what have I done?

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You may remember that last year, instead of doing NaNoWriMo like everybody and their fucking brother, I did the bastard blog version called NaBloPoMo. I started out using the suggested prompts but soon jumped ship because the prompts were banal horseshit.

Wow, I’m sweary tonight. And that’s after a cup of Sleepytime Tea. Can you imagine what I’d be like if I was snorting coke?! It would either be amazing or I’d end up getting punched in the face. Possibly both. Doesn’t coke make people aggro? Maybe I’d be the one punching people in the face, then. I definitely have some anger issues.

ANYWAY.

NaBloPoMo was actually pretty hard once I stopped using the shitty prompts because then it was just like “OK smart-ass, you said you’d post every damn day for a month and you’re supposed to be some kind of funny person so get crackin’ with the LOLs”. Except I can’t be funny every day for a month straight. Not enough to write blog posts AND keep me afloat in real life, anyway…so I struggled. It was good and I learned about myself, but I don’t fucking want to do it again.

So this year I’m biting the bullet and trying NaNoWriMo instead. I’ve been talking lately to a writer friend who keeps saying things like “writers write” and “anybody can NOT write a story”. The way he says it, it doesn’t sound like pretentious writer twat drivel though, trust me. More importantly, it has got me thinking that every day I sit around here twiddling my thumbs waiting for ‘inspiration’ to strike is another day closer I get to death. I mean, not to be a gigantic bummer or anything, but Jesus Christ you guys. SPOILER WARNING: we’re all gonna die. I don’t like the idea of croaking without having at least TRIED to do some of the things I’d like to do, you know? And since chances are REAL slim that I’m going to be hauling my lard ass up the side of the Andes to visit Machu Pichu, or building my own private otter preserve in my back yard any time soon (if ever), I figure I should aim a little lower and try actually writing instead.

That’s not to say that blogging isn’t ‘actually writing’, by the way. And it’s not to say that I’m not going to blog for a whole month. I’m just going to try this other kind of writing that I used to enjoy and be reasonably good at before I grew up and my brain turned to mush.

I’m not doing any of the official NaNoWriMo stuff like tracking my word count on their site, etc. I’m just going to commit to writing 1000 words or one hour a day, whichever happens first. If I write 1000 words or a whole hour and it feels like I want to keep going, I will…but I don’t currently have the mental energy to commit to something as grand as the traditional 50,000 words in a month NaNoWriMo goal. Ain’t happenin’.

Soooo…yeah. I might end up posting excerpts of the story I’m working on here, or I might not. Kind of depends on how awful it turns out. I can tell you this, though: I’m writing a story about writing a terrible story. After all, write what you know, right?

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Mmm, books. I bet they smell so good. Unless some hippy doused them in patchouli, anyway. Why you gotta ruin everything with fucking patchouli, hippies? Damn.

this is why we don’t fax, Jim

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This afternoon I had a customer, we’ll call him Jim, who insisted that I needed to fax an invoice to him rather than email it. Like, he didn’t just ask that I sent it that way. He made it very clearly that it was the only option I had to get him the invoice. Since getting the invoice paid was, you know, the reason I called in the first place, I felt compelled to comply.

I scan a lot and I print a little, but I haven’t had to send a fax in a good eight years or so. We have one of those all-in-one copier/scanner/printer/fax things that has never really worked entirely right. It’s always emitting these strange patterns of chirps, and it likes to eat every third piece of paper I put in the feed tray. Also, we have a weird VoiP phone system where you have to dial certain numbers to get an outside line from certain phones.

Which is really all just stuff I’m telling you to distract you from the fact that I forgot how to send a fax.

I mean, I knew there was a part where you put the paper in, and then you dialed the number and the magic Internet gnomes got to work drawing a tiiiiiiiiiny (omg, so tiny) replica of your document which they then projected across the skies with their special Internet gnome flashlights in a specific pattern that only the gnomes who lived in the machine of the person you were sending the document to could decode…or whatever. But I forgot all the bullshit about having to dial 9 first, and then whether or not I needed to dial an extra 1 before the phone number, and what phase of the moon we needed to be in for this to even work and OMG it was all just such a process.

So, I re-learned how to send a fax, and that was…I wouldn’t really call it FUN, but it killed some time and therefore had value of a sort to it. I punched the right numbers in and I signed my cover sheet with a little smiley face because YAY, COMMERCE!  I loaded the pages into the feeder tray and hit “send”. The machine made a satisfying amount of screechy dial-up racket and then sucked my pages through the scanner part. Assuming my part in this information transfer drama was now over with, I walked away.

But lo, all was not right in the land of the Internet gnomes, it seemed.

Several minutes after I walked away from it, the machine emitted a series of kind of mocking beeps and printed something all of its own accord. Suspicious, I approached the machine once again and looked at the print-out. It read…

…’fax not sent’.

“Awww, COME ON! I have to do that whole stupid thing AGAIN? I already shredded the originals! Goddamnit. This is why nobody faxes anymore JIM”, I grumbled.

I went back to my desk, printed out another invoice and another cover sheet. I didn’t sign the cover sheet with a smiley face the second time, because commerce is great and whatever but seriously, fuck Jim and his insistence on using outdated modes of information technology. The whole process of dialing the extra numbers and then the real number and then praying to the Internet gnomes, the whole nine yards…I re-did it all.

And once again, the bloody shitting fax didn’t go through.

I stomped back over to my desk and called Jim to ask what the deal was. Jim proceeded to tell me to…

…wait for it…

…waaaaait…

…oooh, not quite there yet, but almost…

…he told me to just email him the invoice.

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It’s seriously really good that through-the-phone ear-stabbing technology doesn’t exist because I am telling you, Jim would have been bloodied in that moment. Jim would have suffered. And I would have laughed.

On the up-side, I did re-learn how to fax, though. It probably won’t be relevant to my job again for another eight frigging years, but hey…the more you know.

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I know Jim’s an asshole.

potato hole

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A couple weekends ago Mark and I drove down to southern New Hampshire to attend a beer and chili festival with a group of friends. The beer and chili festival was exactly what the name implies: a festival in which you get to walk around trying many different beers and many different versions of chili. The chili was all you could eat, in fact, and was included in the price of admission. Chili = zero dollars in this scenario.

Remember that. It’s going to be relevant later.

When you first go into the festival they give you a sample glass and ten drink tickets, the idea being that each time you go to an exhibitor’s booth and get a sample of their beer, you give them one of your tickets. When you’re out of tickets, you’re ostensibly out of beer. Except…none of the exhibitors were actually taking tickets. Some of them had containers out to collect tickets, but not a single one of them were creating any kind of “you can’t have this beer until you give me a ticket” enforcement situations. So in essence, it was a no-holds-barred, beer-sampling free-for-all. With chili. FREE chili.

We entered the festival and proceeded to work our way around the small tents, sampling chili and beer. We got almost to the end of the lawn area where we had entered and I asked if it was time to perhaps circle back around to hit the tents we hadn’t visited in our first round. Our friends, who had been to this festival before, laughed and pointed down along a paved walkway at the end of the lawn which led to another, larger lawn with several GIANT tents set up on it. Turned out there were a lot more breweries exhibiting at the festival than we had realized there’d be. Three giant tents worth, in fact! Excited at the prospect of sampling many more beers, we made our way toward the giant tents.

It’s worth pointing out here that New Englanders are known as a thrifty lot. My people aren’t big into wasting things, especially food and drink. Thus, the concept of getting oh, say, a sample of beer, and only drinking a few sips before dumping the rest out is kind of foreign to me. Also, how would YOU feel if you were a brewer giving out samples of your wares only to watch people take just a few sips and then dump them out? You’d be offended, right? You might begin to question your chosen profession, even. You’d surely be hurt. I try to do my best not to hurt people if I can help it, so I was doing my level best to finish off each beer sample entirely before I’d go for the next one. Even if I didn’t particularly like the beer. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in me drinking a fair amount of beer on a stomach that only had a few sample-sized portions of chili in it.

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Ommegang Brewery’s Rosetta – it’s a lambic that tastes like sour cherries and heaven. And my heathen ass doesn’t even BELIEVE in heaven. A++, will buy.

So, we were there by the giant beer tents and my husband started talking about wanting more food. Beginning to feel the effects of all the beer samples I had been diligently finishing off for the last hour or so (mustn’t waste, after all), I agreed that food would be a smart move. We assessed our options. The chili tents were waaaaay off on the other end of the park where we first came in, but there were a couple of food trucks vending quite close to the end where we were.

“But the chili is FREE”, I said.

“But the guy selling sausages is CLOSE. Plus: we got cash on the way here for just such a situation. Plus: sausage,” Mark replied.

“Damn you and your flawless logic”, I grumbled, and off we went to the sausage truck (which is an inherently funny phrase, but don’t derail me).

There were a few people in line ahead of us so we got a good look at the wares as others got their orders. The choices were a disturbingly long grilled hotdog, a pretty normal-looking grilled sausage with or without grilled onions and peppers, and french fries. The purveyors didn’t have any signage displaying pricing, but it was kind of too late at that point because it was our turn at the counter.

Me: “Hi, how much are your hotdogs?”

Sausage Man: “Sausages and hotdogs are $8”

Me: “$8…does that include fries?”

SM: “Nope.”

Me: “Oh. How much are the fries?”

SM: “$6”

Me, trying not to snort at that absurdity: “Ok, we’ll take just a sausage please”.

We stepped back from the counter while the guy made the sausage and I turned to Mark with wide eyes.

“Six bucks for FRIES?!” I hissed. He made some malarky argument about captive audiences and hand-cut fries but I stopped hearing the words coming out of his mouth because, six bucks. For fries. When there were seventeen (at least!) types of chili like 500 feet away. FREE CHILI. ZERO. DOLLAR. CHILI. 

The guy gave us the sausage (hurrr), we ate it, I went back and told others of the outrageous pricing, then we all drank more beer and talked about more amusing subjects. A good time was had by all. (That whole story was really just background, so I don’t feel bad ending it abruptly.)

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My husband is shown here exhibiting the infinite patience for which he should be sainted. Note the slightly manic twinkle in my eyes. Or slightly drunk? Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. JOKES WITHIN JOKES, OMG.

Anyway. Fast-forward to last night.

(I wanted to put a gif here of the thing they do on Wayne’s World when they change scenes, but you think I could find that thing anywhere? NO. Fucking Internet. Why do I even bother?)

Wait, what?  Oh yes. Last night.

So last night Mark and I were running some errands and I was ranting about…I don’t even know, something…and at the end of the rant Mark pointed out that I was nearly as offended by that thing as I had been by the price of fries at the beer festival. Since the rant pump was already well-primed, that was all the nudge I needed to go off about those stupid fries.

“Six bucks for fries. THAT WAS INSANE. Do you know how much a 50 pound bag of potatoes costs? Like $10. MAYBE. And that’s RETAIL. If they were buying them through a wholesaler they were like half that. And it’s not even like there’s LABOR involved with making fries. With the sausages, I can kind of see the justification – you have to grill them, you have to slice and grill the onions and peppers, you have to put the sausage in the bun…there’s semi-skilled labor involved in that. But french fries? You dump potatoes into hot oil and you WALK AWAY for several minutes. You maybe go back and shake the basket halfway through cooking, but that’s it. There’s no labor. Nothing.”

Mark tried reason on me:  “Well, someone’s gotta cut the potatoes, at least.”

“NO THEY FUCKING DON’T. They put them through a fry cutter!  You set the potato on it, push the lever down, it forces the potato through a cutting grid, and VOILA, french fries. You don’t even have to PEEL the potatoes. The most you could argue is that they have to WASH the potatoes, but big fucking deal, how long does that take? Not $8 worth of time, that’s for damn sure.”

“Err, $6.”

“Huh?!”

“You said $8, but the fries were $6.”

I side-eyed him as best I could while also keeping the car on the road, because I was driving through this entire thing, it’s worth noting.

“Six dollars, eight dollars…I don’t fucking care. They were too damned expensive and I am deeply annoyed by it. So…so shove THAT in your $8 POTATO HOLE,” I spluttered.

Needless to say, the $8 potato hole was still being brought up this morning. I don’t even want to think about how long it’s gonna to take me to live that one down.

It’ll be longer than it takes to make a batch of french fries, though. I can guarantee you THAT much.

broken bits

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I started writing this as a post for World Mental Health Day, which was on Monday…but it turned out I had a lot more to say than I originally thought and thus it took me a while to finish the post. Better late than never?!
Also, a quick warning – there are mentions of self-harm (though no graphic descriptions), and allusions to suicidal thoughts below. If you find these subjects triggering, best stop here.
My ‘official’ (ie: documented by a health professional) history with mental illness goes back about 11 years, but it has been with me a lot longer than that.

As a child, I’d often get overwhelmed by emotions and I’d cry. I couldn’t adequately explain to anyone why I was crying, so I was told to toughen up. For the record, my parents were both brought up in pretty emotionally repressive families themselves and they didn’t really know any other way to be. I get that and I don’t hold it against them. They did the best they knew how.

Anyway.

Because I believed that I wasn’t supposed to cry without a ‘good reason’, I instead developed a habit of hitting, scratching or pinching myself, or sometimes biting the insides of my cheeks. when I started feeling like I was about to cry. It was a way of distracting myself and hopefully heading off the imminent crying jag. It didn’t always work, but it worked often enough that it became habit. Self-harm isn’t something I would have understood had someone explained it to me at six or seven years of age, of course. Hell, it’s something I still don’t always understand 30 years later. But that’s what I was doing. I was purposefully hurting myself in an attempt to cope with emotions.

The first time I started to realize I probably wasn’t OK in the head was around age 15. That was when I started having trouble in school (due in large part to ADHD that I didn’t know I had), and I was sad a lot. I had always been a very smart kid that could keep up despite my focus problems, but as the workload intensified in high school, that all came crashing down and my identity as a smart kid was something I began to seriously question.

By senior year, I was in real danger of failing a required English class and thus not graduating. I had gotten pretty good at playing a character – a funny, flippant music nerd who simply didn’t care about academics. But inside, I was a stew of insecurity and self-loathing. I felt like a failure and a disappointment to my family. My brain started convincing me that I wasn’t actually smart at all, that all my teachers had lied in order to spare me from realizing what a no-good loser I was. I believed that the few friends I had were hanging out with me because they felt sorry for me. Things eventually came to a head when I was no longer able to intercept the mail the school was sending home about my being in danger of flunking out. The look on my mom’s face when I had to tell her I might not graduate still makes me feel bad almost 20 years later. It was like watching something I loved being crumpled up and stomped on. This was the toughest woman I knew and I had managed to break her with my inability to be normal, to just do what needed to be done like everyone else did. That certainly didn’t improve the tenor of my already negative inner dialog any. I did end up graduating, though I was FAR from prepared for post-secondary education. Going to college that fall had mistake written all over it…but off I went, undiagnosed mental issues and all, because that was where smart kids were expected to go after high school.

College was pretty bad. I’ll spare you the gritty details but the gist is that I was there for two largely unpleasant semesters before I was told I didn’t need to bother coming back. Anxiety was my constant companion through the first semester and by halfway through the second semester I was experiencing my first full-blown depressive episode – not that I knew what it was at the time. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on and I didn’t get any help. Instead I floundered, flunked out, and went home to find a job. I didn’t know how to deal with the resultant feelings of guilt and failure, so I just…didn’t. I stuffed them down and distracted myself with experiencing the fun parts of a college experience via my best friend, whose school I visited almost every weekend.

When best friend moved away after graduating college, things started to fall apart again in a big way. The brain weasels were soon running rampant, telling me that I was the only one of my group of high school friends left in town because I was a failure, a fuck-up and a disgrace. I self-medicated with booze – a LOT of booze. The chorus of self-loathing that I’d been living with for the past ten years was now getting louder by the day. It told me that I didn’t deserve my job or the things that I had, that I wasn’t worthy of the love of my family or my long-distance boyfriend. It told me that nothing I did would ever be good enough, that I had no friends because I was terrible to be around. It told me not to bother trying to do any of the things I used to love – making music, writing stories, painting and drawing – because I was never going to be any good at any of them. It wanted me to believe that there was no point in even living anymore, and for a little while there, it had me pretty well convinced.

Shortly after my 25th birthday I experienced a bout of costochondritis, which is an inflammation of the cartilage between the ribs where they connect to the sternum. Imagine someone sliding a knife between your ribs right up near your breast bone and then slowly trying to turn the blade vertical, prying your ribs apart a millimeter at a time. Super funtimes! It also caused a lot of referred pain into my left shoulder, neck and breast. Being a life-long fatty and having a history of heart disease in my family, it really wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that particular combination of pains being symptoms of a heart attack. The doctor in the emergency room and my primary care doctor both told me that my heart was fine, but I couldn’t stop thinking that there was something very wrong, that I was on the verge of dropping dead. I felt constantly sick to my stomach, I would have spells of not being able to breathe, of feeling cold and clammy…all secondary symptoms of a heart attack, coincidentally. It got to the point where I would end each day at work by writing a series of notes with directions for what to do in my absence because I was absolutely convinced that I wasn’t going to be there the next day. What I know now, of course, was that I was living in a constant state of panic attack…but that was never even mentioned as a possibility at the time.

After a couple months of limping along like that, I finally broke. I went to my doctor and sobbed about how I was so terrified of dropping dead that I was starting to have trouble leaving my house (because, you know, death can only get you if you leave the house? Brain weasel logic is weak at best). She told me I was depressed, wrote me a prescription for Wellbutrin and set me on the 10+ year path of exploring everything from medications (five so far) to exercise, special diets, supplements, and a variety of self-help plans.

Finally being diagnosed with ADHD and being properly medicated for that has made a huge difference in my anxiety levels, but I still struggle with depression regularly. I’ve finally started learning ways to help myself, though. Talking with people who’ve had similar experiences reminds me that I’m not alone no matter what the brain weasels want me to believe. Meditation helps me to just be where I am in this moment and not worry so much about the future or feel so bad about the past. Yoga helps me move my focus out of my head and into my body, giving my brainmeat a little much-needed rest. All of these things compound over time and help me to realize that the way my brain works is not all there is to me…but it’s part of who I am, and that’s something I’m learning to be OK with.

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“When I’m feeling down, I like to chew my foot. Sounds weird but it helps.”  – Junior

If you’re struggling, know that you’re NOT alone, and that people truly do want to help you feel better. The world needs you in it, so please stay! If you need immediate help, start here (you don’t even have to call, you can chat with them online! Isn’t that handy?!)

Anti-Trump bucks

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A couple weeks back, a funny thing happened. A good friend of mine who also happens to read this blog sent me a private message on Facebook, and the following exchange ensued:

Friend: Sooo…I have a slightly awkward question for you.

Me: Oh, fun! I love those! Hit me.

Friend: Ok. I feel like we know each other pretty well in a lot of ways, but politics is something we’ve never actually talked about and I’ve just kind of been wondering…do you support Trump?

Me: WHAT? NO. OMG. No, no, no. Uuuugh. (barfing noises)

Friend: O…kayyyy…

Me: What, uhhh…what gave you the impression that I would be a Trump supporter?

Friend: Almost every time I go to your blog, there’s a Trump ad at the bottom of your post. Like, nine times out of ten. It got weird enough that it started to make me really wonder.

Me: Holy shit. Thank you so much for telling me. I must find a way to fix this.

A matter of hours later, another friend who DOES know my political leanings pointed out that he had seen a Trump ad on my latest post. Two days later, several more folks brought it up as well. My guts churned every time someone else piped up about it.

I was livid. I pulled up my WordPress account and clicked all around looking for an ad filter, preferences, ANYTHING that would allow me to stop the Trump ads from appearing on my posts. It turned out that the only option was to upgrade from a free account to a paid one.

It didn’t take me long to decide that that racist, narcissistic, tax-evading dumpster fire is NOT getting the benefit of the eyes of my readership, however small it might be. I’m not saying that you have to agree with my politics in order to read my blog. I’m just saying that I will not knowingly provide his campaign with ANY avenue to further spread his hate-filled rhetoric. If you can even call what he says ‘rhetoric’.

So, long story short: I just coughed up $35 real, actual dollars from my bank account to upgrade my WordPress account so that you guys wouldn’t have to keep seeing Trump ads at the end of my posts.

THAT is how much I love you all. At least $35 worth.

lizard brain

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Apparently I slept in a way last night that caused a muscle or nerve in the back of my neck to seize up. Not hugely uncommon for me – I tend to carry all my tension in my neck and shoulders, plus I type eight hours a day and have relatively poor posture while doing so.

The muscle or nerve in my neck that’s unhappy happens to be right near the base of my skull, so every time I move just right, it sends this pain up into my head and my lizard brain is like ‘WAAAAH, MENINGITIS! WAAAAH, STROKE! WAAAAH, TUMOR! WAAAAH, PARASITIC AMOEBAS EATING MY BRAIN!’

Ten years ago I was a pretty much full-blown hypochondriac and wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking that I was sitting here slowly bleeding out into my brain pan or something. I would have eventually worked myself into such a panic that I’d have made myself physically ill. Nowadays I can identify that lizard brain is the culprit when I start thinking a random ache or pain is Something More Serious. I can’t put lizard brain totally on mute, but I’ve gotten a lot better at not letting it control me.

Or maybe that’s just what the parasitic amoebas want me to think…

 

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Amoeba aliens. In my brain.

I’ll take ‘WTF Do We Do Now’ for $1,000, Alex

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My family is all pretty close, at least in the geographic sense, if not the emotional sense. We all basically live within about ten minutes’ drive of each other. A strong love of place no doubt factors into why we’ve all stayed so close to the area we grew up in, but stronger still was the near-gravitational pull of my maternal grandmother Mary, aka: Nana.

It’s not that she ever made any of us feel like we couldn’t or shouldn’t move away and do our own things; she just had a way of making people want to be around her. She was funny, kind, welcoming and generous with her time. She liked nothing more than to have people stop by for a visit and tell her all about what they’d been up to. You could sit and talk her ear off for hours, but when you finally sighed and said you guessed it was time to go, she’d always say “well, you don’t have to hurry”, as if she’d be just fine with you going on about your boring-ass day for another hour or two. And she probably would have been, because that’s just how she was.

Nana was the force holding us all together around her, but she was also someone I looked up to and admired greatly. For all her softness, her generosity of spirit and her ability to make people feel comfortable, she also had extraordinary strength of will. She was whip smart, fiercely independent, and when that woman set her mind to do something, you had two choices: get on board or get the hell out of the way. She was born in the middle of the Great Depression to an already dirt-poor family of miners and subsistence farmers. Education and hard work were the only ways out of that situation, and she made a life-long habit of both. Her mantra was that you could do anything you put your mind to, and she was living proof of it. The stories she told affected me from a very early age, both directly from her tellings and indirectly via the way she had brought up my mother and aunts. Nana was a woman I aspired to be like; she was the stick I tried to measure myself against.

The call came early Monday morning that she had quite unexpectedly died. She had been fine the day before – she had gone out for her regular Sunday morning breakfast at the diner, she had done her grocery shopping and washed some windows, and she had spent the evening visiting and watching the Patriots game on TV with some family members. It had been pretty much her perfect day. At some point very early Monday morning she had woken up with chest pains, called my aunt (who lives next door), called the ambulance…and she was gone before they even got her halfway to the hospital. The whole ordeal probably lasted less than a couple hours, depending on how long she waffled before she decided to call my aunt for help. She had high blood pressure but she hadn’t had any serious heart problems above and beyond what would be expected of an 81 year old woman. She had suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis for more than a decade though, and while she didn’t generally speak of it much, she was in a lot of pain on a daily basis – sometimes to the point of being quite debilitated. In the past few weeks she had apparently expressed to several family members her desire to ‘just go to sleep’, and her worries about trying to make it through another tough winter. I don’t think that she would have decided to take something in order to end her own suffering, but I do very much believe in the power of will and the ability to talk one’s self into dying if that’s what they truly want…and I believe that’s what she did.

Nana wouldn’t have wanted a fuss to be made over her. She would have liked for us to take what we wanted of her stuff, give the rest away to people that it might help, and then get on with our lives.

So, that’s what I’ll try to do. It won’t be easy. But, like Nana taught me, I can do anything that I put my mind to.

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Mary Godfrey – 3/31/1935 – 9/12/2016 Photo credit: R. Williams

My new favorite podcast, plus feels, plus a random giraffe. The end.

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Most of what I do for work is pretty fucking boring. I look for numbers, I add or subtract some numbers from other numbers, I type numbers into various computer programs. Once in a great while it’ll get crazy up in here and I’ll have to do some very basic algebra (I don’t like those days, by the way – I failed algebra twice and I’m pretty sure the only reason I didn’t fail it a third time was because the teacher was really fucking sick of seeing my face at that point (and the feeling was mutual)). Sometimes I have to send emails to people about numbers. Occasionally there are meetings where I am asked questions about numbers.

If you’ve been around my blog long enough, you know that I also share an office with someone whose musical taste (and I use that phrase loosely) differs significantly from my own. That wouldn’t be a problem in the least, except that said person has also decided that, for whatever reason, he is entitled to listen to his music over speakers connected to his computer rather than listening via headphones like a civilized person. Historically, my way of dealing with this has been headphones of my own (TAKE A HINT, BRO) and a somewhat unhealthy obsession with about three dozen songs on Spotify. Several friends had suggested that I try podcasts or even audiobooks for times when I get sick of my Spotify playlists, but I never really gave either idea a chance. I’m an asshole like that sometimes. Probably not a newsflash to anyone.

Anyway.

During a probably-undeserved Twitter break one afternoon not long after we got back from GenCon, I noticed a link posted by one of my favorite authors, Pat Rothfuss. It was a link to a podcast called Unattended Consequences that he was doing with some guy named Max Temkin. There had been some amusing back-and-forth tweeting between the two during GenCon that I was really curious about the context of, and this podcast episode Pat was linking to was apparently explaining that whole thing. Intrigued, I decided to give it a go.

I knew via Twitter and Pat’s blog that he was interesting and amusing guy, but I had no idea who Max Temkin was. Turns out he’s one of the co-creators of Cards Against Humanity, and not surprisingly, also very funny. Add into the mix that I was still coming down from a great GenCon myself and therefore kind of pining for anything to keep the con glow alive just a little bit longer, and I was sold. I snickered and giggle-snorted my way through the rest of the afternoon feeling like I was hanging out with two nerdy friends and it was good.

The next day, like any mild obsessive worth their salt, I decided to go back to the beginning and work my way through all the episodes in order.  The podcast is often very funny, but it’s also interesting and insightful. They don’t just talk about gaming – they drop nuggets of writing advice (which, let’s face it, I need all the help I can get), they talk about books, philosophy, pop culture, and they’re both pretty upfront about their respective mental issues. I feel I can especially relate to Max, who routinely mentions his struggles with anxiety and the manifestations there-of (the unholy trinity of stress, procrastination and self-loathing with which I am so deeply familiar). Hearing talented, successful folks acknowledge mental struggles similar to my own is really helpful to me. I mean, it’s helpful when ANYONE is honest with their struggles because it helps to break down the stigma of mental illness, but for me personally, hearing someone like Max Temkin, Pat Rothfuss, Felicia Day or Jenny Lawson explain how their brains fuck them over on the regular makes me realize that success and mental illness are not mutually exclusive. You can have brain weasels and still make good art, do good things, and live a fulfilling life.

I’m almost caught up on Unattended Consequences now and I have to admit, the prospect of virtually hanging out with Pat and Max only once a week rather than almost every day is kind of a bummer. I’ll muddle through with other podcasts so that I don’t strangle my coworkers, but I don’t have to be happy about it.

Do you have any favorite podcasts? Do you do one of your own? Leave me a comment and we’ll chat podcasts. Or, find me on Twitter and we can talk about them there.

PS: This was a completely unsolicited and unpaid post. Pat Rothfuss and Max Temkin don’t know me from a hole in the ground. I just really enjoy their show and wanted to share it with others.

PPS: But if Pat Rothfuss and/or Max Temkin DID end up reading this and liking it, I’d probably shit my pants with excitement. Like, actual load in my actual pants. Actually.

PPPS: This post needs a picture. In honor of the discovery of possible new species of giraffes this week, here is a sassy giraffe. We should name him Gene. It’s a tongue joke.

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Did you think it was a fish hanging out of his mouth for half a second when you first saw it? I did, and it was VERY confusing.

PPPPS: What do you mean, ‘it’s obvious where the Adderall wore off during the writing of this post’?!  Ok, fair enough.

 

Order of the Perfect Avocado

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A week or so ago, I had an avocado so perfect that I was compelled to take a picture of it for posterity.

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Mythic-level perfect avocado.

If you’re an avocado person, you get it. A regular person shopping for avocados will be satisfied to test a couple to make sure they’re not rock-hard or mushy before making their selection, but an avocado person will stand in front of the display and feel up so many avocados that it starts to get awkward. Other shoppers will openly look askance at us. Some of us may in fact be on the produce section staff watch-list because of the ardent attention we pay to the perpetual pile of olive green wonderment that is the avocado display.

A perfectly ripe avocado is rare enough, but finding a truly flawless one is a rarer beast indeed. Feeling up an avocado for ripeness is an art, but there’s plenty you CAN’T tell just from feeling and looking at an avocado:

  • has it been bashed around in transport?
  • have pinholes in the skin caused the dreaded grey-green oxidation in the flesh?
  • does it have those weird still-unripe spots where the flesh will continue to cling to the skin or the seed even though the rest of the flesh seems perfectly ripe?

You simply cannot know until you cut into it and see. That’s why it’s so exciting when you DO end up with a perfect one. They’re so few and far between that the perfect ones feel…miraculous. It’s what I imagine someone finding the image of Jesus charred onto their morning toast, or the face of the Virgin Mary outlined by the speckles on the skin of their banana might feel. Except, you know…somewhat less inclined to religious dogma.

Anyway.

I shared this picture of my miraculous avocado on Facebook and Twitter because I know I have a lot of similarly avocado-loving friends. In terms of “like” clicks, this picture outpaced basically EVERY OTHER picture I’ve EVER posted on Facebook, memes included.  On Twitter, someone actually downloaded the picture and set it as the background image on their phone.

This avocado has clearly spoken to people. LIKE A MIRACLE.

So, after speaking with several other avocado disciples this morning, I would like to announce the formation of the Order of the Perfect Avocado, dedicated to sharing miracles of avocado perfection for everyone to enjoy. If you have a shining example of avocado perfection that you’d like to share with the world, you can tag it as #APerfectAvocado on Instagram, Twitter or Tumblr. We’ll find it and feature it so that everyone can bask in the green glow.

pterodactyls stormed the field

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My husband is super into sports. Not just “dudes keeping a ball away from other dudes” sports, but like…pretty much any sports. He’s not that big of a basketball fan and I’ve never seen him purposefully skim through the channels to find, like, gymnastics or figure skating competitions…but just about anything else, he’ll watch for at least a few minutes if he finds it on TV. Even golf. That right there should tell you something about his level of commitment to watching sports.

When he first moved in with me, he had this thing about how he didn’t want to record games (matches? Sporting…events? Whatever…) on the DVR and watch them later. He only wanted to watch them live. If he couldn’t watch a game live from the start, he would just skip the whole thing because…well, I’m not really sure why. But he had his reasons. Man reasons.

Anyway, after several months of disagreements about what we were going to watch on our one TV, and instances of him missing a game he wanted to watch because we had to be somewhere else, he finally started to warm to the idea of recording sports on the DVR.  Nowadays, there are things he still prefers to watch live, but for the most part if real life interferes with sports-ball TV time, he’ll just record the event and watch it later. The one side-effect of this, however, is that when he’s waiting to watch a game he’s recorded, he will be SUPER ULTRA OBSESSIVELY careful about trying to avoid seeing the score of the game he’s currently not watching. He’ll stay off social media, he’ll avoid news websites that he knows might be running a ticker of the scores, etc. It’s serious business.

So, last night the New England Patriots were playing. Normally Patriots games are firmly at the top of Mark’s “must watch live” list, but last night’s was only a preseason game (I can totally hear him scoffing at the word ‘only’ in my head right now, by the way), so it was acceptable that it be recorded and caught up on a little later. We finished dinner, we went into the living room, he turned on the TV…and there was the Patriots game, because the DVR had been set to record it so the TV had been auto-tuned to that channel. Mark squawked and threw a hand up to shield his eyes, not wanting to see the score. He had the remote and was trying to change the channel but couldn’t make the remote work…possibly because he had his hand over his eyes. He started pleading with the TV as he struggled with the remote.

“No, no, no, don’t tell me the score, don’t tell me the scooooore, noooo!”

To which I, exceedingly helpful wife that I am, cheerfully replied…

“Oh don’t worry, there’s no score yet. It looks like there’s only five minutes left in the quarter.”

There was a beat of stunned silence, then we embarked on a detailed refresher course of Mark’s feelings with regard to having sports scores spoiled for him.

But…IN MY DEFENSE…my reasoning was that there was literally no score, so I wasn’t really ruining anything. Right? I mean, there are things you can GUESS might have happened in a game that has a 0-0 score with five minutes left in the first quarter, ie:

  • one or both of the teams are having a bad night on offense (PLAUSIBLE)
  • one or both of the teams are having a GOOD night on defense (ALSO PLAUSIBLE)
  • somebody might have gotten really CLOSE to scoring but then it didn’t happen (+3 PANTS OF PLAUSIBILITY)
  • maybe nobody had gotten close to scoring at all because…I don’t fucking know…pterodactyls stormed the field (MAYBE NOT PLAUSIBLE, but entertaining to consider)

By their very nature, zeros have no value. Logic* therefore dictates that my revealing that the score was zero all revealed ACTUAL NOTHING. I don’t see how that’s problematic in any way. IN FACT, quite the opposite, I feel like I did him a FAVOR by increasing his anticipation for watching the game. If I hadn’t said that there was no score, he wouldn’t have been NEARLY as interested in eventually watching the first quarter of the game to see just what shenanigans had led up to said fest of equal nothingness.

So there.

*Disclaimer: I use the term ‘logic’ in the loosest sense here. Not that anyone reading this really needed to be reminded of that, I suppose…but still. Better safe than embroiled in Internet debates with people way better at logic-ing than I am (see also: everyone, ever). 

Life_restoration_of_a_group_of_giant_azhdarchids,_Quetzalcoatlus_northropi,_foraging_on_a_Cretaceous_fern_prairie

These are giant azhdarchids. They were pterosaurs that stood as tall as giraffes. FUCKING GIRAFFES. AND THEY FLEW. Can you imagine how horrific it would be to round a corner in the late Cretaceous and see a group of these motherfuckers wandering around? HOLY SHIT. I didn’t even know these existed. This is why I love the Internet. So many dinosaurs.   PS: I took this image from Wikipedia, who say it’s by Mark Witton and Darren Naish. Hopefully they won’t sue me. They know a lot about dinosaurs so maybe we could be friends.