j, on phone to mom

a few weeks ago, a friend sent me an epic series of post cards which cheered me up very much, but which got temporarily lost in the shuffle of the move. the last postcard i got featured a series of quotes from our past, one of which was me saying something like "when you're poor and your life is meaningless, you multitask with whatever's available." it's one of those not-quite-so-funny because it's real quotes. which i will answer in kind, something my friend said on the phone to her mom in december:

No, Mom, everyone knows that Amtrak is spelled with just a 'K' at the end.
No, I don't know why.
Yes, I understand that not literally everyone knows how it's spelled.
Mom! YOU should know how it's spelled, though!
Because we had this exact conversation yesterday!

hearing her say this in my head made me smile for many months to come.

humans are monkey manques

Yesterday was spent trying to use the word manque in a context where it could be humorously confused with "monkey" when spoken out loud. It's actually hard to find a situation where it's not slightly funny, assuming the noun before manque can also be used as an adjective.

damaged genius

can't. stop. watching. house.

Sometimes I think I could handle being a diagnostician, then I realize I'd still have to walk by needles and blood tests and stuff while at the hospital, even if I were as hands-off as House is, and I'd be constantly either passing out, or saying "eww!" out loud to dissapate the passing outy feelings, and that would probably annoy my fellow doctors. So I guess I can never be on Dr. House's team. Still, he's exactly my type. Tragically.

I tried to imagine what ideal relationship I'd have with house, and I decided, it would be some kind of situation where I can watch him do his work, without his knowing of my existence or anything, so that he stays candid and can't be mean to me. I would also want to stay clear because it seems like if you go to him with a slight cough, you and your entire family will be diagnosed with leprosy by the end of the episode.

Then I realized that's just the relationship we have. Hurray TV!

Today I bought a bed. I just up and bought a bed during lunch. and tomorrow I will have a new bed in my new condo. [UPDATE: it's here!!! See camera phone pictures, right. I missed a baby shower waiting for the delivery, but I still got cake and to see the mom-to-be]

i know what boys like

two things related to the same thing that made me angry today:

1. a craigslisting for a bright blue foot locker chest. Quote: "I only have girls, so blue is not a color they want in their room."
2. the playroom of a house I was in today that will be for a brother and sister. the sister's side of the room had butterflies and fairies. the brother's side had rockets and tank engines.

circumstances that might have made me less angry:

1. "my girls don't like blue, so we have no use for it." the "thus" implication of the "so" in the original phrasing makes it sound like the blue/pink divide is a biological imperative. which is just stupid on so many levels.
2. if the sister were older than 2, AND had shown no interest in anything else besides butterflies and fairies her whole life. apparently, the butterflies are an imperative, it's just not biological. girls like pretty, boys like doing.

wait, hang on... let me check the year.... yes, it's still 2006.

it's the color blaster!

there are few things good that come out of a young boy getting his fingers caught in a blender (besides blood). especially when that boy is 18 years old, and my brother. the good things are most likely limited to the following quotes regarding the incident (paraphrased where necessary):

mom: i was up till 4:30 last night, cleaning the blood from all over the kitchen. i felt like lady macbeth. it doesn't come out for anything! it was like it was atomized. and i will say, for willie's health, his blood does clot fast. some of it must have glommed up before it even hit the ceiling. yes, the ceiling.

me: [after a long argument about whether or not they were talking about a blender or a hand mixer. it turned out they were talking about a stick blender--see above--, also called a hand blender by some] So..... did y'all call it a hand blender BEFORE the incident?

mom: i gave willie back those cigarettes i found. i told him "remember how i told you not to play with that blender? and remember what happened? trust me, you'll regret it a lot more if you don't listen to me about the cigarettes. but you're 18, so i can't just steal your cigarettes anymore."

mom: [when asked if she was hopeful about his ability to generalize, for instance about cigarettes above, to heed parental warnings now] No, I don't really think it'll help, i was just being hopeful. i asked what he learned, and then had to tell him that among other things, he learned sharp things aren't toys. i listed some other sharp things that he shouldn't play with, and when i said chainsaws, he just corrected me: 'chainsaws aren't sharp.'


so it would seem we're going to have to have separate learning incidents with the following: regular blenders, food processors, chainsaws, hand mixers, garbage disposal, trash compactors, coffee grinders, fire, electrical outlets (oh wait we already had that one), sofas (oh wait we had that one too), and scissors.

i sent my brother this, and he was delighted.

these are not published figures.

did you ever wonder where doodle-bugs go when they die? so did i, until this morning, when i found out:

they go underneath my bookshelf.

what else did i learn today? i learned how to crochet. it's way easier than knitting. nora and i were talking about knitting (she said "I worry about getting old. Because I'm not sure what I'll do." The context of the conversation meant whether she'd knit or crochet when she was older because she didn't do either now.), and I told her I knew how to knit, i just didn't know how to cast on, tie off, purl or bind. i told her i'd taken a class, i had just missed a few lessons. a few crucial lessons.

yes, sam's

why do i get the feeling that mom is adding pages to old scrapbooks? pages like "baby's first trip to Sam's Wholesale Club" and "baby's first mortgage payment"?

Pillory (last Thursday - Yesterday morning RIP)

It will be hard to update about Argentina and New Orleans for a while (multiple reasons), but for now, a short story about The Kitten That Got Away.

I bought 2/3 of a kitten just before I left for my trip. It was like a downpayment, and the guy was going to keep him for me for the extra week. After careful thought about what I would name a new kitten, the name that kept coming back to me was Pillory. I had slight misgivings about this name, due to the number of times I envisioned myself having this conversation:

Me: His name is Pillory.
You: Pill-or-ee?
Me: Yeah. You know, like what happens to medieval debtors?

Anyway, for lack of a better name to refer to him as, I called him Pillory around the house once I got to New Orleans. It also seemed to annoy mom, and the more I called him that, the more absurd the name seemed, and the more I liked it.

When I got back to Austin yesterday, the owner/guardian said he'd escaped that morning. I'm a little bit heartbroken, because although we'd only met once, I loved Pillory as my own already. I'm still hoping he'll come back. Mom thinks he heard that I was going to name him Pillory and just bolted.

Pillory I barely knew you.