Chinese, Chalk and Cheese

When I go to a certain chain Chinese food restaurant, I usually take two or three fortune cookies. I always feel guilty about it, even though I know they don’t care. I take them, though, because I love them. I love everything about them. Of course, I love the fortune part, that’s a given. Who doesn’t love being told that their winning smile will gain them many friends? They’re almost always so complimentary. The other thing I love about them is that they’re the cookie equivalent of saltine crackers. They’re bland, almost tasteless, and utterly crispy. I love saltine crackers, because when I was little, whenever I was getting over the flu, that’s the first thing I’d get to eat again, so they always make me feel better. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because they remind me of that, fortune cookies make me feel better too. Biscuits and gravy also make me feel better.

I love the way chalk looks on a blackboard (or are we supposed to say chalkboard now?) but only time I like it is when the blackboard is clean. Once it’s been smeared with chalk dust and you try to write on it again, it’s just kind of dull and dank and depressing.

As any of my friends would tell you, I get angry. Oh, do I get angry. I don’t think I feel any other emotions as strongly as I do anger. I wonder though if other people get angry like that too, to the point where even though they know that they’re being irrational and stupid, they can’t stop. It’s like this goblin living inside the back of your throat, yanking on the tendons and stuff, and kicking inside your ribcage. You can’t just ask it to stop, either, because pointing out to the goblin that he’s hurting you just makes him kick harder and then he starts biting at your tongue and clawing at the inside of your skull, and your eyes pop and bleed everywhere and it sucks. I have to admit, though, that there is a part of me, that goblin, who loves to be mad. Coming down off anger is awful though. There’s the guilt and the self-disapproval to deal with, and it is unpleasant.

I’ve always been bothered by the fact that in media when people are shrunk, they can still breathe. Wouldn’t, if you were just shrunk, you die almost instantly? I mean, the big-ol’ oxygen molecules that the little people’d breathe in wouldn’t be able to attach to the teeny-weenie hemoglobin in the little tiny blood stream.

The ceiling tiles in here don’t line up right.

I bought some delicious cheese while I was in Holland. It was made by a man in a shoe factory. This wasn’t just your average cheddar, oh no. It was tender white cheese, filled to the brim with garlic joy, and it had a waxy crust so that it didn’t need refrigeration. The perfect gift! So, I bought the delicious cheese, and I put it into my luggage. The next morning, I realized I had made a grievous mistake. All of my belongings now smelled strongly of garlic and cheese. While the smell was delicious when one was about to take a bite, it did get a bit old after the first couple minutes. I quickly transferred the cheese into a separate backpack, but, alas, it was too late. Now all of my memories of Europe are screened through the robust scent… of cheese.

Socks and Feathers

Curling up in a chair, with my feet level with my butt, and wearing my boyfriend’s coat is one of the greatest pleasures I can think of. I love that jacket, it’s a grey plaid flannel, and it has that woolly sheep-fur junk as a liner. It’s so snuggly. I got to wear it in the car on the way back to my house, too, with the windows down and the air so cold I could feel it swirling around in my lungs, and the music so loud that it was hard to believe that anything was making noise anywhere else in the world. That was wonderful.

Speaking of woolly mammoths, I read a really funny book a while back called Mammoth. It was about… a mammoth. I bought it while on vacation, and read it at the beach. I love books like that, the trashy sci-fi novels that you don’t feel the least bit silly or guilty reading while you’re chilling out on vacation. I mean, I read the trashy sci-fi at home, too, but I always feel like I have to roll my eyes at it and keep my distance, or else I’m wasting my time. When I’m on vacation, though, I’m allowed to enjoy the stupid.

I have the worst skin. Not in terms of appearance, but it’s that awful combination skin. Yesterday my nose was flaking, and my cheeks and forehead were oily like no one’s business. So, when I went to Tar-jey, I was interested in buying some face lotion that didn’t have oil in it. I ended up getting some with sunscreen in it, which is wildly exciting to me, because I’m sick of being so freakishly pale that I sunburn walking to class. In the autumn. I also got new face soap that smells like lemons.

I chew sugar-free gum to the exclusion of sugared gum, because the gum with sugar in it gives me cavities. Once the flavor has started leaving the sugar-free gum, though, it starts to taste a little funny, with the same sort of aftertaste as diet soda, which I take pains to avoid.

I love wearing baggy, long-sleeved shirts and sweaters. They make me feel prettier, which seems a little backwards. Maybe it’s because I think that my face is halfway decent, but I’m not too sure about the rest of me. Besides that, they make me feel like a little kid again, ready for hot chocolate and freeze-tag. I think that’s why I like wearing the boyfriend’s coat, too.

I have a necklace with two jade fish hanging from it, and I think it’s fabulous. Fish are fascinating animals. They have such interesting body shapes, and they’re so foreign, like birds are. Birds and fish are a lot alike. They both, for the most part, live in three dimensional worlds, while ours is largely a two dimensional one. While it’s true that we do move up and down to some degree, compared to the lives that birds and fish must lead, our experience must be completely flat. I envy them that extra degree of life.

Turtle neck sweaters are too cozy for words.

The wind today is so extreme. There was junk flying all over the freeway, and it actually cut visibility down pretty far. It was unpleasant.

Lately, I’ve felt sort of restless about music. There’s something I’m looking for, and I’m not finding it. I want something a little smoother, and a little sadder, something with a lot more hum and piano.

My socks are uncomfortably white today.

Best Russian I Can Be

It’s finally cool enough out for me to wear the sweater that my dad bought me for my birthday. I got several long sleeved shirts for the fall this summer and I’ve been chomping at the bit (positively foaming) to wear them, but it’s been too hot. Then all of a sudden it went from being hot yesterday, to being cold today. Perhaps it wasn’t that sudden of a change. Perhaps I’m just unable to tolerate a very large range of temperatures.

I returned a composition book to the school bookstore today, and I think it irritated the woman behind the counter. I understand that it isn’t an expensive item, but today, that $2.79 will make the difference between my eating lunch and my not eating lunch. Not because I’m totally broke in general, but because I’m totally broke right now. Side-note; $2.79 is way too much to pay for a composition book. I’m an idiot.

I have a lovely piece of wood that I would like to add to my fish tank. The only problem with this is that there are purple streaks on it which my dad says are from the firefighting chemicals they spray on the forests, and I don’t know if that stuff is poisonous or not. So The log is soaking in a tub in the backyard, and I think it’s irritating my mother.

I really want to learn Dutch. The language is truly fantastic. All of those letters stuck in all over the place just make me happy. It would be a useless thing to do, learning Dutch. I mean, there really aren’t a lot of people who speak it. It isn’t like Spanish, or Mandarin. There is something appealing about it, though. Learning Russian would be fun.

I love having long nails. They make me feel delicate.

Lenin, the Russian one, as far as I can tell from his portrait, had a fabulous mouth. I mean, that thing was curvy and puffy and just made for lipstick ads.

I forgot my best friend’s birthday. Again. Actually, I didn’t really forget, I just thought it was a month later than it was. Last year, I thought it was two days later than it actually was, so I’m actually getting worse. I am the worst friend ever. I can’t believe she still tolerates me.

I have not made her a card yet.

Balls.

Crawfish Shins and WWI

I associate Kevin Bacon with Adam Smith. There is no reason for this. One is a top rate actor, as anyone who has seen Tremors will agree, and the other is a drop-dead-sexy economist that was born, alas, far too early. Unfortunately, this association is seriously screwing with my ability to take the subjects of history and economics seriously because someone will say that Adam Smith advocated a free market capitalism system, and I’ll be hearing Footloose in my head, which in turn leads to me thinking about God, The Devil, and Bob, and then I’m like, oh, French Stewart, and I get dragged back to earth and I’m like, dude, who cares about Europe in the late 19th century, we could be talking about 3rd Rock from the Sun!

Karl Marx had some mad crazy eyebrows going on there.

So for the first time this quarter I’m going to take my history notes on my computer, instead of using the more traditional, tried and true, pen on paper method. There are some downsides to each note-taking technique. If I write them by hand, I waste paper, ink, and I doodle all over everything. If I type them, I am unable to draw helpful diagrams, and I run the risk of, oh, say writing something frivolous instead of actually taking notes on the World Wars. I think that once I actually start bringing my tablet to take notes with, things will get better. I have no logical reason to think this, but I’m pretty sure it’s true anyway.

Sexist music makes me feel good inside. I know that it shouldn’t, but it does. I be that I could examine the reasons for this and find deep and convoluted self-loathing or some such, but that might ruin the fun.

Yesterday while I walked from my chemistry lab to my car, I saw six black widow spiders. Honestly, they’re getting ridiculous. Where are the lizards when you need them?

I got kicked in the shins, and it hurts. I doubt it was intentional.

I had a fascinating dream last night. There was a white swimming pool, which had a couple of crawfish in it. Once I got in, though, I realized that there were hundreds of them, but most of them were clear-white instead of reddish orange. In the dream I thought to myself that while the clear-white must help them in their quest for camouflage, but they must have crazy high rates of mutation from damage done to their DNA from the sun. There was a man there who was catching some of the clear crawfish, and another man came over and told him that his grandmother had kept beads in their pool for years, and now they had crawfish that were blue and pink in order to match their surroundings, so the first man went to collect a few of those too.

I wonder now how hard it would be to breed crawfish in designer colors. It would be an interesting project.

I was thinking some more about the lesbian comment I made yesterday, which is unusual. Not for me to make a lesbian comment, but for me to be thinking about something I already said. I realized that I wanted to clarify it (more to myself, than to anyone else). It isn’t that I think that all Christians are against gay people, or indeed that there are no gay Christians, because, duh, that’s not true. What I meant was that I think it’s ridiculous for people to use religion as an argument against gay marriage, and really, it’s the only argument that’s being made. That the government is, in many places, taking the religious arguments against anything seriously into consideration makes me very upset because we are supposed to uphold a separation of church and state in our country, but we don’t. That was my point, but I think I may have made it in a less than effective way yesterday in my lame attempt at comedy.

Gay Cramping

I hate it when I reach that point where I feel like if I don’t wash my face right this second, right this instant, that I’m going to have to claw it off completely because the oil is driving me absolutely crazy. I just reach this point where there is absolutely nothing else I can think about, and the oil on my face completely consumes all of the me that there is. I hate this feeling not so much because of the oily feeling itself, but because once I reach this point, washing it won’t make it better. It should, but it doesn’t. Instead, washing it just makes my face feel pulled tight and dry, and then my T-zone gets flakey and it makes me want to kill whoever invented hormones.

The worst part about having a computer make an error is that I’m always sure that it’s somehow my fault. I mean, I don’t understand how computers work. I really don’t. Like, I have a pretty good general idea, but if you were to ask me about anything specifically, I’d be lost. And that’s so bizarre when you really think about it, because it’s something that I use pretty much every day. I like the word bizarre because it sounds British, which is a dumb thing to say, because, hello, I’m speaking English. But, it’s so bizarre, because you’d think that in order to use something that is this complicated, I’d have to understand it better, but I don’t.

I was pretty much content to feel this way, too, but when I was in my history lecture the other day, the professor mentioned that he didn’t understand how cell phones work. How, he asked us, could the signals know which phone to go to? Obviously they do, but how? And I realized then that I don’t want to go through life thinking little sound fairies bring me the voices through my phone. That’s not good enough.

The other day at work, I was involved with a task that entailed standing still for long stretches of time and I got total leg cramps in both legs. I have never experienced anything like that before, and I think that it happened because of the “protect traditional marriage” garbage that was playing over the loudspeakers. No, my workplace is not that politically charged, there was a paid advertisement (imagine that said advert-is-ment, not adver-tize-ment) playing on the radio. That didn’t change the fact that I felt rage.

I don’t understand how anyone could fall for the fail of logic that was displayed in the ad. I mean, honestly, if a person doesn’t like gay marriage, why do they think that gay people would want to marry them? And it isn’t as though the lesbians are going to say, “Gee, I guess if I can’t marry my lovely woman here, I’ll have to find me a man to go be all up in the Christianity with.”

I like drinking water, but the downside is that it makes you pee. The upside is that you don’t die.

Rockin' Sunglasses

My sister’s cat is getting heavy. I think it’s because of my dad. He gives the cat treats every single day, without fail. And not just one or two, but a small handful. Then the cat also gets his ‘little taste’ for dinner, while the dogs are getting fed (because otherwise we run the danger of having him stick his head in the dog’s dishes to get their food), and then he gets fed by my sister in the morning and evening with the other cat, who is not overweight.

Despite it probably being unhealthy, Maurice does wear his additional girth well. I have to admit that he is a handsome cat, even with the extra couple pounds. That doesn’t make him any less evil, though.

My mom used to have this book about architecture in Santa Fe, and in it there was a house that had walls made out of huge boulders, with Plexiglas shaped to fill in between them. I think it was the most wonderful idea I’ve ever seen. I’m totally in love with the idea of having a wall in my house made not just out of rocks, but made out of one or two rocks. The inside of the house had natural stone nooks, too, which I think is the most romantic idea. Plus, the effect was really beautiful.

I love the desert (the place, not dessert, like the post-meal snack). There’s so much orange and brown, and the animals are downright neat. I’m not sure if I’ll ever live in the desert, though. It gets awfully hot in the summer in the ones nearby, and while I’m down with the heat, certain other important persons in my life do not like hot weather at all. I am also curious about snow.

The weather has taken a turn for the warmer again, which makes me glad. I want, this weekend, to go hiking with my boyfriend. I think we’ll take a picnic, and spend a couple hours trekking around a creek I know of. I love hiking around creeks, because I like to pretend, briefly, that I’m a wild animal of a person who is roving around the landscape where I’m most at home. This is, of course, complete nonsense, because I am most at home on the sofa in my house, but it’s a fun illusion nevertheless.

I am sitting at a table in the cafeteria at school right now, watching the line for the Panda Express. I want food, but I’m hoping (probably in vain) that if I wait a while, and watch the line, it will get shorter and I won’t have to stand as long.

I am not looking forward to going to work tonight. The first couple weeks back to school kick my butt, because I get so out of shape over the summer. I try to stay active, but it’s so much easier to just sit still than it is to get up and move, especially when it’s a billion and twelve degrees outside.

I also think that I should start wearing my sunglasses. I have them, and they’re very nice, and I look totally awesome in them (or, at least, I feel like I do) so I really have no excuse. Every morning, when I get into the car, I think, “Hey, sunglasses,” and then I drive off without them.

Nazi with a Side of Chicken

So I’m tired of people thinking that evolutionists are in favor of Social Darwinism. It’s definitely insulting to me. I mean, honestly, the theory of evolution has nothing to do with Social Darwinism except the name. I recently heard evolution described as the survival of the fit enough, and I think that’s an absolutely brilliant way to put it, because it’s so true.

I don’t really want to go to work today. I work at a craft store now, and it’s really not bad work, but I had three days in a row off, and that makes going back hard. Especially now that I have school going on, too. I don’t know if I’m going to continue to work while I have school, but I think I will. It hasn’t been bad so far, but one we get down to crunch time, I might feel differently. I’d just feel bad bailing on the store during the holiday rush, but that’s the way it might have to go down.

So our blender is totally broken, and it sucks. I was trying to make myself a coffee drink this morning, and all I managed to do was get the counters all sticky with coffee-dulce-de-leche scented muck. I really did almost cry. I feel bad for my dad, who was trying to enjoy his (hot, blender-free) coffee, and got caught in the verbal cross-fire between me and the blender. Not really fair for anyone.

I’ve had the same cold for about ten days now, and I’m getting sick of it. Seriously, this is unnecessary. I don’t need the lingering cough or drippy nose. I just don’t. I’m so over it.
I’m not over orange chicken, though. Man, I swear, that stuff is slightly spicy crack. It makes my mouth feel slightly funny when I eat it, but I think that’s just part of the appeal. Also, fried rice. Whoever came up with that idea gets my kudos.

My butt hurts right now. I’m sitting in the lobby thing of a lecture hall on campus, waiting for some unknown class to be over and leave so I can go sit and learn all about the history of the 20th century. Nazis for the lose, man. I know how this goes down. Some Franz guy gets assassinated and WWI is like pachoo and then all get’s quiet on the western front and a goose dies, and then we have a great depression and the southwest all blows away and then the Nazis put all the Jews, gays and gypsies (sounds like my kind of party) in camps (no longer a party) and make the rest of the world mad by trying to take it over, and then they lose because we’re too awesome, and something about Japan and bombs. Actually, that’s about where my timeline of the 20th century ends. I mean, until I’m born, then it gets interesting again. In all seriousness though, I really don’t know enough about the later half of the 1900s, because my history classes never got up that high before, and I’m a lazy weenie who doesn’t really care.

In other news, I think I want to take some archeology/paleontology classes in the future. I should look into that. I’m getting all re-interested in dinosaurs again. Darn you, National Geographic. Darn you!