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.

stabbing victims

Two things: since I last updated, Xander managed to make off with the 'C' key and the dash key, and F9. You know, he could have ALL the function keys if he would just leave me the letters! So, now I'm missing x and c. Obviously, I can still type them, but it takes a concerted effort on my part, and I might be risking electrocution. Not sure. But hoping this is fixable. I found all the other keys he took, but I don't know where these other ones are. I also don't have a back arrow key.

Second thing: At work today, I was zoned out. I must have been really zoned out. No coffee was the culprit. That's my line, anyway. But one of my bosses came in and asked what I was doing (always her precursor before asking me to work on something), but I answered completely honestly "Thinking about stabbing victims. What did you want me to do?" And she just backed out of the office and said "umm, nothing." Then I kind of snapped out of it and was like "No, sorry, I was just thinking about... what it's like to be stabbed. It must be pretty awful." It wasn't exactly the "No, the thought I was having was perfectly normal" save I was hoping for. But at least she knew stabbing was meant as an adjective, not a gerund. Um.... yeah. You know, that I wasn't thinking about stabbing people (already calling them victims).

What I really had been thinking was I would probably prefer to drown than to be stabbed, as scared as I am about drowning. Then I started thinking about how they both involve your self's integrity to be breached, but one allows something in (water in your lungs) and one allows something out (your guts on the street). Then I started thinking if this was true of all unnatural deaths--some kind of breach. And also if it meant something about me psychologically that I'm more afraid of being out of bounds than letting something foreign past my security...... again, these are thoughts that I have when I'm unfocused and uncoffeed. I'm glad R-- came in when she did. Even if she's not.

I feel like at some point I promised my mom I'd show her the Yahoo Avatars I made for my brother and me. So, I just figured out how to download them, and

damn do we look fine! With our kitties!

So much to say! But so little of it do I remember. At the moment, all I can think about is my perpetually flat bike tire. Because of it, I had to walk half a mile home, pushing a bike. So I won't get to participate in Ride Your Bike to Work Day and the biking birthday party tomorrow. And the organic gardening tour the next day. And now I have to walk to the grocery store, which I wouldn't mind, but my iPod keep rejecting all of my downloaded podcasts. Which brings me to:

Podcasts
My new obsession. They have all kinds of podcasts! I quickly learned that however much I love Veronica Mars and Firefly, the podcasts of fellow fans sharing rumors, or just talking about what they like about the show is a waste of my life. However, daily lessons on German and Russian, daily updates about word origins, weekly installments on the history of the Byzantine Empire, weekly updates on science news, All Songs Considered, and more---this is all GREAT. I love not taking classes, so that I can learn more. I've felt so free since the end of classes. Which brings me to:

Bragging
My social psychology teacher really liked my paper, and wants to use it as an example! My mom is writing a book! My brother is getting a job! I'm going to Argentina! I'm buying a condo next week! Which brings me to:

HGTV
My second-newest obsession. What I want more dearly than anything in the world is a spongey roller, like they use on so many of their programs. If you would like to see what I mean, I think one is featured on this segment about painting stencils, the segment that got it all started. Okay, so, that segment doesn't feature the spongey rollers. Nevermind. But it's a good segment, anyway. I was at the bank the other day, and mentioned that it was my first house, and it seems like it should be a big deal, but so far the only big change that I've made is I can't stop watching HGTV once I turn it on. The banker didn't answer, and I asked "Have you ever seen it?" and he looked up and gave me this look, which at first I thought said "Lady, I am male." But instead he said "Oh, yeah--when my wife and I got our first place, we must have watched it like 20 hours straight when we found it." So apparently, it wasn't that my obsession with HGTV was uninteresting to him--he must just hear that a lot dealing with people taking out mortgages. And unrelated:

Hat Trick?
The last two works of art (okay, a cartoon and a comic book) I have really enjoyed were recommended to me by TB. Shall I ask her advice for more and hopefully win the triple crown? Because I am not doing at all well choosing my own stuff. I chose: Exterminator! (William S Burroughs) and Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller). Am I alone in saying those two gentlemen need to be beaten soundly about the neck and shoulders? Not to mention around their man-bits. Actually, I didn't choose Tropic of Cancer--it was a book club book, which was originally this Saturday, but it got postponed two weeks because no one's been able to finish it. I was so happy when the Argentina/New Orleans trip meant I didn't ever have to finish the book

This is all old news to anyone I've talked to in the past month. But I felt I should update. All inspired by finding out how to download Avatars!

noggins

Have you ever been to a pumpkin farm where for a set fee, you can have as many pumpkins as you can hold, as long as you can take 4 steps with them? So you pile up your little brother with pumpkins and send him walking? And it doesn't matter if he drops all the pumpkins on his head at the fourth step--you still have the pumpkins at that point?

That's how I've felt this past week. Pumpkins=knowledge about microeconomics and social psychology. My brother=my brain. Well, I finished the exams, and now all of the information is toppling out of my brain. In a few weeks, there will be no trace that I ever learned anything about these subjects. But because of my masterfully cramming the pumpkins in my head, I will have good grades that will last long past the knowledge's expiration.

Tonight, I'm going to watch Harry Potter at a park, while I finish my social psychology paper about the Veronica Mars episode "One Angry Veronica." Then maybe I'll finish watching Star Wreck: In the Pirkenning. I think it's safe to say I get the randomest mail from my friends in California. Second-randomest comes from Louisiana, and my family.