report it to the proper authorities or act irresponsibly and commit property damage against them. The only other alternative is to ignore it. I mean there really aren't any other choices than those. But we need more than just those options. Why not send people to a time-out?

"NO FARTING IN AN ELEVATOR--GO SIT IN THE CORNER UNTIL YOU LEARN TO TIGHTEN YOUR SPHINCTER MORE EFFECTIVELY!!"

"YOU DROVE FROM TALLAHASSEE TO FORT DIX WITH YOUR LEFT TURN SIGNAL ON. SIT IN THIS CHAIR AND THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU DID!"

"IT IS NOT APPROPRIATE TO ANSWER YOUR CELL PHONE AT A FUNERAL. GO FACE THE WALL UNTIL YOU CAN APOLOGIZE!"

It seems like a good idea to me, but then again I also think it's a good idea to go out in public wearing a kilt so maybe I'm not the most objective gauge of these things.

Scent-sational

They say you can't smell you own scent--you're around them so often that your senses completely overlook your own body odour, the smell of your toiletries, deodorant, your laundry detergent, and anything else you might use regularly that happens to be perfumed but that you don't notice unless you're actively trying to.

I'm undoubtedly odd but if I ever can smell any of these things, it kind of bothers me. I don't find it unpleasant, exactly, just jarring to be aware of something that I'm normally oblivious of. When it comes from my own personal hygiene products, the first few days after getting a different one (because I just buy whatever is on sale at the time) I can smell them--then I get used to it and never notice it again.

But right now I happen to smell like someone else's cologne or body spray or detergent or something because I can smell it on myself and isn't at all familiar. I don't have contact with others to explain it so it's driving me nuts because I CAN SMELL MYSELF RIGHT NOW and I don't know who or where it came from or how it managed to transfer to me. I don't think it's being too fussy to want to know who the hell I got close enough to that I still had their scent on me the next day. Or when it happened. You have to get pretty uncomfortably intimately close with someone to  keep smelling like them the day after it happened, and I'm a little annoyed with myself for having obviously done this but having no memory of the event.

Because quite frankly it's the most action I've gotten in months and I'm disappointed that I can't remember anything about it.

running on fumes, so naturally writing seemed appropriate

So, yeah, as of right now I am working on 48 hours without having slept and I'm really not liking it at all. Holy fuck. I can honestly say I have never felt this physically miserable without there actually being a legitimate medical cause for it--like I just had some kind of surgery, or I'm having a horrific period, or I have the flu, or I'm passing a kidney stone. Possibly all of the above. I was so sluggish at work and so obviously unwell that even the horrible 'hemorrhagic-fever-is-not-a-good-enough-excuse-to-call-out-of-your-shift' top manager asked if I felt okay. (But didn't offer to let me take a break or get a drink or go home.) Yeah, no more doing this to myself. I need a regular bedtime. Operating on no sleep at all is not, it turns out, something I am at all able to cope with physically or mentally. Even that ever-present narrator in my head is talking pretty fucking slowly right now, which never happens. Wow.

Additional bodily development: I am officially dropping an alarming amount of weight at an even more alarming speed. I've had to tighten my watch band twice in the last month. (After wearing it for six months without having to tighten it at all.) I can't wear my ring anymore because it's so loose it sometimes just slips right off. My ribs are standing out more than they normally do and you can see my knee and ankle bones for the first time since I was in high school. My hands have gotten smaller. I mean visibly, noticeably smaller. I'm not a nutritionist or anything but something tells me that if you're losing body fat in a place that doesn't even have a lot of body fat to begin with, something might possibly be going on that is potentially less than completely hunky-dory.

Unrelated: there isn't a single self-service gas station in the town where I work (which is about half an hour from my apartment). Seriously, not one. Everybody I work with thinks this is totally normal but I freaking hate it. I don't want someone doing that for me, I can do it my goddamn self! Having someone else pump your gas is like having someone else tie your shoes--the only acceptable reason is if you happen to be incapacitated or something, and if you don't know how to do it yourself then you're actually kind of pathetic since you lack the ability to do a very basic and very necessary everyday skill. Most of the people at work don't know how to pump their own gas. Seriously. How the hell can you say something like that without the abject humiliation you should be feeling at such a staggering lack of competence?

Really unrelated: let's face it, evolution totally played a lot of really mean pranks on us. I mean just think about it--evolution left us with the appendix, an organ with absolutely no other function except to fuck us over. It either does nothing at all, or it fails painfully and can kill you. Evolution is also in charge of nipples on men, which makes so much in the way of complete nonsense that it's best not to think about it at all because it's only going to give you a headache trying to come up with a reasonable excuse for why men might have once lactated. That's all bad enough, but evolution wasn't going to stop there. No, evolution decided it would be fucking hilarious if all humans made identical noises for intense and unbearable pain and really good sex. The next time you stub your toe, do yourself a favour and tape record the sounds you make. It'll sound like a sex scene soundtrack, I guarantee it.

So unrelated that it kind of looks like I'm degenerating into psychosis: a woman came in to the store today to get a coupon applied retroactively to a purchase. We can do this, but it requires tricking the computer into thinking the customer has returned and re-purchased everything on the receipt and to do that involves laboriously typing in the long barcode numbers by hand, one at a time, and then doing it again to trick the system into thinking new purchases have been made. (This is the only way to do it without requiring they bring all of their purchases back to the store.) Now, this is obnoxious and time-consuming but we still do it. Except that the lady who came in today was fucking insane. She had so much fucking stuff that it required three separate transactions to complete because the system only allows transactions of up to 65 items. Yeah, and it took three of those. I wasn't handling the return myself, and thank goodness for that because if I'd had to I would have gone completely crazy. Instead it was on the manager. I bagged for her because it helped save time, since not only did this woman want every single one of her previous 195 items returned and re-purchased for the purpose of saving a total of about $50 all together (I understand times are hard and you need whatever you can get, but nobody was inclined to feel sympathy), but she also bought another thirty or so. Then I remembered who she was, because I'd had to deal with her before and she's one of the most annoying customers I have ever dealt with. She's the kind of person who refuses to pay the given price for anything, even when the given price is enormously reduced--she's also scathingly cheap and refuses to take any item over $3 and will argue about pennies. The last time I had to deal with her she kept whining about a coupon she swore she had but couldn't produce. But there weren't any out at the time and I had no idea what she was talking about. So she called her sister and demanded that I talk to her, because her sister supposedly had the coupon in her possession and I guess seh figured I could apply it through the phone by magic or something like that and... ugh. Even though she was getting basically like a 95% discount on all the shit she bought, she still bitched because our system will only allow one coupon to be applied retroactively to a purchase. She even wanted to go through the entire process again--which took more than an hour--so she could use both and save maybe a few more cents. At that point she was paying so little that even a huge percentage reduction was only going to add up to a few dollars for the entire four-transaction-purchase.

PROTIP: You are shopping in the 'clearance' section and purchasing items for, on average, less than a tenth their original price and getting a 50% discount on THOSE along with the coupon you had and wanted applied retroactively. You are no longer allowed to try and squeeze savings out of us. The level of your fussy disruptiveness and general demanding behaviour makes the pitiful amount of money you ultimately spend in our store not worth the time, effort, patience, and constant tooth-grinding required to get through the hour-long process of ringing you up without degenerating into a violent psychotic outburst for which the only remedy is rhino tranquilizers.

In all she had over 200 items total, with all her previous purchases added to the armfuls of new ones. (And bitched mightily because the already-dirt-cheap kid's clearance section didn't qualify for the half-price sale.) She paid a total of $90 and the manager outright lied and said she couldn't adjust the same purchase more than once just so the woman would fucking leave. She had so much shit with her that we had to get someone to help her carry her eight bags to her car--we made the two available male employees decide between them, which naturally meant rock-paper-scissors. While they were arguing, the obnoxious customer had left.

If I see her again, I'm going to conveniently come down with anthrax or something so I have an excuse to hide in the bathroom or conveniently faint. Or maybe have a heart attack. Or something. Anything. If necessary I will come down with the fucking Black Death if it means I won't have to deal with her ever again.

my normal

When you live with something all the time, it becomes normal to you even when it turns out to be really unusual or uncommon. This opens up a clear avenue for a serious discussion on how this skewed perception of normalcy contributes to the perpetual cycle of abuse--or how I don't get psychiatric treatment because to me mental illness is 'normal' and I have no idea what the alternative would even be like. But I can't maintain the requisite level of maturity to have that conversation. I think of seriousness the same way I think of high heels--they're nice to have and wear occasionally if I feel like doing something a little differently, but they're not comfortable and if I do it too much I will probably break my leg.

So instead this is going to be about the minor (and neutral) things that were normal in my life but turned out to be fairly unusual.

All the dinner forks I've seen outside my parent's house have four tines. It's just one of those universally accepted truths of the world--forks have four tines. I don't think I ever saw any other deviation from this 'rule'. But in the cutlery set my parents have and that I grew up using... all the forks had three tines. Since I've never seen such a thing except at home, I assume this is really unusual though not particularly noteworthy.

Both sets of my grandparents got divorced long before I was born, so I grew up knowing all four of my grandparents but they were four separate entities instead of being two couples. The idea of attending a grandparent's 50th anniversary party or anything else that focuses on their long partnership is... completely foreign to me. Grandparents who still liked each other was completely beyond my experience.

It's not really noteworthy now, but in the late 80s and early 90s when I was still quite young, home computers weren't very common since they were expensive and not especially useful. But since my dad is like a computer-guy-hipster (he was programming computers before computers were mainstream!) he would sometimes bring one home on loan to work on it. So for most of my younger years the idea of having a computer in the house was novel to most people but par for the course to me.

My mom put my brother and I in the same places in the back seat of the car our entire lives--him on the left, me on the right. That was how it always was and it was never questioned and neither he nor I ever (seriously, never!) thought to switch. I don't often sit in the back seat of a car anymore, but if I do I sit on the right side--sitting on the left side is so weird for me that it's almost physically uncomfortable, like wearing shoes on the wrong feet.

This one is a little weird because most people aren't even aware something like this is possible, but... my dad sinks in water. I know, human bodies are buoyant--but my dad sinks like a rock without fail and he always has. (Most likely because he's fairly densely muscular in relation to his height.) It was slightly novel to me, actually, since he's still the only person I've ever known who can't float, but never anything more than a mild anomaly. But it's a sufficiently unusual thing that not many people know it can happen at all.

My parents happened to be born in the same year so they were always the same age. For some reason this just became so completely, immutably normal to me that it genuinely came as a surprise when I found out that other people's parents usually had at least a few years between them. And to be honest I still sometimes have to remind myself that my parents are definitely the minority in this case because it still strikes me as ever so slightly unusual that few couples are the same age.

------

And that's all I could think of tonight. The problem with identifying the 'normals' that are uncommon or unusual to most other people is that, until you learn otherwise, you never think of any part of your life as being anything but mundane. For all I know, I could be sitting on a treasure trove of bizarreness without realizing it because I don't know what 'normal' is for anyone but me. As much as we all like to think we're capable of changing our own perspective, no matter how hard you try you can't experience 'normal' the way anyone else does.

as indicators go...

I think I might be an evil person.

Every time I see a cat curled up in a bathroom sink (or even a picture of a cat curled up in a bathroom sink), I am overcome with this inexplicable urge to turn on the faucet. I know I will probably die a terrible, painful, claw-related death but that doesn't stop me from wanting to do it, just to see what'll happen in the thirty seconds or so leading up to my demise.

Plus, a dog I occasionally have to go babysit is blind but went blind way later in life so he doesn't have the kind of graceful adaptations as do animals who were born that way or have had a lifetime's experience in dealing with it. So he doesn't always know where he is and loses his bearings and walks into walls and appliances and furniture. He never hurts himself but that doesn't mean the gut-busting laughter I break out with every time I see him do it is any less evil.

What is WRONG with me??

...why?

True story:

My dad used to work for an international aerospace and engineering company, and him being away for weeks at a time for temporary duty in other countries (and possibly on other planets, too) was a fairly common occurrence. It was his practice to bring an empty suitcase with him on the trip and bring it home full of weird or unusual souvenirs, which he would then keep and give to friends and family as silly gifts over the next few years.

Which is how he came home with a stack of kangaroo testicles from Australia.

To be honest, I didn't know that's what they were until years later. On his first trip to Australia he came home with a large stack of these small light brown leather drawstring pouches just slightly bigger than a ping-pong ball. My dad used his for a change pouch (and still does) and the label on their packages said 'Lucky Pouch'. Which in retrospect is way more inappropriately hilarious than it has any right to be. I don't remember how the subject came up but I do know I was almost out of high school before I was informed--I couldn't figure it out for myself--that the reason they were naturally bulbous in shape was because they were made from tanned kangaroo testicles.

I really wish I was making this up. I don't even know which is weirder: that people make change pouches out of kangaroo balls, or that they keep doing it because people like my dad buy them. Oh well. If nothing else they make really unique gifts, I guess.

Also true: before going on some outing one day he decided he wasn't going to need change for anything so he opted to leave the change pouch at home and just use what he had in his wallet instead. Without thinking about what he was saying, he proceeded to inform my mother of his plans by saying, "Oh, I think I'll just leave my scrotum at home today."

And that's the story of how I ruptured my appendix.

what's in a name?

The big fancy proper Latin names for most living and extinct creatures in the world are somewhat fitting, if not entirely accurate. Sabre-tooth cats are called 'Smilodon', which means 'knife-tooth'; the kind that once roamed North America is called 'Smilodon fatalis', which means 'deadly knife-tooth'. Fitting. The Latin genus name for the rhinoceros is actually 'Rhinoceros', which means 'nose-horn'--the Indian rhinoceros is even called 'Rhinoceros unicornis', 'one-horned nose-horn'. (Supposedly Marco Polo encountered this species during his travels to the East and actually believed he'd seen a unicorn--and he was pretty disgusted with what he saw.)

Every now and then it seems like the people in charge of these names were just phoning it in.

Mastodons are one of the now-extinct elephantine creatures that once inhabited the Americas, cousins of the woolly mammoth but hairless and more like modern elephants. But if you're like me you picture the Black Ranger's zord from the old 'Power Rangers' TV show when you hear the word 'mastodon'. Either way it's an imposing kind of creature.

Except that the name 'mastodon' is the Latin name and it means... 'nipple-tooth'.

No really. I'm not kidding. Go look it up.

I don't think I'll ever be able to take those animals seriously again. If they weren't already long extinct by the time they were given this name, they probably would have died from collective shame.

Nipple tooth. How many hits of opium did it take to come up with that one, huh?

Subtlety is not Always Effective

Before I moved I used to get door-to-door-damnation people (Mormons, JWs, Girl Scouts, and other cults that make their adherents solicit tracts) despite the 'No Soliciting' signs on the door. Mostly I'd ignore them and after a while they would go away--sometimes it would take a long while, because those are some persistent fuckers--but sometimes they were taking way too long or I felt like being a bitch and I'd answer the door and torment them for giggles.

Hey, if you want to interrupt me at home to sell me something I neither want nor need when I would rather be doing something worthwhile and productive (like masturbating or clipping my toenails with pliers), then I am entitled to be as much of a bitch to you as I want. At least the crazy guys shouting on street corners have the decency not to interrupt people at home.

And also Girl Scouts have cookies and that shit is crack cocaine.

Sometimes I would pretend to speak another language. Or play really dumb and make them repeat themselves over and over again. Or ask really horrid questions that had nothing to do with religion and made me seem like I might be dangerous or mentally unstable. (Perennial favourites were, 'So how do you get blood stains out of a shower curtain?' or, 'Does anyone besides me hear those voices chanting?') Once I pretended I was going to sacrifice my mom's dog.

But the most fun one was the time I answered the door topless for Mormons.

I saw them in their suits and ties and nametags peddling their bikes up the incredibly steep hill outside the neighbourhood so I had some advance warning they were coming around. They were two guys, and they were both quite young--eighteen, maybe nineteen, but no older than twenty--and I know enough people brought up Mormon to safely assume they were going to be really naive and probably not have seen a naked woman before. So I watched and I waited and when they knocked on the door I took my shirt off and answered it topless.

I'm actually quite comfortable being topless in front of other people so it wasn't a big deal for me. But it was a big deal for them! They didn't even manage to ask me if they could talk to me about Jesus. They just trailed off halfway through and stared. I asked them if I could help them with anything. They just stuttered out a 'SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, MISS!' and went back to their bikes. If their eyes got any wider, they probably would have just fallen right out.

It was a glorious moment of PWNAGE and I like to think I did them a favour--it's not like they were going to see any real-life boobies until after they were married, and still probably not even then. (That's what the Magical Mormon Undies are for.)

This was years ago and I still think those boys aren't completely sure what it is they saw.

Solution to the Economic Crisis

I figured out how to implement some new taxes that, by my estimation, will end the recession in about a week.

Movie producers are now required to pay a Sequel Tax equal to $1,000,000 per number. For example, they are making another 'Underworld' movie--since it's the fourth so far, it will have to pay $4,000,000 in Sequel Taxes. (Exceptions: movies that are part of an actual established series based on something that's actually written well. 'Lord of the Rings' is okay; 'Twilight' is not. 'Star Wars' stopped being okay after 1983.)

A Bling Permit Tax will now be charged in order to legally be allowed to wear large, tacky, gaudy pieces of jewellery. Each piece will require a $500 permit, on the theory that the cost is prohibitive enough to discourage people from wearing fake diamonds as big as a doorknob.

Being an asshole in public will result in a $10,000 fine. Bigger asshole behaviours will also be subject to a mandatory public flogging. Really big asshole behaviours (see below: 'Things That Should Carry a Death Sentence') will get you shot and your assets will be liquidated to pay the fine.

The new You Can't Wear That Tax will vary depending on the circumstances but essentially it will require you to pay in order to be allowed to publicly wear stuff that isn't actually clothing. Like substituting a scarf for a top or wearing a dress made out of Kermit heads. Raw meat, latex, and tinfoil are likewise not appropriate materials with which to make clothes.

Who the Fuck Are You? laws will carry a fine of $1000 for sending friend requests on social network sites to people you don't actually know. This fine will be doubled if you're doing it just to get access to their photos. If you can prove otherwise, you don't have to pay it, but meeting at a party nobody involved has any clear memories of doesn't count. Half the fine--$500--will be applied if you're friend requesting someone you've met before but haven't had any contact with in more than ten years. If they have to ask who the fuck you are, you're getting fined--full stop.

Seriously, this is pure genius. I need to write the President right now.

stop that, you're embarrassing yourself

I have to say this.

Please, boys. Please. Stop talking that way. Stop posting pictures of yourself on the internet throwing up gang signs. (Or posing with money.) Stop rapping like you're someday going to perform alongside Kanye West. Stop turning the bass on your car stereo up to the point where it could fell an ox at a hundred paces. Stop referring to drugs, sex, gangs, alcohol, 'the man', or 'bitches and hoes' in casual conversation. In fact, the next time you refer to a girl that way, I am going to hit you with my purse and you don't want that to happen because it weighs as much as a small cargo plane. Get some pants in the right size, pull them up, get rid of all your visors and your cheap 'bling' the size of car hubcaps, shave off that stupid 'soul patch', buy some shirts that aren't vests and some sweatshirts that incorporate less material than a parachute, and cancel the dental appointment you made to get grills.

You are not badass. You are not gangsta. You are not the product of the rough streets of Philadelphia or Atlanta. You are a bunch of middle-class white kids from the suburbs of Long Island and you still sleep on Spiderman sheets. The hardest drug you've ever done is Tylenol and you mom still packs your lunch. If you like modern gang-related movies and rap that's your business, but stop imitating it. I love 'Star Wars' but I'm not going to emulate it because if I did I would look like an idiot. (Plus that Ewok costume gets itchy.) The reality of serious gang life is brutal and you're lucky you have no direct experience with it.

Also, here's a tip: gangsters don't order frilly drinks with extra whipped cream at Starbucks. I don't even order frilly drinks with extra whipped cream at Starbucks and I'm a girl.

Things That Should Carry a Death Sentence (but don't)

I'm probably just joking since I would most likely never seriously suggest that people deserve to die for perpetrating what amount to trivial annoyances. Except I'm really not and they totally do.

If you text during a movie or performance of any kind or if you refuse to turn your cell phone off (or at least silence it), you should be shot.

If you park your car in such a way that it takes up more than one space, you should be shot.

If you use the last of some communal resource (office coffee creamer, toilet paper, etc...) and don't replace it for the next person, you should be shot.

If you are rude or belligerent to wait staff or store clerks (or anybody else in the service industry) for rules over which they have no control, you should be shot.

...and if you do it for no reason at all, you should be shot twice.

If you constantly give 'helpful advice' to others that you yourself have never needed to follow (treatment options for conditions you've never had, for example), you should be shot.

If you wait to read the menu and decide what you want until you're at the counter and hold up the rest of the queue, you should be shot.

And if you bring your children to a public place, except a park or something, without making any effort to get them to act like human beings instead of baboons on meth, you should be shot. If the little beasts cause any material damage to the venue in question, the owners are entitled to sell them into slavery to cover the losses.

picking up bad habits

Say what you like about kids playing video games. I don't care what you think of them or what kind of violent, inappropriate, or anti-social behaviours you worry they're going to learn from playing them. I don't seriously think any kid with half a functioning brain is going to have a poor enough grasp of reality to try and emulate running down hookers and slicing people in half with swords.

There's really only one video game behaviour I really worry about seeping into the real world.

I'm afraid kids are going to think it's completely acceptable to walk into stranger's houses, go through all their personal belongings, and take their valuables. That's been a common feature of video games since Zelda and if there's any one thing kids might mistakenly pick up, it's probably that.

Murder I can deal with. I just don't want people going through my shit.

hot and cold

I feel like a hypocrite sometimes. Almost without exception I think people look much more attractive with their natural hair and eye colours (or something very near to it) than an artificial one that's radically different. Except for Marilyn Monroe, who was a natural brunette and very pretty that way but way hotter with the platinum blonde everybody pictures her having. I just don't find it very attractive when your hair and eyes don't match the rest of you, and I can't help but wonder who the hell you think you're fooling.

At the same time, I dye my hair. And it's a colour quite different from my natural one. Naturally I have ash brown hair in the most boring, generic shade possible. I dye it red--intense, bright, Jessica Rabbit red. It's hardly going from black to blonde, but it's still a pretty big difference. My excuse is that red looks better on me than brown (I have light olive skin and green eyes) and except for when my roots are visible it's hard to tell that it isn't my real colour. Well, that and my eyebrows are black, but to be perfectly fair that doesn't match the brown either. I'd never go blonde or black, since neither would work on me and would look pretty terrible, but the difference is still big enough to make me feel like a total hypocrite.

I also don't think leggings are an acceptable substitute for pants, but sometimes I wear them without anything over them if I forget to do laundry and have run out of actual clothes. Today I did it on purpose even though I had normal pants freshly cleaned and at my disposal.

But I guess if I have to have a few hypocrisies, at least they're completely superficial in nature.

Unrelated: today was one of those weird weather days where it's cold outside but very sunny. So if I stood still outside for any length of time I'd be cold everywhere except for the parts of me facing the sun, which would fairly bake. When that happens you just sort of have to turn yourself over like a pancake so you get evenly uncomfortable on all sides.

Also unrelated: right now I'm being tormented with a completely mystifying (but unbelievably bad) knee pain. No, I didn't take an arrow to the knee (/nerd joke). I didn't hurt my knees at all, at least not that I'm aware of. No falls or incidents of 'that-isn't-supposed-to-bend-that-way'. But not knowing the cause doesn't make it any less painful. It's really indescribably, intolerably bad--sometimes it even makes me nauseous, and the only other pain I've suffered that's done that has been kidney stones. Icing makes it worse, since it kind of feels like the pain you get when it's cold out and your joints seize up and ache, only a million times worse. The only things that bring about the smallest measure of relief are heating pads or tying something tightly around my knees so it compresses the effected area, which still just make it slightly less intolerable. Actually, pressure makes my knees hurt a little less--hence the tying--but weirdly, being on my feet is less blindingly painful than sitting or laying down. Something about having pressure in my knees makes them feel the tiniest bit better.

Nothing else helps in the slightest, including my stash of painkillers, but fortunately it's not a constant thing. It just flares up every now and then for no reason. When it does, it's nearly agonizing and lasts days at a time before abruptly vanishing.

I can't think of any explanation and the only reason I know I'm not completely imagining it all is because when it happens my knees swell up, which is the only physical sign anything is wrong. The only possible reason that makes any sense is that my knees can't cope with the stress of carrying the rest of me around since I'm about fifty or so pounds overweight and knee problems are common among people with weight issues. It still doesn't make much sense because I'm on my feet most of the time but not in pain most of the time. It doesn't correspond with an increase of activity on my part. It doesn't correspond with anything. It just likes being mean to me, I guess.

unrelated

First, I need to seriously filter my posting or find a venue more appropriate to a more or less constant stream-of-consciousness style of writing. Unfortunately I am way too long-winded for Twitter.

Unrelated: when I was really young (no idea how old but no older than about three because I don't remember my brother being around yet) my mother made a costume for a skit being done at my day-care centre. It was for 'Hey Diddle Diddle' and the costume was a tinfoil spoon. I distinctly recall being disappointed that it wasn't for me, even though if it was I would probably earnestly desire the destruction of all photos of me wearing it.

Also unrelated: why does Blogspot randomly delete or drop words on me? It makes it look like I'm borderline illiterate...

Really, really unrelated: MC Escher paintings are trippy. MC Escher paintings reproduced in three dimensions with Legos make me wonder for the future of mankind. And are even trippier.

well-read, not well-spoken

I read a lot (a lot) so I don't feel completely uncomfortable suggesting my vocabulary might be a bit bigger than the average person's.

 But almost every word I've added to it since I was twelve was from reading, which doesn't really sound like a major problem until you realize that reading new words doesn't teach you anything about saying new words. On paper my vocabulary has an impressive range--but I have to guess or completely make up the pronunciations. As soon as I open my mouth it's clear I have no idea what I'm actually saying and only about half the time do I manage to get anywhere near making myself understood.

It's my dirty secret.

eccentric vs absentminded

I'm not excessively eccentric but I have my moments. Most of the time I think I count as 'quirky' but a few of my behaviours have nothing to do with being strange and everything to do with being absentminded.

I habitually mismatch my earrings, shoes, and socks. To me a successful day is one in which I manage to wear two of the same shoes. More than once I have mismatched my shoes and failed to notice until I took them off. I don't do things like this because I want to be different--I do them because I'm absentminded and wearing two of the same of something might as well be rocket science. I have five ear piercings so each ear takes two and a half pairs of earrings--dealing with that many finicky small pieces of jewellery and keeping track of them can be difficult. So can getting dressed at 5.30 in the morning if you don't happen to be a morning person--finding two matching socks or shoes or earrings in a dark room requires more mental acuity than I can well spare before lunchtime. (Actually it requires more than I can muster even on a good day, but I don't like to admit to that.)

In the end I kept doing all of it because I got used to it and kind of liked being seen as a little on the eccentric side and I let everyone think that's why I started in the first place--no one needs to know that I fail at life on such a basic level, right?

objectively embarrassing

'Embarrassing' is pretty subjective. Personally I don't feel embarrassed about losing my balance, tripping, or suffering some other public side-effect of my body's complete lack of equilibrium. But other people would abandon their entire lives and become a hermit living under a dumpster for the same reason. Whether or not you feel humiliation at your own actions or the actions of others is largely due to your own self of self-consciousness and disposition.

And sometimes something is in such universally poor taste it's objectively embarrassing, or at the very least is extremely awkward. Especially when someone is doing something really stupid without having any idea just how bad they look.

Case in point: my grandfather has been bald since time immemorial. He never had a toupee and left his combover in the 70s. He's never really cared about not having hair, which is why it made no sense for him to purchase a visor with a shitty hairpiece attached to it like this one. (As far as realism goes the hair is like the fur on a stuffed animal. It's about as real as a hooker's tits.) And he wears it around without a hint of irony. He's not wearing it to be silly--he's wearing it because he thinks it looks good. And he wears it in embarrassingly inappropriate places--like to his 58-year high school reunion and to a Vietnam pilot reunion.

I cannot stress enough that he had no idea how bad it looked. He was doing it because he thought it looked nice, not because he was trying to get a laugh. He was genuinely confused when his wife and I begged him to stop wearing it. He didn't realize how stupid it was.

I'm glad to report that the visor went 'missing' some time ago.

dogs, bad music, and very stupid people

I've dog-sat for most of my life so I've met a lot of dogs. I've never met a dog quite like Loki. Loki belonged to a neighbour and I babysat him since he was a puppy but he had some weird habits. For one thing, he never sat on a sofa--not on the seat like a normal dog, even when you put him there--but instead preferred the arms or the backs. He was never around cats or anything that might explain where he learned this, he just did it. I used to try and keep him off there but he seemed pretty comfortable with himself and never fell off so eventually I just left him to it.

He would also 'chase' animals on TV. Just animals, not people, so I know he wasn't attracted to the movement like other dogs I've known who like watching TV and don't care what's on the screen. It had to be live-action video of real animals--not people, not animation. It wasn't even that he liked the sound, either, since it didn't matter if it was spoken narration, soundtrack, real sound, or muted. The rest of the time he couldn't be fucked to care that the TV was even on at all, but as soon as there were animals on the screen--whoosh!!--he was off. This is him trying to catch some monkeys off the National Geographic channel a few years ago. He never seemed particularly bothered that he couldn't catch anything--the eternal optimism of dogs, I guess.

I used to live right near Washington DC and any time I went there during a standard US school year (between August and June), there would always be busloads of school groups from out of state on field trips. They could be any age from ten to eighteen and on one particular occasion I was weaving my way past a group of high school seniors on a school trip. I listened to one group's conversation since at that age kids have no volume control and it went like this:

Girl: Where are we?
Boy: Washington DC, duh!
Girl: No I mean, like, what part of it?
Boy: This is the National Mall.
Girl: No way, it's not! It can't be!
Boy: ...why not? Look at the map.
Girl: So, wait... you mean the National Mall isn't, like, a mall?

I used to think that joke only existed in comic routines. To this day everybody in my family thinks I made it up because nobody could be that stupid. Another boy in the group made a comment for which I hope he is rewarded in the afterlife with cocaine and hookers:

"No, but the grass is 20% off!"

I have no clue where they came from but I strongly suspect it was the sort of place that has lead in the drinking water.

And, finally:

I have few strong feelings about music preferences. It's one of the last available types of socially acceptable open hatred and discrimination, so I never tell anyone what I like or listen to--but still don't have any really strong opinions about it. One thing I have never done is develop an inexplicable, intense, violent hatred of a particular singer based solely on their music. Even when it was played to death on the radio and everyone was singing it and talking about it and I was sick of it.

Until now!

People think that British singer/songwriter Adele is the greatest female music artist since, well, ever. It seems like it's required by law for her songs to be played on every radio station at least twice an hour so no matter where I am or what time it is, one of her songs will pop up on the radio. The songs themselves I'm just not fond of--I don't like them at all but it would go no further than a desire to change the station to avoid them were it not for their complete cultural pervasiveness. They are played and talked about and requested over and over and over and over again, all day, every day, without pause.

And for this reason, I FUCKING HATE HER MUSIC.

I can't stand it. It makes my blood boil. Every time I hear those chords or the lyrics I am completely overwhelmed with an uncontrollable urge to commit a violent homicide. I hate the music, I hate the lyrics, I hate her fucking raspy emphysemic voice, and I hate the way everyone thinks she's so freaking awesome. The intensity of my hatred cannot get any greater. If it does it will collapse upon itself and create a dense singularity from which even light cannot escape.

I fucking hate Adele.

I have never in my life developed a hatred this strong of a total stranger who is not at least responsible for something I find extremely objectionable--like the man who shot George Tiller or former President Bush. But goddammit, I hate Adele with every molecule in my body. There is not a single solitary proton within me that doesn't hate her. I have damn near broken my radio because of how hard I hit the scan button when her fucking songs come on. Her death cannot come soon enough for my liking.

I have never met her, I know nothing about her, I've never heard or read any interviews with her, and I don't really even know what she looks like. But fucking fuck, based completely on her overhyped and overplayed songs I hate her so much I wish she would fall off the fucking planet. 

Sim-ilar experiences

I was a huge fan of The Sims when the game first came out (holy fuck, was that really more than ten years ago now??) and played the SHIT out of that game and all of its expansions packs until I was well into college. (I became quite skilled, as well. Or at least as skilled as you CAN be.) Even after Sims 2 came out, I sill played the original, mostly because the expansion packs were cheaper now that it was an outdated version. But also because with subsequent releases, my computer was getting older and I'd never had a computer that could actually handle a game that big and complicated--for this reason I never played World of Warcraft or Everquest, either. My old Sims games don't run on my current laptop and I still sort of miss it but I don't have time to play for hours and hours in a virtual real-world when I have an actual real-world that needs chores done and work accomplished and bills paid.

But my mate is a big Sims player and used to bring his laptop to my house, when I still lived there, and let me watch his Sims in 2 and 3 ruin their lives. I always thought the original mis-Sim-ventures were funny but it seems like the developers just deliberately put more and more bizarre options and freak accidents in every new version of the game. I suppose ostensibly to make it more true-to-life but really I'm sure it was for the lulz. Nothing is more lulzy than watching your Sims completely fuck up. (Back in my day the worst thing you could do was lock them in a windowless box without a toilet until they pee'd themselves to death--or drown them in a pool.)

I'm one of those people who thinks video games are awesome spectator sports so I have no problems sitting in the background and watching someone else make all the decisions. My mate made a house for the characters he was writing at the time (he's a novelist) and they behaved the same way in the game as they behaved in the books. It was brilliant. One was very promiscuous and kept having sex with anyone who walked into the house (the pizza guy, the gardener, the maid). She had a baby with some guy--my friend never did find out who--and left it for her more-responsible, straight-edged friend and housemate to raise because every time he TRIED to make her take care of it she would listen to it cry for a few minutes, get frustrated, and then put it on the floor. Which I thought was so funny that I nearly pulled a Sim-accident and pee'd on the sofa.

The one thing that made me laugh so hard I drooled in my lap was when Promiscuous Sim broke the dishwasher and had to call the repairman for it. While that was going on my friend was busy with the other Sim; when he turned his attention back he discovered that Promiscuous Sim had seduced the repair guy, had sex with him, and gotten pregnant. When he left the dishwasher was still broken (doesn't matter, had sex) so the Sim tried to repair it herself. It exploded. She was completely covered in soot, her clothes burned off or blown away, and her hair charred and standing straight up on end.

Naturally she went over to a mirror--singed and messied--and check herself out like she was hot shit.

Then sat down, in the same condition, to have cybersex on her computer.

It was glorious.

On that note, I found this Tumblr because, even though I can no longer play the game myself, I still enjoy hearing and seeing other people's mis-Sim-ventures. I'm not acquainted with the new features of the games but I still understand all the memes and it still all gives me something great to laugh at.

I adore the Sims. It's like a very convenient and harmless outlet for your really poor decisions and bad judgment. Have sex with strangers, ruin your career, put the baby on the floor in the toilet while you set the kitchen on fire before trying to have sex with the Grim Reaper when he comes to take the soul of your roommate--and then with all of that out of your system, log off your computer and like a comparatively normal life with all that shit out of your system.

I wonder if therapists recommend this?

Anyway, go check it out: SIM MEMES TUMBLR.

dressed to ill

Someone called me a 'hipster' today. Just walked by me and shouted out in an accusatory fashion, "YOU FUCKEN' HIPSTER!!"

I'm really, really NOT a hipster. Like, at all. I'm so mainstream even people in the mainstream feel indie around me. I assume it had to do with how I was dressed and I'd never picked my own style out as being anything but, well, mainstream. Today I wore: dark skinny jeans (which fat girls shouldn't wear but I do), white-and-yellow striped knee socks over the jeans and scrunched down around the tops of my brown biker boots; white tank top under a loose, oversize, shapeless Henley shirt; fingerless gloves; purple glasses; purple beret; denim jacket with badges on it; thin scarf. (It IS January!!)

Oh my god, did New York turn me into a hipster? I think I might have to cry...

that's why

Earlier I saw one of those side-by-side comparison 'what-is-wrong-with-this-picture' photo sets comparing a brothel to a prison somewhere in Germany. The prison was modern, new, clean, well-built, well-equipped, and all-around a more accommodating place to spend your days than the cramped, dirty, dilapidated brothel. Obviously it was meant to show how much better prisoners were treated over sex workers in a 'why-is-this-okay' sort of way, but I didn't even have to go past the title to come up with a reason this is an unfair comparison.

First of all, old buildings semi-remodelled for another purpose are the norm in most of Europe, which is smaller and much more crowded than the Americas and has been built on continuously for thousands of years. Easier and cheaper to fix up something that's already there than it is to rip it down or find somewhere to put a new one.

Though hardly an unreliable indicator, the condition of a building is in no way automatically indicative of the treatment of the people who live/work there.

Budget--it said nothing about this, but odds are a prison has a much bigger budget in both construction and maintenance than would a brothel.

...and the brothel isn't built for the use of quite so many people.

A prison is a public institution. A brothel is not.

The biggest reason the comparison is misleading and unfair is this: with few exceptions, a brothel is unregulated and a prison is regulated. There are authorities, codes, and standards that by law have to be met and consistently upheld in order for a place like a prison to be approved for its intended use. It has to be safe, adequately heated, and reliably plumbed or the government will (at least in theory) shut it down and pronounce it unfit for use. This is the story for all buildings of every kind intended for human use and/or habitation, but especially true for taxpayer-funded institutions like prisons because, with everyone helping finance them, the standards are placed much higher. In most countries, there aren't any such rules for brothels or other back-alley operations--no government authority making sure they are safe or reliably maintained or free of asbestos. Without laws governing them, they're free to keep their inmates/workers in whatever conditions they feel like without legal consequences. This is why you see the government declaring buildings unfit for human habitation and condemning them, only to have them snatched up for use as brothels, drug labs, drug dens, chop shops, salerooms for stolen goods, and other illegal operations: there's nobody stopping people from using unsafe or dilapidated buildings or keep a consistent standard for their workplace and/or employees when the operation itself is illegal to begin with. And hey, a condemned building comes with certain clear advantages, like not costing anything to rent and being, at least on paper, empty.

the price of fame

Though they've long since passed into pop-culture immortality for their roles as C3-PO and R2-D2, but I can't help but wonder, particularly during the first halves of episodes IV and VI...

...how miserably hot, stuffy, itchy, constrictive, sweaty, and downright uncomfortable must it have been for Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker in those droid costumes? I get cranky when I can't take off my hoodie in a hot car, being trapped in a close an airless metal shell for ten hours a day for years must have been brutal. Well done on them for not going crazy. 

...spell that?

I've never been particularly fond of 'creative' names with unusual spellings, unnecessary punctuation marks, or that are just completely made up and defy spelling conventions. People saddle their kids with names like that all the time and it just seems mean when the name you deliberately pick makes them look like an exotic dancer or deadly pathogen. There comes a point where you're no longer being creative, you're just being a dick.

Never mind people with weird names forced on them unwillingly by their parents--but what possesses people to willingly change their names to something that wouldn't even be acceptable for a cartoon character? Some countries have laws concerning what you can and can't name your children (including prohibition on names like 'Facebook' and 'ESPN' and ones that are totally made up), but what about people changing their own names? Should you still be allowed a stupid name if it's your own decision?

Ethics aside, it's hard to keep a straight face when you encounter a guy with a name like this one.

Geezis shit.

How many beers did it take for that to seem like a good idea? You look like a bad hippie parody.

Fucking hell. If I had a name like that, I'd smoke pot and get publicly shit-faced and carry an unregistered gun too.

why?

Why is 'weather systems shaped like penises' an entire genre of internet image macros? It's weird enough that one such Rorschach anomaly exists, let alone that there are people who devote time and effort to combing televised weather reports looking for phallic shapes and then screencapping them for posterity.

But I should know better by now than to wonder about thinks that rise to popularity on the internet.

I doubt I'm the only person alive who can remember 'Hamster Dance' after all...

INTRODUCTION

I decided to do what I should have done to begin with and transfer and compartmentalize my weirdness into different places so it all doesn't become like the verbal trail-mix from hell. I have just moved all of my scattered thoughts from LJ and other places to this blog, where hopefully I can keep it all in quarantine. My regular blog of collected (and better organized) essays can be found here: Mirth and Matter.


As for why... read on.

I really can't come up with a better word for the thousand little inconsequential and mostly totally unconnected thoughts that zip through my head in any given hour. I don't know that this happens to other people or what but my brain NEVER, EVER shuts up. When I say that I have a non-stop running commentary going on in my mind, I really am not kidding--it's part sportscast, part movie commentary, part narration, part self-evaluation, and part scathingly sarcastic social commentary and when I say it is constant I mean it NEVER STOPS. I'm doing it right now, even as I write this. I've done it so long that I don't really even notice I'm doing it anymore--most of the time it's all in one ear and out the other and I rarely remember any particular talking points or specific comments for longer than a few minutes. There aren't any pauses or breaks or segues anywhere, either--thoughts just blend one into the next without stopping, even when they're (as they usually are) complete non-sequiturs. I'm a horribly disorganized kind of person and my head is no exception. Sometimes I think that having fuzzy hair is like a visual metaphor for what goes on underneath it.

People who write professionally (or think they should) like to offer a lot of 'record your thoughts' advice and suggest keeping a small notebook or a tape recorder or, more recently, using some kind of notepad program on your phone if you happen to have one and using it to quickly jot down your thoughts so you don't forget them. There's nothing wrong with that advice, and I'm sure it works well for many people and I made a good many serious, hopeful, enthusiastic attempts over the years to do it, but eventually I had to concede defeat. Recording the things that go on in my head is just plain exhausting. The sheer amount of completely pointless but long-winded drivel I publish on a daily basis suggests there's an awful lot going on up there and to be frank it's barely the tip of the iceberg. It's only because I can't be bothered to commit most of it to memory and almost immediately forget everything that these entries are not longer and significantly more numerous.

'Scattershot' does it no justice at all but I can't think of another word to usurp and I'm definitely not the sort of person capable of contributing a new word to the English language. For one thing, how would I spell it? I don't imagine many people notice unless they are, like me, the kind of anal-retentive asshole who notices stupid tiny things like this, but I am fairly inconsistent with my spelling conventions. I freely pick between British English and American English spellings (and pronunciations, as well, though you don't get that through text) depending on how comfortable I feel with either. Even when I generally stick with one set of spelling conventions over the other, I still have no problems using the other for certain words in the same spelling family. So while I end words like 'theatre' with the British -re ending, I also write 'meter' and 'liter' (actually, there seems to be a pattern to this--I use the -re ending for everything except units of measurement, where for some reason I feel more comfortable using -er). Even worse, sometimes I'll actually use both spellings of THE SAME WORD interchangeably--like with 'anaesthesia/anesthesia'--and completely at random. Sometimes I'll use both spellings in the same freaking paragraph, though I make an effort to go back and make them all match.

See that? That up there? That is how my mind works all the time. I am not capable of quieting it down, or turning it off. This is the kind of stuff that goes through my head all day, every day. I've gotten good at ignoring a lot of it but it's still there in the periphery, juuuuust invasive enough that I always know it's there even though I'm not listening to it--like a television in another room or neighbouring apartment that's JUST loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be particularly disruptive.

So this is going to become my sounding board for all of the unconnected thoughts and half-thoughts that my mind collects throughout the day. Don't expect too terribly much insightful, inspiring stuff here because that isn't how my brain works--if it was I'd've had a job in the greeting card business years ago. All entries prior to this one have been coped from my old Livejournal, which was intended to be a fanfiction archive but quickly degenerated into a chronicle of madness just shy of criminally insane. Everything else is new, and will be updated as I see fit--which, as you will soon learn, is just as unpredictable as the contents themselves.

As for the scattershot I've managed to remember today:

Seriously, at what point have you stayed up too late to be entitled to go to bed? When are you basically required to go take a shower and rejoin the living instead of sleeping? I don't actually have a night shift that justifies being able to sleep all day long, but I still stay up late until it turns from 'late' to 'early'. Sometimes I'll actually debate with myself whether or not I'm still allowed to go to bed and will argue so long that eventually I HAVE to get on with my day and don't go to bed at all. I've started calling this 'overshooting the bedtime threshold'.

I really don't like red light cameras, though not for the obvious reasons. I won't say anything regarding their ethical or constitutional validity because frankly no matter what I say I will deeply and terribly offend a whole lot of people. Obviously, though, habitually ignoring traffic signals is not only illegal and dangerous, it's also incredibly rude. My beef with the cameras has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with their very existence, but rather the horrible BLINDING flash that completely bleaches out my vision every time one of them goes off. This isn't a problem during the day because you barely even notice a camera flash in daylight, even one bright enough to flood an entire four-lane intersection with enough light to take a photograph. At night, though, when your eyes are adjusted to a lower light level, the flash is just blinding. It never lasts long,but the fact that my vision is temporarily dangerously impaired is worrisome. I never actually had experience like this with red light cameras before I moved here. Maryland and Virginia had them, of course, but they never used a flash to illuminate the license plate (this is how they send you your ticket)--instead they employed night-vision and very sensitive light-sensing equipment and utilized the ambient light as well as the reflective surface of license plates (the law is, your plate has to be reflective and you face huge fines if it isn't) to read the plate number. This is a much safer system than blinding drivers every time some jerkoff decides he's too important to stop for red lights.

I really need to stop believing that the few minutes I save in the shower every day by NOT shaving for almost three months in any way balances out the inevitable time-consuming and extremely annoying battle that eventually takes place when I DO eventually decide to tackle my body hair.

When I called work today to ask if we had our checks in (we don't, and I am pissed--we're supposed to get them every two weeks but haven't been paid in over a month), I realized that without exception every woman who works there does the same thing. Even Shanon and I, graduates of the Bea Arthur School of Female Baritones, do it. When addressing customers and answering the phones, we automatically adopt a high-pitched, girlish, almost sing-songy way of speaking. Like when you talk to a baby or an animal. When we talk amongst ourselves, we use our normal pitch and tone--but for some reason we ratchet it up an octave to talk to customers. Maybe we're instinctively trying to appear softer, sweeter, more approachable, and less threatening? I've no idea. The guys don't do this but they'd all sound pretty fucking creepy if they did. I'm sure there have been gender-study papers and research done on this.

The compact all my glittery eyeshadows are in is exactly the same size and shape and looks remarkably like a smart phone. (Have a look.)

Of the eight and a half months I've lived in New York, school has been in session for about six and a half of them. Granted my own personal schedule is inconsistent and rarely coincides with local schools, nonetheless I noticed something. This entire time I have not seen a single school bus that wasn't a 'short bus'.

Finding money in pants pockets while sorting laundry is a bit like god rewarding me for actually doing it like a big girl instead of just spraying my dirty clothes with Febreeze and hoping for the best.


Chinese takeout is urban comfort food.

New-Year's Resolution

(2 Jan., 2012)

I'm not one for normally making these but what the hell. I moved this year and I didn't think THAT was gonna happen.

So, I resolve to put aside a couple of hours every night, and go outside, and walk around...

...AND CORRECT THE SPELLING AND GRAMMAR OF ALL THE GRAFFITI BETWEEN HERE AND THE CANADIAN BORDER.

What's yours?

Unrelated: Most resolutions are about losing weight and for a long time I've thought I probably pretty urgently needed to do that myself, but I realized that probably isn't the case anymore. I've dropped a huge amount of weight in a very short time--my clothes don't fit properly anymore, I had to tighten my watch a few holes, and (and here's what actually surprised me the most) my normally quite snug-fitting rings are now so loose they wobble around on my fingers and the stones won't stay on top. Looking at myself right now, I can actually see my wrists and legs are visibly skinnier. And if I notice something, it's GOTTA be drastic.

the signs

(2 Jan, 2012)

Another good reason I would make a truly atrocious parent:

I have no maternal instinct. I never have. I have never possessed a single molecule of parental love.

Also, there were signs that not only was I NOT INTERESTED in being a mommy, I was probably pretty alarmingly poorly suited to the whole business. And not just that I didn't like playing with babydolls, either--a lot of girls don't like doing that--but I honestly had no idea HOW to play with a baby doll despite having grown up around people with babies and having friends who played with baby dolls. I usually just ended up pretending the doll was something more interesting and amusing, like a dog or an airplane. If harangued into a game of 'house', I would invariably elect to be the Daddy so I could 'go to work' and leave the area and have an excuse not to participate. Sometimes I'd mix it up a bit and want to be the dog. (Also, like other girls, we were in the habit of 'playing' the characters from our favourite movies and I would always elect to be the male characters while the girls fought over being the female characters. I always noticed that the guys had more fun and got to do shit like break into castles and swing on ropes.)

Come on, stop that, I think by now we've established that I was never anywhere NEAR normal at any point in my life.

I think I only ever owned one baby doll my whole life and my parents took it away from me because I had more fun drawing all over it with a pen than I did actually playing with it. For some reason, I distinctly remember that the doll was a male doll and had a penis--this was more than twenty years ago and I swear to fuck my baby doll had a penis. No idea why I remember that so vividly.

Because I had been given baby dolls, I was also given accessories and among these was, quite naturally, a toy pram.

The pram was used to mow down my enemies and run over the enemy toys.

I've been vocal about my dislike of children and disinterest in having any for almost longer than I've been physically capable of producing them. My parents, while not especially happy about it, were never really argumentative. I guess by that point it just sealed the deal--they were probably pretty sure by then that I wasn't mother-material if I was going to do things like draw on my children and use their prams to run people down.

Good call, mom.

too awkward for words

(1 Jan, 2012)

This happened a few days ago but I've managed to successfully block it out of my mind so as to protect my delicate psyche. Now that it's sufficiently far behind me it is less awkward than it is fucking hilarious.

I've still been pretty sick off and on the last few days so one day at work last week consisted of me making a lot of truly impressive Olympic-sprint-calibur mad dashes for the bathroom to throw up every half hour or so. Now, I always have a bit of a weird social phobia about accidentally walking in on people in the bathroom (or them walking in on me--to me it's just as embarrassing and awkward both ways) but I don't recall that either scenario has ever happened to me before.

Until last week!

The door said 'vacant'.

The door lied to me.

There was this very surprised looking 300-odd pound woman sittin' pretty in such a way that I felt like I owed her dinner or something for how much I saw--having a very loud and messy shit.

No amount of 'OHMYGOD I AM SO SORRY!'s will even BEGIN to mitigate the awkwardness inherent in that kind of situation. There are no words in the English language adequate to express the million different horrified, apologetic, embarrassed, and disgusted thoughts that run through your mind more or less all at once.

I did everything I could to avoid her while she was shopping. There was just absolutely no possible way in the world that I could have checked her out or watched her stand in the queue or helped her on the floor after what I'd just seen. When she left the bathroom I actually dove into an empty dressing room like I was trying to get away from a grenade. I couldn't bring myself to go back to the bathrooms for the rest of the day, either, even though the whole thing didn't do much to help my nausea.

The whole thing was basically so horribly, embarrassingly awkward and deeply traumatizing that I saw swallowing my own vomit as a preferable alternative to even the slightest chance that it might repeat itself.