ass kicking

We have a unicorn in my lab. And as everyone knows, unicorns kick ass. Wait, apparently not everyone knows that.

A and I got the unicorn a while ago from a toy store in a strip mall near campus. It's a unicorn on a stick, like the old fashioned, perplexing child's toy "horse on a stick" (seems it's called a "stick horse" because "horse stick" could sound bad).

Our unicorn stick has sound effects. This is what made A and I buy it. I mean, we were playing with it anyhow, giggling like idiots in the store. When we realized that pressing the unicorn's ear results in a few moments of galloping noises which end in a series of whinnies, we had to get it.

And so now we have a unicorn. We brought it to school because it is often a toxic place and having a unicorn to look at and play with sometimes is helpful. We have many nice happy memories of people on the unicorn either in celebration or for cheering up. Today, it was for cheering up. I've been trying to fight off a first class bad mood all week.

I went over to the box where the unicorn stands. Justin, named after the unicorn in the Scrubs episode since it seems that the makers of that show understand the usefulness of having a comfort unicorn one can go to when one needs to. I went over and took Justin for a short spin. The other grads cheered us on, happy for the unicorn moment. The undergrad, however, was not impressed.

This is the undergrad who sits at the desk my officemates and I had set aside for a fellow grad student. The fellow grad student had transfered to our advisor but doesn't personally use the space we went out of our way (way out of) to make for him in our advisor's lab because he doesn't want to offend his former advisor by leaving the one remaining student his former advisor has in a lab by herself. It's politics and it's about sparing the professor's "feelings" (this professor has the range of feelings of a very small child - "cranky" and "full") at the cost of the feelings of us, the grads who moved all this shit around because we were told "hey guys, ____ is coming to the lab so let's make some space for him!"

This is the undergrad who works for the politically absent fellow grad student, collecting his data for him, and so this is the undergrad who sits at the desk we set up for our fellow grad in our office, who ignores her subjects when they show up, ignores them in that sort of bored receptionist ignoring way. This is the undergrad who, when she finally does recognize their presence, advises the subjects she is running for our politically absent fellow grad student to throw their shit "where ever" in our office without regard for doorways, walkways, or other people's space in this small area. This is the undergrad who quite often seems to be very put upon by things like us wanting to use our lab space for data collection on a day when she usually runs for our politically absent fellow grad student, by our coming and going through our office, by our eating lunch in our office, and by our sometimes talking with each other or meeting with our students in our office.

In my book, everyone can be put upon for no apparent reason at all. It's life, it's hard, you feel like huffing and puffing sometimes. I understand, truly. But the frequency of this undergrad's put uponness over things being done by people who are much more graciously putting up with the not terribly convenient circumstance of her working from our office (at best an irksome reminder of her boss's choice to be absent) is far too high, even for me.

This is the undergrad who was annoyed that I was playing with my unicorn, in my office.

"Ummmm, why do you have a unicorn in your office?" she asked in those tones which say "I'm saying 'why do you have a unicorn' but really, what I mean is 'that is like so stupid, it's totally gay. My gohhd, if I were getting my PhD, I wouldn't waste my time riding a unicorn around an office that has rainbow cut outs on the walls (gay!). I'd wear glasses and put my hair in a bun and I'd look very smart while I squinted at computer screens and pressed a pencil to my lip nearly chewing it but not quite. My office key and flash drive would be on a color coordinated cord around my neck, and I might also carry a clipboard, at least when I am running subjects...which is so totally beneath me' Now please stop fooling around for 5 minutes. I know it's your office and you're sharing your space with me simply out of misguided respect and concern for your peer who I am doing data collection for, but I simply must get back to squinting over and highlighting every second line of my reading for my Dysfunctional Personalities Types class."

I haven't touched the unicorn all semester, hell, I think not since I finished my first time teaching as an instructor last semester. It's not like we're always fucking off in there. Usually it's largely headphones and laptops. But now, I'm thinking of riding that unicorn every day she's in there. It's my office. I can ride a unicorn in it if I want to.

Got unicorns?

Here be treasure!

Oh look what I just found via Kate's comment. It's something new to make me laugh.
I'm potent, Now

Their mission statement reads: Objectifying human beings is wrong. But anthropomorphizing objects is just dandy.

I think today and tomorrow, and possibly Friday, need to be about laughing.

shitty day

Today was like yesterday but amped up. In short, it kinda sucked. Lab bullshit, interpersonal fuckery, and petulant faculty are some of the things that have kept me stressed. I've about had it with this shit. Oh and my doctor is leaving to practice in MA. I don't blame her, I'd flee this state too if I had somewhere to flee to. But it still sucks I have to find a new primary care physician. Sucks a whole lot.

One of the few things that keeps me here in my PhD program (not necessary keeps me going, but here at least) is that I have little confidence in the following:
Whether life/work would be better any place else
Whether I have the energy and physical ability to make a new start at a new job which would be anything more secure, rewarding, flexible, and higher paying than convenience store clerking (no offense to folks who work in those settings that kind of job barely makes ends meet, I could never work the hours I'd need to even squeak by, and I'd have a whole lot of useless education debt to pay off)

Right now, my head hurts and I hate a whole lot of people. Mostly I am disgusted with the petulant faculty. They should behave at least a little better since they have the advantages and luxuries of age (not too old, not too young, right smack in the middle), health, life and career experience, a fatter paycheck, some minimal degree of respect, and greater job security than the other people who have been acting like children today. But I cut slack for circumstances, and I realize that with my division going down fast, the other grads are in the same fithy waterlogged boat I'm in, whether they consciously realize it or not.

Nap day

Among the many (many) things that make sense but we don't as a culture condone is this one. Nap Day. What a great idea. I didn't even know about it and I was participating today during the talk. That makes me feel all happy inside.

I'm still waiting for a chance to promote my suggestion for a celebration with presents like a wedding but for grown up people who aren't married. I'm feel quite certain that we as a society need this, and almost as certain that the best chance of it catching on is if it were promoted by a commercial entity. I don't have a snappy name for it but I think I've blogged about it before so I might have proposed a name then - though obviously not anything snappy or I guess I'd rememgber it.

Any suggestions? Something to cover "hey you've been living on your own for a while and you aren't married but you sure could use some home stuff" day. It'd be on a person's 29th birthday, maybe 30th although that has its own quasi rituals of hazing associated with it, especially for single 30s. To try to usurp that might be difficult. Hence my proposal for 29, but it's flexible. Really.
Really?
Yeah.
It's one of those days. I find I am writing and speaking as if I were being cross examined. Wtf. Guess I need another nap.

daylight

It was dark when my cat started crying this morning. Today is the first day back after break and last night I didn't sleep well.

At noon, there is a talk by a group of students I do not like. I don't like two of them on personal account, and the entire lot of them because I feel they act like trusting, simple children (even though two at least are more than old enough to know better). What they have is a shocking willingness to take shit. Or more appropriately stated, to eat shit and smile about it. Wanting to do that is repugnant to me (hence the wonderfulness of that saying I think) but wanting and pushing others to do it too....well that's where the person directed dislike comes in. Dare I say "loathing"?

When I have slept so unwell as to have managed to wake up in the congressionally mandated predawn hours of today, yes, I think I do dare say it.

Oh they better hope the talk is too boring for me to stay awake and alert through.

how does it feel?

So how does it feel to find out your ex is getting married? How does it feel to find out another ex is getting married? From my experience as both the ex getting married and the one whose ex got married, it's sort of hard to put your finger on it. For me, it's a mixed bag of feelings that would sound like "err", "umm", and "eeeesh" if I were pressed to vocalize through them.

I heard about the most recent on Friday. At the time I didn't register the impact but since it's been skittering around in my mind all weekend, I'm realizing perhaps that immediate self assessment was premature. I think it is a good thing I have a shrink's appointment on Monday.

So let's count em up. I count three. Sure, there've been other guys I've dated who got married by now. Plenty of them. My first time guy, Army Bob, married a woman with the same name as me (and I married a Bob, Dr. Bob - one of life's wee tiny jokes). But Army Bob and I dated for less than a year and were totally out of touch as soon as it was over since I took off for college and he took off for the bottom of a bottle and signed up for the Army soon after. We had a few very minor interactions in the years after we broke up, and I only found out he was married many years later when we emailed briefly during his divorce before he went back to jumping out of helicopters over post 9/11 Afghanistan.

There was A.B., but that was an "on again off again" multi-state kind of thing, with the sum of "on" times adding up to a grand total of about 4 months, with 2 of them long distance. I didn't leave that relationship with any delusions that he had ever felt about me as I had felt about him. His marriage and my hearing of it was years and years and years after anything romantic between us ended, with plenty of time in there for any remaining hurt to have formed a nicely smooth scar.

Of the ones I know were significant on both sides, involved some objective signs of commitment, and which spanned more than 18 months, that leaves three.
Crazy, Flounder, and Tom.

Crazy psycho ex boyfriend (F_____) married my apparently equally crazy ex best friend (L_____). Both were significant relationships for me. I knew L______ from about 7th grade, was friends with her from 8th, and was best friends with her from at least 10th grade until my sophomore year in college. I met F_____ the summer after I graduated high school and he was my longest lasting relationship to that point. Also the most fucked up one ever. It lasted 2 years and some months, but taught me a lot about myself. Like that even at the age of 19 during one of the darkest periods of my life, I had the strength and clarity of mind and heart to ditch someone who was hot, talented, charismatic, and incredibly abusive. F and L hooked up about 6 months after F and I broke up and they got married just this past Fall.

Ex hubby Flounder got married within a month of our divorce being final. That was an "ummm", especially when I heard he had given her an engagement ring the month I moved out of our house.

And now Tom. We lived together for over five years, broke up and he had a new lady within a month (she's been referred to in this here blog before as "ass like an ibook" or "ibook" for short) Tom was seen on my campus flashing around ibook's picture and his "promise ring" a very short time later. They are getting married this summer, I was recently told, after something like a 2 year relationship, most of which it seems they were engaged (or promised) for.

I realize the timeline, both egocentrically for me and internal to their relationships, is a nontrivial part of my feelings about my exes getting married. It's the "right after we broke up" thing in part. But it's also the "you've only known her how long?" thing also.

Take Crazy F and my exBestfriend L. They got together way too soon after I dumped Crazy. I lost L as a friend because I couldn't live with knowing what horrible judgement she had. Crazy was abusive and she knew it. But they racked up about 15 years of courtship, breakups, reconciliations, and staged cohabitation before they tied the knot. I have to say, out of the three of the exes, theirs seems like the most adult timeline for marriage. I suspect it finally dawned on them that no one but them would be willing to put up with their respective whole lot of crazy.

As for the other two, I can only say eeeesh. I don't wish them ill, but I do find myself wondering what the fuck. Admittedly in both breakups, I had a new beau in short order. In both situations, I was totally smitten with my new fella. And I'm not 100% against marriage for myself or others, nor am I 100% convinced I'll never do it again. But as the saying goes, once bitten twice shy. I've been bitten twice, so I get legit claim to some serious shyness. When I reflect on the impact of those endings along with my upbringing, I sometimes think it warrants applause that I haven't developed an overt "philo-phobia".

Which brings me to the "errr" part. I question whether what I tell myself is a not unhealthy dose of hesitancy and skepticism is in fact an indication that I am poised on the cusp of embittered and jaded distance.

Peanut butter Cap’n Crunch

October 2000

Peanut butter cap’n crunch sounds come from the couch as we sit
filling this small room
so small, probably you’d think
it would be filled easily
but you try filling a room.
It's not all that easy.

She says “how was work?”
Not “I feel lonely”
or “do you believe in an after life?”
or “I wish I still liked kissing you”
or “stop chewing so loud”

What I'm reading

My little brother sent me a link yesterday (it was part of the Coulter buzz). It's a blog called Joe.My.God.

Liking it so far....

Douchebag du jour (II)

It's that blitheringest of douchebags again, Miss Ann Coulter - coincidentally her recent exposure is tied to presidental hopeful and a past douchebag du jour, Mr. Romney.

Miss Coulter's recent "faggot" remark (which is costing her a bit) wasn't made in a campus auditorium concert sponsored by a handful of over-entitled college republicans who bring in hateful acts like Coulter (or my favorite, The Warrior) to validate their pseudointellectual rebellion against a system that they feel is run in a way that keeps them down (otherwise they each would have gotten scholarships, admission to ivy league universities, and maybe a stipend just for being an oppressed white).

Miss Coulter made her comment as part of her act at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference. Other speakers at CPAC included notable republicans Vice President Dick Cheney and former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani (as if I didn't have enough reason already to think that man was odious).

In a recent TV interview (transcript here and here) about reaction to her act and her "faggot" comment, Miss Coulter advised young conservatives to follow her lead, saying "...I think the lesson young right-wingers ought to draw from this is it's really not that scary to attack liberals."

She also defended her use of the word "faggot" saying she used it correctly and that "It isn't offensive to gays. It has nothing to do with gays. It's a schoolyard taunt, meaning wuss. And unless you're telling me that John Edwards is gay, it was not applied to a gay person."

There's nothing inoffensive about Coulter using "faggot". Coulter does not self identify as or with the people the word has long been used to deprecate and villify. Coulter is not a symbol or result of an oppressive violently intolerant culture. She's a cause. It's just a joke, she says.

The comments of Miss Coulter, my douchebag du jour, reminded me of one of my favorite Dead Kennedys' tracks.

"Night Of The Living Rednecks" by the dead kennedys

....Ray's guitar broke. No, we won't play Rawhide, won't play anything.
We'll play the theme from the Dinah Shore show.
Who wants to be Dinah Shore? Who's alter-ego is Dinah Shore?
Oh, his fists didn't go up so quickly this time. Yawn...yawn..yawn.
Put those headphones on, it's be-bop time.

I want to tell you a story about the last time I was in Portland.
The night before we played at the Long Goodbye.
I was walking on the street about 10:30 at night.
A lot of people go to bed around here at 10:30 at night.

And well, I was walking along when suddenly these jocks in this
bright blue pickup drove up. It had KC lights, tractor tires,
everything but the CB. It was a life-size Hot Wheels car for some dumb rich kid,
right. Well, they drove up to me
and they yelled what dumb rich kids usually yell, "Hey, faggot,"
and showered me with some water.

So, I stood there thinking, what a bunch of fuckheads and picked up a rock.
Now, I waited, walked down about a block to
where the Kentucky Fried Chicken is, on Burnside,
and sure enough they drove around again.
They said, "Hey, faggot, where's the nearest McDonald's?" I said,
"I don't know" and they squirted me again.

So I threw the rock
and put a nice-size dent in their giant Hot Wheels car.
They screached to a halt in the parking lot of some department store,
who's name I don't remember, it's up the street from Fred Meyer,
and they got out their clubs and they ran after me, yelling,
"We're gonna kill you, you god damn faggot, we're gonna kill you,
you motherfucker."

So I got in a phonebooth by the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Burnside,
held my legs straight out like this so they couldn't open the door
to the phonebooth. So they began charging the phonebooth,
beating on it with their club, yelling,
"We're gonna kill you, you motherfucker, we're gonna kill you,
you god damn faggot." I just looked at them.

So, there was a crowd gathering by this time
and these kids were standing nearby and they said,
"Oh, look at him, he's insane." I thought, ah-hah, here's my way out.
I yelled at them, "Take me to a mental hospital right away.
I wanna be be put away.
Please put me away, c'mon, call the cops and put me away.
Please put me away now."

They said, "Alright, faggot, we're calling the police." So they called the police.
The cop comes out and I go, ah, my savior, I'm away from these jocks.
He opens up the door, "Get out of there, you,"
throws me up against the car, frisks me, shoves me in the back.
Then he goes over to the jocks, "Now what happened here?
It looks like we're going have to take him to jail
but we got to have the full story first"

So the jocks, who had an ace in the hole, ace in the hole
Take down on the bass, a little bit down on the bass. Yeah,
ace in the hole, and they go, "Well, goddammit,
the motherfucker put a dent in my truck, a $5000 truck, right,
so I got my club, I went out and I wanted to kill him.
I want to kill him. Let me kill him, goddammit.
Let me kill him."

So the cop made them go home, and he drove me home,
and he confiscated their club and my rock as further evidence.
And I thought, so this is Oregon, huh? Tolerent Oregon?

where did you come from?

A while ago I signed up for this thing called "site meter". I wanted to know if anyone other than the usual suspsects is hitting this blog. Surprisingly the answer is yes. Hello lurkers!

No, I'm not posting the counter since this was for my info, to satisfy a personal curiosity and to check things like if my parents' town shows up associated with an IP address. So far no.

Anyhow, one of the features you get, if someone came here through a search, is what the search terms were. Here's the best yet: overly sensitive to female smell

No quotes in that search*, hence we have many words which, in isolation or various combinations, I'm sure occur on my blog with quite a high frequency.

For some reason, this made me think of the man test that is going around on email. It's a marketing gimmick so I hesistate to put the link up but, well, fuck it. It's not only offensive and funny (funny because I'm 70% manly it seems) but offers an interesting glimpse at the masculine identity stereotypes which are as stupid, damaging, and limiting as the female stereotypes I am more familiar with dissecting.

Go test yourself on "manly" knowledge and shit here if you must. But if you do, post your manliness score in my comments section because I'm dying to know who among you is more butch than me.

*A hint for doing your searches (I thought everyone knew this but I guess not). Type quotes around words you are searching for as phrases. E.g., "overly sensitive to female smell" and if that is too exclusive, try simply "overly sensitive" "female smell"

hippie import clothing store (I)

The hippie import clothing store was located not far from the state street theater, quite close to what I came to think of the multidimensional used book store (it had more rooms than it seemed it should or, I believe, could have had). The hippie import clothing store was right next door to to the dance club which according to my brother's recollection is alternately either named "The Mango" or "Tangerine".

One afternoon, my co-workers at the hippie import clothing store told me Leaf would be working with us that week.

"I hate it when Leaf is here," Sam said. "She sits on her ass. She doesn't DO anything."
"Wait, her name is [leef]? Is that 'L-e-i-f' like viking?" I asked.
"No, no...'" said Eva who was standing under the extremely large mermaid, picking through the cherry vanilla incense. Eva said "It's Leaf like tree," and held out her aromatic hands, fingers stretched into branches which she wiggled stiffly for emphasis.
"They named their kid 'Leaf' like tree? That's fucking horrible."

While we spoke of Leaf's arrival, I contemplated the girl's situation. Sure, she might suck to work with as much as the other employees seemed to think she did. And she might even be a rotten person. But how much of this could really be laid only at her feet? I mean, if ever there was a situation of mom and dad setting the kid up for shit, this was it. By this point, I'd been working at Leaf's parents' store for over a month. I'd heard and personally witnessed not good things about our employers, store owners N____ and B____. But finding out they had burdened their child with the name Leaf was up there for worst things I knew about them yet.

Maybe it's because I had grown up where I did - which very much wasn't here - that I thought giving your child a name like Leaf was a signal at least to the sensitive adults of the world that you were selfish to the point of cruelty. But maybe here it was ok, or at least less bad, to name your child something like that.

Here was Ann Arbor MI in 1996. We were downtown but away from the extremely undergraddy part. "The City" as people from the pokey towns around it called it. And why not? If they didn't come in for the congested football game days, they came during other super packed times like the annual art fair or hashbash. To them, I'm sure it looked like a city.

Here was where you were more likely to get hit by a spandex and hemp wearing bicyclist whizzing down the sidewalk than actual motor vehicle traffic since most of the time, the cars were caught in a web of perversely arranged oneway streets and power-pedestrians.

Here, there was a working class but it wasn't much like the working class culture where I grew up. Here there seemed to be a very large number of 18-25 year old refugees from the boring MI suburbs who were pissing off their parents simply by not being in college, simply by working a working class job for a working class wage, growing pot in the basement of a house shared with 4 to 7 other young people, and spending most evenings smoking happily on porches throughout town. Here you had some folks born into the working classes, raised in less suburban suburbs, people who were older and younger, but who collectively showed signs of having a larger degree of tolerance and wider range of social attitudes than what I was accustomed to from my rather parochial Irish/Italian south of Boston former ship building town.

Here, the working class households were the primary motivators for all the cool shit in town, like a 24 hour diner, bars without TVs, native plant nurseries, neighborhood/community art and writing projects, cooperative gardens, and those corner bakeries where if you volunteer to help out a couple of hours a week, you can get free bread. It had pockets of anarchists, open atheists, and self-proclaimed artists. Maybe, I thought, in a place like this, they could abide names like "Leaf". Where I grew up, if you'd named your kid that and sent her to public school, the kid was gonna get hit, physically or emotionally at least every week if not every day for no reason other than the residents' intolerant xenophobic inferiority complex attitude which caused them to necessarily hear names like "Leaf" as "My parents think they are better than you and yours (so please feel free to fuck with and/or smack me)."

I'd been living in Ann Arbor long enough to know that the exact context for judging the cruelty of her parents, my bosses, N____ and B_____ might need some adjustment. I hadn't thought I'd get culture shock moving from south of Boston to Ann Arbor. I knew the "r" thing would be a problem, but I had assumed it would be one way. I wasn't prepared for things like completely failing to understand a nurse's declaration to me that "mrrstrrr strrjrrs in room threethrrrrtifrrrr wants a vrrrrnrrrrs"

"So you go to school with Leaf?" I asked Eva. Eva filled me in on how Leaf was tormented by people at school and how Leaf herself was in fact quite mean to the few people who tried to be friends with her (like Eva). I couldn't help wondering if Leaf would've been less mean and less tormented had she been named something else. Spoiled, being raised by people who never matured past 17, and named as she was, it seemed to me Leaf was pretty much fucked from the word go.

I looked around the store, noting the nearly life-sized llama ("it's an alpaca!" N_____ had corrected), the half strung balinese instruments, the grateful dead batik-like printed wall hangings ("tapestries"), and the many mermaids, mercats, merdogs, and frogs holding mirrors hanging from fishing line from eyes N_____'s husband and store co-owner B_____ had screwed into the ceiling.

When they swung, I wondered how much coke B____ had done the day he installed them. I hardly ever stood under the large mermaid. Seeing others under it as its cracked and puttied body swung lazily over them made me feel a little funny, like the way you get when you're too close to the edge of a building.

Who the fuck would name their kid "Leaf", like a tree? These people would.

* = "Mister Sturgers in room three thirty four wants a Vernor's**"
** = Vernor's is a kind of ginger ale.

Douchebag du jour

There's a reason he's called "Twit Romney".

(Excerpts below from The Boston Globe)
Romney: Marriage needed for school fixes
By Jim Davenport, Associated Press Writer
February 22, 2007
GREENVILLE, S.C. --Republican Mitt Romney recited a schoolyard ditty Thursday to underscore his argument that traditional marriage is essential for improving education.

"First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage," the presidential hopeful told a crowd of about 175 people gathered at a private club.

The former Massachusetts governor said student success is closely tied to married couples getting involved in their children's education.
....
"Every child in America deserves a mom and a dad," Romney said. "We've got to have marriage before we have babies if we're going to have parental involvement in our schools."
...

My office smells like gingerbread, burnt things, and poop

"Do you smell something?" my office mate M asked me Tuesday when I was preparing for class.
"Nope, but I just came in and it's cold out. Give my nose a minute to thaw," I responded. I'm usually pretty sensitive to smell. I waited and worked.
About a half hour later, I left on an errand. When I got back to the office, I smelled it. Not strong but bad.
"Remember yesterday how I told you it smelled like poop over in the hallway?" M asked. I said I did. "I think someone tracked it in here" he explained. He then took me on a tour of the stains of the carpet.
I was doubtful that any of them were the source of a new smell as they all seemed somewhat familiar to me. Although who would know a new stain on that carpet?

"They're brown..." M said ominously, gesturing to a set of stains. We discussed the possibility that someone had walked into the room, was able to stand so close as to leave this stain by the door, then went over and stood by my desk, near the garbage can, and then settled with their feet stuck way under M's desk. We acted out various walking in and tracking poop scenarios, none of which seemed likely.

I left for class promising to bring in something to help with the smell. I had just the thing. My good friend cjblue had just visited me this weekend. She got her annual birthday mix CD (Funtastik mix - "with bagpipe action") and I got some very excellent gingerbread scented cleaning supplies. Only a friend who knows me as well as she does would understand that very cool scented cleaning supplies are not at all an odd present for me.

This morning I had to be on campus much later than I should ever be. I had to be in for a 9 AM meeting, which is about 2 hours earlier than I ever get onto campus even when I'm up early and moving fast. The morning is extremely unkind to my body*. Despite feeling like hell thawed out, I managed to get out and going with everything I needed, including my gingerbread scented heavy duty cleaning liquid tucked into my bag. I got in after the meeting and promptly dabbed cleaner onto the carpet (yep, I keep cleaning rags in my office).

"Oh that smells NICE!" M said as we cleaned. We made sure to hit all the stains he worried were the source of the stink. We turned off the fluorescent overhead lights and switched on the incandescent lamps. It felt cozy and nice in there until about 2:40.

At 2:30, my stomach had relented in its super bad cramping enough for me to consider putting food in it. I chose popcorn because it seemed to be the least offensive and immediate option. I remember as I put it in the microwave, I checked to see how long to put it in. I had a small conversation with M and the somewhat intimidated undergrad RA about it. "I have this habit of burning popcorn. The first time I met my mother's biological sister I burned it. It was embarassing, I was like 12 and the only one home when she got there...." I blathered on and in the popcorn went, set on "Popcorn" level. One minute into the cooking, I said "Shit, do you smell that?" My phone rang. It was A asking how I was feeling. "Um, better but I'm burning down my lab right now...can I call you back sweetie?"

I looked at the popcorn. The bag was just starting to puff up, not overcooked. "No really, it smells like wood burning." I decided it had to be the popcorn and stopped it. The bag was black in places and smoldering when I opened the oven. I immediately closed it, not wanting to set off the fire alarm. We emptied the trash can, poured whatever water we could find into it, and threw in the still smoldering and increasingly burnt looking bag. I stomped on it to sink it into the water. Finally it went out. But it still smelled like burning.

After M and I took the bag with burnt popcorn bag water in it out of the can and threw it away outside the building (dripping foul smelling burnt popcorn bag water all the way), we returned to the lab. I put the trash bag I had thrown onto the floor back into the can. While leaning down to do this, I was hit with the stink.
"Woah, it smells horrible!" I said.
"Yeah...you know, I smell the poop again!" M said.

We realized the trash can had been the source of the "poop smell" M had noticed. The trash can I had stepped in to put out the burning bag of popcorn. We emptied it of trash and poured in some gingerbread cleaner. And we waited.

At 4:30, when the fluorescent lights were back on, I was on my way out, and the undergrad was flirting with her boss - my recently engaged (and not to her) friend, we were still waiting.

I will reread this blog entry the next time I'm feeling even a little bit guilty about my preference for working at home.


*You can assume this is whiney overly sensitive bullshit, and if you do, keep it to yourself because I don't want to hear it. It's an unpleasant fact of my life and not some indulgent whim.

4 votes short

Senate Dems. Weigh New Iraq Restrictions
Sunday February 18, 2007
By Deb Riechmann, Associated Press Writer

The [US] House passed a nonbinding resolution Friday that rejected the president's 21,500-troop buildup in Iraq. The vote put Bush on the defensive going into a far more consequential confrontation over paying for the plan.

On Saturday, Senate Republicans foiled a Democratic bid to repudiate Bush's deployment of additional combat troops. The 56-34 vote fell four short of the 60 needed, but Democrats quickly claimed victory, noting that a majority of senators voted against the escalation.

And how did Senator Lieberman (Rat-Conn.) vote on this? If you're familiar with "Joe", I think you'll be able to guess how he voted. If you'd like to know how he and other US Seantors voted on this resolution, follow this link to the Boston Globe story.

Does anyone out there suffer under the delusion that CT is anything other than a rather large golf course for a clutch of robber baron fucks? If so, please allow me to correct that. First off, realize that CT elected Lieberman - AGAIN, despite having a much clearer idea this time where the senator's allegiances were. I suppose anyone with eyes could have seen it before, but you'd have to have deliberately looked a bit and for many reasons (some of them even really good reasons) people sometimes just don't look. But this last time, the true nature of Lieberman was pretty much in the faces of even the less deliberately attentive. And he won anyhow. I know there could be some reassurance in the fact that it wasn't a clear victory for him. There was a nice turn out of progressive voters who gave Lieberman a good run for his money (and it was a lot of money). But lacking any substantive evidence that this group is anything more than a completely unaffiliated set of inconsistent, unstable voters which includes in its ranks a large number of folks who know very little about candidates or races who lack national name recognition, I felt the minor bouyancy of seeing what had to be at best a pyrrhic victory for Lieberman was limited in scope and duration.

So while I am happy about outcomes like Joe Courtney beating Rob Simmons for the US House in the last election (because Simmons creeped me out in an X-files smoking man kind of way) I still feel unimpressed with CT's political leanings. I still feel that CT is a state of rich and/or well off bastards who manage to project a very superficial appearance of yankee-moderate values but who consistently vote craker, and of an unfortunately large number of apparently quite idiotic working poor (hey, I'm in that socio-economic group so yes, I'm knocking my peers here) who consistently vote like it's an act of sympathetic magic which will bestow upon them the affluence and dignity of the american dream they desperately, irrationally cling to.

Rescue poetry

I needed some rescuing and here it is. I wanted to share it with anyone else who might need it.





"This is for you" performed by Isaac Miller and Ulises Dorantes (and Cameron Bartolini, according to the title on the video)
2005 National Youth Poetry Slam Finalists

Comments

The blog has been returned to moderated comments.

I usually enjoy seeing evidence that someone is out there, but if that someone is simply using my blog to sell crap, that's a little less enjoyable.
So, if you're a real person who's not peddling shit, please excuse the inconvenience.

man of the house

Ever look up your town on Wikipedia? Not long ago, I looked up a place I was living in and discovered what was apparently some intense rivalry between the north side of town and the south side of town. And there I was, a city slicker interloper not even knowing they HAD distinctions like "side of town" in the little bitty antique filled hamlets around my campus.

I have since moved to something more like a city. It has sidewalks here and there, a bus line, and grocery stores it doesn't take a half a tank of gas to get to. Overall, I like my new place pretty well. But having had such an enlightening experience with the prior wikisearch, on a whim tonight I decided to look up my new town. And here's something I found which is really outstanding.

On my town's wikipage, "As of the census of 2000....There were 23,197 households out of which 28.2% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 43.8% were married couples living together, 13.0% had a female householder with no husband present, and 39.6% were non-families. 31.1% of all households were made up of individuals and 10.1% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.32 and the average family size was 2.93.

"13.0% had a female householder with no husband present?" My god, it's a town full of loose women. No wonder I like it.

I smacked (into) a guy on campus today. I had just come from proctoring an exam of about 13 students for an hour and a half while the professor sat at the front of the room engrossed in an article. He sat and read while I stood and walked. I kept thinking "what the hell did he need a proctor for???" About 20 minutes in, my hip decided this much standing was not ok for us to do. And then my knee got in on the action. When I finished 50 or so minutes later, I was sore and cranky on my walk back to my office. It was then that I met the fellow. He was coming down the middle of the slushy sidewalk, totally failing to acknowledge the presence of another person moving towards him. I have a problem with people who can't be bothered to exercise even that basic level of awareness which would normally cause someone to change trajectory even just a little to accomodate another non-intrusive seeming person. Especially when it's not crowded or congested and there's plenty of room for everyone to have his or her space. And very especially when the other person is walking slowly and stiffly, you know, possibly in pain or something.

I see these men get out of the way of other men. I know they do because I've tried it. I walk with a man on the inside, the fuckheads get out of the way. I walk with me on the inside, they don't. I get very sick of this shit. As I passed this fuckhead today, I didn't squeeze over into the snow drift to get out of his way. He stayed his middle of the sidewalk course and I felt his coat brush my side, the side with the bad hip. So I checked him.

For something like the 80th time, I considered getting a cane. It won't help much in the snow and I have no idea if it would make walking any less painful for me, but it would at least be a signal for people to not expect me to dance lithely around their ignorant, unaccomodating asses. And, should they fail to notice not just another person walking but another person walking with a cane, I would have something to hit them with other than my shoulder or elbow.

Snow day

I am enjoying a snow day. Today's snow cancelled two otherwise likley intolerable meetings on campus - which is well worth the digging and chipping out I will have to do later today or tomorrow.

I slept in way past a decent hour and am currently looking at the pile of quizzes and homeworks I should be grading, looking at but not doing because the snow has slowed so much down that I feel like I can sit snuggly warm in my apartment meandering around the internet, occasionally looking at things that are relevant to my living (i.e. teaching and research) but mostly not.

The sound of music

The hazardous side effects of a new alarm clock include having jimmy fucking buffett stuck in my head all damned day.

Music is still tending to lodge itself in very great detail more often than what had been normal for me. I'm not sure I can do the "hum the themes to Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Wars without mixing them up or failing to recall one" trick so perhaps it's faded a bit from where it was a few months back. However, recently beyond the mandatory recall issue, how I experience music when I hear it has changed some. It's hard to describe. Essentially, it's more. E.g., music that annoys me I find is nearly physically painful to continue to listen to. Not a big deal, just turn it off, right? Well sometime's you just can't at that particular moment.

That's what happened today. A few days ago it was the station my bathroom radio was set to started playing some seriously fucked up jazz. And I was stuck in the shower. Although that certainly lasted longer than this morning's blast of margaritaville, the jazz shower was not as bad as today's music misery moment, which has etched each note, each progression, each inflection, and all the unfortunate overlaps and acoustic collisions onto my defenseless early morning brain.

tea bag fuck up

I don't adhere to a whole lot of beauty product. I have stuff, but in general I consider all but a basic moisterizer and a face cleanser which a dermatologist insisted I use (because the regular shit was ripping up my face) more or less dispensable.

So I don't have eye cream, firming gels, exfoliants, royal anything that came out of a bee's ass, lip venom, lightening creams, darkening sprays, and so on.

If I'm wanting to exfoliate or tighten my pores or whathaveyou, I am as likely to make something out of ingredients in my house as I am to buy a product. Usually the results are innocuous if not better than what I'd get with a $50 wee bottle of synthetic goop.

That said, this evening as I was washing my face I happened to remember a completely terrible outcome of a home "beauty aid". It involved tea bags.

You know the classic cucumber slices on the eyes, hair in rollers, mud mask look? Have you ever wondered about the cucumbers? They are supposed to reduce puffiness. Well, there is another version of that putting things on your eyes to reduce puffiness trick which calls for tea bags.

Many years ago when I was living in Michigan, I developed a seasonal allergy. It involved my eyes pretty much exclusively. They'd puff up so bad they were practically swollen shut every morning for a few weeks in the late summer. Having never had seasonal allergies, it took me some time to realize this was what was going on. In the meantime, I was just stuck with puffy sore eyes. I thought "Oh I read something about putting tea bags on your eyes when they are puffy" and I promptly got some tea bags cooking. I let them cool off, then applied them to my eyes.

After a short time I took them off and looked in the mirror to discover bruise-like rings around both of my eyes. No, they weren't tea dyed. They were covered in dark purple-red bruising. I showed my (now ex) husband, Dr. Flounder. He was horrified and amused, but could offer no explanation. "My god, people are going to think I hit you!" he exclaimed. Ah Bob was a sensitive soul.

It didn't take long for the bruising to go away. It's possible a different tea wouldn't do that but you know, I'm just not planning to go there again.

So I'm wondering. Anyone ever heard of this happening ever? Possible explanations will be entertained. Post them in the comments section.