Category Archives: run-away imagination

Chinese Lizard Zombies

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(Scene: Mark holding the laptop toward me, dramatic music fading from the speakers as a trailer for The Great Wall ends on the screen)

Me: Sooo, instead of the Mongol hoards, they’re trying to say that the Great Wall was built to keep out…lizard monsters?

Mark: Kind of, yeah. Oooh, it was written by Max Brooks!

Me, not knowing who that is, but trying to be supportive: Oooh…?

Mark: He wrote World War Z.

Me: UGH. You know, I was thinking that the trailer had a lot of the same look as World War Z, but I didn’t say anything because I figured you’d pooh-pooh me.

Mark: I wouldn’t have pooh-pooh’ed you…

Me: I don’t think I need to watch a movie about Chinese lizard zombies, honestly.

Mark: …

Me, talking to the dog:  Junie, maybe we could get a lizard zombie and tie your leash to it and it could take you for shamble walks! YAY, SHAMBLE WALKS! Grrr! Aaaarrrrgggg!

Junie: …

Me: But that probably wouldn’t end well because we’d have no control over which way the lizard zombie shambled so you’d eventually have to call us from your little doggie cell phone, like ‘beep bop boop boop…hey guys, I’m in Thetford and I don’t know the way home. Can you come pick me up?’  Except, you’re a dog so I don’t think you’d even really know where Thetford was, so you’d be lost and we wouldn’t know where to come pick you up. Stupid lizard zombies!

Mark: Not only would he not know what town he was in, but how would he dial a cell phone with no thumbs?

Me: Well clearly it would be voice-activated. We’d pre-program the numbers for him.

Mark: So he could just dial by saying ‘beep bop boop’ like that?

Me, exasperated: I DON’T KNOW. Maybe it’s like, that simulated tone thing that hackers used to use to get on the Internet from pay phones.

Mark: Was that ever a thing? I don’t think that was a thing.

Me: IT WAS, I saw it in a movie once!

Mark: What movie?

Me: HACKERS.

Mark: Oooh, ok, you meant the movie Hackers and not real, actual computer hackers.

Me, going upstairs to bed: Eh, six of one, half dozen the other, really.

Mark: Riiiiight…

****

So the moral of that story is that you probably don’t want to try tying your dog to a Chinese lizard zombie for shuffle-walks because it will get lost and you won’t know where to go pick it up because APPARENTLY you can’t set cell phones up for dogs to voice-dial from, according to my husband.

Also, Hackers wasn’t a documentary, I guess?  I’m still pretty iffy on that one, honestly.

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Very clearly using payphones to get on the Internet. I AM VINDICATED! Also, remember when Rollerblades were the amazing thing that all the L33T badasses wore? Me neither…

When in doubt, apply otters.

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There are big blocks of time that it feels like I don’t remember.

I say “feels like” because I know that in reality, you can’t ever remember everything that’s happened to you because that’s not how the brain works. Long-term memory kind of acts like a card catalog in a library. You go to the catalog with a subject in mind – ie: “summer camp”, and that’s like giving your brain-meats the Dewey Decimal Number for what you’re trying to remember. Your brain-meat then acts as librarian, taking that card and running up and down its stacks at lightening speed (or slightly slower for some of us…heh), pulling memories of that thing from the shelves for you to inspect.

In other words, long-term memory isn’t a constant loop of all the moments of your life being played over and over again, just waiting for you to hit “pause” on the one you want to access at that particular moment.

Think what life would be like if that WAS how it worked, by the way. I imagine it would be like the worst possible case of ADHD ever. You’d never be able to get anything done because your brain would constantly be like “Hey remember that one time, at band camp? And Aunt Mildred’s dog? And Easter morning, 1978? And the day you were born, and the 47th time you skinned your knee falling off your bike, and the drive to the cemetery when Grandpa died, and the smell of the lake at night and how your first kiss felt and smoking weed behind the gym between classes and the words to that song from 3rd grade music class and and and…”, but multiplied by literally all the moments of your entire life.

That sounds kind of horrible. I’m pretty glad it doesn’t work that way, now that I think about it.

I should probably take this opportunity to point out that I’m an accountant, by the way, NOT a neurologist. This may actually not be AT ALL how memory works. I didn’t even finish college and I’m also prone to making shit up, so…probably don’t use me as an academic citation on your fancy brain science term paper or whatever. Show-off.

ANYWAY.

So, it feels like there are these chunks of time that I can’t remember, and sometimes it bothers me. When it bothers me, I start actively trying to recall things from my childhood in order to prove to myself that no, I was NOT in fact just beamed down from the Mothership. Except, then I start worrying about how maybe aliens have the technology to basically pre-populate our brains with just enough memories to make us think that yes, we DID in fact have childhoods and that the idea of being beamed down from the Mothership is preposterous, now be a good drone, keep incubating those trillions of bacteria and stop questioning reality. And really, THAT’S a can of worms I can’t even really handle on a GOOD day, so that’s when I usually start just looking up pictures of baby otters online instead. Two or three good baby otter video clips will put me right back on track.

otters

I would literally pay for this experience.

Well, as on-track as I ever get, anyway.

mystery peaches

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Last night I dreamed that I was at a grocery store. I ended up in the produce section, in front of a display of peaches. I carefully selected five of them, sniffing each one to make sure it was at peak peachy-ness, then placing them gently into a plastic bag. I don’t remember paying for them in the dream, but I’m pretty sure that can’t be held against me in a court of law, so NYEH NYEH, dream grocery store! I DO WHAT I WANT.

Anyway.

So I had this bag of perfect peaches and I was super happy about it. I was kind of half wandering / half floating through the parking lot of the store when I noticed there was a car with the trunk left open, bags of groceries sitting unattended within. I looked around and didn’t see anyone who seemed to be obviously responsible for said car and groceries, so I slid over and deposited my bag of perfect peaches into one of the grocery bags.

Except, as I was doing that, the parking lot turned into someone’s kitchen and the trunk of the car turned into the crisper drawer in the refrigerator in said kitchen (because dreams are bizarre). It was very certainly not my home and not my fridge, and I knew that at the time. I tucked the bag of peaches into the drawer and felt immensely satisfied about the fact that the person who came home and looked in the fridge later would find a bag of surprise peaches and spend several minutes standing there thinking, “but I didn’t BUY peaches, did I? No, I definitely didn’t. I don’t think. Do I even like peaches? Should I EAT these mystery peaches? I don’t know where they came from. What if they kill me?”  It was like I was getting great glee from someone else’s potential befuddlement and worry, which is kind of funny on the surface, but really kind of fucked up if you start thinking about it.

peach

Sidenote: peach pits have always creeped me out. There are way too many tiny places bugs could live in a peach pit. Also, today is all about me ruining peaches for everyone, apparently. Sorry, peach farmers.

This morning in an attempt to make myself feel better about clearly being a total asshole in my dream, I took to teh Googles to look up what it means to dream about sneakily inserting peaches into someone else’s fridge. As you can imagine, that particular text string didn’t yield anything useful. But, I DID find a section about peaches in an online dream dictionary which, if anything, made the whole situation more confusing:

“To see a peach in your dream represents pleasure and joy. You take pleasure in the simple things in life. The dream may also imply that something in your life is just “peachy” and going well. Alternatively, a peach may be indicative of virginity, lust and sensuality. Consider how it may be a metaphor for your sweetheart or loved one.”

Ok, so I was trying to give someone else pleasure and joy, but sneakily rather than outright? That actually kind of sounds like me, to be fair. Although, in the dream I was also finding amusement in the fact that the (metaphorical) pleasure and joy I was giving was somehow going to scare or worry the recipient in some way. Also, if the peach is a metaphor for my loved one, I was happy to give him away.

So basically what I’m getting from this is that I’m a gastronomic sociopath who possibly also wants to pimp her husband out to strangers.

But that’s not even the weird part, because then there was THIS:

“Dreaming of wiping melted chocolate off of a wrinkly peach relates to having someone completely dependent on you or having to take care of someone.”

FIRST OF ALL, that seems incredibly specific. Like maybe the author had a super uncomfortable dream about wiping chocolate off a wrinkly peach at some point and tried to make themselves feel better by adding it to the dictionary so that it would seem like a common thing that a lot of people dream about.

Second, you cannot say something like ‘wiping melted chocolate off of a wrinkly peach’ to someone with an overactive imagination like mine without it going to some VERY weird places.

Places I really didn’t ever need to go and would like to forget the routes to.

Have you gotten there yet? I bet you have. I’M SO SORRY.

But I’m also laughing hysterically at the thought. So maybe the dream dictionary wasn’t so far off after all…

these are things that I think about

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The other day I noticed that my box of cotton swabs has some kind of strange and confusing imagery on it.

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I get the keyboard one, for sure. Cotton swabs are super good for cleaning the accumulated finger-filth and manky crusties off keyboards and from around the keys themselves. Although, having said that, I now fear slightly that I’ve given you the impression that my computer keyboard is a cesspool of smeg and horror. It’s not, I promise. Well, except for that one time when my husband dropped a sandwich HP-sauce-side-down on our laptop and we had super sticky keys for a month despite many wipe-downs and I eventually ended up prying the keys off and cleaning under them with the point of a very sharp knife in order to restore functionality and reduce overall grossness. Other than that my keyboards are all maintained to an acceptable level of hygiene, I assure you.

ANYWAY.

The baby one, I kind of vaguely understand as well…although the scale is messed up so it totally looks like someone drying a baby’s head off with a GIGANTIC cotton-wrapped wand. Or maybe it’s not a baby at all, maybe it’s a doll and they’re cleaning it? I don’t know, whatever. Point is, I can see how cotton swabs might come in handy with regard to tiny human maintenance. In theory. Having seen the size of mess most babies can make themselves with bodily functions in literally a split second, I think cotton swab manufacturers might be overplaying this angle somewhat.

The eye thing is a definite yes comprehension-wise for me. Fully half of the cotton swabs that enter my home end up getting used to fix or remove eye make-up. Cotton swabs and coconut oil have saved me from many an embarrassing eyeliner smudge.

I think the middle one on the bottom row there is maybe supposed to be a suggestion that you use your cotton swabs to apply glue? Or paint, maybe? I’m pretty crafty but not so much in either the gluing-shit-together sense or the applying-paint-to-shit sense, so I’m just kind of spit-balling here. Those two options seem more feasible than my original thought, anyway…which was “that looks like a tube of hemorrhoid cream. Would someone really be so grossed out by their own ass that they’d refuse to apply medication to it without using an implement like a cotton swab?”  Because, you know, that’s something a totally normal and sane person thinks about on a Thursday morning while getting ready for work.

Ahem.

The one that truly boggles me though, is the bathtub faucet one. What is this trying to say? Do they think I should be cleaning my grout with cotton swabs, or be so meticulous about cleaning my faucet that I use cotton swabs to…I don’t know, clean it? Because, no. NEVER going to happen. That’s what chemicals are for. And, if I made more money, cleaning ladies.

Are you the clean-the-grout-with-cotton-swab type, or do you just ram them in your ears until they make your toes curl and you maybe cough a little, like everyone else?

This Plant May Have It Out For Me

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Two weeks ago I was carrying my African violet from the living room into the kitchen for its weekly watering when gravity suddenly and inevitably betrayed me.

The plant was already a little lopsided from a couple of previous encounters with my dog and my husband (they both say “accidents”, but I’m not so sure). The lopsidedness combined with the fact that I was only using one hand to carry the pot balanced in its saucer, plus my general overall lack of coordination, was too much to account for and gravity was like “you know what? No. You need to learn a lesson. Now your favorite plant is root-ball up on the floor and there’s dirt everywhere. How’s THAT for a lesson? Don’t you feel smarter now? You should. YOU’RE WELCOME”…

…which is a long-winded way of saying that the plant fell on the floor. And also that I may have issues with anthropomorphizing natural phenomena. Among other things.

Anyway.

So the plant landed on its side and it broke a whole bunch of leaves. I ended up cutting at least a third of the leaves off because they were just going to die at that point anyway. I figured I’d probably lose the few flowers that the plant had recently set buds for, and I was fairly convinced that I might in fact lose the whole plant seeing as how African violets are supposed to be so picky and intolerant to trauma. Turns out I was wrong about the flowers, because the violet bloomed a few days later. Huzzah!

Then yesterday, I was moving the violet out of the way (MUCH MORE CAREFULLY…see, gravity? I DO learn!) on the kitchen counter when I noticed that not only was the little bastard still blooming but it had in fact grown a whole bunch of new leaves and set a crapload of new flower buds!

I can’t decide if the plant is a masochist that thrives on abuse, or if it has decided it’s sick of us weird pink two-legged monsters trying to kill it all the time so it’s beefing up to try and end us.

Either way, I feel a little bit weird around it now.

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I fail at picture-taking you can’t really see the proliferation of new buds and leaves. So basically this photo is completely pointless. LIKE LIFE.

PS: I DID try to warn you yesterday that I might start writing about my houseplants. I’m just saying. No refunds.

rituals (and consequences)

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There are certain things that must be done. Rituals, if you will. Certain things have their places, certain activities have a specific order they’re best done in, and some steps on the way to a destination are non-negotiable.

For instance, I have a bedtime routine that involves checking the bed for spiders.

Part of it stems from the fact that I intensely dislike being personally near spiders. Notice I don’t say “I hate spiders”, because I don’t. I totally respect spiders’ places in the ecosystem and I admire their innate engineering instincts.

I just don’t want the creep little fuckers to touch me. Ever.

So, when I go to bed at night, one of my rituals is to check the bed for spiders. I flip the blankets and top sheet off the bed, I shake the pillows, I shake the blankets and sheet, then I put it all back together again. If my husband has already gotten into bed, I’m ok with assuming he’s already gone through this process for me. If I’m the first one to bed, though…everything gets shaken.

The other night, after having gone through the whole shake-and-make process and kind of laughing at myself the whole time, I pulled out my notebook to scribble down my thoughts about it so that I could remember to blog about it later on. The note went something like this:

“Must shake out pillows and blankets before getting into bed because spiders. Problem could be solved by just making bed in morning but what if the spiders get into the bed while I’m gone to work? Better to leave bed unmade then thoroughly check for spiders whilst making it right before getting into it. Fresh bed is safe bed.”

Then, because I realized just how incredibly bonkers it looked having been committed to paper, I actually wrote the following postscript:

spidercray

Yes Internet, I know I spelled Hughes wrong. It was late and dark and I’m nuts. Don’t judge.

Satisfied that I had effectively put things into context for anyone who might come across my notebook in the case of my untimely demise, I then put the notebook away, picked up my Kindle…

…and felt a disconcerting tickle on my left arm. Glancing down was like a slow motion horror movie and confirmed what I already instinctively knew:

SPIDER. ON. MY. ARM.

Making a sound somewhere between a steam whistle and a bagpipe, I flung my arm away from my body as though it wasn’t connected and I could somehow fling it and the spider riding on it across the room if I just put enough effort into it. The Kindle went flying, the dog jumped up and started barking, and somewhere along the way I managed to partially squash the spider.

Yes, sorry spider-lovers…a spider WAS harmed in the making of this story. It probably had a thousand creepy 8-legged babies before I killed it though, and they’ll probably all come to avenge its death some night when I least expect it (OH GOD NEVER SLEEPING AGAIN, JESUS FUCK).

After several seconds of hyperventilating I managed to regain control of my faculties and go back to reading my Kindle, but I’ve been rethinking my spider-checking ritual ever since. I mean, clearly either I wasn’t vigilant enough in my shake-and-make routine, or we’ve got some kind of special breed of ninja spiders of doom living in our apartment.

I bet they came in on the grapes.

SHIT.

 

steve

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We have this neighbor named Steve.

Well, Steve might not actually BE his name, but that’s what we call him.

He also technically might be a “her” rather than a “him”. It’s hard to tell, honestly…

…because Steve is a chipmunk.

The Steve Saga started back last summer. Our actual human neighbor, Gary, has his mailbox affixed to this antique standing scale. One day last summer I was walking Junior, Professional Harsher of Mellows, down our road. As we rounded the corner by Gary’s mailbox, a chipmunk came barreling out of the underbrush growing along the edge of the lawn and dove straight under the platform part of the scale that the mailbox is attached to.

Ever since then, Junior has been OBSESSED with the platform. He let up over the winter while the chipmunk was hibernating, but this spring when things started thawing out, Junie was right back at it – sniffing, digging and making tiny angry Wookie noises every time he got near the platform.

Mark decided the chipmunk needed a name a few weeks back, so he started referring to him as Steve.

It wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the fact that I have this terrible habit of talking to the dog while I walk him. Not just general guidance like “good boy” and “no, don’t eat poop”, but often fairly extensive one-sided conversations.

I mean, Junie never actually answers me BACK, so that’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still probably somewhat disconcerting for the neighbors to look out their windows at 7am and see me wandering around mumbling in a sing-songy voice about how Steve’s not home and can’t take your call right now but if you leave your name and a brief message…

…yeah.

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“Do veef nuff mek mah mouf wook faf?” – Steve the chipmunk

 

 

tweets, how do they work?

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Twitter is kind of beyond me.

I have an account (@Alpacalypse5), but 99% of my posts are Instagram photos and links to posts that I write here on the blog. Succinctness (is that even a word? Spellcheck says it is, so suck it) isn’t my strong suit to begin with, and that little character-count in the bottom right corner of the Twitter posting screen just fills me with dread. Plenty of people are really good at being very funny and/or profound in 140 characters or less, but my heart probably couldn’t take the amount of Adderall I’d need to be included in their ranks.

Could you imagine, though? Going out in a blaze of Adderall-fueled viral tweet glory? My obituary would be like:

“In search of that one golden moment of virality, Shelby took a whole handful of prescribed ADHD meds, wrote what is now considered the Best Tweet Known To Mankind, then dropped dead of a massive coronary. She is survived by her husband and dog, who are both pretty fucking annoyed that she didn’t stock the fridge with sandwiches before she croaked.”

And then the obituary editor would be like, “Frank, virality totally isn’t a word” and Frank the obituary writer would be like, “Fuck you, Steve. You’re always so negative. You know what? I’m sick of this dead-end job, and that’s not even a pun. I’M OUT.”  And then, in the final cruel twist of irony, Frank’s flouncing would knock my half-written obituary into the recycling bin next to his desk, never to be finished. The author of the Best Tweet Known To Mankind wouldn’t even have an obituary to be remembered by and her memory would fade into the ether as quickly as, well, a non-famous person’s tweets…

…

…wow, I got kind of lost in that one.

ANYWAY.

What I came here to say was that I’m going to try to be better at actively tweeting instead of just lurking, so feel free to follow me if you want.

Also, if you’re super confused right now, it’s totally ok. I am too, and I wrote this shit. Sometimes you have to just go with it.

tweet-about-bad-service

Acid reflux, huh? I feel your pain, birdie.

never again, grapes.

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I bought some grapes while grocery shopping on Sunday.

It was a mistake.

The grapes themselves are fine – it’s me that’s the problem.

You know those awful memes you see on Facebook where someone buys a bag of grapes and then notices there’s a GIANT FUCKING SPIDER in the bag?

Yeah.

Those things haunt my dreams. I’ve always been vehemently anti-spider (or, anti-spiders-in-my-space, I should say. I have no problem with spiders who respect my personal boundaries), but those spider-in-the-grape-bag memes have fucking scarred me for life.

Except, I forget things a lot (due in large part to the inside of my head constantly being like a freshly shaken snow globe. The snow being thoughts, not cocaine. Just so we’re clear…ish…), so sometimes the things that have scarred me for life kind of take a little while to bubble back to the surface and become Big Fucking Issues…

…which is how I ended up with a 3-pound bag of grapes on my kitchen counter that I subsequently spent quite a lot of time eyeing suspiciously, examining for signs of movement and/or arachnid legs.

THEN I started thinking about how the grapes had been in the house long enough that any spider living in them had probably crawled out by now and made a home behind my fridge or something. MOTHER. FUCKERS. At that point I began contemplating the feasibility of nuking the entire site from orbit. But, nuking would have meant having to move in with my parents until we found a new place which, at 36 years old and newly bankrupt from having bought a nuclear weapon, seemed…less than ideal.

My husband finally saved the day (albeit unwittingly) by breaking into the bag of grapes and eating like half of them yesterday while I was at work. When I noticed he’d been eating them, I told him how I bought them and then couldn’t make myself put my hand in the bag because of the spiders and how the grapes were all too close to each other in the bag so I couldn’t see, like, AROUND the grapes enough to be sure that there wasn’t actually some kind of lethal (or at least super hairy) spider in there, and how I was relieved that he had finally eaten some so now I could see they were safe and eat some too, but also that I felt kind of guilty for thinking that because I didn’t purposefully WANT him to eat unsafe grapes but I appreciated that he (again, unwittingly) took one for the team. So to speak.

I think he probably stopped listening somewhere around “internet memes of spiders”, because he’s known me a really long time and that’s usually where things start going downhill quickly for me.

ANYWAY.

I managed to nut up and take some of the grapes to work with me for lunch today. They were OK, but they weren’t really worth all the mental turmoil they caused. I think I’ll stick with apples. Or pears. Fruit that I can see completely around and inspect thoroughly before consumption. And if any of you assholes send me memes about spider-infected apples, we’re done. DONE, you hear me?!

Also, side note to any Federal agents who may have been led to this site by Internet bot scanners (don’t lie, it’s a thing. I’m not paranoid, you’re paranoid) picking up the phrase “bought a nuclear weapon” , chillax. If I had that kind of money, I’d be in a secret bunker, covered in puppies, drinking high-end merlot through the longest twisty-straw I could find, and paying a group of scientists to come up with a coating for Cheetos that doesn’t stain your fingers. PRIORITIES, YO.

I don’t get it.

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This is my favorite dog in the whole world other than Junior. Just FYI.

You know how sometimes someone shares a link to something, saying things like “OMG, you have to read this, IT’S HILARIOUS”, and then when you click on the link and read the thing it’s…not that funny?

Or worse, you click on the link, read the thing, and find it to be not only NOT funny, but actually pretty dumb and/or ignorant?

And then you sit there thinking back on all the past interactions you’ve had with the link-sender, trying to figure out where things went so wrong in your relationship that they picked up the impression that you would think shit like THAT was amusing?

And because you’re now well down the hyper-analytical rabbit hole, you then start wondering if you even really know ANY of your friends AT ALL, and wondering if anyone truly knows YOU at all, and what’s the point of even trying to interact with anyone socially in a world where it’s technically not acceptable to sit someone down and make them fill out a pre-screening friendship questionnaire because fuckin’ A man, life is short and ain’t nobody got time to waste laughing politely at jokes that aren’t funny?

And further to that end, are all these people who are laughing at YOUR OWN jokes just laughing politely because they’re normal and well-adjusted and don’t get annoyed when things with a build-up of “this is really funny” don’t actually pan out to any amusement whatsoever?

No? Just me? Fair enough. I kind of suspected as much.

Carry on.