Changes hurt my brain

Well, I mean, some changes. Today my father brought my sculpture over to my new apartment, and it's the first thing your eye falls on when you walk inside. It makes me completely happy. That is a change that does not hurt my brain.

However, this new apartment, despite its beautiful perfection, is not without its problems. I was pleased upon arriving here to find that the linen closet in the bathroom has one of those adorable little pull-down doors in it, do you know what I'm talking about? There is a handle, and you pull it down and chuck your dirty laundry inside the bottom half of the linen closet? You know?

I love this. I have always wanted one of these. (Do you know what I'm talking about?) I am much more motivated than I have ever been before, to put my dirty laundry in its designated place. I am even more motivated than I was when I was little and putting the laundry in the hamper meant my mother would do it for me. When I lived at the dorms and in previous apartments, I mostly just threw my dirty clothes in a corner close to where my laundry bag was, and then when the pile of dirty clothes got big enough that it made me unhappy, I did a couple of loads of laundry.

Now, I never see how big my pile of laundry is. I never see it at all. It's very weird and I'm having a hard time adjusting. This morning I got up and tried to find the shirt I wanted, and it wasn't anywhere. I searched in my closet, and then I searched through all the drawers in my chest of drawers, and then I searched in the pile of clothes I really need to hand-wash (I will soon!), and then I searched through all my unpacked boxes. And finally I sat down sadly and tried to live with the realization that the shirt was gone forever.

"How can it be missing?" I asked my cuddly Harrod's teddy bear, who is called Basil Bear. Baz had no answers for me. "HOW?" I cried. "I DO NOT EVEN HAVE ANY BIG PILES OF DIRTY LAUNDRY LIKE NORMAL. WHY AM I BEING PUNISHED FOR MY CLEANLINESS?"

Which is when I remembered about the pile of laundry tidily hidden behind the little door in my bathroom. Baz didn't really deserve to be yelled at (but I really like that shirt, and I am on the rag, so you can understand how this all went down).

How to cook

The key, of course, is to not cook for several months between attempts. In this way it becomes possible to forget the abject, multilayered misery that happens when you cook a new thing. Like maybe wait three months. After three months it is possible for me to tell myself that I have been exaggerating my loathing for cooking. You know, for comedic effect. So today I cooked a new chicken spaghetti thing. It looked very easy. Ho, ho, ho.

I cut up the chicken first. This went really smoothly, despite my hatred for touching raw meat, and I was feeling fantastic about myself and my cooking abilities, so I bravely went ahead and put the olive oil on to heat up. I didn't know olive oil had to heat up. I would have totally dumped the chicken into the skillet first, piece by piece as I cut it up, and worried about the olive oil when I started cooking the chicken.

Then I chopped up the garlic. I figured, since I had already cut the chicken successfully, theoretically the most traumatic part of the process, I could now give myself a prize by doing something super easy and fun. My sister has recently discovered that she owns a vegetable chopper, and all you have to do to work it, is slam it up and down repeatedly, and the garlic becomes chopped automatically. Like magic!

First problem, of course: I didn't bring over the garlic I bought. Of course. I looked and looked all over for garlic and couldn't find any, and after three terrifying - because! the olive oil was already on the skillet which meant TOO LATE to go buy/pick up garlic - minutes I found some, and I got going with the chopping. V. easy and fun. I was feeling totally great, and then I took the chopper apart to wash it and couldn't get it back together again. Every time I tried, it started making horrifying noises SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK (sorry, Robyn!), and I couldn't get it to go back together. At all. It looked all broken and tragic, and after innumerable efforts to mend it while retaining my equanimity, I started to cry because not only was I failing at cooking, but I was also failing at being a good sister. Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

I know this is stupid, but I am writing this while the chicken is simmering in the kitchen, mostly to stave off the moment when I have to cook the pasta, and it still feels v. upsetting right now - anyway, I finally sorted the stupid chopper and carried on cooking the chicken, and I put too much goddamn spice on it. I put the right amount from the recipe, but I guess I had the wrong proportions, so the basil and blackened thingy were just way too much, and my whole house smells like basil. Way too much basil. I am gagging on basil right now. I poured in the tomatoes, covered it, and disconsolately wandered over to write a complainy blog post.

There always comes a time like this, when I am cooking something. I reach a point where I hate the food I am cooking, truly hate it, probably as much as Fred Phelps hates the gays - IF NOT MORE - and I can see why, if these are truly the emotions he possesses, he chooses to send his family out picketing all over the place with his hatred of the gays, and if I could do that with my hatred of the food and not be ridiculous (a challenge Fred Phelps faces too - and does not manage to surmount), I would totally do it at this point in the process. At this point I am ready to take the whole pan and pour it into the trash and sit down and cry for a little while, and ultimately go get take-out.

No idea how the food turned out. I haven't tasted it. The house smells like basil and I don't expect great things out of the chicken spaghetti. But I am going to go make pasta anyway, because I've started and it's too late to stop now.

So there are people living in this town who have leashes

FOR THEIR BUNNIES.

And in case that was too confusing, what with the sentence being split between the subject line and the post itself, I'll tell you again. Yesterday I saw a guy and a girl, and the girl was cuddling a bunny, and that was sweet, but the guy was, I swear to God, holding one end of a leash and the other end of the leash was attached to a bunny. Or, I don't know if I can even call it a leash, because it had a little harness on it, which went over the bunny's head and under its little front legs.

If you think about this, it's really great that the guy and the girl have found each other. I don't expect there are that many bunny-leash enthusiasts in this world, and really, what are the odds of finding a mate who is willing to walk outside with you while you wait for your leashed bunny to have a poo, let alone one who is willing to actually hold one end of a leash whose other end is attached to a pooping bunny? The guy and the girl both had a bunny, and both bunnies had a harness leash, and they were in public. People could SEE THEM taking their bunnies out for a poo. (Like me.)

There's this too: In order for the bunny-leash freaks to have purchased this harness leash thing for their bunnies, harness leashes for bunnies had to already exist. Think about that. Someone, somewhere, thought, Hey, you know what we need? Leashes for bunnies! So people can walk their bunnies!, and they thought that this was a pressing enough need that it would be safe to manufacture them en masse. AND THEY WERE RIGHT. Chilling.

Don't get me wrong. I am all in favor of restraining your bunny. The people across the street from where I used to live had this bunny and they let it run free, and the bunny was a great big rapist and it used to sneak up behind the neighborhood cats and start humping them. Its name was Bubbles. One time during the St. Patrick's Day parade a drunk guy saw me near my house and hollered "YOUR BUNNY'S HUMPING THE CAT." He was drunk, but not drunk enough to have forgotten that the proper place for pet bunnies is in a cage. And I think that's a useful lesson for all of us.

Seriously, bunny-leash freaks. The proper place for a pet bunny is in a cage. Just clean out the damn cage. That is what all the other pet bunny owners of this world are doing. Not letting their bunnies roam free. Not putting them on weird harness leashes. They are keeping them in cages like you do guinea pigs, and if you think this is mean to the bunny, the obvious solution is DO NOT HAVE A BUNNY AS A PET.

People whose fault it is

So I just bought ninety books over the past few days, right? Of which about forty-two are books that I’ve never read before, but presumably I want to read them because I bought them. They are sitting in my living room in an appealing stack, waiting to be put on a shelf that has not yet been moved into my apartment because it is large and heavy and I’m not strong and I don’t have a truck or a dolly. And I decided very reasonably that what I would do is, I would read all the books I currently have checked out of the library, and when I had finished them, I would return them all, and when I had returned them all, I would start reading my nice new books. I figured this would take a little while because some of the books I have out of the library are huge and long, like the biography of Edward Murrow (which is awesome by the way), but that is not a big deal because my library book bazaar books belong to me and I do not have a deadline for reading them.

Today I returned three of the books to the library. I had read one of them a few days ago so it was well time to get rid of it, and I read the other two over the weekend. I felt like this was excellent progress on my part, bringing my total number of checked-out library books down from fourteen to eleven, a major step in achieving my goal of returning all of my books, a total library book reduction of just over twenty percent. And do you know what I did then? I went and checked out THREE MORE BOOKS. It was totally counterproductive, and here’s who I blame it on:

1. Michael Sera for being funny in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and making me want to read the book and see how it compares.
2. Kirkus Reviews for calling Thursday’s Children “goopy treacle” – you can shut your face, okay? – and comparing it unfavorably with some other book about dancing, rendering it necessary for me to check the other book about dancing out of the library to check that it isn’t better than Thursday’s Children, which I seriously doubt that it is. And anyway Thursday’s Children is not goopy treacle and it does have substance. And charm. So there.
3. Also: the author of the other book about dancing, for being from Baton Rouge and writing about a book about a Louisiana girl. Way to make your book irresistible to me.
4. My grandmother for taking me to Barnes & Noble one time and letting me loose to wander around, notice Merlin Holland’s excellent The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, and fall into a mad and relentless obsession with Oscar Wilde, and subsequently into lesser but related obsessions with gender issues, sexual ethics, and the Victorians.
5. Also: my therapist parents for talking about mental health all the time so that now I am obsessed with that too.
6. Also: book blogs for writing appealing reviews that deal with Victorian-era women who are unhappy in their marriages and go see neurologists to help them deal with their mental issues.

THANKS A LOT, Y’ALL.

(No, but really: thanks a lot. I am looking forward to reading these books. Especially the book about dancing because I am interested to see how it compares – not because I am determined to reject it in comparison with Thursday’s Children although I am certain that it won’t be as good – just because I like it when somebody compares two books and then I read them both and decide what I think. Like that time someone said Geek Love was a way better circus book than Water for Elephants and I read them both and decided I should just stick to Circus Shoes and never again venture out into the world of circus books.)

Keyboard shortcuts

When I was a junior, I took this class called "Computer Applications" that was essentially all about teaching you how to use Microsoft Office. It was great. There were all these assignments to do, and you were supposed to do one every class period, but instead of that I did like six every class period until I ran out of assignments, and then for the rest of the semester, I would just print out a completed assignment at the start of class and spend the rest of the day reading up on whatever I was interested in just then - Scopes trial, French literature, whatever. This was before the Oscar Wilde thing happened unfortunately. Er, but anyway, the one thing this class did teach me - apart from reinforcing the lesson that IT IS AWESOME TO FINISH EARLY, which I have known since I was five but it is no longer any use to me now that I am a grown-up - is a lot of keyboard shortcuts. I am a keyboard shortcuts goddess.

Keyboard shortcuts are something like the elusive One Best Way my family is always pursuing, except that unlike the One Best Way, which is constantly under debate, keyboard shortcuts are indubitably much quicker and easier. Like when I discovered that Ctrl and K brings up hyperlinks, holy shit, that was a good day. I put hyperlinks in emails and Word documents all the time, and I used to hate it. NOW I LOVE IT. I'm just all, Ctrl K, Ctrl V, Enter, bam, done; and then I look around for a Staples button to emphasize the awesomeness (you cannot do Ctrl and K in Blogger although I deeply wish you could).

But sometimes keyboard shortcuts make my life hard. It more and more frequently happens that I accidentally press Ctrl and + at the same time. (The grey matter in my fingers evidently thinks this is funny.) For those of you who don't know, pressing Ctrl and + at the same time when you are on Mozilla makes the font bigger. I love that Mozilla has these handy shortcuts and everything but it freaks me the shit out when the font gets bigger. I do it without noticing ALL THE TIME, and then when I go back to Google and run a search (Alt and Home, I love you, Firefox), and discover that the font size is too big, I have a humongous internal tantrum. Like this: OH MY GOD GOOGLE IS RUINED SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED TO GOOGLE AND IT IS RUINED FOREVER MY PLEASING FONT SIZE IS GONE OH GOD OH GOD NOTHING GOOD WILL EVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

As you see I am very emotional about this. I use Google all the time, and it turns out I am deeply invested in maintaining its regular font size. I just can't press Ctrl and - fast enough, and then I have to collapse against my computer desk for a little while, in relief that the world has been restored to normalcy. I don't know why it's such a problem, as the font is the same; still, one size larger IT IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE.

Flashbacks to childhood

Today at work we had to take pictures for our website, and when we got through I felt like going home and eating a gallon of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I had no idea I had such memories of humiliation from taking school pictures. I was joking to everyone about hating taking pictures, as I do, but then when it was really my turn to be photographed, I remembered exactly why. It was like someone had shoved me in a time machine and tossed me back to being nine years old. Totally against my will, I think I need hardly say.

When I was in elementary school and they would do our school pictures, the photographer would always click, click, click, get through all my classmates. But that never happened with me. The photographer (it was always a dude) would say “Smile for Barney!” which made me want to bite, and he would take the picture. He would scrutinize the camera critically, then say, “Okay, sweetie, one more. Cheese!” At this point I would still be capable of lying to myself that the picture was bad because he’d mentioned Barney and I was seven or eight and thus far too mature for Barney, and I had made a bad smile out of annoyance. Click. Examine. Dubious suggestion that we try it again. (Here my self-deception about Barney began to break down.) Click. Scrutinize. Repeat. I honestly don’t know if this happened to everybody – it seemed to only be me – but it has evidently left scars.

(I will say that my sister Bonnie always took ages to get her picture finished. However, I believe this was due to her refusal to cooperate, because I remember one particular instance where she irritated the short bald photographer so much that he turned red like a short bald tomato and screamed at her for five minutes before carrying on.)

I take terrible pictures. It is just a fact of life. But I feel very wretched when I have to take a picture, just me by myself, and the person taking the picture makes four or five or ten valiant tries to get a good one, then finally gives up in despair and assures me the one they have is pretty, which – I can tell by their faces and I know from experience – it never, ever is. I try and try to convey to them that there will never be a good picture, so they might as well settle for the first bad one and spare me the extended flashbacks to my childhood trauma. It’s pointless because nobody ever believes me. They always want to be all Oh I’m sure that’s not true (yes it certainly is true), and furthermore they think that they will be the one to change my mind for me by taking the most beautiful picture ever. It's sweet but they are always, always wrong.

Jenny's Choice

Oh, God, this is cruel.

I don’t know if this happens to everyone, but it often happens to me that I will be mildly interested in something – like, I don’t know, code-breaking, or early 20th century science fiction. Then suddenly, upon the smallest provocation, instead of being mildly interested, I will be wildly interested (oo, it rhymes). It's like I leaned too close to the source of contagion, and bam, I caught obsession. After this happens I will be like a ravening fiend for a while, reading more and more and more books about that thing. Oscar Wilde was, of course, a particularly epic example of this.

So recently I have become wildly interested in World War II, specifically the Brits during World War II. I have all these books about them out of the library, and I’ve made a massive list of other books I will want to read when I have finished reading the books that I have already. Including a biography of Edward Murrow, which I really is only tangentially related to the Brits during WWII, but whatever. I cannot get enough of books about the British home front during WWII at the moment.

However. In my innocent attempts to find digital primary sources about Edward Murrow during the war (P.S. This is sweet.), I happened across the Harvard Library’s digital collections, which as you may imagine are not insubstantial. And I thought, Oh, hey, well, I will just glance through these quickly to see what they’ve got, and when I am done with the British home front I will some ideas about what interesting primary documents I feel like reading next.

I realize now that this was foolish. I realize the whole notion of finding primary sources that had been digitized for my viewing pleasure was never going to be quick and simple. I obviously completely forgot what sort of a person I am; viz., an obsessive completist who will not settle for glancing over any single collections of digital archives, and who will now probably spend ages and ages checking out the digital archives of other major universities and having this whole problem much exacerbated.

Be that as it may, you will just not believe what the Harvard Law Library has on their website. IT IS LIKE THEY ARE CALLING OUT TO ME. It is a great big digital collection called “Studies in Scarlet”, and it is a whole bunch of, I swear to God, trial narratives printed in the US or UK from 1815 to 1914, all relating to marriage and sexuality. There’s over 400 of them. Over four hundred Victorian trial narratives relating to marriage and sexuality. I want to French-kiss Harvard Law School. I believe it is possible that Harvard Law School has a crush on me, and has chosen to court me by making these things available and waiting for me to come to it. This is Harvard Law School’s attempt to do a John Cusack to win my heart.

NOW I DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO. I cannot decide which obsession I want to go with. It is early days yet in my British home front obsession: I have only read a few books, and although I have made a list, I have not yet acquired all the books on it. I could still swerve away and do the sex trials instead. (There’s one about Lady Colin Campbell.) Britain was so inspirational – but sex trials are fascinating and hilarious.

Anyone have any thoughts? I will be quoting some set of people to you endlessly in the weeks to come, on the phone, in person, via email and IM, probably on Facebook – would you rather it was staunch Londoners who will never surrender, or prissy Victorian judges who think orgasm is a dirty word? (No, but really though – during the Salome libel trial when someone said orgasm, the prosecutor was all “What’s that? What’s that word? Some unnatural vice?”)

Why is it Thursday?

Why is it Thursday?

I don’t feel like Thursday today. You know how sometimes it’s some day, and you just really, really, really don’t feel like having that day right then? That’s how I feel today. Every time I look at my calendar I feel displeased. Thursday. Bah. I would have changed it to Friday, just to make myself feel better, but I couldn’t because the Friday shoe is so ugly. I’m so unwilling to have Thursday that I would actually rather it be Wednesday than Thursday (setting myself one day further back from the weekend), except that of course, that would then mean that I’d have to have Thursday all over again.

For a lot of today, I was trying to decide why this should be. I like Thursday usually. It’s not one of those days of the week where I feel depressed. The Office comes on Thursdays. Thursday is only one day away from a weekend. At Essex I had Thursdays completely off. There are three books I like a lot with Thursday in the title – Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child (bless Noel Streatfeild), G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (a line that speaks to my soul: “We have abolished Right and Wrong.” “And right and left,” said Syme with a simple eagerness, “I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.”) and Rumer Godden’s marvelous Thursday’s Children. Thanksgiving, the only day of the year that I get my uncle Mark’s wonderful dirty rice, is on a Thursday. British elections are held on Thursdays, and God knows I love elections. Both of the Brownings were born on Thursdays.

Well, hey, that really helped. I feel a lot better now. Thursday!

Betrayed

So I'm sitting here, editing some stuff for work, watching Doctor Who, and taking an occasional break to watch a Tale of Mere Existence, the existence of which I have only just recently remembered, because I was thinking about the approximately twenty-second space of time at age thirteen during which I questioned my sexuality, and it reminded me of that video about a pickle, and I tracked it down. And anyway, I've been doing that, and eating pistachios, and I was reading the thing I'm editing, and I pulled a pistachio out of the bag and popped open the shell and bit down on what was inside the shell and IT WAS ANOTHER SHELL.

ANOTHER SHELL.

It was an unpleasant surprise, and I spat it out really fast, and it got on my coat.

See, what had happened was that a small full shell had fallen into a large open empty one. And upon reflection, it's not really fair for me to feel betrayed by this, because I am always so pleased to find pistachios in the bag that have fallen out of their shells. And this is the flip side of that.

Why Thanksgiving is troublesome

In the first place, people are always saying you can't start singing Christmas carols until after Thanksgiving. Though this is obvious bullshit I have heard it many a time, even from people who like Christmas. See, but if Thanksgiving didn't exist, they would have to say can't sing Christmas carols until after Halloween, or at a stretch, until after Veterans' Day. That would be obviously better!

Thanksgiving is just a general placeholder for when Christmas things can't happen before. (A syntactically bewildering sentence there.) No Thanksgiving means no unpleasant deadline to which we would have to pay attention. Christmas festivities could begin whenever the hell we want, which they already do for me, but there are just so many people who feel bound by the not-before-Thanksgiving rule.

But I actually started writing this post for a reason that has nothing to do with Christmas, which is turkey commercials. When Thanksgiving gets close people start having these horrible turkey commercials with people doing lots of horrible things to raw turkeys. These commercials are uniformly so incredibly vile that they trigger my gag reflex, and I have to swallow frantically and turn the TV off. NO MORE RAW TURKEY COMMERCIALS. If I wanted to see that crap, I would watch the beginning of Pieces of April. UGH.

...I don't hate Thanksgiving really. It's always nice to get together with the family and eat lots of foods. Especially when there is dirty rice. I just wish people didn't get all hatey about Christmas until Thanksgiving is over. I get excited about Christmas way before Thanksgiving shows up.

A terrible combination

God gifted me with optimism, and then combined it with a terrible sense of direction. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Today I walked to Wal-Mart to do my shopping, all part of my general plan to walk places when they are within walking distance, and it was a tiresome walk, let me tell you. The recent hurricane has caused a great deal of debris to build up on the sides of the roads, and every time I would reach a massive pile of debris in my path, obscuring the sidewalk or stretch of lawn I was walking on, I would have to stop and wait for the oncoming traffic to let up enough that I could go around (on the street). And it was rush hour. So tricky.

Well, on the way back, laden with heavy groceries, I thought I'd be all crafty and take one of the side streets, and it would go around through a nice neighborhood and eventually lead back to the main road, and then I'd have avoided all the debris areas until I got back to the portion of the road that had sidewalks. I didn't know the neighborhood at all, but I thought, Well, hey, all roads lead to Rome, right?

And I walked, and I walked - it was a nice neighborhood - and I walked and I walked, and a busload of interested young children went past me and pointed at me (I waved at them cheerfully because I was cleverly avoiding debris and getting groceries and saving the environment). After a while, I had still found no road leading back to the main road, and I was beginning to suspect there never would be one. So I turned around and started heading back, all the long way back to where I had originally come into the neighborhood. It was very, very long. The bus full of children passed me up again. They were still all pointing and interested but I was like MOVE ALONG YA LITTLE FUCKERS, THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

Of course when I got back to the main road and looked back in dismay at the neighborhood that had totally failed to help me, that was when I noticed the NO OUTLET sign. Damn neighborhood. No outlet indeed. I was about ready to get a bulldozer and MAKE a damn outlet. Shit.

Inarguably reasonable

No. I know I've said this before but I really mean it this time. I am reasonably cranky and no reasonable person can think otherwise.

I went to the library, and I really wanted to get a couple of Martin Millar's other books, because Neil Gaiman says glowing things about Martin Millar, and I quite enjoyed The Good Fairies of New York (it was charming, and I would like to read it again), so I looked him up and found that only one other of his books is at the library. Which was a little sad, and I felt sad, but I also appreciate that a library has a limited budget and cannot be expected to have all the books that every author has written who is liked by Neil Gaiman.

Goddamn book wasn't there, and neither was the damn Good Fairies one which I wanted to reread. I searched and searched and searched. I searched under Millar; and then, because Millar is a weird spelling, I searched extensively under Miller; and then, because Martin can also be a last name, I searched under Martin. I searched under paperback, and I searched under young adults, and I searched under young adult paperback. I searched under romance, which I am pretty sure Lonely Werewolf Girl is not, and I searched under graphic novels, which it is also not, and I searched under fantasy/sci-fi, and all of this searching was wholly fruitless. So instead of reading that, I read The Interloper.

Which was, frankly, kinda creepy.

And now instead of being curled up in bed halfway through Lonely Werewolf Girl, I am sitting here, finished with and kinda creeped out and dismayed by The Interloper, typing a cranky blog post about the failure of either me as a searcher or one or more library employees as shelvers. Besides which, if I'm being honest, I feel annoyed with Martin Millar for having a name that is one letter away from being an extremely ordinary name, thereby making finding his books unnecessarily difficult. You know what, Martin Millar? I don't care if this does force me to use the Unreasonable Crankiness tag also! Your name is very trying! You should just - you should either get a name that is properly distinguishable from other people's, like Vladimir Nabokov or hell, like Neil Gaiman, or you should spell your very-close-to-ordinary name the ordinary way so that nobody will get confused and lose track of your books. So there.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO LEAVE ME ALOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE

I am TRYING to catch UP on my WRITING right now and I CANNOT BECAUSE SOMEONE'S PHONE KEEPS BEEPING.

It is someone in my family's phone, because the noise is coming from my living room. And it's very disruptive. I sit down at the computer desk all writey-brain and earnest, and I type for a little while, and then Bdoobdoobdoo goes something in the living room. Since it's obviously a phone alerting me to the fact that a call has been missed, I go into the living room and try to find the stupid thing and track it down by its bdoobdoobdoo, which of course by now has ceased. But I'm tenacious, and I don't want anyone missing calls, or losing a phone, so I hunt all over the living room trying to find the stupid thing and hoping it's going to make the noise again and clue me in to its approximate location.

Nothing.

So off I trot back to the computer and sit down all writey-brain and earnest once again, and I swear to God the phone knows when I have done this because it immediately goes bdoobdoobdoo again, and because I CANNOT LEAVE RINGING PHONES ALONE I go running back into the living room to try and find it again.

But with a less firm grip on my sanity this time.

This time I'm all Where are you phone? and Speak again bright angel but OF COURSE IT WILL NOT so because I'm tenacious as previously mentioned and I (ohforGod'ssakeitjusthappenedagain and IlookedandIlookedalloveragainandit'snowhere) keep searching but the phone is not anywhere, and I look down the sides of the new recliner and I shake up all the sofa cushions that my mother has fluffed all pretty earlier today because darling tim! is coming! to visit!, and I find a pair of my pants that somebody has inexplicably hidden there but no phone, and I fling magazines about searching even though I know I'm just making my life difficult and I will have to clean up again or else explain to tim that the reason the house is so messy is that THERE WAS A PHONE A PHONE A PHONE and I could not escape from its hateful bdoobdoobdoo noises

And I actually sat down in the stupid living room and read a book for twenty minutes because I was hoping the phone would do the noise BUT IT DID NOT, and SOMEBODY IS CALLING US RIGHT NOW and THEY CANNOT GET THROUGH and WHAT IF THE ONLY NUMBER THEY HAVE IS THAT PHONE NUMBER AND SOMETHING REALLY TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED?

I need to go do some diaphwagmatic bweathing.

I really love Shakespeare

Like, hey. William Shakespeare. What a cool guy. I like him for very many reasons, like because he writes good. And because I read this book that said he was probably Catholic. Catholic! Woohoo! And I am Catholic! UP WITH PAPISTRY!!! And because, okay, he was this random-ass Stratford kid who came to London to make his fortune and he wound up being the greatest writer ever. And because he was total actor scum and he was all writing plays just to pull in the groundlings; and because SUCK IT ROBERT GREENE.

And because this is from a play of his that is supposed to be a crap one (Troilus and Cressida):

Margarelon: Turn, slave, and fight!
Thersites: What art thou?
Margarelon: A bastard son of Priam's.
Thersites: I am a bastard too; I love bastards; I am a bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in every thing illegitimate. One bear will not bite another, and wherefore should one bastard? Take heed, the quarrel's most ominous to us: if the son of a whore fights for a whore, he tempts judgment: farewell, bastard.

And also this is too:

Thersites: Agamemnon is a fool to command Achilles; Achilles is a fool to be commanded of Agamemnon; Thersites is a fool to serve such a fool; and Patroclus is a fool positive.
Patroclus: Why am I a fool?
Thersites: Make that demand to the Creator. It suffices me thou art.

And because, hello? Mercutio? How much does Mercutio rock? I know everyone loves it when he tells Tybalt "Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives", but I seriously love it when he tells Tybalt that.

Sidebar: Tybalt's such a ridiculous person. Do you get the feeling that Tybalt was the loser Capulet cousin when he was younger? Like at Capulet family reunions Tybalt was the one who got teased for sucking his thumb and wasn't allowed to play on the swing set with all the other little Capulets even though he really wanted to because they thought it was funny when his face turned all red and he started pulling up grass and throwing it all around and trying to hit everyone with sticks? And then when he grew up he started to be all like NOBODY MESSES WITH THE TYBALT but everyone still kinda made fun of him behind his back? I know Juliet's officially upset when Romeo kills him and she's all "who else is living if those two are gone?" but she gets over it pretty fast once she figures out Romeo's alive; and I'm thinking her initial reaction is a little overdone on account of she secretly feels guilty for that time at the last Capulet crawfish boil when Tybalt caught her laughing helplessly at Sampson's Little Tybalt in a Tantrum impression.

And don't get me started on Malvolio, or Sir Andrew Aguecheek. I can't even remotely read or watch Twelfth Night with a straight face.

Oh my God, and that scene in The Tempest where Miranda sees all the people for the first time? I love that scene. Actually I love The Tempest generally. One time I saw a glorious production of it at the Globe, and Ferdinand shook my hand because I was a groundling and it was for sure the best play I have ever seen ever.

Well, whatever. I won't go on. I love me some William Shakespeare. I sometimes have anxiety about what I will say when I run into him accidentally-on-purpose in heaven. Because, you know, I don't want to be like DUDE I AM YOUR BIGGEST FAN because a, I don't think that's true, and b, I bet he gets that all the time, and c, I want to say something much cooler than that. I'm just afraid that in the moment I'll forget the cool thing that I have prepared to say (I'm sure I'll think of something before I die, but if not I'll just avoid Shakespeare until I've got something good), and end up looking like a dumbass. In front of William Shakespeare! Nobody wants that.

However, if there is any justice, my pal Will will know about all the times I got really upset when other people made fun of him. Like today we were discussing Herman Melville's thing about Hawthorne's short stories, and Melville gets persnickety about how everyone admires Shakespeare so much, when there are other writers that are just as good if everyone would just admit it. I know this isn't making fun of Shakespeare in any way, but it still kind of pissed me off. I was feeling belligerent, and if Melville had been right there, I would have probably made a rude noise at him and flicked him in the face.

All through class I kept thinking angry thoughts about the mean things I would say to Melville if I ever got the chance, and then I started thinking about other people who have had some nasty things to say about Shakespeare, like Robert Greene and Samuel Johnson. And you know, that's all fine because I can write them off. Robert Greene, does it make you sad that the only reason anyone knows who you are anymore is that they think it's hilarious that you got all snarky about The Greatest Playwright of All Time. This is like that time that Alfred Douglas renounced homosexuality forever and converted to (I'm sorry to admit) Catholicism, and then got remembered only because of having lots of gay sex in his youth. Teehee.

And as for Samuel Johnson, you know, WHATEVER, Samuel Johnson, your dictionary was NOT THAT GOOD.

But here's something sad. Neil Gaiman – you know Neil Gaiman that I love? – had several bits about William Shakespeare in his Sandman that made me feel really, really sad. In Sandman, William Shakespeare is just a nothing writer until he makes a deal with Dream, and Dream gives him the power to write super duper good, in exchange for which he has to write two plays just for Dream (A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest). I feel torn about this. On one hand, I love the scene where Dream goes to get The Tempest from Shakespeare. It's a poignant coda, and I love Dream to shreds. But mainly I am just upset that Neil Gaiman's effectively talking trash about Shakespeare.

I know! It's fiction! Obviously Shakespeare did not really make a deal with Dream! Nevertheless I find it upsetting how Neil Gaiman that I love is making unpleasant insinuations about William Shakespeare that I also love. If I meet Neil Gaiman I won't mention it, but whenever I read these bits of Sandman I feel like Neil Gaiman is a big bully using his Writerly Awesomeness to make people think unpleasant things about Shakespeare. Inside my head I'm definitely being Tybalty and going, "Quit it, Neil! Cut it OUT! I didn't do anything to you! You're being REALLY IMMATURE! LEAVE ME ALONE!" while Neil Gaiman continues, relentlessly, to have written unpleasant things about my boy Shakespeare.

Well, it's official

I just fell in love with Angel.

I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS. I have things to do! Papers to write! Books to read! A novel to finish! Leave me alone, Joss Whedon!

(Feels like a long time since I got out the Unreasonable Crankiness tab. I always feel so justified, and Robyn and Marie do nothing but validate me.)

You know what I really don't like?

When people talk amazingly slowly and pause a lot while conveying important information. Or any information. That's why I could never be a really good story-teller. I am too anxious to get to the important points. I am no good at handling suspense, and when people are conveying information to me, I would really rather they just cut the crap and the pausing and tell me what they're trying to tell me.

There is this one guy in one of my classes, and I swear to God, every time it looks like we're going to get out of class a minute or two early (which is a godsend to me, even two fewer minutes of class, because I have nine hours of class on Tuesdays), he asks the longest questions ever, and they should really be very short questions, like: When is the next assignment due? or How much would that event you have just been telling us about cost? But instead of asking questions like a normal person, he feels the need to explain in great detail why he is asking the question, and to tell us everything in his life that even remotely relates to the question. Like, "I'm only asking when it's due because I have, um. Because I have. Well, basically, I have three jobs. You know, one's a real job, and the other two are volunteer things, but I have obligations to them too. You know, just however much I um. However much. I want to work. And depending what they need me for. So you know, I have to get everything together and make sure it's going to work with my schedule. So what I was wondering is, what day is the last day we can turn in the um. Well, basically what I want to know is..."

And on and on and on. Every time you think the end is near, he starts a new clause, and it makes me so insane, and every time he starts talking, I try to quickly figure out what he's saying and ask the question quickly myself, using a graceful segue and taking advantage of his pauses. Like I will say, "God, yeah, it sometimes seems impossible to get everything done on time, huh?" and while he's thinking about that, I add, "I was actually wondering the same thing -- what's the last day we can turn in that assignment?" But quite often he just takes this as encouragement and continues talking. Slowly. With pauses.

LIFE IS SHORT. TALK FAST.

The reason I can never become rich

It's homeowners associations. They frighten me. If I became rich, I would have to build a house in the middle of nowhere, or commission a tall ship to be built for me to live in and sail up and down the coast, or buy a train that would belong exclusively to me and run up and down and up and down tracks that I would lay down, because I can never live in a place with a homeowners association.

You know what they do? Do you know? They force you to meet all of your neighbors. If you move into one of those neighborhoods, you have to belong to the homeowners association. You have to. Otherwise you are not allowed to move into their neighborhood. And oh, they are so frightening, these homeowners associations. They make you pay for their community swimming pools even if you never swim in the community swimming pool and never want to and don't feel that it is your job to fund their children's right to pee in a public pool. They have like boards of directors drawn from a pool of volunteers within the neighborhood, and you know what that means? It means that the most power-hungry people within your community (note that I didn't say the sanest. They can be any degree of sane. It's just the most power-hungry.) are the ones with the Power Over You And Your Family.

With their Power, they can send you nasty notes if you don't mow your lawn on time, and then they can start fining you. Money. They can make you pay them money for not cutting your grass in a timely fashion. Seriously. I didn't even make that up. And I know that if I were Rich, I could afford to a) hire someone to mow my lawn and b) pay whatever fine they might levy upon me for tardy cutting of my grass, but still. It's none of your damn business how long my grass is. I feel.

I'm not really sure why I felt the need to express this. But there it is.

Lucid dreaming

I one time watched the scariest film ever about lucid dreaming, which you may have heard of. It was Waking Life, and it was the scariest film ever, because the guy in it was having a lucid dream, and he kept wanting to wake up, but he couldn't. He kept waking up into more and more and more lucid dreaming. He could never, never, never wake up.

And that reminded me of one of the scariest ideas in all of the Sandman, which is that this one guy gets punished by being condemned to sleep forever, and while he is sleeping he has these incredibly horrific nightmares, and he keeps waking up into ever more horrible nightmares. And he, also, can never, never, never wake up. He must just carry on having nightmares forever.

However, I hear from other people that there are lucid dreams containing rather less death and destruction and rather more jollity and getting to decide what you dream about. They realize they're dreaming, these people, and they decide that they're going to fly about, or go to Egypt, or hang out with their dead family members, or whatever tickles their fancy. And that, obviously, sounds totally brilliant. I have flying dreams very rarely. I don't think I have ever had a dream about Egypt. I have had a few dreams with dead or incapacitated family members, but I often forget the crucial details and thus do not enjoy them as much as I might. Plus I have always always wanted to dream about meeting characters in my stories, and I never do. I never have. I long and long and long to have dreams like that.

But it never happens, and do you know why? It's because my subconscious is a big Nazi dictator. I have dreams where I spot that I'm dreaming sometimes. I think, "Oh sweet! I have noticed! Now the lucid dreaming fun can begin!" and my subconscious says, "Um, I believe that's a no," and I'm like, "Yes! That's a yes! I've noticed! Lucid dreaming is taking place RIGHT NOW!" and my subconscious is like, "Look, BITCH. You can either have your regularly scheduled dream as I have planned it for you, or else you can just wake up and have no dream at all." This either cows me into immediate submission or makes me rebellious.

If I submit, I have my regularly scheduled dream (and I must say that my subconscious is excellent and creative and doesn't often give me bullshit dreams but usually sends me dreams that contain symbolism and help me to consider aspects of life that might not have otherwise occurred to me, and very occasionally it tells the future. Like the time I bought Bonnie a car from this parking lot I had never seen before but I saw it the next day and it turned out to be the parking lot of the place where Anna had driving lessons; or the time right after the fourth Harry Potter book came out that I dreamed there was an article in the paper entitled CHO CHANG IS A BITCH, and that turned out to be quite true also, although before that dream I swear to God I had nothing against the girl); and if I get rebellious and say, "You can't stop me! I'm dreaming and it's going to be lucid!" then my subconscious says, "Let there be no confusion on this point! I am in charge here!", and I wake up instantly. All disappointed.

Nazi bastard subconscious.

P.S. I guess I have to label this as being unreasonable crankiness. I guess if it were reasonable to be cranky about this, my eminently sensible subconscious would not be doing it.

Something that kind of irritated me the other day even though it was not a big deal in any way

I was getting ready to print some stuff, and I had this pack of colored paper all set to print the stuff on, and it was in five colors, and on the top of the packet it said what all the colors were. And two things about this packet of paper irritated me, to wit:

1. The papers were stacked in the following order: orange, yellow, purple, pink, green. But on the front of the packet where it said what colors of paper lived inside the packet, do you know what it said, do you know? It said: Orange. Yellow. Very Violet. Lime Green. Very Pink. It's like, it's like they couldn't even be bothered to look at the packet they were wrapping up in printed cellophane! And you know what, Paper Company That I Don't Remember The Name Of And So This Is Going To Be What Is Known As An Empty Threat? (That's a lot of capital letters. I need a quick break.)

Okay, break over, now tell me something, you paper company that manufactures colorful paper for printing handouts on. If you don't care enough to look at your product before you ship it to hundreds - nay, thousands! - of office supply stores across the nation, then WHY SHOULD I BUY IT? You know what I'm going to do now? I'm never ever going to buy one of your paper products again! Never! Not even if I'm stranded on an island with nothing on it but a lot of pens and trees and shops that sell packets of your paper! Instead I will use the bark of the birch trees. Didn't think of THAT, did you? Or I will seduce the shopkeeper and write upon his receipt paper.

2. The color names. I think what happened was this: The paper company hired two people as color name inventors, these positions having been recently and unexpectedly vacated. I think probably one of the previous color name inventors choked to death on a bone that surprised him by turning up in his plate of gyros, and the other one was executed in a tragic case of mistaken identity in Berlin. (Though that is purely speculation). And I think that when the two new people showed up on the job, everything was in such a tizzy from the deaths of the previous color name inventors that everyone forgot that the two newbies had no experience in the color name inventing world. And obviously there was no one around to train them, since the only two qualified people had just died. So someone just handed one of them five sheets of paper and told her to name them. And I think that they were both rather discombobulated because they'd never had any training and they didn't know where to begin. And I think that one of them recognized that the green paper was the same color as a lime margarita and named it Lime Green, and you see the thing was, he didn't know (not being in the Industry) that it wasn't very inventive to call it that, and then once he had come up with that the two of them felt like they were ready for anything. And I think they looked at the purple one, and one of them mentioned that it wasn't so much purple as violet, and the other one pointed out that it was mighty dark for a violet, and the first one said no, it was just deep violet, and the other one said, Very violet, might one say? and the first one pointed out that "Very Violet" was alliterative and would make an excellent name for that paper color. And the other one agreed and then the fatal thing happened, which was that the first one mentioned that she was really hungry for some Mr. Goodbar, and that made the other one realize that he, too, was hungry for Mr. Goodbar, and then they both really wanted to go on break and have some candy from the vending machine, and so they started to slack off and they figured that if "Very Violet" was good, "Very Pink" would do just fine, and then they got really very hungry indeed for chocolate with peanuts so they found they couldn't be bothered with any new color names before having some candy, and they just scribbled Orange and Yellow down to remind themselves what colors they had yet to name, and then they went on break. But see, the vending machine was one of those trying ones that never wants to give you the candy you desire and is constantly telling you that your selection is not available even though you can SEE through the GLASS that it IS; and while the new color name inventors were in the break room trying to convince the vending machine to see things their way, someone came round to their desk and grabbed the piece of paper where they had written down the names and passed it along without even looking at it.

Because that is the only possible explanation for those names.

I just reread this post, and it occurs to me that I should totally get sponsorship from Mr. Goodbar because I have just used product placement.

And then after I wrote that, I looked up "Mr Goodbar" on Wikipedia, and I discovered that there is a movie called Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which stars Diane Keaton, whose character in this film is a quiet and reserved teacher by day and a sexual deviant and bar-hopper by night, and ultimately her sexual addiction and high risk behavior put her life in danger. Wikipedia really says that. Sounds like a value judgment to me. Shouldn't Wikipedia be above such things, Glorious Deliverer of Pure Truth that it is?

You know what I cannot comprehend?

I cannot comprehend how people fail to understand meter. It is just completely beyond me. I've done a fair amount of scanning in my day, in English classes, where half the class had a massive relief attack when my teacher took the meter section off of the final exam and I became furious that the only bit that was a sure thing was gone, and also in Latin classes, where it is less self-evident from just reading it out loud. (Though I have a fond memory of listening to Catullus' "Da me milia basia deinde centum" poem read in meter by a man with a very silly voice.) And I have never had the slightest problem with it. In English, it is so obviously there and so perfectly identifiable that I just don't understand how anyone could miss it.

Because people in my class didn't get it, and I would undertake to explain it to them, and I would say to them, Okay, read this line out loud to me, and they would read the line in meter. They were saying the iambs properly. It wasn't like their brains didn't understand where the stresses went. They just couldn't tell you where the stresses went. But that makes no sense at all. They can say it but they can't hear it. How can that be? MAKES NO SENSE.

But SOFT what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS?

Right? It scans itself! You don't even have to do anything except make a slanty line on the page every time you accent a syllable, and a half-circle on the page every time you don't accent a syllable. Right?

I DO NOT GET IT.

I now return to my regularly scheduled procrastinating and brooding over whether the people who mark my exam will realize that my handwriting is quite small and thus I am actually writing two to three pages worth of material for the average person when I write one and three-quarters pages of essay. I leave you with this, my present favorite double dactyl:

Patty-cake, patty-cake,
Marcus Antonius,
What do you think of the
African queen?

Gubernatorial
Duties require my
Presence in Egypt. Ya
Know what I mean?