Sugared Eyes

I have a migraine right now. Complete with nausea, dizziness and visual blinkies and black-spots. In all fairness to the mighty migraine fairy, it isn’t a particularly painful one… yet. Unfortunately, I get migraines when I’m stressed out, and I’m sure it’s my body telling me to cut the crap and weird stress hormones and whatnot, but when I’m crunched for time and working super hard at something, the last thing I need is to feel like there is a cat inside my skull gnawing on my eyeball and rabbit kicking my temples. It is not going to help me learn physics, it’s just not. Maybe I’ve listened to too much Johnny Cash, because my migraines get rhythm when I get the blues.

Okay, even I have to admit that was a stretch. Because I don’t learn from my own experiences, I went back and got a cocoa from the same coffee shop where I bought the hot water last week, and it was actually pretty good this time. The lady tried to stiff me for a dollar eight though. She said, “That’ll be $2.16,” and I said, “… are you sure about that?” And lo, it wasn’t two sixteen after all.

That story seemed a lot more interesting in my head. I guess I could lie and say I hopped over the counter and scissor kicked her in the face, but that’s just silly.

So I drank some Mountain Dew Code Red--JESUS CHRIST IS A LOIN (actually meant to be lion, but I mistyped and thought this was funnier) THERE IS A SPIDER ON MY WALL!

So I drank some Mountain Dew Code Red and ate some Funyuns (Onion Flavored Rings) in the vain hope that the combination of salt, fat, sugar and caffeine would knock out my migraine like wachaKAPOW, but it didn’t. So now my mouth tastes like a litter box, my stomach feels OILY and nauseous, and my eye still feels like it’s being eaten by Maurice. Where’s the justice?

Only slightly related, but why is it that my English Professor decided that the week that I have three midterms would be the best time to assign a thousand word essay about WC Fields? I mean, a thousand words really isn’t that bad, but with Calculus, Phyiscs and Chemistry to worry about this week, I’m really not up to analyzing a fat clown’s motives, unless there’s free chocolate cake involved, and trust me, there isn’t.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.