safety in obscurity

The nice thing about this particular under-performing, 2-year-old blog is that it has not been hit by spam yet. If only nuclear warheads were this discerning, I wouldn't have to subject myself to 2 full days of "The Road" - the single most depressing (yet somehow truly appealing) book I've ever read. Luckily, spam is nothing like nuclear warheads, carried on the muscular shoulders of ICBMs, so even if it did strike me, I wouldn't be terribly upset.

and for my next trick....

I've decided. I'm going to plant some fucking garlic.

Booya.

the deep depths of profundity

You know the times when you get dragged towards being philosophical and the meaning of things seems awfully close? You're about to grasp something, but your brain is muddled in just the right way to prevent any real revelations? I'm going through that right now.

You get triggers on the way. Mine were

1. An article about Spike Jonze. (Really? Yes.) Apparently, this adult is like a child in his approach to the questions of creativity in a grown-up world. That's both profound in what it says about society's expectations of the paths to success (the man didn't go to college, nor get a proper arts education) and profoundly unprofound (he is of fairly well-to-do parents, though how much his parents' money played into his success is anybody's guess. I'd like to think little. I am awful at guessing.) I think the desire to have a child's perspective is a dip into warm, soothing philosophy that adults welcome from time to time, unable to truly return to the innocence, the expectation that everything will work out. Still, it gets you thinking along a certain path.

2. Three beers and some delicious malaysian food. Because if you're going to be profound, you need to be either an expert on profundities with a degree to show for it or drunk. You could also pretend, in which case you're a bag for the express purpose of douching (which i might be. i'm very bag-like).

3. My first ever reading of the very first chapter of Robert A. Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land". His description of a Martian's thought process strikes me as genuine. The perspectives that one encounters appear new and challenging. They appear child-like, innocent, fresh, open. Basically different from the overwhelming sense of competition and individual gain that we encounter in daily lives. The sense of wonder that we fail to experience on a regular basis. It makes you think about other views on life. Or, it makes you realize that if these views of the main character were really Martian, you would not be able to understand them even if they were written in English and that Heinlein is just making it all up. That his profundity levels are shallow enough for someone hopped up on 3 beers and malaysian food to consider them profound.

You see the dilemma? You want to pontificate on these profound triggers, but the beer and the self-doubt that is borne of adulthood really mess with your train of thought.

...

Malaysian food, man. Really good stuff.

Unwanted things

So there's this itch I've been meaning to scratch and you know how they say you shouldn't scratch it lest it get worse? I ignore those people. We've had two items that neither one of us has really wanted to consume - a single can of an energy drink and a single pack of cancer sticks. In a drunken, drugged-out stupor it may occur to me to use them in a misguided, pathetic attempt to prove that I'm still "full of life" and "cool" (I am), but since I am now wise enough to combine drinking and drugging only once every few blue moons, it probably won't happen.

So I thought I'd post the ad on Craigslist's "free" forum. You know, "come and get free energy drink and unopened pack of cancer sticks" or something.

(Well, to be more precise, this is what it said:

"I have one unopened, untainted can of Red Bull that will never be consumed. Ever. Ever-ever.



Want it? E-mail me. It beckons to you, urging you to drink it all, get your wiiiings and go crazy. In the safety of your own home, you can combine it with vodka and test your body's natural defenses. Do whatever. Just get it out of my fridge. Please.



Thanks.



....



I mean, who brings a can of Red Bull as a gift? Maybe it's a trick and they knowingly donated it, expecting to see something like this on Craigslist. You win, stranger.


Oh, I also have an unopened pack of Marlboro menthols. Which will also go unused, but in a much more emphatic way. You can have that for free as well. Red Bull and Marlboro Menthols. It's a combination made in self-destruction heaven.")


And you know what amazing discovery I have made? People want free stuff. This isn't scientific in any way, of course. I do not have a control group, for example, which I hear is important.

So here I sit now, in the comfort of my own home, wondering if responding to the half-dozen potentially crazy people was intelligent and if I didn't just infect my itch with the scratch. I do have an overactive imagination, though, so I probably have nothing to fear from someone who will go out of their way to get free Red Bull and a pack of menthol smokes.

Although, I bet if I drank half the can and smoked a few of those menthols, I'd be a little more paranoid....

new website

Yes, I have a new website, where you can see all of my exciting work, but the website I'm referring to is one I accidentally typed in a few days ago.

http://gmail.yahoo.com

It doesn't exist. Don't try it, because it won't work. But it gave me yet another brilliant idea. I should buy all of these combo URLs that incorporate rival domains.

intel.amd.com
cia.deptofjustice.gov
microsoft.apple.net
political-education.american-public.org

Something along those lines. I'd be paying a lot of money for a very small-scale joke, but I'd laugh every time. Until Microsoft and Apple, in a Federal Trade Commission-defying move, decide they're best friends and start shopping for a website. Guess what, suckas? Pay up!!

Oh, it'll happen.

Magic Goode

I thought of this as I was waking up, listening to something completely unrelated on NPR. 'Magic Goode,' I thought, 'what a name der fantastiche!'

What's the definition? Being mostly awake at this point, I think I may have forgotten it. But let me try to reconstruct it.

A 'Magic Goode' (is 'magique goode' even better?) is one that produces a sense of wonderment, rather than simple enjoyment. So if you like ice cream, buying it from a beach vendor is enjoyable, but does not constitute a 'magic goode'. However, meeting a friend of yours who suddenly appears behind you with a cone of delicious, decadent cream-based frozen good is the perfect example.

So I suppose these are everyday things that give you a tangle of unexpected warm, gooey tingles inside.

Of course, if you do receive a rug that happens to also be a transportation vessel, that's clearly a 'magic goode'. But mostly because of the unexpected additional benefit that you may not even discover for years to come. In fact, if you own a rug, I highly recommend taking it out for a spin. You never know.

Into the fray once again, my friends

Here I sit, listening to "Hindi Radio Mera Sangeet" on iTunes, aching from my morning 14-mile bike ride (panzy) and getting ready for work. And what better way to restart my blog than with the mundane?

Although, what's not mundane is this pain I have in my tuckus bone. I mean, I just took a ride on the bike - the same thing I've been doing all summer - and suddenly I have a tuckus bone pain?

I just like saying tuckus.

Things that happened today so far:

1. 14-mile bike ride
2. Some lady helped me ride faster by pushing me along with her van. Nobody got hurt, but I hope her feelings did, as I was yelling at her
3. Made chopped cabbage, mayo, boiled potato salad with dill, salt, thyme, per Luisa's recipe. Ate it and liked it. Probably mostly due to the mayo.
4. Washed floors for second time this week. Because if you wash floors only once a week, you might as well pee on them, you dirty monster.
5. Did laundry
6. Worked on music video (this is me looking into the future now)

So welcome back to me.

momentous

Dear Diary,

I stepped in poop today. I thought nobody pooped outside in the winter? I am sad.

Leave my events alone!

I don't know why, but I get annoyed at people's appropriation of events. Take 9/11. Before 2001, it was just a date. The day before my mother's birthday, for instance, or that Friday when I got a hummer from a tranny, for another instance that doesn't apply to me. Of course, after 2001 it signifies a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers, a downed plane and an attack on some other building whose significance escapes me and everyone knows that.

But people are jumping on the bandwagon of 9/11 like it's the cool thing to do. 7/7 becomes "London's 9/11". 11/26 is "Mumbai's 9/11". I mean, aside from not having the phonetic coolness of 9/11, which simply rolls off the tongue (do you think that's why the terrorists picked it? Hmmm....), what's wrong with just calling it "the attacks of 7/7"? Own your date! Embrace it! Don't make it into something it's not by appropriating someone else's terrorist attack. Other people's terrorist dates aren't "cool".

People are becoming too nonchalant about their associations with this stuff. I just want to prevent an occasion when some neighbour's intentional placement of household cleaners on the Goldfarbstein lawn and their subsequent deadly effect on the 5 Goldfarbstein household pets gets named "The Goldfarbstein Household 9/11 Holocaust" in the local community center's bulletin.

I don't know why I made that family more Jewish than the state of Israel. So sue me.

Get an abortion (check)!!

Courtesy of my lovely partner's internetZ searching skills comes this purchasing gem. Don't miss out on this opportunity to write donation checks to your local Planned Parenthood, while telling them they're going to hell.

Pro-Life Zingers Checks are no-doubt still available. And stock up, because you can never get enough bad anti-choice humour.

Kittens - Day 2

An addendum to the previous post. I made the rookie mistake of petting one of the kittens on the stomach. Please refrain from any such activity if you don't like the sight of your own blood.

(Friday night - Saturday night)

The night wasn't particularly restful again. The kittens found our bedroom plants just as appealing as those in the living room. So on they went with the digging. Certainly, if I knew the value of kitten-aeration, I would've patented the idea a long time ago. As it happens, though, I was more concerned with sleep, of which I still managed to get a little. In fact, I'll just admit that I slept in until 10 or 11. The kittens didn't mind. In retrospect, I understand why. There was more dirt to dig up in the living room, where they migrated early in the morning. I may have to clean every day, huh? On top of that (and pardon my French here), but their shit SMELLS! I've used the better half of our baking soda to try and cover up what has got to be a chemical weapon under Geneva Convention standards.

I attempted to do some yoga to stretch my largely-unstretched back, but upward-facing dog is difficult to achieve when you have a downward-sitting cat on your mat. Walter didn't really understand what I was doing, so he insisted on a closer look. Thanks for making this less meditational than it should be, kitten. You ARE the center of attention. I think even the instructor paused to wonder at the cuteness that is you.

I don't know if you're aware, but there is NOTHING to watch on Saturday morning/afternoon, so the kittens and I slowly drifted into a mid-day stupor. They even stopped playing with the bathrobe sash that Luisa generously contributed to the kitten-sitting cause. I know that when I look back on this week, the sash will be the straw that I used to hang on to sanity as it was being mauled by two cuddle-icious kittens.

But I'm off to work and then drinking. The kittens will once again fend for themselves for a good 12 hours. They don't seem to mind. Finally used to the environment, they seem to accept being in a completely different location with a certain upper-caste boredom.

Also, I started moving plants out of reach. Doesn't seem right that they should be abused on this scale. The question is, what is "out of reach" for two creative, energetic, determined kittens? I guess we'll find out when I come back from drinking. In the meantime, I vacuum the dirt left behind and hope that my Dyson doesn't choke on it. Don't lose your suction!!

Ok, off to work. Good night, kittens!

Kittens - Day 1

Dear blogosphere,

I've been put in charge of caring for two adorable kittens this week, while their owners are away. Food and litter elements were provided, all I have to do was open my heart to kitten love. I believe the door's already cracked open just a bit, I'm sure these cutesters will rip it off its hinges.

(So day 1 was actually Thursday night-Friday, but I'm only now getting to a point where blogging doesn't seem like a horrible chore, just a regular one. Also, it's too cold in my office to do any real work, so blogging it is)

Luisa has left for a week of family-time and I am all alone with the kittens. I spent the night on the couch and they seemed pretty tame. This may yet be a piece of cake. I didn't sleep very well, but that was mostly my fault for stressing over the possibility that the kittens will fail to move when I rotate my gigantic body and be crushed under the mammoth weight.

After filling their water and food bowls, I leave the in the hands of Fates as I go to work, hoping they're not dead when I return.

I return and they're still alive. THEY'RE ALIVE! We play, watch TV and generally enjoy each other's company. One thing to keep in mind - they don't watch TV. Imagine watching TV in a room with a person who doesn't enjoy it but wants the company. Impossible. They'll talk your ear off and you'll miss all the dialogue from whatever movie you're watching for the 6th time. Kittens - much the same. No biggie. I should really pay attention to them anyway. I only have them for a week and then my exposure to cuteness will be limited by my access to The Daily Kitten.

Small problem - they apparently really like the plants we have on the floor. Enough to start digging them up. Dirt and leaves are everywhere, although it's more leaves and those are mostly dead. Our laziness in keeping the plants healthy is paying off - the kittens have something to play with. I should clean that up soon, however. Ok, off to bed.