improvise

Problem: I have put off doing laundry for so long that I have actually run out of clean knickers.

Normal person solution: Do some fucking laundry already.

My solution: Substitute bikini bottom for undies. Purchase new underwear while picking up milk from Wal Mart.

Conclusion: I am the laziest motherfucker in the entire world.

equine trivia

'Mule' isn't just another word for a donkey--it's actually the result of cross-breeding a male donkey and female horse.

The result of the reverse parentage--a female donkey and male horse--is called a 'hinny' and differs slightly in appearance than a mule.

Both animals are naturally sterile and cannot produce offspring of their own.

Female horses are called 'mares'; reproductively intact males are 'stallions' whereas castrated ones are 'geldings'.

A female donkey is called a 'jennet' and a male a 'jack'.

oh, that's just too perfect

First you have to know this: I work at an Old Navy store that occasionally has promotions for which employees are required to wear company-supplied t-shirts with silly stupid slogans on them. (The one I have from Giftmas is acid green and says 'Holiday Helper' on it--I don't intend to get rid of it or anything but I;ll be damned if I ever wear it in public again.) The store is having a huge jeans sale at the moment so we all have new t-shirts that say 'Find Your Perfect Fit!' on them. ON actually makes a lot of different styles and cuts for different body types with differing hip and waist and inseam ratios so short curvy girls like me and the skinny bitches can all find jeans in the same place. The jean styles all have names. Employees also have to wear a big sticker on their backs with the name of the style jean they wear so people can just pick out someone who's shaped like them and go, "HEY WHAT ARE YOU WEARING AND WHERE CAN I GET IT??"

Secondly, you have to know this: I am a shameless flirt. I do it all the time mostly to get an edge or advantage of some kind. Usually it's just me flirting with store clerks in hopes of getting a discount or free stuff and it works surprisingly often. I really am just nauseatingly adorable and read people extremely well to determine what tactic (shy, forward, mysterious, silly, or clever) they'll respond to--so it's pretty easy for me to schmooze my way to free goodies at restaurants or small discounts at stores if I have a good enough rapport with the male staff. I happen to have such a rapport with one of the servers at the bakery across from work where I go on my dinner breaks and before or after work to have a snack and read for a bit.

Today I went in before work, wearing my horrid ugly work t-shirt. My lad was there so I got a free cookie. And then I noticed all the people at the counter giggling at something and I had no idea what it was. I didn't realize what they were giggling at until I got to work and put my coat away.

I still had the style name sticker on my back.

I have enormous thighs and a butt that should have its own zip code so I need jeans cut fuller in the hip and thigh, but smaller in the waist. I also looooove flared jeans even though I know short people aren't supposed to wear them. There is one particular style at the store that suits me best and the name is... apt.

The style is called 'Flirt'.

I was gettin' my allure on with my bakery boy with a dessert-plate-sized sticker on my back with the word 'FLIRT' on it.

Fuck yeah, one more point for the 'My-Life-is-a-Sitcom' category.

inflict massive emotional trauma on some innocent victim?

...I can check that off my 'To Do' list.

I'm a pretty warped, twisted little person.

Today at work we had to change the clothes on the mannequins, which involves taking them apart so you can get the clothes off and on. The mannequins in our store are right next to the doors so everyone who walked in saw us, and frankly it's a bit creepy seeing random arms and legs and heads strewn all over the floor.

So I cheerfully greeted all the customers and apologized for the mess, smiling sweetly and saying, "Oh, don't mine me, I'm just dismantling some children."

boy-girl

I try not to ascribe to gender prejudices but I admit some of them are a bit deeply ingrained, and in addition I've never actually seen or heard a great deal that successfully challenges some of these notions. And I don't mean the ones about women being inferior to men or men being more emotionally stunted than women. I'm talking the little sexist stereotypes we accept as fact--that men cut their toenails in bed, women like pointless gifts like cut flowers that die in a week, and men left on their own will happily live in an environment that would be condemned as unfit for human habitation even in a place like Calcutta.

It's hard not to kind of agree with some of those. Even while I exhibit a few characteristic 'male' traits. For one thing, I am more anxious to get into a physical fight than any teenage boy. I'm more obsessively after oral sex than men are after blowjobs. I am argumentative. I am stubborn.

And I hate cleaning.

So I don't.

Right now I am sitting on literally three months worth of laundry. I have absolutely positively run out of clean clothes and I have been rewearing a lot of the same stuff for the last two weeks because I just don't feel like picking all my shit up off the floor and doing laundry like a sensible adult woman. In my world, a quick spritz of Febreeze is just as good as a wash cycle. No,  I am not exaggerating.

Also, I never do dishes if I can help it. I will let them pile up for ages until I run out of dishes and utensils. And even then I will refuse to be an adult and clean the fucking dishes even when I am reduced to ridiculously inappropriate eating utensils. I have been known to eat cereal out of a cooking pot with an ice cream scoop. If a food item comes ready to eat in its own container, I see no point of putting it on a plate--ice cream, cereal, and the like are eaten straight from the box. Sometimes with chopsticks.

Cos, fuck it, I don't feel like cleaning up after myself.

observations

I used to take a hormonal birth control pill of the kind commonly prescribed to women and adolescent girls. I started at sixteen as a way to regulate my erratic, unpredictable cycle and alleviate the horrible cramps and heavy flow that kept me home from school a few days every month. For the most part it did its job, even though remembering to take a pill at the same time every day sometimes just requires a lot more mental sharpness than I can muster.

One really common side-effect of birth control (other than the menstrual ones) is slight weight gain and most women who experience this symptom experience it the same way: their boobs grow bigger. And mine got pretty freaking big. I naturally have a relatively small waist and wide hips, so when I was at my biggest--a freaking D-cup, which for someone my size is pretty huge--I was a real genuine hourglass. I loved my boobs. What I didn't love was not being able to find really cute bras and I was, despite being very busty, not comfortable wearing an underwire. (Since then I've switched to underwire bras.) Bras for smaller girls and women are way cute but unless you go to an expensive specialty store like Victoria's Secret or Frederick's of Hollywood, you're not likely to find larger sizes in cute patterns--all the sizes from a D on up tend to be made more like industrial tarp, all support and no aesthetic. I guess the rationale is, hey, if you got epic tits then you don't need cute undies to attract sexual partners.

So, yeah, I had pretty big boobs for a good long while.

Since I lived in another state, my relatives didn't see me very often and when they did there was no guarantee it was going to be at a time of the year when I'd wear fitted clothes, and I'm not close with any of them so boob size is not something we really discuss. So not many knew I had the rack I did. And because my family members are not exactly the kind of people known for sensitive, tasteful remarks on anything, I tended to startle crude surprise from them when they did notice.

One day several years ago my mom's middle sister was visiting. I came downstairs one morning wearing a t-shirt and my aunt took one look at me and came right out with, "Geezis christ, girl, where'd you grow those boobs?"

Thanks for that, Aunt C. You always know the right things to say, as evidenced by the fact that you are known within the family for consuming wine at gatherings and telling everyone to shut the fuck up.

Sometimes I think I should write a book and then I realize nobody would publish it on the grounds of being too fanciful and unbelievable.

we never had this discussion...

I don't know why I was even thinking about this but I just realized that my parents never had the 'where babies come from' discussion with me. I vaguely remember asking about the subject around the time my mom was OVER 9000 months pregnant with my brother when I was about three, and she gave me some weird convoluted answer about how babies are flowers in their mommies tummies and some shit, which led to me being extremely nervous for years about what might happen if I accidentally ate one. (This sounds ridiculous but you should also be aware that for many years we lived in a small sheep-farming village in Yorkshire where our yard backed up to a large sheep pasture and livestock were just a part of life--for some reason I got it into my head that I could totally subsist on grass just like sheep did and spent a lot of time eating it. I wish I was making that up. It just goes to prove I have been a complete mental clusterfuck far longer than I've been a drug addict.)

So, yeah, I never really asked after this again and my mom never expressly told me all the awkward details. I did work out for myself where babies come from. Mostly because my mother DID sit me down when I was about eight or nine to give me that supremely awkward talk about 'This is Your Body and Soon it Will Start Changing in Strange, Repulsive, Embarrassing, and Horrifying Ways'. And then she gave me a bunch of books on the subject, on the theory that it would be easier to let a bookworm child read about this shit herself than it would be to try and pretend we had a good relationship.

These books, it bears mentioning, had a lot of detailed drawings of female anatomy. I am embarrassed and slightly amused to report that this served as my first pornographic material and the more I think about this subject the younger I end up being when I realize that Mother Nature was sending me warning signs that I was not on my way to socially acceptable heterosexuality.

so, bad idea, then?

I'm in the habit of making jokes out of things I probably shouldn't and being almost completely socially retarded, I'm not always good at identifying things that might bother other people. So I'm not infrequently in a position where I have just said something I thought was amusing and inspired horror in my audience.

A co-worker of mine put in for a week off next month because she was due for a tonsillectomy. She's only about eighteen and has never undergone a surgical procedure before so she's quite nervous about it and isn't entirely sure what the ordeal will entail. I had mine removed when I was five years old so I tried to reassure her that it was a minor procedure and had very little downtime during recovery.

This seemed to settle her fears a bit, at which point I made the following ill-advised remark:

"Of course, that was twenty years ago and medical technology was a bit less advanced then. They were still rendering patients unconscious with rocks back in those days."

Apparently a comment like this will inspire panic and anxiety.

Oops.

sage advice

I happen to know for a fact that Florida police WILL pull you over and even go as far as taking you in for questioning if you happen to be driving a motorcycle in scuba gear. Ultimately they'll have no choice but to release you on the grounds that they have no idea what to charge you with.

Don't ask how I know this, just accept that I do.

did you even think before you said that?

The boything keeps this picture of me as the wallpaper/background for his phone and his PS3, partially because it's me and partially because it's an elf chick in general and he's a huge geek. So naturally a lot of people see it. Normally the reaction it inspires is some permutation of 'wow, she's hot', and if they don't already know who it is they ask--probably in hopes that I'm an underground model or something and there are more pictures and less clothes available to people with an internet connection. I should be kind of offended or something that it's almost like he's showing off, but to be honest I really like the attention, even when I'm not around to see it myself.

When they find out I'm taken they usually come out with a good-natured 'you lucky fucker', or else they apologize for making the comment.

But on his way up here a few weeks ago he passed a guy on the street who did a rubber-necked double-take and asked who the model was. After telling the man it was his girlfriend, the guy actually asked for my number.

What the eff? Who does that? I'm pretty sure that's a universally douchey behaviour as well as breaking an unwritten social rule. I mean it's kind of generally accepted that thou shalt not make a flagrant attempt to bang someone else's S/O. Especially not by asking that person for their S/O's number.

Weird, that.

soft-hearted

Every spring, I go and lie amongst those bluebells. To remind me of another place, another time, when I was another person. During the war, when I was all gingham frocks and white teeth, skippity-hop and fahl-de-rahl. I even had a smile. I was going out with a young flier. I used to meet him off his base in Norfolk and we'd get into his old banger and drive off into the countryside and make love like rabbits, amongst the golden corn or the bluebells. Oh, god, it was wonderful to be alive then--the sheer energy of youth, so wasted on the young. Yes, there's still a romantic vein that runs through the granite hillside of my soul, and I dig into it once a year by going and laying silently amid the bluebells.

now you know

Stop pretending to be Irish--or squeezing the tiniest shred of Irish ancestry from your distant familial past--just because it's almost Saint Patrick's Day. I'm more Irish than you are and I've never even been there. You know fuck all about Ireland. Or Saint Patrick.

Listen up, you obnoxious Anglophiles: Saint Patrick wasn't even Irish. He was the WELSH son of a ROMAN general and his ENGLISH wife. He never set foot in Ireland until he was sixteen years old, and even then it was because he'd been kidnapped by Irish pirates.

You're welcome.

Why do you make this difficult on me?

Because of how overplayed her songs are (and the fact that I hate the songs and everything about them), I developed an intense violent hatred of English singer/songwriter Adele. I developed it without even knowing what she looked like or anything, just purely on the basis of hating her music and even then the only reason I hated it was because of how much it was played--the songs themselves aren't really rage-inducingly bad, but are made that way from sheer pervasiveness.

And because I'm not very smart, I tend not to know better than to pursue shit I hate so I started reading articles about her when I saw them pop up. I wish I hadn't because the more I find out about her personally--the more I see interviews and read news stories--the harder it is for me to hate her because she just seems like a fucking awesome person to hang out with.

For one thing, she's a plump and curvy woman in an industry completely dominated by unattainable, unrealistic standards of female beauty. (And male beauty as well, but you can't really square the popularity of American Idol's 2003 winner Ruben Studdard with the music industry's attitude towards female artists. The man weighs as much as a piece of industrial earth-moving equipment. That would never fly if he didn't have a penis.) I actually think she's really very pretty and I love--love!!--that she's so comfortable in her own skin. She's plump and she's owning it like nobody's business. And I think that's swell.

Also, she once went to a club with Jennifer Anniston and accidentally called her 'Rachel' after her character on the show 'Friends'.

And she flipped off the presenters who interrupted her acceptance speech at the Brit Awards.

And she applied for a helicopter license this week. A fucking HELICOPTER LICENSE. You know who else flies choppers? Harrison Ford. Indiana motherfucking Jones.

I officially cannot hate this woman.

who?

There's something of a cultural norm among people who attend Renaissance Festivals regularly to go by nicknames among other fairegoers. Not everyone has one (I don't), but most people do and you get to know them by that name. This is perfectly normal, but the names are sometimes a bit weird and it feels really strange not knowing someone's real name. I knew the boything for almost two years before I learned his real name because most people call him 'Pyre'.

Also, occasionally the names invoke embarrassment when used out of faire, leaving you with the choice between making up a less weird name or telling a story about a woman you know by the name 'Bacon Face'.

I swear to fuck I know a woman whose nickname is 'Bacon Face'.

two things...

When a language originates from a place that lacks a certain feature or doesn't experience a certain phenomenon, it sensibly has no words for things it doesn't need. (Sometimes they also HAVE words for stuff it never occurred to you that you WOULD need--I'm reasonably certain there's a word in Finnish or Swedish or something for 'the state of being reluctant to write letters'.) Naturally the languages that are born in desert climates don't have a word for 'snow' or 'ice' because, well, they never have a need for it. So when people from the areas where these languages dominate and encounter for the first time things for which their native tongue has no words, the normal mode of operation is just to usurp a word from the local language. New words are recently very rarely just created out of nowhere.

But the invading Vikings that poured into England had to take some pretty startlingly basic words from the local language because theirs lacked the appropriate terms. It says a lot about just how poor and desperate your people are if your language has no room for words like 'trunk'.

Also: as I've mentioned, I'm usually really good at coming up with names. Mostly I do people names and place names are a little harder, so whenever I come up with a good fictional place-name, I tend to store it in case I ever need it. One of my favourites is rather an exotic flavour name and I've never had the right time or place to use it.

The name is 'Tel Azo'.

I took it from my car's license plate--not verbatim, naturally. I simply converted a couple of numbers into similar-looking letters. Let you decide which were numbers first.

young love

Weird random memory time.

Because where I lived was almost completely rural until I was much older (it was two miles in every direction from so much as a bus stop and we didn't get pavements until I was in high school), the same group of students mostly went to the same schools. Every time we went up a level, from elementary to middle to high school, we added more kids but unless you went to a private school or moved or something, you basically had mostly the same peers for years at a time. So even if you didn't know them very well, you could still recognize them mostly by certain traits. Except for me, because there are people I went to school with for ten years who have no fucking idea who I am, partially due, I'm sure, to a radical change in my appearance over the years. One day I will post photos and prove this claim.

Anyway.

For years I had two classmates. Let's call them Marco and Carla. I knew who these kids were--Carla would later go on in high school as having a reputation to consent to advances even with the pickup line 'Nice shoes, wanna fuck?'--and they were known throughout the grade level in elementary school for one particular trait.

Everybody--and I mean EVERYBODY, including the janitors--knew that Marco had a huge crush on Carla. I mean he had this crush for years and chased her helplessly that whole time. Looking back on it even now it seems like an extremely powerful devotion to have even as an adult, let alone as an eight-year-old. We used to get kicks out of encouraging him to exhibit what I recognize today as behaviours constituting sexual harassment and stalking but back then it was just fun to watch. I feel kind of badly about it now, because since then I have been on the receiving end, like Carla, of unwanted obsessive affection that ranged from annoying to just plain scary. One guy named Al I went to middle and high school with notoriously had a massive crush on me for almost our entire school career and on a school trip to New York when we were thirteen, he stalked me for three days and paid the friends with whom I was rooming in our hotel to take pictures of me sleeping for him.

But yeah, Carla rebuffed Marco's advances for ages. Part of me feels quite badly for him because it SUCKS to want something you can't have--but at the same time I feel badly for her, as well, because you always come out as the bad guy when you're turning someone down even when their behaviour is totally unacceptable.

Poor Decision-Making Skills

I just read this gem of screencaps from a supposed Facebook conversation between a girl who gets way too attached way too quickly and her week-long boyfriend following her getting a tattoo--after, remember, a WEEK--of his face on her arm.

I can't tell whether or not it's real but this is the internet and nothing would surprise me anymore. All I can do is shake my head.

And then call the boything with this solemn declaration:

Me: If you ever get a tattoo on any part of yourself that has anything at all to do with me, I will dump you right there just to make you look like an asshole.
Him: Agreed.

This is why I *heart* him.

things of no value

Sometimes you read or hear about someone incurring some sort of injury of a nature seemingly wholly unrelated to the activity that caused it. For example, an early researcher and amateur scientist JBS Haldene had a pressure tank in his hope lab and tested the effects of compression and decompression on family members and friends. (Including, bizarrely, Spain's prime minister.) He subjected himself once to oxygen deprivation of near-lethal levels during one experiment and as a result lost all the feeling in his butt for six years. I have no idea how the two are connected.

Have to be trained specifically to scale jumps and trample obstacles. Their natural inclination is to go around it or stop moving, so standing on or over something requires training to perform an non-instinctual response.

you should be shot for this

Know what should be illegal?

DUCKFACE.

FUCKING DUCKFACE.

It is EVERYWHERE. You cannot escape the girls and their fuck-ugly facially-contorted duckfaces. It's horrible, stupid. It looks dumb. It looks ugly. STOP MAKING THAT FACE!!

I found my fourteen-year-old cousin's Facebook page. Know what her default picture was? MOTHERFUCKING DUCKFACE. NO DEAR GOD NO NOT ANOTHER CHILD NO PLEASE DEAR GOD SHE'S TOO YOUNG NO NOT ANOTHER DUCKFACE VICTIM!!!

Too late....

inspiration

Once I spoke the language of the flowers.
Once I understood each word the caterpillars said.
Once I smiled in secret,
At the gossip of the starlings.
And had a conversation with a dragonfly in bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions of the crickets,
And joined in with the crying
Of each dying flake of snow.
Once I spoke the language of the flowers.
How did it go,
How did it go,
How did it go?

I used to really want to write a fic centred around that poem. For a while the Tamora Pierce fandom looked like a good place to do it but that was many years ago and I've since mostly vanished from it.

Still. Sometimes I want to try again.

out of character

I was a huge fan of the original Sims games way back in the early 2000s and an avid, ravenous, savvy player. (I figured out how to effectively cheat the program without actually activating any cheats at all, it was pretty awesome.) I don't play it anymore because my games are all still at my parent's house and they're all the original CDs from back in the day and too old to work with my current laptop. I never played Sims 2 or Sims 3, either, due to never having had a computer really capable of handling the program. But I still really enjoy watching other people play it and laughing at whatever glitches or misadventures or bizarre scenarios happen in the little microcosm in the computer.

Of course, almost everyone who plays or ever played those games has made a family like their own or made Sim versions of their friends and tried to make them live an approximately accurate life. It never actually turns out that way because if there's one thing those little fuckers are good at, it's making sure nothing ever goes as you intended it to. The wrong people fall in love, babies are born from goodness-knows-where, they react inappropriately to death or disaster and do things that make zero sense here in the real world but are apparently completely normal in Simville. Like reading a cookbook in your underpants on the toilet. Hey, everyone needs a hobby, right?

The problem with knowing your friends have a Sim version of you is that you actually feel embarrassed or want to scold them (the Sims) for doing shit you personally would never do. My friend Damen found his Sim in a homosexual relationship with the guy who was supposed to be MY Sim's boyfriend while my Sim, clearly feeling a little desperate for affection and rejected and lonely after finding out the object of her affection preferred cock, went and had an affair with the burglar who came to rob her apartment. She got pregnant with his child even though one of her character traits was 'Hates Children', and was a predictably atrocious and neglectful mother who kept putting the baby on the floor and going off to surf the web or watch TV. Then the CPS lady came around and took the baby away because Sim me was neglecting it and then my Sim immediately went out and got pregnant AGAIN by someone Damen has never been able to identify. Again she was an atrocious mother and again CPS took the baby.

That dumb Sim is on baby four or five by now and can't stop fucking random guys and keeps getting pregnant and then leaving the baby to starve on the bathroom floor cos, fuck it, I didn't want that thing anyway!

I feel ashamed of her behaviour. Sim me, why are you giving the Sim universe absolutely the wrong impression of me??

well this just made my night!

I was wandering around 'Know Your Meme' earlier, randomly reading articles, when I came across the partially-written page about the 'Make Your Own Album Cover' game. For those who don't know, this is a meme-slash-game people on forums and stuff sometimes play--it involves taking a random Wikipedia article, Flickr photo, and a portion of a random quotation and combining them to create the name of a fictional band and the title and cover art of their fictional album. I think these are pretty cool because some of them are completely ludicrous and others look almost like they could be real. I was browsing through the examples and I stumbled across this one:

This really isn't one of the best ones, but it immediately stood out to me because of the title on the left side. It reads 'an adorable pancreas'.

I recognized the quote immediately and knew not only its context but I knew who said it.

It was from humourist and playwright Jean Kerr.

Jean Kerr is my all-time favourite writer and I am genuinely disappointed and saddened that she isn't more widely-known because her work was just absolutely genius. She wrote about everyday life and its quirks and weirdness decades before Erma Bombeck would even pick up a pen. She was amazing and I owe my own creative ambitions to her. It was Jean Kerr who taught me that the mundane can be made gloriously funny by turning it on its head and looking at it from a completely absurd angle.

The quote in question is this: "I'm tired of this business about beauty only being skin deep. That's deep enough, isn't it? What else do you want, an adorable pancreas?"

She died in 2003 at the age of 81 and I'm deeply upset that I will never get to meet her in person or talk to her about the everyday things that make us laugh.

I have never met another person who even knew who she was.

I'll go get the epi-pen...

My dad has two of the most bizarre sets of allergies I have ever encountered in my life. I'm sure they must be out there somewhere, but I personally haven't come across another person whose particular allergy afflictions are anything like his at all. They don't make any sense to me at all--they don't even make sense to the allergists he occasionally saw when he was young.

He's allergic to dogs and cats, but not all dogs and cats. Unlike most pet allergies, it has nothing to do with their dander. It might have something to do with their fur, but I really have no idea. He's more allergic to cats than to dogs and even just being in a house with a cat--without seeing or coming into direct contact with the animal itself--can cause a reaction. But he isn't allergic to every cat. Sometimes he's less allergic to one than another. His reaction is quite normal--his eyes and face swell slightly, he gets sneezy and coughs, and his throat sometimes closes up--it's just that some cats he's really bothered by and others not at all. It has nothing to do with their fur length or anything since he's sometimes intensely bothered by short-haired cats or completely fine with a big fluffball. The same is true for dogs, that some he's perfectly okay around and others give him a horrible reaction and it has nothing to do with their fur length. Weirdly enough, he isn't allergic to breeds that have hair and not fur. (Non-shedding dogs like poodles and terriers have hair.) He's never been bothered by my mom's dog, even though he blames her (the dog) for the Yankees having never won a World Series championship since we adopted her.

I've actually inherited this trait from him. It's way less prominent in me since I'm almost never allergic to an animal and only found out I could be when I was nineteen. I was dogsitting in the neighbourhood and found my hands would get really itchy after petting the dog. I'm even more reactive to cats (when I'm reactive at all) than to dogs, but I didn't learn that until a few months ago. This one was a very small, very short-haired Siamese cat and I found myself feeling a 'full' sensation in my throat a few minutes into cleaning and feeding. I had no idea what it was but I knew it was probably not good, so I had to call my dad at work and ask him what it felt like when your throat starts to close up. "Well how do you feel right now?" "Like I have a throat full of cotton balls." "Yep, your throat closed. Get out of that area and go take some Benadryl."

His other allergies are food allergies. But it isn't like a normal food allergy, especially in the way he reacts. He doesn't break out in hives or swell up or anything--he just throws up immediately. He can't keep them down and for some reason his stomach violently rejects them. There are only three things that do this to him and they're all completely unrelated. They are: pineapple, coconut, and liver. Just those three things. He can't eat them or anything that tastes like or is made with them.

I've never seen either of these problems in another person in my life. I'm starting to wonder just how much of a freak of nature I really am.

Coinage

This was a bit too long to post with the rest of the things in my last post, so here it is in its own post!

Awesome moment at work: a woman paying in cash today had a couple of foreign coins in her pile of pennies. Being near the border (near-ish...) we're allowed to take Canadian coinage, but not paper money--but not from anywhere else. So I let her pay with her Canadian pennies but not with the one from... Barbados!

See, I collect coins. I don't usually find foreign ones, though I'm known at work for asking customers if I can trade them a penny from my register for their old wheat-back Lincoln pennies and 1976 'drummer' quarters.

For the uninitiated: Lincoln cents until 1959 had two sheaves of wheat and the words 'ONE CENT' on the back instead of the Monument, hence the name 'wheatback' or 'wheatie'. The US Mint also for one year--1976--produced quarters with a drummer on the back instead of an eagle to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration. These are all still legal tender--since every scrap of currency ever printed by the US Mint is still legal tender, these are still sometimes found in circulation, though not so much anymore since people like me keep snipping them up. Still, I can say from experience it is entirely possible to find a Lincoln wheatback cent from 1914 in circulation in the year 2012. It might just be me, but I find there to be something kind of... otherworldly, almost, I guess? Something... reverent, something special about holding a coin in your hand that predates you by such a huge margin. It's one thing when you're youngish like I am and are holding a coin that predates you by a few years. Maybe it feels a little surprising--if you're inclined to think about it, anyway--to hold a coin that predates your parents. But to hold a coin in your hand that's been in consistent circulation, been handled by people and used in business transactions from one person to another, for nearly a century? That feels... interesting. Think of all that coin lived through. That coin saw the invention of cars, it saw suffrage, it saw two World Wars. It saw the rise of radio, of movies, of television, of computers, of the internet. It saw the end of Jim Crow laws. It saw Roe v. Wade. And now I have it. It never fails to amaze me.

And also I'd never even seen money from Barbados. The woman had no idea where it came from because she didn't even know that Barbados was a country.

I asked if I could have it for a 'real' penny and she gave it to me. Most people do this, actually--since it's just a penny and I'm so cutely enthusiastic about my finds, they tend to just let me have them.

Which is a lot safer than pinching coins from my till. Which I also do. Ssh!!

lots of shit to talk about tonight!

I realize I'm not what most people would pick out of a crowd as being 'eccentric' because I by and large don't dress particularly strangely. Every now and then I will go out in public wearing something that inspires a double-take in a stranger--like my kilt--but other than that I'm pretty well just a standard-issue jeans-and-sneakers kinda girl. Even when I wear skirts it manages to be very neutral. But... the only reason I don't wear the cute little tutu-style skirts little girls are wearing today? THEY DON'T MAKE THEM IN GROWNUP SIZES!!! Except that I've dropped about thirty pounds since I moved last year (actually, probably more since I don't own a scale and haven't been weighed since before the new year when I had a doctor appointment), so today I went and tried on a skirt from the girl's department at work. It was a girl's XL. It fit! IT FIT MY SIZE FIFTY BUTT. Mostly because it had no constrained hip measurements, being a tutu and all. I bought it. Fuck the police, I'mm'a wear mah silver tutu in public if I want!

And I bought a t-shirt with a screen print of the famous 'subway vent' scene from Marilyn Monroe's 'Seven Year Itch' because I love Marilyn. She be mah homegirl, yo word muh homies. Wow, am I white or am I WHITE?? Geezis...

In other news, a man came into the store today who looked absolutely uncannily like Douglas Henshall from 'Primeval'. A bit of a chunky Douglas Henshall, but he had the same eyes and hair and even was scruffy like he was too busy chasing dinosaurs this weekend to shave. I tried not to stare or sound like a creep so I didn't say anything, but it was pretty jarring when he came to my till and had a pronounced New York accent and not a Scottish one. It just didn't fit.

Weird moment at work: kids are a common feature in my store. I'm used to them and their varied behaviours and don't notice them unless they're doing something extreme and bizarre and dangerous. Since I'm also Mary Sunshine, they stick me at the first till right by the door (so I can say hello and smile charmingly at customers), which also happens to be right by the group of mannequins we use for display. Almost without exception, kids fucking love the mannequins and go up and poke them and try to play with them. They especially love the dog. Old Navy used to--and some still--sell dog accessories, collars, toys, and the like, so most stores have a dog mannequin. Kids fucking LOVE the dog. They pet him and sometimes they name him. So when the two-year-old daughter of my customer was interested in the dog, it was par for the course. And then she did something I have never seen another child do. She got down on her hands and knees and started groping the dog mannequin right where its genitals would be if it had any. I mean she was actively reaching, poking, prodding, getting down and looking--sometimes kids do shit that's misinterpretable or ambiguous but this child was at it with the authority of a vet or a dog breeder. There was absolutely no mistaking it--that little girl was trying to find that dog's penis. Her mother was horribly embarrassed but the kid would NOT be deterred from her search. I damn near gave myself a facial hemorrhage trying not to laugh.

quirk?

I haven't had the opportunity to look at everybody's handwriting sample in the world, but from what I have seen I've noticed I do something slightly weird that I've never seen another person do.

Most of my 'quirks' in writing come from being taught my alphabet and my early foundation spelling vocabulary in the UK but the bulk of my schooling was in the US. My 'y' is rounded and its tail curls around, my 't' is curved at the bottom. But every feature in my handwriting can be found in many other people's--except for one. I don't even know why I started doing this in the first place but at some point I re-designed the lower-case 'f' and instead of actually sitting on top of the line like it's supposed to, it hangs below it like 'p' and 'j' and the rest.

This is what I mean.

See? The 'f' hangs by its cross.

I don't know why I do that. It doesn't make any sense, but 'making sense' is only occasionally a prerequisite for the shit I do.

you can't deny evidence

I'm not much like anyone else in my whole family. They're by and large very outgoing and sociable and into different things than I am. I don't even have a particularly consistent appearance. While my face has a lot of my mom's features (all female babies in my entire family on her side look almost identical until they reach they age of six or so), I don't have anyone else's colouring. My hair is naturally ash brown (I dye it bright red), and my eyes are green. No one else has these traits. I'm also left-handed, which I know can occur quite easily as a spontaneous thing but usually it involves having a parent or grandparent who was left-handed. So far as I know, I only had one great-grandfather who was a lefty and everyone--really, EVERYBODY--else is a righty. They also mostly wear glasses and I've never needed them. (Actually I probably do now, I'm starting to have a lot of trouble seeing at night, particularly bright lights--they blur together and feather horribly to the point where I can't tell where one car begins and another ends or what reflective street signs say until I'm too close to react if it turns out to be a problematic situation.)

But I still have enough traits in common with them that I can't reasonably speculate that I was switched at birth or something. For one thing, my parents and I are apt to display exactly the same abusive techniques.

Also, years ago my younger brother was an obsessive player of the online MMO 'RuneScape'. He always played a female character and messed with people who tried to chat him up thinking he was a girl. It always gave him a cruel little giggle to crush the dreams of hopeless nerds all over the internet.

The problem is that that sounds like something I would totally do. If I were a guy I'd be SO on that shit.

The odds are not especially good that two unrelated people will develop such eerily similar and completely fucking deranged senses of humour.

that's handy...

The problem with being simultaneously weird and socially inept is that I don't have any exposure to normal people and consequently don't always have a good grasp of exactly how ludicrously exaggerated my weirdness actually is.

Every so often I'll find myself with a moment of sudden realization that a particular aspect of my normal is, to most people, ludicrous.

Today I had such a moment.

I own a top hat.

And not just any top hat. I own a purple crushed velvet top hat.

Most people will never even wear one of these, much less own one. Even people who own one don't get much use out of them. Admittedly I don't get terribly much use out of mine but it's a favoured prop at some of my shoots.

The only reason I don't wear it as a matter of routine is because tehre is no socially acceptable way for a WOMAN to walk around wearing an accessory that hasn't been a staple of fashion for over a century and that was only worn by men anyway.

bad choice, decent reason

My worst and most destructive habit by far is a drug addiction. Or, I should say, a drug preference. I won't go into detail except to say that yes, I have a problem with prescription drugs, but nothing I'm doing is technically illegal and my name is on all the bottles; I'm as responsible as it's humanly possible to be about it; I never, and never would, buy off the streets because that's asking for trouble. When I don't have access to drugs I can still go on quite normally without suffering any withdrawal symptoms or negative reactions. I just don't have a big enough habit for that to happen, so I can go for months at a time completely clean between scripts. No one in their right mind would pick me out of a crowd as a drug addict. Even people who know drug addicts personally and can spot these things. Unless I tell you, you won't know.

Of course, I have a horrible time trying to make a script last because I have zero self-control. If I have no obligation that would preclude me getting high off my tits (like I have to drive somewhere--I've done this before and I've scared myself out of doing it ever again by getting into a minor fender-bender), then I will pretty much just choke down the pills every couple of hours as each successive rush wears off. I can't make a month's worth of sleeping pills last more than a few days, usually about four or five but never more than a week.

I do it because it's one of the only reasonably effective coping mechanisms I have. I try to take my mind off my emotional and mental maladies but that isn't always possible. Reading a book, watching a funny movie, listening to music, going for a walk, writing it out--these are all excellent ways for me to try and deal, and they're my first line of defense, but when I get in a bad way my mood is such a bottomless black pit of self-hatred and suicidal depression that even the artificial chemical high that comes from drugs is better than being that bleak. I do that, I take a nap, and when I wake up I feel a whole lot better and can go on with my day.

That's just kind of how I cope right now. I have a horrible relationship with psychiatric drugs--I'm honestly less functional on them than I am completely fucked up on pills.

As demented as this sounds, the fact that I know I can still feel okay--that I'm not going to be stuck in whatever hole I find myself in on a particularly bad day--is one of the things that keeps me going. It's not the healthiest coping mechanism in the world, I grant, but it's one that works for me for the time being. In the end, it makes me feel better and helps me remember that life isn't always going to suck this much.

And if the price of that reassurance is being an addict?

Well, then it's one I'm more than willing to pay.

this makes me awesome by proxy

When Mexico came up in a conversation I had at work today, I suddenly recalled a fact that I'd known for most of my life but that didn't strike me as being really fucking cool until just then.

One of my dad's cousins married a well-spoken and privileged gentleman named John. John is from a family so fucking rich they owned a private villa in Mexico (hence why I remembered this at all). He speaks flawless fluent Spanish, which is a little jarring to hear because when he isn't speaking Spanish he's talking in a very stereotypical plummy English accent.

Because he's titled.

I'm related by marriage--and fairly closely--to the British aristocracy. Nobility.

I've always known this but somehow I never thought it was interesting enough to mention until now. Go figure!

excuse me, are you lost?

Every now and then you might find yourself doing a double-take when you see a person who looks completely out of place in the setting they're currently occupying. It's not like I'm going to suggest that certain people can't go certain places, but seeing something like this is just very visually jarring.

When I was in college, I would sometimes spot an adult student on his way to or from class with his laptop case. That by itself isn't the weird part. The weird part was that he was a Buddhist monk. And I know this because he was wearing the traditional orange-and-yellow monk robes and sandals and his head was shaved.

Obviously Buddhist monks are totally entitled to an education--there are probably a lot of perks of having someone with a degree at the temple, I'm sure--and nothing about their beliefs or their religious obligations says they can't use technology or go to school or anything. But surrounded on all sides by typical college students, seeing him never failed to feel really weird. Sometimes I felt like asking him if he was lost. He just looked so out of place.

Magic Carpet

Computer animation has been around for a long time. At least since the 80s, and possibly even before then, people have been developing and refining techniques necessary to render smooth animated images using computers. By the early 90s, the technology had progressed to being capable of a wide range of animations, including rendering them in three dimensions--a 1993 compilation called 'Imaginaria' was released that featured several dozen very brief short films (none is more than a minute or two long) as a way to showcase the various techniques and applications of computer generated images.

Just as with colour film, CGI wasn't used generally until it had been around for some time. Both techniques were too expensive and time-consuming to justify using and neither graphic designers nor computers of the day were capable of handling the amount of work. 'Toy Story' was the first movie rendered entirely in computer generated graphics, but Disney can also claim the first completely computer-generated character in a full-length movie.

So what was it?

It was the magic carpet from the 1992 movie 'Aladdin'. Animators decided to render the carpet with computers in order that its detailed and complex pattern remain consistent as the character moved and rippled.

missed it by THAT MUCH!

My dad is the most boring human being alive.

It's not that he doesn't ever do the things people usually tell stories about their dad over. It's just that, even though he experiences the same things that other men his age typically experience, he does so in a way that manages to be completely absurd and disappointingly dull at the same time.

For example, my dad had a midlife crisis when he was in his mid-40s. Lots of men have these. Two of my uncles experienced these and did what any other sensible man would do and bought red convertibles. (The one on my mom's side bought a brand-new shiny red Mustang; the one on my dad's side bought a vintage 1970s Cougar.) My dad went through a midlife crisis and he dealt with it by... buying a canoe. I swear to fuck, he bought a canoe. That was his idea of dealing with the insecurities that came from being middle aged. At least it was red.

He makes a yearly trip to Las Vegas around September or October. On the surface this doesn't sound like it could possibly end with him being boring, but I assure you it does. He doesn't set foot in a casino or see a show or glimpse the glittery lights of the strip. Nope, when my dad goes to Vegas he does it to ride his bike 200 miles through the fucking desert. And no, not a motorbike--which is what people usually picture when I tell this story. A pedal bike. For the equivalent distance between New York City and Washington DC. It takes two days. None of it is interesting in any way.

My dad is also no stranger to alcohol. Like all good strapping lads of Italian ancestry, he has a very high tolerance for intoxicants. And like people with high alcohol tolerance, when he starts to get drunk he gets really really drunk really really quickly. He's also one of those drunks who, rather than falling asleep, instead gets a burst of energy. What does he do with all this energy? Something hilariously ill-planned?? No, he rearranges the furniture. Every damn time. I got used to sometimes waking up to find whole rooms completely remodelled. On one particularly productive night, he switched the living room and dining room around completely. He once moved the guest room from the second story of the house to the basement and brought his entire office suite--his computer, desk, file cabinet, rolly chair, et al--up two flights of stairs from the basement to the now-vacant room. This is his idea of 'drunk behaviour'.

It's really quirky behaviour, but nowhere near interesting or weird enough to gain any kind of advantage during a 'shit my dad does' conversation at a bar.

this just seems totally inappropriate...

Random memory time.

I honestly have no idea what planet my parents went to college on because they were in college in the late 70s, right when National Lampoon's 'Animal House' came out and arguably the rebirth of frat house madness and all-around bad behaviour. Yet neither of them knew what beer pong was until a few years ago. At least my dad had been to toga parties. If he hadn't, I would probably have seriously tried to find evidence that neither of them actually ever went to university and may even have been in the country illegally. (Even funnier, my dad was the only guy on his floor who actually knew how to make a serviceable toga out of a bedsheet, so you knew someone was going to throw a toga party when there was a line of half-dressed guys outside Andy's dorm room with an armful of sheets or wearing a failed toga that could look like anything from a wrap dress to a diaper.) It's not that they didn't drink--oh fucking boy, did they drink, as evidenced by the only piece of real sage fatherly advice my dad ever gave me, which I shall repeat here verbatim in hopes of enriching the life of some young person someday:

"Never be drunk and unconscious at a party where there are people drunk and conscious."

Smart man, huh?

Anyway, neither he nor my mom had ever played beer pong and manged to remain totally unaware of it until about five or six years ago when we went to a graduation party thrown by a family friend for their daughter who, many years earlier, used to babysit my brother and me. Since it was just down the street and my parents walked, my dad didn't see any reason not to get totally shit-faced so he spent most of the afternoon playing round after round of beer pong with the guest of honour and her fellow college friends.

Apparently nobody stopped to consider that there might have been something a little inappropriate with a middle-aged man playing a drinking game with the babysitter.

To be honest, I still think it is.

Freeze Frame

Okay, so I know WHY bathroom-mirror-self-portraits have become a staple on the internet. I don't like them, but I know why they exist. Not everybody knows their digital camera has a self-timer feature, or even has a digital camera at all--some smartphones have a self-timer in their camera mode but not everyone knows that, either. (Plus phones won't stand up on their own like a camera will.) So a phone picture is usually the best most people can do on their own. Unless you take it at arm's length, for this you need a mirror, and the only place a lot of people have a mirror big enough is the bathroom.

So I get why people feel like this is their best option, because lord knows they probably haven't got enough pictures on Facebook yet, amirite?

But what I don't get is the circumstances under which all these cell phone bathroom mirror photos seem to have been taken under. You probably can't escape having your toilet in the frame, but is it really that hard to remember to flush? Or, I dunno, put the lid down? Everyone poops, but it makes us kind of uncomfortable when we find ourselves confronted with inadvertent proof of this. I don't care how hot you think you look all carefully posed and primped with your best duckface and come-hither expression--the presence of your gastrointestinal waste in the background puts your sex appeal well into the negative numbers.

Of course, that one could always prove to be an accident--maybe you share a bathroom with a roommate or sibling or someone, and you just didn't realize they'd forgotten to flush? It happens. We're only human, after all.

You can't claim 'ACCIDENTAL!!' when you take one of these lovely mirror portraits while someone is clearly visible in the background having a shit. Sometimes it's a small child, sometimes it's a friend, sometimes it's a significant other. But the fact that someone is there on the toilet in the first place is so full of 'WTF' that there aren't enough syllables in 'WTF' adequate to express just how mystified I am at anyone who posts such a picture to Facebook. Everyone poops. I get it. Everyone usually gets a colonoscopy, too, but that doesn't mean anyone else wants to see pictures of it on the internet.

All of this pales in comparison to those few remarkable souls who take pictures in their bathroom mirrors of themselves on the toilet. And not just sitting on the toilet seat, either, but planted on the throne with their pants around their ankles throwing a double-whammy of duckface and a peace sign or gang sign to the camera. Why would you do this?? What were you thinking?? Even if you were a nudist I can't think of any reasonable explanation for posting pictures of yourself taking a shit on Facebook. Just... TMI.

Maybe I just don't get the younger generation. Maybe all the cool kids are doing it. Maybe they don't find it taboo in the same way my generation doesn't find premarital sex or same-sex relationships taboo. Maybe it's the next frontier of  equality.

Or maybe kids today are just fucking stupid.

Personally, I say it's that last one but I could be wrong. I'd say more but it's time for me to go and soak my teeth.

..wait, what?

On today's episode of 'Shit My Boyfriend Says'...

Me: "Actually, it was pretty awesome and I couldn't believe it finally happened. I guess it was like... I dunno, imagine how you felt the first time your saw a pair of naked tits in person."
Him: "I don't want to, they were my sister's."

identical--almost

Random academic trivia of the night. (Well actually morning, and nearly sunrise. But whatever.)

Identical twins share exactly the same DNA profile because they formed from the same zygote--a fertilized egg, from which the technical term 'monozygotic', meaning one zygote--and thus contain the same genetic material from the same sperm and ovum. So DNA tests are useless because it's impossible to tell which twin contributed the test sample. Bizarrely, it is possible to differentiate between the two by a much less technically advanced method: fingerprinting. Identical twins often have very slight variations in the patterns of their fingerprints.

There also exists a rare phenomenon called 'chimerism' which is kind of like the reverse of an identical twin. Instead of a zygote splitting and making two people sharing one profile, chimerism is when two different zygotes (which would normally develop together as fraternal twins) fuse together and produce one person who has two genetic profiles. In 2002 a Washington woman named Lydia Fairchild was not only denied public assistance but actually temporarily lost custody of her children when the standard DNA test required to apply for assistance appeared to reveal she was not their biological mother. (The test did show she was related to them--it would have to, since Fairchild's two genetic profiles still came from exactly the same parents, just like siblings.) The matter became so heated that, when she discovered she was pregnant a third time, she invited court officers and state attorneys to witness the birth and take DNA samples immediately. The result was the same, but still they refused to believe she was acting as an illegal surrogate and intended to charge her with welfare fraud; it wasn't until they became aware of a much earlier case in Boston in which another woman, Karen Keegan, was accused of not being the mother of her own children due to the dual genes of chimerism.

The reason for this is because the fusing of zygotes creates certain regions or organs to develop from one source and other parts from the other source--so that, in these two cases, the blood and saliva tested were formed with one set of genes and the other, related but still not identical, genes formed their reproductive organs. In Keegan's case, her thyroid also contained the second mystery genes.

Chimerism is extaordinarily rare--just a small handful of cases have been recorded in the last seventy years--but it does raise an unlikely but alarming possibility. A rapist, for example, might possibly possess two different genetic profiles in such a way that his semen would appear to come from a different person than the contributor of the standard cheek-scraping or blood sample used in conventional DNA tests.

Weird, huh?

endless repetition

I'm not actually completely sure how common this practice is, but a staple feature of my American primary school career was spelling as an academic subject. I don't really recall doing anything like that in England, since I guess we were all expected to learn how to spell words properly on our own just from learning to read them or something. Though I distinctly remember teachers giving all of us a simple handmade 'book' (comprised of sheets of paper folded in half to make the leaves and 'covered' with colour construction paper) which we were instructed to have a teacher or aide write any words we didn't know how to spell. The intention was probably to give us a crude reference book to look up and learn the spellings of words we had trouble spelling.

American schools, or at least the ones I'm aware of, do things differently. They assign students to groups based on their proficiency in language comprehension (I was usually in the highest or second-highest group) and each week each group was presented with a sheet of paper with ten to twenty different words we were supposed to learn. I don't know if this was a school-wide mandate or part of a county or state curriculum or what, but every single week for every single year, teachers gave us exactly the same homework to do with our spelling words. It was so completely repetitious that I remember it even to this day. On Monday we were to write each word three times; Tuesday we were to put them in alphabetical order; on Wednesday we were to use each word in a sentence. Spelling tests were every Friday, so on Thursday we were instructed to study our words even though I never actually did it. At some point I figured out that if I wrote each word three times in alphabetical order, I could kill two birds with one stone and take care of Tuesday's homework on Monday afternoon. (The teachers usually accepted this without hesitation. I'm not sure why, but I guess in the long run it didn't really matter.) There probably isn't anything wrong with this system since obviously I successfully learned how to spell although I gather from all the infuriatingly unreadable Facebook and internet forum posts I've read over the years that I'm in the minority.

I don't know why I wanted to talk about this. It doesn't mean anything to anyone at all, including me.

baptism by fire

My boyfriend was brought up Jehovah's Witness and was mercifully born with enough intellect to know that it was complete bullshit and left the church as soon as he was able. Because the rest of his family are still active members, most of their family friends are JWs as well. I've met a couple of these and one that I really quite like. Sarah (not her real name) is bubbly, vivacious, outgoing, and just all around really friendly and sweet-natured. She also happens to be painfully pretty in ways that make other women want to hate her, but she's just so NICE and SWEET that you just can't bring yourself to do it.

Anyway, had I not known she was actually a devout JW, I never would have guessed. She doesn't have the aversion to 'sinful' or 'immoral' things that I expect from cultists and is actually quite openly sexual--and openly bi-sexual--in a religious culture that thoroughly scorns sexuality in any form and especially sexuality in a form other than the traditional 'think-of-England' heteronormative kind. She wasn't especially smart, but she was great fun to talk to and mess around with and even after I found out the depth to which she was devoted to her religion, I still liked her. She's been the boything's twin sister's best friend for many years so she's essentially part of the family now.

I happen to be a very openly flirtatious person, even around people in whom I have zero interest, which is how I behaved with Sarah. (To be honest, if polyamory was in the cards I would totally be trying to nail her.) I jokingly insisted that she should come back with me to New York so we could get married, because they legalized that shit just after I moved here.

"What about Max?"
"Oh, he can just be our live-in sex slave and sleep at the foot of the bed like any dog."

For the record, he thought that was FUCKING HILARIOUS.

When I left, Sarah apologized profusely to him for trying to steal me away and he had to explain to her that I'm like that with just about everyone and no harm was done. Every now and then I reference my intention to rescue this girl from her cult and marry her--he'll still be my pet, naturally. Yesterday he gave me some 'disappointing news' about her. I was seriously afraid something bad had happened until he told me she had just gotten baptized and was officially a 'proper' JW.

"Oh, is THAT all? Geezis, you scared me!"
"Yeah, but she's a full JW now. She got baptized."
"Not irreversible. It's not like anything serious actually happened there! They just got her hair a bit damp."

I do intend to rescue this child, even though I'm only half kidding when I say I'm totally gonna marry her. (The joys of having polyamorous tendencies in a monogamous relationship.)

And then this conversation segued into one about baptism and for some reason I was reminded of an old Spartan practice I read about several times from several different sources over the years, for school and otherwise. I explained this to him and compared it to baptism and he thought I was one sick and twisted little genius.

Life for the Spartans was pretty fucking harsh. Every citizen was trained from the cradle to be the perfect warrior, and every baby born was expected to become a warrior. Deformed or sickly babies were killed outright, but they weren't content with that level of ritual infanticide in a time and place when infant mortality was still extraordinarily high. They took it up a notch.

There was no sense in raising a baby to be a good, strong Spartan soldier (or a good strong Spartan breeding machine--which was all the women were good for) if they didn't have that Spartan fighting spirit, a test was devised to determine if a newborn was a good Spartan. Shortly after birth, the newborn baby was plunged into a basin of cold water for a few seconds and then brought back up. If the baby came up squalling and shrieking, then it was nice and strong and worth raising. If, on the other hand, it came up shivering and blue, then it was weak and would never make a good soldier.

So naturally they threw the 'weak' babies into a ravine to die.

Only tangentially related to baptism because of the whole newborns and water thing, but still.

random fact of the night

The trademark satin unitards, ears, and pompom tails worn by the 'Bunnies' who serve as waitresses in Hugh Hefner's exclusive 'Playboy Club' lounges are copyrighted. (The first uniform to be granted a copyright in the US.) They are all each custom-made for each woman but they belong to the Playboy company and the women are not allowed to take their costumes off the premises. They must instead sign their uniforms in and out at the beginning and end of each shift--leaving the Playboy Club with any part of the costume is grounds for immediate termination and stiff fines.

I felt like bragging...

This is fucking hilarious. And something about which I believe both of us are entitled to brag. Also I intend to bring this up for the rest of his natural life--just like bringing up that he once wore pleather pants in public.

Boyfriend: "I ripped my pants last night."
Me: "How'd you manage that?"
Boyfriend: "I got a hard-on in my sleep and it ripped them."

S#!t my Boyfriend Says

We both value comedy and our senses of humour are a big draw for each of us. But we don't constantly bandy around obvious jokes. I'm the grand master of subtle comedy. Sometimes he gets a good one in, as well.

Today my boyfriend said...

(In the last few months I've found articles on scientists designing a robot that makes sandwiches and a robot that runs on human waste.)

Me: "WHY DO WE NEED THESE THINGS? THERE ARE OTHER PROBLEMS TO SORT OUT!"
Him: "Why not? That way you can have a sandwich-making robot that runs on the shit you make."

apparently no one notices this

So, two things you have to know before I can start talking my ass off. First of all, I swear in real life significantly more than I swear online. (Most people seem to do this the other way around because the internet has the safety of anonymity. I dunno why I use fewer bad words in the faceless realm of the internet than I do in front of people in a position to make my life difficult over it.) I talk a lot anyway, at least with people I'm comfortable around, and it's not an exaggeration to say that every two or three words is some permutation of the word 'fuck' or some other objectionable profanity. Second piece of background knowledge: my boyfriend's family, excluding his oldest sister and his dad, are hardcore Jehovah's Witnesses. These are the kind of people who are acutely aware of everything other people do that they find unwholesome or inappropriate. They're not the type to overlook excessive use of unnecessary bad words.

I don't particularly care what most of his family think of me apart from the aforementioned dad and sister--mostly because they're people he really likes and whose opinions matter to him--but they certainly don't give a crap about PG language. So when I went to visit a few months ago I talked like I always do, which meant lots of swear words. I honestly expected to get flak for it--his mother especially doesn't like me because I'm not appropriately religious and say and do a lot of really inappropriate shit. I was really surprised when I didn't, but only mentioned this upon returning home and asked what everyone thought of me now that I wasn't there.

"They like you a lot," he said. "They think you're great. Lo said Mom was having a really hard time trying to come up with a good reason to hate you."

"Really? I thought they'd be pissing and moaning about all the swearing."

"You didn't swear all that much. Maybe, what, twice?"

"Uhm..." I was confused. "Twice every sentence, maybe!"

"That much? Seriously? I didn't even notice that. My mom definitely didn't. She'd've said something otherwise."

"How could YOU not even notice it??"

"I think it's the way you talk. It's so fluid and fits so well together--you don't notice it because it sounds so natural for all the words to be exactly where you put them."

Last week he said the same thing again--that the way I talk minimizes the impact of the bad words I use because no part of my speech seems superfluous or unnecessary.

I really wonder if it's just them or if more people just completely fail to notice my proclivity for profanities. I wasn't allowed to swear if my parents were in earshot so I guess I learned not to put the emphasis on naughty words the way most other people do.

Equally possible is they're just stupid. You have no idea how mind-bendingly stupid his mother is--she's so bad she doesn't even remember regularly that her son is deathly allergic to shellfish and keeps bringing it into the house. It's a wonder any of those kids survived to adulthood...

...I didn't even know I wanted to see this...

OH MY GOD, THE INTERNET FUCKING HAS EVERYTHING!!

LOOK WHAT I JUST FOUND! A PICTURE OF A HOT NAKED CHICK IN A BATHTUB FULL OF WAFFLES.

My life is now complete. I can die happy. Also I really fucking want some waffles right now. Girl optional.

EDIT: Oh internet. What would I ever do without you? Oh yeah, that's right--something productive. Instead I see this--no big deal or anything, just a typical night at the laundromat naked in a clothes dryer playing an accordion.

when do you even breathe?

I don't think this is a stereotype of any kind, and if it is I apologize for buying into it if it isn't true, but in my experience I've found that people who speak Spanish talk extremely fast.

I've been around all kinds of people who speak all kinds of languages, some of which I understand and most of which I don't. Ironically, it's Spanish I have the best grasp of even though I haven't spoken it in years and no longer have the command of it I used to. But people speaking French or German or Russian or Chinese or Japanese don't seem to do this. It's just something I noticed with Spanish-speakers, especially from Central and South America rather than Spain.

Listening to someone speak in Spanish is like listening to a tape being played at double speed. Even French offers better annunciation and you only ever pronounce the vowels in that one. I really can't tell where one word ends and another begins and when I spoke Spanish I never talked that fast. I certainly don't talk that fast in English.

I guess it's just something about Spanish that makes people talk really quickly. I don't even know how or when or whether they stop to breathe.

not normal

Even though the abuse I suffered growing up wasn't particularly extreme or horrifying, it was still pretty fucked up. It was so fucked up that it spawned what appears to an outsider to be a sweet and affectionate familial gift-giving tradition.

My dad has always given my mom wooden spoons for Christmas. She enjoys cooking, so on the surface it just looks like a man giving his wife a simple but thoughtful gift based on something she likes doing.

The reality is that my dad is just replacing the wooden spoons that were broken over the course of the year from being used to hit me. A wooden spoon is hardly an unbreakable object but it still requires a lot of violent force to break one. That kind of violence was used against me often enough that my dad felt compelled to replace all the spoons that were broken on me.

It's pretty fucking twisted that hitting a kid with enough force to break a wooden spoon spawned a tradition in my house.

A WILD SPECIMEN!!!

So, I moved almost a year ago (as of April) and have lived in New York--HIPSTER CENTRAL!!--for all that time without seeing a really impressive specimen in the wild. I mean I see kids in high school and the college campuses exhibiting certain hipster traits or sporting certain hipster fashions--bragging about obscure bands they're into, berets, skinny jeans, plaid tight shirts, big glasses, thrifted clothes, fixed-gear bikes--but never really saw any full-blown classic HIPSTER in person. Probably because this is the suburbs and kids don't go totally hipster here for the same reason they rarely go totally goth. It's just not done here in White Bread, Long Island. (This is like the whitest white place I have ever been. Even the ethnic minorities are whiter than I am.) You're not going to hit every bullseye every time you see someone who identifies as 'hipster', of course, but you've gotta hit more than just one or two at a time in order to really be considered a prime specimen worthy of study.

On that note, imagine my joy today when three wild lady-hipsters appeared at work. They were truly glorious. The one who came to my till was wearing a homemade tour t-shirt written in acid green sharpie on a clearly salvaged old men's undershirt (because screened tees are so mainstream, right?). I only knew it was a band because of the tour dates and cities listed on the back because I had never heard of the band before and the name was so fucking weird I thought it was completely made up. I googled it. Apparently it exists. It's called--I swear to fuck--'A Cat Born in an Oven Isn't a Cake'. My brain is full of fuck.

She also had: men's jeans, mismatched red and black Converse high tops, gauged earlobes big enough to drive a moped through, and Buddy Holly glasses without lenses.

It was glorious. Wild specimens just aren't on the same level as the bland photos you see on the internet.

I wanted to sedate her and tag her for tracking.

scurred

I'm a wimp. I'm the first to admit it. I'm close to thirty and sleep with a night-light and stuffed animals for protection from night terrors that don't exist and cannot possibly hurt me. Horror films scare me stupid no matter how campy or implausible or downright parodic they are. I get nightmares watching 'documentaries' about ghosts even though I don't believe they exist. This is a level of fear out of all proportion and indicative of bigger underlying problems.

Having said that, I don't think I've had more than a small handful of nightmares in my life in which ghosts or monsters or death featured. I have nightmares all the freaking time, but never about the stuff that keeps me up at night. I have no idea why. It doesn't seem at all normal to fear certain things awake but others when asleep. Actually the shit I have nightmares about is stuff I hate in the waking world but that seem laughably petty in comparison, especially when compared to other people's night terrors.

So what the fuck are my nightmares about?

Sometimes they're about my hair being cut. I have fairly long hair that used to be long enough to sit on (a combination of bad diet and a cutback keep it butt-length now) and I'm ridiculously proud and protective of it. Because it isn't something that can be replaced, I have an incredible paranoia that something will happen and it will be cut short. The dreams always go the same way: I try to convince myself that the short cut isn't bad but ultimately realize that what has happened is irreversible and will take a decade or more to recover. When I wake up I always have to make sure it's still there.

The other major feature of my bad dreams is... being tickled. I'm not only ticklish but extremely ticklish and I hate it. Mostly because, as a child, every adult I ever encountered thought tickling me was playful and I enjoyed it because I was laughing involuntarily. I don't like it. I hate it. I hate being prodded in my vulnerable spots. I would rather have kidney stones than be tickled, I hate the feel of it that much. The worst part about it is nobody thinks it's a big deal even though my response to being tickled is to retaliate with as much physical violence as I can muster. I have broken people's bones before over this. I have dissolved friendships over this. I fear being tickled more than I fear death and my worst nightmares involve being tickled and unable to make it stop.

appealing traits

The boything had surgery yesterday for his shoulder. He injured it two years ago at work and it took until now to get the company to fix it. He's fine but he called me as soon as he was out from under the anaesthesia and he made less sense then than he does when he's drunk. He sounded way out of it but was feeling good enough later in the day to go to a Magic card tournament even though he was still slightly cross-eyed at the time and high out of his mind on painkillers.

Of course, surgery meant being shirtless in front of hospital personnel, and being shirtless meant everybody could see the marks I left on him when he was here. And since he enjoys it I leave some pretty nasty wounds. Even through his clothes I almost broke skin and he still had the worst of the bruises and teeth marks yesterday morning. I'm not kidding when I say he looks like he was in some kind of life-or-death altercation with a wolverine.

So right up until they put him under for surgery he had to explain to everybody who saw him and his bruises that he wasn't in a fight or anything, that his girlfriend left them because she bites. The anaesthesiologist just looked at him funny and the doctor wanted to ask more questions but was laughing too hard to do it. I keep forgetting how weird that is to most people. To each his own and all. When people talk about it at all, I generally glean they put much higher value in shit I find completely mystifying when considering a partner--I used to not want to date anyone who smoked until I realized I didn't mind making out with smokers--and in the end it comes down to everybody having very different desires.

Even so, most people's list of prerequisites for a relationship is full of more common or vanilla mandatory traits. Has no STDs or children, no wife or prison record, certain physical attributes. I know women who won't date guys who don't have chest hair (I guess because they think it's masculine or some shit), which makes Max all the more a bizarre choice for me because he's completely upholstered and I really dislike body hair.

But that's all relatively normal. Most people don't consider 'CAN TAKE A BEATING' one of their top ten considerations in a partner.

Then again, most people don't make their partners wear collars.

So it's possible I'm just really, really weird.

look at all the fucks I give

Baseball and football are pretty American cultural pillars. Other sports are more popular elsewhere. I lived in a small farming village in northern England for several years as a child so happily my early life was free of the obsessive zeal Americans have towards their sports--Europeans have other sporting addictions, principally soccer, but it isn't quite as culturally pervasive. It doesn't seep into everything with quite the same fervor, nor is it treated like some kind of sacred belief. Nobody gave a fuck if you didn't care about it. American sports mania was kind of a culture shock for me.

Shortly after moving to the states, the Superbowl came to what I assume was some kind of historic showdown between the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers--it was a big deal, even though I didn't know then and still don't know why. Suddenly everyone in school was talking about it nonstop and doing so on a level of comfortable familiarity that made me simultaneously really confused and really bored and really frustrated. Why did everybody care so much? What was the big deal? It was a stupid fucking sport's game and I have no interest in sports, I have no idea who plays what, and am neither interested in nor capable of providing opinions on the matter. Yet it was like some kind of preoccupational plague. In one particular incident that stands out in my mind, the kids around me in the lunch queue chatted amiably with the school principal--not ordinarily an overtly talkative or friendly guy--about who they thought would win and who they wanted to win. It was mind-boggling. The frustration was due to nobody wanting to discuss anything else as well as being labelled some kind of pariah over not giving a shit.

I didn't care about it.

I still don't.

It's still just as frustrating and mystifying to me that this sport-related zeal overtakes the population at the end of sport seasons. My parents had serious fallouts with otherwise good friends over the 2000 Yankees/Red Sox World Series. Over a fucking game. My dad became murderously angry when his teams failed to perform to his expectations. (I don't say that his mood depended on their victories--he's a Green Bay fan and I know enough about them to know they're not a good team.) Some famous coach took over the Washington Redskin football team when I was a senior in high school and it was all anyone could talk about. That I had no opinion and didn't care marked me out as almost a terrorist. I wish I was exaggerating. People honestly treat it like religious fanatics treat denominational differences--often with enough passionate opinions to somehow justify getting legitimately angry when a friend or family member dares to enjoy any other team. Or, worse, a RIVAL team. A woman in the store a few months ago was talking about her son's preference in NY football teams (I don't know which) in a tone of voice that clearly betrayed high emotional strain. This kind of disowning would be excessive for the loved ones of Ted Bundy. People routinely do it over superficial sport rivalries.

Over the years I've learned to tune it out but every now and then it just takes on a complete cultural saturation that's impossible to ignore and has far-reaching effects on my acceptance within a community.

Since I don't watch any sport I have no idea which games are in season at any given time, or when they have their big playoffs. I know the Superbowl is usually the beginning of the year but I never have the faintest idea when because I literally do not give enough of a fuck to remember. So I only found out it was nearly that time in the last few weeks, and then only because nobody could stop talking about the New York Giants. People have been going nuts talking about Giants. People call daily asking about clothing with the Giants logo. Poeple talk with me about it like I understand them and demand to know my affiliation and opinion. I'm genuinely shunned or treated coldly when I reveal a total lack of interest.

I don't know who's playing what. I don't care which teams go to which games. I don't care who wins. I don't plan on just humouring sport fans by going to a Superbowl party at which I will have zero interest in the main attraction. I don't even watch the big games for the famously complicated Superbowl ads. I do not fucking care. Stop talking to me about it. And stop treating me like shit because I don't have a fanatical obsession with brain-damaged overgrown steroid-pumped high school jocks in shoulder pads and tights who get paid more money per game than I make in a year.

Just knock it the fuck off and leave me alone.

a machine gun to a yoyo fight

I'm not saying rage is the modern disease or anything--chiefly because I'm too scared. I'm just saying that if we as a human population have escalated to the kind of explosive tempers and blind hatred that would drive us to respond to road rage with a chainsaw?

I dunno, maybe we could, like, enroll in anger management classes.

Just a thought.

word-of-mouth?

I'm aware that all kinds of weird plastic surgery procedures exist that seem totally superfluous or stupid to me. It's your money and your body, so do whatever the fuck you want with it--provided you accept that I am just as entitled to laugh at you as you are to get it in the first place. I even knew they did surgeries for tightening the saggy vagina that has grown to cavernous proportions from a few too many childbirths and/or penises. There are even good reasons to have it done--namely from countries in which a woman's worth, and sometimes her life, depend on being able to prove or give the appearance of virginity upon marriage. Or for women who have sex with men who just can't get enough of that pre-pubescent poontang.

But I wasn't aware that cosmetic hoo-haa surgery existed or that anybody thought they needed it to begin with. I didn't know there was a vagina beauty standard so deeply-ingrained it made women nervous about one of the two physical features that men DON'T usually have aesthetic opinions on. (The other being breasts.) It's called labiaplasty and involves making the labia symmetrical and I guess prettier, even though it's something even I can't find a single fuck to be self-conscious of. (And that's saying a lot.) But it exists and is apparently popular and commonly accepted enough that it can be advertised on a radio station. It wasn't even a satellite radio station. Just a regular ol' Joe Schmoe station. Advertising cosmetic pussy surgery.

Is there ANY part of the female anatomy not subject to ruthless scrutiny??

denial and guilt

Geezis christ, I'm going on another writing binge. What the hell is wrong with me?? Besides the obvious, I mean, because frankly that's a gimmie.

I never thought about this before, but it just occurred to me to question the universally accepted taboo of peeing in swimming pools. I mean, we all instinctively recoil in disgust and dutifully declare it gross and unsanitary, but WHY? There isn't a reason for this. Yes, pee is gross, but as far as public swimming pools go urine is probably one of the cleanest things you're likely to encounter in the water. You have grosser stuff in your sink, yet we all act like we're appalled at the notion of someone releasing two or three ounces of sterile bodily fluids into heavily chlorinated water where it's immediately and harmlessly diluted.

You're already soaking wet and urine is much less likely to give you syphilis or bubonic plague than the filthy bathroom through which you would otherwise have to trot barefoot.

Totally unrelated: Years ago when I was still in college, I would often see the same guy out for a jog during my commute. I remember him only because he would frequently be wearing a pair of highlighter-vomit-pink gym shorts. It seemed--and still seems--perfectly logical to me. If I was a man and wore neon pink hot pants on a regular basis, I'd want to make sure I was able to outrun everyone else, too.

personal vernacular

Here's a new genre for my ramblings: words in my vocabulary that haven't seen the proverbial light of day in a zillion billion years because, for some reason or another, I no longer have a reason to use them. A lot of them have to do with horses and their related needs and shit because I rode and for nine years and taught for four until I was nineteen (instructors lied about my age and paid me under the table because it's not technically legal to work with or around animals until you're eighteen in most of the US), most of which are confusing to non-horse-people or need to be explained in more words than it would take to just use the descriptive term in conversation. Some general terms like 'mare' and 'gelding' and broad terminology for tack (aka, riding gear) are usually common knowledge but others are obscure enough that it's more trouble than it's worth to use them. Mostly for very specific markings or features, like 'forelock' for that bit of fringe on the forehead or 'frog' for the triangle-shaped lump of tissue in the concave bit of the hoof. (I never have figured out why it was called that. It's the most sensitive area on any given horse's body apart from the genitals--they can feel the vibrations of approaching potential threats through the ground long before anybody will see or hear it, and damage to the frog can cripple a horse for life.)

One term I hardly used even while I was working with horses is 'wall-eye'. Even horse people sometimes don't know that it means. It's just a fancy term for the one blue eye characteristic of a common minor mutation. (Horses rarely have two blue eyes, for reasons I have never understood.) Sometimes it's applied to a horse with any colour eye but the normal brown, but technically it's specific to the one blue eye. Usually the pupil is quite distorted, as well. I used to think it was actually really special but as far as physical oddities go it's a pretty common thing to find in horses. I remember it almost exclusively found in horses with light colouration, or at least mostly-white faces and pink skin. (Like people horses come in 'dark' and 'light' skin tones but unlike people they can pretty commonly have patches of each on their bodies.)

Another term I didn't really use was 'god's thumbprint'. It's another abnormality you sometimes find but I only saw it a handful of times. It's a small finger-sized indentation in the neck or chest area but I don't know what the technical name is for it--I don't even know that other people really use this term for it or not or just call it a 'neck dent' or something. The glurge-heavy story has its roots in Islam, of all places, in which horses play a significant role because of their cultural importance. (Only the Native Americans love their horses more.) Supposedly god told Muhammed to deprive his horses of water for a few days and then release them to a watering hole before blowing his war trumpet to summon them back; whichever horses responded to the call at the expense of their own thirst were to be the ones he should breed for god's race of superhorses or something and five mares turned around and came back when summoned. God 'touched' each of them to protect them and left his thumbprint so he'd know which were the descendents of the chosen horses.

A cute story but I've only ever heard it once.

deadly

Shit that kills people:

Plague.
War.
Genocide.
Accidents attributed to gross human miscalculation.
Sport riots.

EXCUSE ME, WTF IS WRONG WITH THIS LIST PLZKTHNX.

bad and worse

Okay so retail sucks. We know this.

But the suckiest parts aren't the obviously sucky parts, like bad customers. Bad customers are a part of life. You deal with it by punching tables and nobody blames you because they could hear the yelling as far away as the Yukon Territory. No, the worst part far and away for me is the customers that are ANNOYING AS FUCK, but really really nice.

I hate them.

Because I can't hate them.

When a customer is an assbiscuit, you're totally justified getting angry and wanting to punch them. When they're super nice, you have no excuse for wanting to inflict egregious bodily harm and have no socially acceptable outlets for your frustration.

Also, you know it was bad when your managers BOTH laugh so hard they almost pee themselves. When one does it, it was bad. When two do it, it was REALLY bad.