free fruit

Last Saturday, I spent the whole day at the pharmacy trying not to wing an empty drug bottle at the computer because the computer was where the trash can had been the week before. Today, I spent the whole day at the pharmacy trying not to wing a full drug bottle at the computer because sometime during the intervening week the computer turned evil.

Oh sweet Jesus, she appears to have been hired by Starbucks. Genius.

something tells me you did not really shoot a man in reno

Looking at my referrals, it's clear that people who stumble across this site looking for useful information are repeatedly unhelped. Just about nobody is googling "orooni's stupid opinions about or experience with" biaxin, the indian word for bad hunter being "vegetarian," and especially f*m**l* g*n*t*l**. (Which, to be fair, I don't even really write about all that much.) (That was like three years ago.)

Although, on the topic of biaxin, I experienced the horrible side effect of the metallic taste in the mouth, to the point where I would dream about eating metal and wake up crying and salivating copiously from the unpleasantness of it all.

Having worked at a pharmacy on and off for 10 years, I know a random assortment of information about drugs. I heard one pharmacist say many times that about 50% of people who take biaxin (or clarithromycin, the generic), experience the metallic taste. It got to the point where I was losing enough sleep from it that I went back to the doctor and asked to be switched to a different antibiotic. I said, "I'm one of the people who get a really bad metallic taste from it," and she snidely informed me that indeed, everybody gets that. The implication being that only the pains-in-the-asses come back and complain.

Which is pretty much why I've been avoiding her. Sinus infection? Bah. I can stick it out.

a la peanut butter bicycles

Louie Dog came to us as a grouchy two-year-old with a vague history of a life lived on the streets. Other and I agree that he would be more comfortable than most dogs living in a junkyard, provided there were someone there to towel him off carefully should it rain.

Jane Dog, however, came to us before her little brain put together that objects did not cease to exist outside her immediately appreciable reality. She was about 5 weeks old.

While Lou sees bones, biscuits, and dog food as possibly the LAST things of that nature he will ever be provided, and suspends all non-crucial life activities and bodily functions until they are GONE, INSIDE HIM WHERE YOU CANNOT REACH, Jane sees all of these things as things with which she can torture Lou. Which really works very well.

They got fancy bones yesterday, and Lou ate his with almost disgusting speed. About half of Jane's is left, and she slept downstairs last night, ON the bone, to protect it. She will do things like set it two inches in front of Lou, and then jump on his head if he dares to look at it. He learned not to dare a long time ago.

We are tired of the Jane Dog Dominance Display, and the treats get taken away if she doesn't just settle down and eat them already. Meanwhile, Lou is reduced to sniffing around the site of his bone extravaganza, sifting the carpet fibers to find any remaining bits of sweet, sweet rawhide. We don't know where he got the rolled-up twenty, though.

treading trodden trails

Okay, so, in light of current goals, I am taking classes. And right now I'm taking a class about how the brain actually works. And maybe I am not doing so well, if grades are an accurate indicator of performance, which in this case: Yes. They are.

The grade have improved, though, up until this point. And today we had a test and so I did what you do when you have a test in something that you're not really so knowledgeable about, which is spend the entire night before the test studying. ASK ME ABOUT THE LATERAL GENICULATE NUCLEUS.

And so, a metaphor. I gathered up my garlic (diced, chopped, peeled, and whole), carved a passel of wooden stakes, stole a bunch of crucifixes, picked up an Ott Light and dialysis machine (still with me?) and marched to the battlefield to find a bunch of damn werewolves.

gonna cause a power outage

Today on the radio I heard a story about Southwest's way of dealing with the same sorts of problems that all the airlines are having -- weather/other delays FUBARing schedules, etc. -- and learned that there is a job wherein people are assigned passengers who have been screwed over in one manner or another by such delays, figure out exactly why they were screwed in that way, and write a letter to them, explaining what went wrong and why, and apologizing.

I almost never hear about a job and think wow, what a great job. I usually think wow, I would rather move to the subway and panhandle than have that job. But really, if I hadn't just sunk a bunch of money, time, and energy into heading down the Psychologist Career Path, I might just be winging my way to Dallas right now to show up on the doorstep of Southwest Airlines and beg for this job.

Do you think that there are folders for each screwed-over customer? Like with their names on the tabs? And maybe a manager walks into a roomful of hunched over apology letter writers and says things like, "alright, guy's luggage gets left off a plane and doesn't reach its destination until he's back home," and waves the folder around, and then one of the hunched over people looks up and says, "I'll take it"?

This job has everything: the piecing together of flawed logistics (o! how I love the piecing together of flawed logistics!), explaining said logistics in writing, and the human touch of an apology that normally cannot be found anywhere within a business of 30 people or more. Plus, perhaps it would be difficult to put the explanations into a template form, because the mishaps might all be different from one another.

Maybe I'll bomb the psych subject test.

cheepcheepcheepcheep

I've run across this article in a couple of different places, and it's depressing -- this type of practice strikes me as being dishonest, especially when the reader's only clue that the writer is getting paid for a favorable mention of a product is a vaguely worded box off to the side. I don't scrutinize people's sidebars, although I'll probably be paying more attention to them now. I wouldn't bookmark (and read every day) a blogger's work who was participating in this.

From the article: "[...T]he vast majority of bloggers don't consider themselves journalists, so they don't need to follow that profession's practice of keeping clear lines between content and the advertising that supports it."

I would imagine that the bloggers don't consider themselves prostitutes, either, but that seems to be the best analogy here. And really, I don't even have a philosophical problem with prostitution, as long as all the parties involved are consenting adults. Have at it, consenting adults. What I do have a problem with is advertisers having access to people with the aura of unbiased-ness. And people profiting from the appearance of unbiased-ness -- at our expense.

It would be interesting to do a study about whether the offer to be paid for a favorable review of a product affects one's opinion of it - I can't imagine that it wouldn't.

"On and On" just gave me goosebumps. Please somebody help me.

Well, the Etsy levy has broken. (If you go weak-kneed when confronted with thousands of pages' worth of handmade crafty stuff and also don't happen to have oodles of extra money to spend, you might not want to click that link.)

I bought a little thing a couple weeks ago. And then I went back today and bought a slightly more expensive but smaller thing that is a version of something I've been looking for for a long time, something that fits into the weird mythology that my lack of religious upbringing but still intuitive nature has required me to create. And THEN I went to Creative Thursday, as I do many days, and lo: she is selling prints of her paintings on Etsy. And lo: Oscar & Lucinda is one of the prints she has made and is selling. And lo: I stared at Oscar & Lucinda for many minutes back when she first posted it, then for the next couple of days went back and stared at it some more, doing calculations of this-many-hours-at-the-pharmacy-for-this-many-weeks, and then went back another day and felt glum when I saw that it had sold.

And, thus: lo. My mailbox will be very exciting this week.

We burned all kinds of things.

Wow. If you want to feel like a real rebel, go stand in a store and claim not to want to be part of their Savings Club. Other told me the other day that one of the cashiers at the grocery store started to ask if he had a card, and stopped himself and said, ah, you don't. And Other said, yeah, I'm the one. And the cashier said yeah, that's how I remembered.

Well, tonight there was a new cashier, and new cashiers and I always have the conversation about how since I don't have my card I can just punch in my phone number, and the idea that I have never provided them a phone number is so flabbergasting that we have to stand here and talk about it for a few minutes. Ending with the tip that once I cave and get a card, I can bring in all of my old receipts and get all that money back.

A couple of months ago things actually got a little bit heated during an exchange wherein I insisted to a cashier at Borders that I really honestly seriously swear that I am not a Borders Rewards Member Even Though I Would Get Great Deals. And did not want to be. And she was acting as if I had come upon a wounded toddler in the parking lot and was planning on just leaving him there because I had to get home to paint my toenails and watch reruns of the Gilmore Girls - I would really help them out if I would just give her my phone number so she could look my card up. ME NO HAVE CARD. YOU NO HAVE ME PHONE NUMBER. And then her head exploded.

Honestly, at this point, if the idea of selling companies marketing data stopped bothering me, I would hold out just to keep screwing with these people's minds. In lots of ways I'd rather be in certain types of pain than face confrontation of any kind, but in this case it feels worth it -- I don't think that what the company is getting out of it is worth what they're giving me in return. Why is it that every single new cashier feels the need to get me into the club?

I do not really steal stuff!

Hey: how about we all just stop paying attention to Ann Coulter? Who's with me?

i.e. prison. or parts of utah.

i. narcissism
ii. dimethicone
iii. "I Know What I Was Feeling"
iv. forced tape delay
v. a rerun you are killing me people

i. narcissism

You may have heard about the recent study that determined that kids today are brats. I've spilled several gallons of 0s and 1s on the topic of the nonexistent manners and general unpleasantness of many of the students on this particular campus, but today I heard a story that really hit the narcisissm nail on the head.

Other was talking with one of his officemates, who is teaching composition to first-years, and she recounted a story in which, on the first day of class, one of her students approached her, handed her her phone number, and instructed her instructor to call her every night before class to remind her what the homework was and to make sure she'd done it.

WOW. And I thought that drivers stopping dead in the middle of the street (instead of pulling over to the side or even putting on blinkers) because they are lost or otherwise ignorant, and people, when you hold the door open for them, walking through it without acknowledging you instead of propping it open for themselves were bad signs.* This, though. This is a whole new level. What must it be like to go through life like that?


ii. dimethicone

"Aveeno: Active Naturals: Skin Relief Moisturizing Lotion: with soothing oat essence: dimethicone skin protectant" may have the longest and clumsiest name in the universe, but oh people. My days of spontaneous bleeding from the hands in popular midwestern craft stores are OVER.

I have tried: "Lay it on Thick" Shea Butter from Bath & Body Works (which works if reapplied every 2 hours), "Petal Soft" from Nature's Health Connection (which works okay for awhile but smells funky), "Corn Huskers Lotion: Heavy Duty Hand Treatment" (which smells like my grandma in a good way but doesn't work at all), AmLactin XL Moisturizing Lotion Ultraplex Formulation (which is expensive as hell and burns like hell if your skin is actually cracked), Lubriderm Advanced Therapy, St. Ives Vitamin E and Vitamin A Advanced Therapy Lotion (which smells nice), No Crack Nighttime lotion, and Vaseline Intensive Care Advanced Healing Fragrance Free Skin Protectant Lotion. And nothing works.

Because I now understand that to "work" means that a hand lotion can be applied once, after showering, and your hands will not be bleeding by the time it's time to apply it again 24 hours later. In fact, last weekend, I did not apply it for three straight days and my body parts weren't cracking open until the third evening.

WOOT.


iii. "I Know What I Was Feeling"

Awhile back (this should be a link, but really, I am lazy and it's not really necessary) I blogged about this really awful, horrid country song that I'd heard on the bus. I didn't take the bus for awhile (too cold/slippery), but the first time I took it home in months, I heard this song again. Joy! I had not hallucinated it! Anyway, I'm still not going to google it, but I can tell you that it's by George Findlay (sp?) and should probably be accessible through google using the following search terms, which I wrote down: "little white tank top," "born to kill tattoo," "daddy," "9-pound hammer," "slammer," "thinkin bout long kiss," "right there in the middle by me," and "man just gotta get goin," if for some strange reason you are interested.


iv. forced tape delay

I wrote most of this entry on Tuesday, Feb. 27, and didn't have time to post it last night and Blogger was having none of letting people log in when I was originally trying to post.


v. a rerun you are killing me people

But in the interim, is Jim Halpert being killed? With a baseball bat? Is Pam warning him? Does she even realize the danger? Will Roy shave his cute beard now? I AM DYING TO KNOW.

*This sentence sucks, and I apologize for it. It's like the seventh try, though.