the altoid conspiracy

My family's relationship to the last remaining grandparent is strained, mainly because she likes to make up mean stories about family members to tell to other family members. Usually they involve people being mean to her or exhibiting personality traits that she finds offensive. Often, they give metaphorical form to emotions that she's having but probably has no idea how to deal with in a healthy way. Herein lies the single practical application of my degrees in English - I can analyze her output and come to what have mostly proven to be reliable assessments of her motivation.


I have stories - oh, do I have stories - but for right now I will relate only the latest, in which she somehow obtains information that none of us gave her. It's harmless information, and really doesn't have anything to do with her, but it's strange that she would have gotten it. My mom's hypothesis - that she is in league with the devil - seems farfetched, and my Other's hypothesis - that another relative told her - seems unlikely to me considering that keeping information from the grandmother is this person's cherished pastime.


The problem is, I can't offer any alternative explanations, aside from a level of obervant-ness that she has not exhibited before. Either that or she's got us bugged, in which case we're all screwed.

upon printing out the full thing and holding it in my hands:


it's like having a baby... a very flat, quiet baby.

He's not fat-- he's my thesis!

Okay, the giddy Oh-My-God-I-Totally-Wrote-A-Thesis-(But-Okay-I'm-Not-Saying-It's-Good) stage is setting in. I just sat in my desk chair and laughed for about 5 minutes, because I just performed my first whole-thesis word count.


Me: Hey fool, guess how many words my thesis is!

Other [pause... head-tilt-back... muttering]: thousand is ... pages...

M: [rocking back and forth like a traumatized monkey]...

O: Eighteen thousand three hundred sixty nine (18369)!

M: No! But hey, awesome guess. My thesis is twenty six thousand two hundred sixty five (26265) words!

O: Wow!

M: I know!

O: ... And that was a good guess!

uppin the coupon ante

One of the things I like about my Other is that if I say something like, "Guess how many commercials I saw for Raising Helen in a 1-hour 45-minute period today!" he doesn't say "How many?". Nope. He'll say something like "5!" or "17!" He always takes a crack at it.


This fact relates obliquely to the following Kroger story.


Now, we feel that we should not give in to the Discount Card Hegemony, because we would rather pay full price for items than give the grocery store and whomever their cronies are access to information about our buying patterns. We would rather pay a privacy tax than save $.30 on beenie-weenies. There are several cashiers who really cannot stand us because we refuse to save ourselves about a dollar a visit, and despite the fact that we've lived here now for two years and are frequent visitors to the grocery store, they ask and then give a lecture about The Discount Card Will Save You Money. Money! Don't You Like Having Money?! every. single. time. we go through their line.


Alas, though, that was a digression. Sorry.


What I really mean to be talking about is the special one-off coupons that automatically get printed and handed to you with your receipt. Those drive us (well, me, really) nuts because they would always be for a different brand of one of the same products we just bought. Has anyone else noticed this? How contentious does the grocery store have to be? Why not give me a damn coupon for something I actually want to buy? (Well, yeah, because I'm already buying it and thus don't need the incentive of a coupon.) I actually bought a different brand of an item using one of those coupons, and it printed up a coupon for the brand of the item that I'd originally bought. Luckily, since the second brand sucked ass, I happily went back to the first one.


Then one day the coupon took a different approach. "Save $.75," my coupon said to me, "on 2 pints *any euphoric flavor* Ben & Jerry's." And I was actually buying Ben & Jerry's. Hot dog!


So, la la la, I went in the next time and bought my "2 pints" of old Ben & Jerry's, when another coupon printed off for me.


Me [looking at the coupon]: Wow.

Other: What?

M: Things just got a little more interesting.

O: Is it for ice cream?

M: Yes, but guess what it's for. [Remember?]

O: Buy... three pints...

M: Yeah, and...

O: Save a dollar!


And he was right. As I can't really eat three pints in a timely fashion (okay, I probably could, but should probably not get in the habit), I have not yet tested how far these coupons diabolical scheme goes. Someday, though, I just might.


Tomorrow tune in for exciting stories about reading in the Borders cafe.

few like it warm

Well, the days are going by quickly. My thesis is getting worked on - it's now officially out of the writing stage and into the revising stage, and tomorrow I'm going to tackle the unpleasant job of revising the fourth and last chapter. Then it's off to the advisor again - hopefully he won't respond for awhile.


Today I took a long, practically involuntary nap. That's the problem with working at home - inevitably I end up asleep. It doesn't help that I'm almost halfway through a very long and boring book that seems to be getting less coherent by the page. Two of the characters seem to be heading deeper into insanity, and they're taking the prose with them.


Then I spent two and a half hours reading blogs. Guess maybe I should look for a job.

My kingdom for a freakin scarf.

I am at the library, working on the BeastMaster. If I finish Chapter 3 today, which I am seriously aiming to do, all that will be left (haha, yeah, all) will be to revise. Favorite sentence so far that will nonetheless need to be edited out in post-production:


Assuming for a moment that “the end of the bourgeois ego” isn’t a jargon-bloated crackpot myth, this idea seems to be in conversation with the displacement that Cayce reports, but the two thoughts do not line up exactly.

As much as I would have hated to hear myself say this going into grad school, I have come to believe that some people go so deep into Theory Land that they lose touch with Reality Land. I love Theory Land, but I wouldn't want to live there.


My imagined relationship to my material conditions is not great at the moment. For one thing, I am usually cold, but the air conditioning is oppressive to the point where I have to prop the door of the quiet study room open. I figure that since you can feel the temperature drop several degrees as you come in, that might do some good. Although the good done temperature-wise is offset considerably, as expressed in the following equation:


very cold quiet study room + open door = very slightly less cold quiet study room


Also, on this laptop (Am I complaining? I am not complaining.) the touchpad mouse is very sensitive, and sometimes takes the sides of my hands brushing it as I type to mean "hey, highlight and remove all the text you happen to catch." I can usually get it back, but there's nothing quite like seeing 2.5 sentences you've spent several brain cells crafting disappear while you're in the middle of sorting out your next thought.


And, finally, the room checkout is on a two-hour schedule, while the laptop checkout is on a three-hour schedule. This is only convenient every six hours.


Can you tell I'm talk-y? Or write-y? Despite the last few days' depressing lack of progress on the BeastMaster, I am at least now willing to type a bunch of stuff. Probably should get back to typing a bunch of stuff related to the BeastMaster.

yes yes, banana-rama, we know

About the most fun I've ever had in my life was had on Halloween day last year. Other & I decided to attend a costume party several other students were throwing, and so spent the day driving around putting together our costumes. (He was the Bill of Rights, I was a Patriot-Act-weilding John Ashcroft. The Patriot Act was represented by a fake, squeaky caveman club with "Patriot Act" stickered on. I got to spend all night whaling on him.)


If I ever get my act together enough to spiffy up the old blog-o, I'll post some pictures.


Anyhow, the day went so well, because we found every last detail of what we were looking for. We found scroll-printed posterboard at an office supply store, and a little tiny American flag lapel pin, and wingtips. We found *wingtips.* *In my size.* It was like an elf was anticipating our every move, and putting the perfect things in our path. Last case in point: still riding high on the triumph of the scroll posterboard, we turned our attention to looking for "Hello my name is" nametags, because I am not exactly the spitting image of John Ashcroft. So we asked a store employee walking down one of the aisles if they had them, and he just happened to be pushing a cart full of them.


So I've decided that my new hobby will be dressing up for things (though the only events I've thought of so far are concerts). Next stop: emo kid for the Modest Mouse concert that's coming up. Now to figure out what "River's Glasses" are. It will be nice, because if I were six years younger, I'd totally be an emo kid. Instead I was just a weirdo.


I'm praying to god that Richard Cheese comes anywhere near me for a concert, because I really want to dress up in '50s clothes. And it's one of Other's lifelong dreams to wear a smoking jacket and an ascot.

That's not gonna be good for business. That's not gonna be good for anybody.

there's always money in the banana stand

An exchange before either of us had really fully woken up this morning, and the dogs were so excited about the fact that we were up early and making park-going-to-noises that they were interfering with park-going-to-preparations:


Me: The dogs know 'fuck off.'

Other: Huh?

M: They know 'fuck off' and it keeps them out of your room.

O [to dogs] Fuck off.

[sound of O's bedroom door closing]

M: That also works.

They really do know 'fuck off.' Too bad I lacked the foresight to train them to obey a word that isn't 'fuck.' But then I'd also need to remember to say that word instead of 'fuck,' which comes so naturally. So it's just as well.


As if figuring out what the hell your hands are isn't hard enough.... Just think about what these kids will be like in 20 years. Yeowza.

Braarr rarr rarr - nobody understands you, She-Bear

Good news!


1) The Richard Cheese lounge version of "Baby Got Back" is no longer stuck in my head.


2) I got the virus (smssv.exe) off of my computer, and everything (knock on wood) seems to be functioning smoothly. Dad said last night "[something something] worm its way into the memory and [something bad]," but for now I choose to ignore him.

In other news, today was spent cleaning my room in hopes that it, once clean, would be an ideal place to get work - either school-work or craft-work - done. Unfortunately, it is still not clean, despite some progress, and some Smallville-watching and icecream-eating and etc.


My office/room is very small, so I have to economize with the space, and part of this entails hanging the knitting supplies, which are stored in a lovely Target plastic bag, from a set of hanging wall shelves I installed a while back. It's hanging above my footlocker out over my floor, and it reminds me of how they advise you to hang your food at a campsite likely to be frequented by bears.


So now I'm picturing a bear coming in here and trying to get my knitting supplies.


I suspect that everyone has at least one quirk or two about their senses of humor, and one of mine is that I find bears doing bear-like-things *hilarious.* I learned this fact about myself during my senior year of college at an inopportune moment - in the middle of my graduate-level Psycholinguistics class.


There was this very sweet but perhaps somewhat misguided grad student who was giving his presentation that day. He was wearing a sweater with, seriously, very large holes down around the bottom of it - the hem just hung there, under what must have been 5 inches of sweater-hole. Well, he was kind of rambling on, and I don't think that anyone was understanding him


And let me just take this opportunity to say that I really don't like making fun of people who aren't mean or evil, swear to God I don't.


and I just started picturing a bear attacking him and biting holes in his sweater. And I almost choked to death trying not to laugh. I wasn't laughing at him so much, it was just this absurd image of a bear eating his sweater. And growling. Hehehe.


Oh man, that's so mean... I'm sorry, sweater-bear guy.

but I used electric scissors!

From an e-mail from my mom yesterday:


I knew we had gotten rain and thunder last night, because when I got up this morning, Reggie was in the shower. That was new.


lalalala.


You gotta love mom.

she's got a neck that won't quit

Yesterday our yard was littered with coke cans, beer cartons, and White Castle bags. But the yard people came today, and so now the yard is littered with weed-whacked fragments of coke cans, beer cartons, and White Castle bags.

I've never met a happy purist.

Today I was introduced to two awesome things:


1) Super Size Me, which I highly recommend going to see, and


2) This very strange man named Richard Cheese, and his band Lounge Against the Machine. Please, please, please listen to his version of "Baby Got Back." Please.

If I have to grovel, then I don't even *want* to be on yr weekly e-mail list.

Insofar as high school graduations are perfect to the extent that they are lame, then that was the *best* high school graduation ever.


Leadership, community, carpe diem, definition of success, future. Plus someone had an airhorn.

heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack

Well, the cicadas around my area must have juat been late bloomers, because they're out with a vengeance now. They're aggressive and mating all over the place and two of them decided to die in my car. I haven't yet convinced one of the brothers to get them out.


They're really weird-looking. If you look closely at them, which I've had the opportunity to do a lot (too too much), you see that they look like they're molded from plastic. They have the blurry, fuzzy-lined quality of those joke cockroaches and insects that you buy at toy stores. And red, red eyes.


My little brother's graduating tomorrow (yay!) from high school, so I'm kicking it on the home front. TGI Friday's, here we come. Again.

phrase that sends me looking for the back button on an internet job search: "other faith-based organizations"

okay OKAY, it's a plague

Unless the full New York City experience is clawing your way through crowds of thousands of tourists, then I believe I only got a partial view.


I'm back home now, after 6 days of driving, flying, metro-ing, Amtrack-ing, walking, subway-ing, walking, subway-ing, walking, walking, walking, subway-ing, Amtrack-ing, driving, metro-ing, flying, and then driving. And I am tired.


I learned so much on the trip, but most of it is interpersonal and highly specific, and therefore probably boring to anyone who's not me. Although I will say that if you get the chance to go soon to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I highly recommend the Byzantine exhibit. Some of the things in there almost gave me a beauty-induced nervous breakdown.