Buster'd Humps

Despite the fact that I’m really not in to pretty men, I think that Buster Keaton was pretty darn spiffy. Seeing him in the old silent pictures, I just want to sit down with him and hear what he has to say. Ironic that a silent film would make me want to talk to the character, but maybe that’s how you can tell that the movie worked. Keaton’s movies did work, too. The several that I’ve seen were just as spiffy as his face, although some of the freshness has been lost (mostly, I think, because of the Bugs Bunny cartoons-- they used exactly the same gags as Keaton did, I swear). Side-note: Harold Lloyd’s smile in the film called Safety Last made me feel very strange.

I think maybe I smile at people too much. It’s sort of an appeasement gesture for me, like, “I swear I’m not going to punch you! Let’s be friends!” Unfortunately, I think I end up creeping people out-- they want me at about a four, and I’m probably up around nine or ten somewhere. At least when I’m surrounded by strangers and alone. I talk a lot of trash but I really have no backbone.

Like today, I went to get some tutoring help, and was totally timid about it. In my defense, I did get my hand verbally slapped in the Lab I had right before--don’t touch the pennies, are you mad? Those are for the TA to experiment with! Play with your food dye, peasant. Speaking of which, I squirted way too much yellow into the water. It said use one drop for 100 mL or something, but it wouldn’t come out, so I put some muscle into it, and ended up dumping about a quarter of the bottle in. Oops. Then our graph came out sort of lopsided and wonky. Playing with the spectrophotometer made up for it, though.

I swear, that is the coolest word I learned today. Spectrophotometer. I haven’t tried saying it out loud yet, but I’m building up to that. Unfortunately it’s one of those words which really has no use except in reference to a very, very specific activity. Those accursed nouns.

I have been getting up really early lately (not entirely by choice) and thought for a little while that coffee would be the answer, so I had my parents buy me some coffeemate (because milk in the morning disagrees with my stomach--I’m thinking it’s philosophical, as they seem to resolve their issues around noon) because I can’t take my coffee like I like my men (er…?). Then I started worrying about caffeine addictions. Honestly, I think I stress myself out about this stuff on purpose to distract myself from the real issue which is that I have a physics midterm which I am in no way ready for in about a week. This midterm is the straw which has broken my humped yellow back (I spit!), and caused me to bite through my night guard, which is not a cool thing, seeing as my last one cost three hundred dollars and ruined my teeth.

Maroon Lepus

Last night I had a very strange dream. I was in the living room of my house, and my dad was getting ready to go on a trip. My sister was going to take her cat, Maurice, but she was going to keep him in a stroller. I didn’t think it was a great idea to take a cat to San Diego, but I kept my tongue, and didn’t say anything. My dad mentioned that the last time we took the cat to San Diego, my boyfriend let the cat out of the car and it was a terrible pain to try and catch the cat. I said something to the effect of, well, it isn’t as though he takes terribly good care of his cats, so maybe he just didn’t know any better. The weird part about this, is, of course, that my boyfriend does not have a cat. Actually, his dog wouldn’t really allow him to have a cat. Not because the dog is particularly vicious towards small animals, but because the dog is afraid of cats.

There was a rabbit smeared across the road near my house as I was driving to school this morning, and it made me think. I don’t recall ever hitting a rabbit, and I don’t ever recall being in the car when one was hit, but I still see dead rabbits in the road all the time. Clearly, they aren’t being hit by cars, but rather have some strange disease where occasionally, when crossing a mildly busy road they will just explode in a skidding fashion for three to five feet. I’ll call it lepus itineris finis (basically rabbit road death, I think) and it will be my great latin-named disease and I’ll become famous all over the world.

Alright, even I’ll admit that was completely silly and irrelevant. Besides, who would care? There would be no fame in my discovery, and no fortune. Happily, I’m sure that lepus itineris finis is not real, and it’s more like lepus itineris hit-by-a-freakin’-truck.

When I first got my driver’s license, my wonderful dad bought me a pick-up truck. It was fabulous. It was a really pretty dark green with the pinstripes down the side and the glitter in the paint. It was a stick, and I even got mats with frogs on them for the floorboards. The only problem was that I couldn’t see over the hood of the truck. I’m not a particularly short person, but my torso is, and I was about eye level with the top of the steering wheel. I was very, very crushed by this, because I like pick-up trucks too, and I wanted very much to be able to drive it. Unfortunately, it was not to be, and my dad sold the truck.

It’s kind of like those really pretty dresses with the elastic band under the bust that is supposed to keep everything in place. They’re great in theory, very pretty, but when I put one on, the elastic band keeps popping up over my boobs because they were ultimately designed for people with a bigger bust than I have, and I am never going to be able to wear them. This also goes for a particularly pretty shade of green, which unfortunately makes me look purple and sick.

I think there is a shade of maroon which is almost universally flattering, but they usually only make polo shirts out of it, which is a real shame because polo shirts really don’t flatter anyone.

Rattle My Hair

I spent a week and a half with most of my hair pulled up in a ponytail, and in that time my hair grew out what seems like a lot. It is very cool to suddenly notice how much longer your hair is. It’s one of those things like foot size. There’s not really a noticeable difference between one day and the next, but suddenly! BAM! There it is. Richard Dawkins used a similar analogy to explain evolution, and I thought it was very apt. Why I have stolen it to talk about my hair, I honestly don’t know.

If I were loading a steel box onto a truck without a tailgate or handrails, I would make sure I wasn’t loading it on to flat ice. I would also probably tie the box down with bungee cords. I understand that it makes sense to word physics problems as “real world” scenarios, but honestly, who would load a steel box onto an ice covered truck and not attempt to secure it in any way? That’s just stupid. Although I have on several occasions set my backpack (complete with laptop) on my passenger’s seat while driving, and once it fell off while I was on the freeway and knocked me into neutral. If I leave the story at that it sounds very scary, but I was only going twenty miles an hour, downhill, at the time, so it wasn’t really a very big deal. Perhaps I’m not much more intelligent than someone loading the steel box into the truck after all.

I’m reading The Princess Bride (the abridged version, by William Goldman) and it is thus far almost exactly like the movie. I am surprised because that is almost never the case, ever. Most of the time, the book is butchered on it’s way to the silver screen. The Golden Compass was an extreme example of this. An extreme, heart wrenching, frustrating example of the phenomenon. I have not heard what Phillip Pullman thinks about the damage done to his story, but I can’t imagine that he was happy with the results. I will admit that the movie was visually stunning and that there were some wonderful parts. Overall, though, I think it comes down to the extreme difficulty of condensing one of those densely populous fantasy worlds down from a thousand plus page trilogy into a two and a half hour film. They weren’t written to be experienced that way, and often, it doesn’t work. There are a lot of exceptions, of course, and even though the odds are against me, I still go out of my way to see the film adaptations of my favorite novels. And my second favorite novels. And so on. (By the way, anyone who has ever read Michael Crichton needs to see the movie version of Congo. Pure B-movie camp, all the way through.)

People on campus smoke. Not all people, obviously, but enough for it to be noticeable. It doesn’t really bother me (unless they’re being rude about it, and no, spitting and flicking your ashes onto my backpack does NOT make you look feminine and mysterious, it makes you look like a pig), especially when the people smoking are far away. On my way out of math class today, I realized that I kind of like it because from a distance, the smell reminds me of campfires, and I loved camping when I was little. There is something about eating macaroni and cheese out of a metal bowl with a plastic spoon that just appeals to me. It’s also quite hot today, and the smell of hot pine trees is also a smell that makes me want to walk up creek beds bare foot, looking for little critters and new plants. This summer, I’m so there.

When I was younger, before his ankles got so bad, my dad really liked to go gold panning. I loved to go with him, but not because I really like swirling dirt around in pan (although finding gold and garnets is really a lot of fun). No, I liked it because of the swimming and snakes. I know that sounds funny, but we would swim in this little fork of this river with the dogs while my dad would pan, and we must have seen about a bajillion snakes, lizards and fish in the process. Once, I was off on my own a little farther than was really safe, and of course I was barefoot, and I hopped up on a wide, flat rock atop another wider flatter rock. I simultaneously put my eyes and foot down towards the second rock, and came within a couple seconds of hopping on the most beautiful baby rattlesnake. I probably would have heard the little guy, but the river was only about a foot to my left, his right, and that drowned out any sound he could have hopped to make. His little rattles looked like miniature pearls. Fortunately, my mom showed up and startled him away, but it was literally breathtaking.

Lime in my Squid

When I was a very small child, I knew that when I grew up, I was going to be a dog. Once I got a little older, I grew out of that phase for a little while and decided that I was going to be the first person to photograph a live giant squid in the wild. Now, I didn’t really make a big deal out of this, and it wasn’t as though I was ever super interested in squid, but in the back of my mind and the bottom corner of my heart, I held on to a secret hope that my life would work itself out and I would be the one to photograph one of those suckers.

Obviously, since the event has come and gone without me, this life goal has been shattered into a million pieces. Which is fine, I suppose, because the odds have always been slim-to-none that I’d even go into the field of marine biology anyway, especially as a field researcher. This doesn’t explain the soul crushing disappointment I felt when I saw those stills for the first time (in my defense, the disappointment was quickly followed by elation and awe).

Lime is better than lemon in iced tea.

I have a pet snaked who is named Spike. I’ll admit that his name is sheer laziness on my part. I’m not all that fond of it, but he used to belong to my cousin, and while I could have tried to think of a slightly more mature name, I didn’t do it. He is a Kenyan Sand Boa, and is very pretty. He is, however, the most useless pet I’ve ever had. This is, of course, not his fault. He’s a snake. He’s a desert snake. Of course he’s not interactive, and of course he is completely uninterested in me. That’s fine, but the kicker is that he lives under the sand. So I basically have a nearly empty terrarium that I feed mice to once in a while. Despite this, I’m still very attached to the snake, which baffles me.

Spike’s terrarium lives on top of my bookshelf, and I feel slightly funny right now, because my books are completely discombobulated. Now, I don’t need them in alphabetical order by author’s cat’s maiden name or anything, but it would be nice if there was some sort of system here. I feel funny about having Poe touching Napoleon’s Buttons. Richard Dawkins is jammed haphazardly between the novelization of X-Men2 and the Mini-Atlas of Cats! Madness! On the positive side, though, at least they aren’t dusty anymore.

I am completely addicted to chapstick. I am more upset when I realize that I’ve left my lip balm at home for the day than I am when I realize I’ve forgotten my calculator before a chemistry exam. If I think the word “chapstick” to myself, I have to apply it or I freak out about the pain that my lips will be in. I didn’t think any of this was such a big deal until I found out that there is this anti-lip balm movement. Then I thought to myself, the movement has to be fake, right? So now I’m doubly insecure-- on the on hand, what if there is a movement and they’re right? Have I been bringing about the downfall of modern man by wearing lip balm? (And oh god-- have they even seen my lip gloss collection?!) And on the other hand, have I been duped into caring? It has to be a fake organization-- but what if it isn’t? On the outside, I don’t care. They don’t have to wear chapstick, and I’m sure they don’t really care that much when I do. Still, it always bothers me when I think that people might disapprove of something that I do when it hasn’t occurred to me that they might care at all. It doesn’t bother me when I offend people as long as I know in advance that I am committing a social sin. But it is mortifying to me to think that I may have accidentally made someone judge me. This is why I don’t mind little old ladies glaring at me while I wear a tube-top, but if my pants slip down and I bend over I’m terrified that someone may have seen my underwear. I also hate it when my brand new white socks get those first gray stains on top. What are those even from?

Dirty Sunshine

Not fifteen seconds ago, as I pushed my spiral bound notebook into my backpack, I caught my middle finger between the backpack and the chemistry book that was already inside and shoved the skin back up away from my nail. It hurts a lot, and it doesn’t make my hands look any more presentable. I like to keep my nails a little on the long side, and I do make some effort to keep my cuticles healthy and neat, but at times like this I feel it’s all for nothing. I have two broken nails, and three which are in the process, and there are several places where the skin has been chewed basically off because of my nervousness (I am the only person that I know of who chews the skin next to her nails instead of the nails themselves). On top of everything else, my hands are grungy. We’re not talking a little dirt or ink-- I’ve got orange chicken residue, probably soda, hairspray and Baby Christ only knows what else. Thinking about what it must be doing to my keyboard freaks me out even more, too.

My desktop keyboard is gray, and when I did a thorough clean up of my bedroom, I sat down with a washcloth and a bottle of counter cleaner and cleaned up every single key. I was completely disgusted to find that the keys on my keyboard, which I touch every day, got that rag dirtier than dusting my entire bookshelf and all my knickknacks did. I haven’t been able to find the courage to pop off the keys and clean underneath them, and I think I may just buy a new keyboard instead.

Lotion kills razor blades. Either that, or I suddenly have titanium leg hairs. While it might be kind of cool if that were true, I have my doubts.

Often I see a bad situation coming, and I know that I’ll suffer if I don’t do something, but I just watch the train getting closer and closer anyway. Just as an example, I recently broke a pen. Not the inkwell inside the pen, mind you, just the plastic part on the outside. Did I get up and throw the whole thing in the garbage and move on with my life? No. I put it in my backpack. Did I put it in a little compartment where the damage when the inkwell breaks will be minimal? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know where it is. Will there be any effort made on my part to locate the broken pen before disaster strikes? No. I will suffer.

I sat in the sun for almost an hour today. I wasn’t reading or typing, or drawing, or talking… I just sat. It was wonderful. I’ve heard that people get addicted to sunbathing, and at the time, I thought that was a ridiculous thing to say, but after today, I completely understand. What was really neat was the way the top of my head and my legs got really hot compared to my arms, which I think was because my jeans today are very dark, and my hair is darker than my skin. Unfortunately, I think I burnt my nose, but skin cancer is a small price to pay for that amount of joy and warmth.

Jazz and Wasps

The big midterm was yesterday, and I was ready. I spent the hour before hand chilling in the library, and sat down at four past the hour, which was cool because the class didn’t start until ten past. Then I had one of those chilling, slow dawning realization that makes you actually blanch. My driver’s license was in the car. This sentence may not mean much, but you have to realize that in order to receive credit for the exam, you have to show some form of photo ID, and that was mine. So what did I do? I stood up, asked the girl next to me to watch my backpack and I sprinted all the way across the large campus, and to my car. When I opened the door, pale, sweaty and shaking so hard the key wouldn’t go in the first time, I reached into the driver’s side door pocket thing, and groped for my wallet.

It. Wasn’t. There. Words cannot express the fear I felt. I actually screamed, and people turned, looking for the rapist and/or car thief. Then the wallet gods smiled down upon me, and I remembered that my wallet was in my trunk. All in all, it took me seven or eight minutes to make the round trip, and I was only a little late. I ended up getting a C+ on the test, too, so it can’t have affected my performance too much. The incident taught me two very important lessons, though. Firstly, remember to keep my stupid student ID card in my backpack at all times no matter what. A discount at the movies is not worth a mile sprint, it’s just not. Secondly, it taught me that I’m not nearly in as good’a shape as I’d like to be. I have been working on this, though. Four days a week for the last three weeks, I’ve been getting up at six to do sit-ups and squats with my mom. Still, it wasn’t really good enough.

Over the weekend I noticed a dramatic difference in my waist. Now, I’m exceptionally short-waisted. I mean, we’re talking rip-to-hip overlap here, so I always figured there was nothing to be done about it. I’ll never have a waspish figure, but, after three weeks of sit-ups and such, I do have an actual noticeable place in my torso that is smaller around than the rest, and is above my stomach and below my sternum, so I’m pretty jazzed about that.

I’ve always found the term “jazz hands” incredibly amusing. It seriously makes my day every time I hear it.

Sugared Goats

I am that unholy mixture of nervous and angry. I have an important midterm coming up at eleven o’clock, and as a result, my normally short fuse is pretty much nonexistent. I spent a lot of my time studying for it this weekend, but I still don’t feel prepared. It’s chemistry though, and as hard as I might try, I think that’s always going to be a weak subject for me. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because on the surface, it seems like it should be right up my alley. I love the sciences, and math is fun, and conceptual stuff usually makes me happy. For some reason though, as soon as you start talking electrons to me, my eyes glaze over and my mind wanders. I’m fighting to overcome this weakness, though, because when you need six quarters of a subject you can’t really afford to be lax about it.

I was at a store with one of my best friends a while back, and because we became tired, we found a bench and sat down. Twenty minutes later we realized that we were facing the laxatives. I think that it is very strange that a store like that would be so tactless as to place a bench facing the wall’o-easy-poo. I mean, if you had to grab a bottle of stool softener, would you want to do so with an audience? I think not. It would be like having a bench in front of the maxi-pads or the “family planning” section of the store—it’s just not the thing to do. Incidentally, no one grabbed anything while we were sitting on the bench, although several people did walk by, look at us, and then walk away, so maybe we were scaring away business… poor, miserable, constipated business.

I’ve never really been all that fond of the taste of popcorn. It has never been one of those foods that I think of when I’m sitting and minding my own business, never one that I crave. Sure I like popcorn okay, and I’ll eat it, and sometimes I’ll even make it for myself. Once in a while I just want salt and butter, and don’t really care where that comes from. But popcorn itself just isn’t all that exciting. (The obvious exception being movie popcorn—that stuff is just straight up crack). Kettle corn is an entirely different animal. Kettle corn is absolutely amazing. At first, I thought this was odd, that I would enjoy kettle corn so much, while not really caring at all about popcorn (with or without cheese). Then I realized a simple fact: I love sugar.

I am not really that big on things like cakes and cookies, and most candies are simply good, not amazing. Things that are only a little sweet though, but have loads of sugary joy—ohh baby. I can’t get enough of them. Like salad dressings with honey, or sweetish bread… or kettle corn. There’s something about things with just enough sugar to notice that really floats my goat.

While we’re on the subject, I am rather fond of goats. It is one of my many dreams to have a pet goat. It will be a female goat, and I will milk her, and I will use that milk to make ice cream. I love goat’s-milk-ice-cream like nothing else. Besides that, with their freakish eyes and knobby knees, goats are completely adorable. They should all be wearing those golf hats with the pompoms on top.

Licking the Minnow

I think that a lot of animals are weird about their ears. My sister’s cat was laying on the sofa, just chillin’ out, and our dog, Sheila, came over and stuck her tongue into the cat’s ear as a form of greeting, but the cat just sort of took it in stride, and let it go. A few days ago, the same dog, Sheila, put our other dog’s entire ear into her mouth, and, while chewing on the entire ear, she barked loudly. Did the other dog, as would be understood and excused, turn around and gut Sheila like a fish? He did not. Instead he sighed and barely raised a lip.

I cannot even imagine being that nonchalant about someone screaming in my ear, especially while my ear was in their mouth. I can also not imagine being greeted by a friend by having them stick their tongue all the way down into my ear canal. Then again, dogs and cats do a lot of things that are unfathomable to me, and I think that it has to do with a lack of personal boundaries, which is understandable, because they’re dogs and cats.

While I don’t mind it so much from friends and family, I am not really big on people touching me, especially strangers. I don’t even like brushing hands with cashiers at stores. This isn’t because I think they’re dirty or anything like that, I’d just rather not interact physically with most strangers. I think this is especially interesting because Desmond Morris talks about something very similar in The Naked Ape. He mentions that people in modern society have a huge social taboo against touching strangers, which is why we apologize when we run into or bump someone in public, regardless of whether it would have hurt someone or not. I personally have said excuse me to many people that I didn’t even actually touch, just because I came a little too close to them for comfort. Usually when this happens, that someone will laugh and say that of course it’s fine, but I’m still compelled to apologize anyway.

When walking on the sidewalk, I feel like there are these invisible bubbles that wrap around everyone, and it makes me uncomfortable to allow my bubble to come into contact with anyone else’s bubble. There is also an invisible bubble around my pet crawfish, Leonard, which is probably of arbitrary and random size, which I feel that Minnow (my little fish, that’s his name) should not enter. I fear for Minnow’s life, feeling that he is taking his life into his own scales whenever he pushes the boundaries of Leonard’s personal space, but he hasn’t been eaten. Yet.

I like things that remind me of food. My favorite candles at the moment are these cheap cherry-scented ones that I got at Big Lots for a dollar. They smell like cherry cough drops, and I love them. Unfortunately, they don’t really make my room smell like anything other than air and smoke, which rather defeats the purpose of having scented candles in the first place.

Bigfoot and Brain Surgeons

The list of things I’ve never understood would be far too long and far too boring for me to even attempt to write out. It would include things like osmosis, Lewis-dot structures, geography, and the appeal of the new Narnia movie(s). There is something, though, that has been bothering me more than any of the other varied and wide-reaching subjects that I know less than I could about, and that is the question of whether or not people who have part of their brain removed can feel the difference. I don’t mean feel the difference like know that part of their consciousness is gone (although that would be interesting to know too), I mean know the difference by the weight of their heads. When the surgeon removed the lowest rib on the front, left hand side of my ribcage, I was able to tell as soon as I was really conscious that there was something wrong there, and that still hasn’t gone away, even though it’s been almost six years since it was removed. I would assume that it would be even worse in your head. But maybe not, I guess there aren’t any nerves inside the brain itself, so perhaps you wouldn’t even be able to tell that it was missing.

I’m sure that if I cared to, I could learn the answer to my question fairly quickly, I mean, google doesn’t fail me often, but I’m not sure I care to find out just yet. Some of the best thinking I’ve ever done has been internal debates on subjects which I could easily find out the truth with minimal effort, but chose not to. Even when I end up being wrong, I think that the exercise of wondering if is important, and I know that it helps me make connections between subjects that never would have occurred to me otherwise.

The other day, I was thinking about how gorgeous mule deer are. They have this big glassy eyes, and ears that are comically large, and that jelly-bean body up on those knobby-kneed stilts. They’re amazing; I could fawn all over them for hours. There was a little zoo in the mountains near my home which had an exhibit of mule deer, and they would come up to the chain-link fence and lick your hands (probably for the salt). There were also some bison there, and I always got the impression that those big, beautiful beasts could walk right through the fence if they wanted to. There’s something thrilling about being at eye-level with an animal who’s forehead is bigger across than your hips, and having it look at you with all of that calm curiosity. There’s something alien about the way prey animals think, and they way they look at you.

I’ve always wondered that about bigfoot. I mean, he’s supposed to be an upright ape, and is often touted as the missing link (in Oregon..? but I guess I shouldn’t be picky about geography when I’m talking about bigfoot) but would he be an omnivore or an herbivore? I suppose he could be a predator, a carnivore, but given his probable evolutionary history, I think that’s unlikely. I would put my money on omnivore, and I bet his diet is a lot like a bear’s. Not a polar bear, more like a black bear, or a grizzly; someone that eats mostly plants and fruit, but wouldn’t object to a little fresh venison once in a while, maybe even the occasional rainbow trout.

Peach Pearls

A couple of weeks ago, I was sick. I was very, very sick. I couldn’t breathe through “by dose” and my head was stuffed with dust bunnies and spit. I couldn’t even get up enough energy to brush my hair, much less shower. My sister had several of her friends over, but did I stay in my room to shield them from the cousin of Grendal I had become? I did not. Instead, I shuffled into the room in my ratty pink bathrobe and plopped down into an armchair with a coke, and my laptop. After a couple of hours of playing Yoshi’s Island (yes, on my computer) I ran out of soda. So, I stood up, set my computer down on the arm of my chair and began to walk away. Two feet from the chair, I turned, and said, “Just wait, I’ll be right back,” to the computer. And yes, it was said with complete and utter sincerity.

I find myself talking to inanimate objects all the time, actually. “I just don’t get it,” I have often whined at my homework, and “Why won’t you print? I love you,” might have slipped out once or twice when I still had my old printer. Honestly, I think that printers really respond better to genteel kindness and understanding than they do to threats and anger. They are stubborn, temperamental creatures, and must be treated with delicacy and respect. I have never had a printer work when I was rude to it, not once. I also think that my printer is almost out of red ink.

I was looking at gemstones today, and there was a ring that I didn’t like. It had red stones (probably garnet, I didn’t ask and I’m certainly no expert) set in a flower pattern. It took me a few minutes to figure out my initial reaction of dislike bordering on outright revulsion. The stones were pretty, and it wasn’t poorly made or gaudy. Then it suddenly struck me-- it was a flower with four petals, and that just doesn’t happen in nature. Ironically enough, I wasn’t bothered by the multitude of obviously artificially colored pearls that they offered as well (we’re not talking about a delicate rosy blush on a white pearl, we’re talking shock-bright-bubble gum color here). I found those deliciously tacky. (There were also some bronze colored ones in a string that were very earthy and pretty).

I am also not a fan of diamonds. I think that they’re kind of boring, and they’re certainly overpriced. My favorite gemstone, in case anyone cares is the opal. Unfortunately, I think that opals might be the most abused gem that there is. Trying to find an opal ring that isn’t hideously tacky (or flanked by diamonds, which rather defeats the purpose) is like trying to find a flower with four petals in a garden.

Last summer my mom grew a bunch of arugula from seeds in a planter on our front porch, along with some sugar peas (which are finally producing) and some other plants. Once the arugula was tall enough, my mom transferred it to our vegetable garden near our avocado trees were before they died. Several months went by, and the arugula went a little wild, and then all of a sudden, in February it flowered. I was shocked, because it hadn’t occurred to me that an ugly little plant that looks a lot like spiky spinach would have beautiful little white flower clusters. Just goes to show that you never can predict things like that.

Although I think that the prettiest flowers are roses, the best smelling have to be peach blossoms. They smell like a cross between almond flowers and jasmine, and on a warm spring evening, that smell can get you completely stoned (pun completely intended).

Nilla Folders

It wasn’t until very recently that I realized that manila folders probably weren’t named based on someone’s mispronunciation of the word vanilla. A quick search on wikipedia confirmed my new suspicions, and I realized I’m an idiot. Oddly, the connection between ‘Nilla Wafers and vanilla was also a relatively recent one on my part. Murphy’s law of word association is not one that I care to break often. Most of the time when think two words are related, they aren’t. When I assume they have nothing to do with one another, they share a common root.

Another common root that I enjoy is the potato. I think I was in the fifth grade, and we were having some sort of spelling test, and I was one of the only kids who spelled it right. I’m sure that my faux-Irish American upbringing is to blame, and it isn’t my obviously superior intelligence. Which reminds me, to my eternal shame, in my rush to finish a paper for my English class last quarter, I used the word imbibe instead of eat. As in, they had to imbibe the flesh of the dead lemming. Every single time I think of this, I burn with shame. Literally. The shame feels much the way Mrs. White described her anger in the movie Clue; “I can feel-- flames. Flames, on the side of my face. Heaving, deep, heaving--” which is a fantastic movie, anyway. I wasn’t sure that you could feel a deep burning shame until recently, and this either says something very good about me, or very bad. That is, I could either never have done anything shameful or embarrassing in the past, or perhaps I just never noticed the shame that I should have felt. Or perhaps I’m deluding myself, and I merely do not hold on to the memory of all of the many shames of the past.

I’m sure it’s the latter. Not the ladder, as I may have written once or twice in younger, more innocent times. (Now that I have gotten away from it, I do remember the time that I said “shat” in front of my mother without knowing what it meant. Shame-- I felt it then. So clearly I’m a liar).

I have two new loves, as of late. One is the word lush. The way it forces the mouth to wrap around the gentle swishy sigh of the u, and the drawn out ending of the word, as though the word doesn’t care if you have places to go, people to see, or booze to drink. I have yet to be able to clip the end of the word off neatly, and I‘ve never heard anyone else do it either. I want to be lush. Not in the drunkard sense of the word, but in the lavish, opulent, savory way. In the delicately beautiful, the densely luxurious way. Additionally, lush’s lovechild lushly might just be the most juicy-fun word I have ever had the pleasure of speaking. It may be awkward in a sentence, it may not play well with others, but as far as the sound of it as an individual goes, I can’t beat it.

I also am completely, totally madly in love with the song “Bubble Toes” by Jack Johnson.

When you move like a jellyfish
Rhythm don't mean nothing
You go with the flow
You don't stop

Truer words were probably never spoken.

Cancer and Margarine

This afternoon I made myself a bag of microwave popcorn, and, yes, I stood in front of the microwave with my face pressed against the glass waiting for it to be done. I’m not sure if I do this because I want to use my mind powers to make the popcorn cook faster, or I’m afraid that I’ll let it burn because I hear with my eyes (and see with my fingers, as all children do). At any rate, this may seem odd for someone who had a mild (and slightly silly) flip-out about her toothpaste causing cancer. Free-radicals, you see, are in the air, and they cause cancer in people’s lungs--something about knocking electrons out of place, or something, who cares, the point is, peroxide (or, maybe just hydrogen peroxide, I’m not sure) is a free-radical.

What does this have to do with my toothpaste? Well, you see my toothpaste is this new super-whitening kind with baking soda and PEROXIDE. So, by using this toothpaste, I have inadvertently killed myself. My dear boyfriend assures me that this is ridiculous, but I have a sinking feeling when I brush my teeth nevertheless (Haha, get it? Sink?). Actually, I’m not really that worried anymore about mouth cancer, not since I sat down and thought about it for a while. I do, however, think it is ironic that my toothpaste gave me pause, but then I still press my nose up against the glass of the microwave and wait for the ding.

Anyway, once I got my popcorn out of the waxy bag and into a bowl, I poured about four thousand tablespoons of melted margarine on top and took the whole thing upstairs. Of course, I had water instead of soda, because the water will cancel out the “bad stuff” in the popcorn and margarine. After eating about half the popcorn, I realized I was starting to get a stomach ache. Did I immediately stop consuming the salty treat? No, of course not. Two more handfuls later, I felt nauseous. This, I thought at the time, might be countered by… more popcorn.

It wasn’t. So, I set aside the offending snack, and drank the rest of my water, hoping that this would fix the problem. And although it didn’t, it was at that moment that I realized I was drinking out of a Dead Guy Ale tumbler.