Life in the Pink

My boyfriend really, really does not like it when I talk about taxiderming his corpse after he dies.

He’s not so into it being plasticized, either.

Not even when I offered to make it into an animatronic taxidermy with a motion sensor so that when people approached it, it would say things like “Cynthia is awesome” or “‘More hay, Trigger?’ ‘No thanks Roy, I’m stuffed.’” and wave its arms and go “Arrrrrgh!” to terrify children.

I like that Mothers Against Drunk Driving is protesting the fact that you can drunk drive in Grand Theft Auto, a game that is famous for allowing you to shoot cops, beat up hookers, and, oh yes, steal cars. I mean, can we have a little perspective here? Yes, “drunk driving is not a game,” (See? What they’re doing there? Because it’s a video game? Nice pun, MADD.) but perpetrating violent crimes against sex workers is also not a game, unless maybe you’re wearing a funny hat while doing it and have some sort of point system going on. (Also, what if you were drunk driving and racing each other? That would probably be a game, technically. I mean, yes, a very bad idea and dangerous, but also a game.) I like that they were apparently like “Oh, the rest of it is fine, but the drunk driving part really puts it over the line.”

Boyfriend: You’re pretty far into that book.
Me: I’m on page 250.
Boyfriend: Do you like it?
Me, immediately: No.
Boyfriend: Oh. Why not?
Me: All the characters are sociopaths.
Boyfriend: I wouldn’t say they’re all sociopaths.
Me: Still, you wouldn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with any of them.
Boyfriend: I guess not.
Me: And reading a book is sort of like being stuck in an elevator with somebody.

The stuck-in-an-elevator test is not really all I look for in a quality novel, per say, but it does tend to have a strong correlation with whether or not I enjoy a particular reading experience. I know, I know, this probably removes all of my humanities/creative writing cred, but I do not like books that are actively unpleasant or “reader hostile” or whatever you want to call it. (This means you, David Foster Wallace.) I have to read lots of badly written and boring papers about various computer things for work, if asking that my pleasure reading be slightly more enjoyable than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick makes me a shallow person, then so be it.

This morning I borrowed a travel mug from my boyfriend because I had enough coffee for both my thermos and a travel mug, and you can’t just waste coffee like that. Unfortunately, once I got to my car, I discovered that the mug was slightly too large to fit into my car’s cupholders. Which meant I could either drive with one hand on the wheel and one hand steadying the travel mug, or I could drive with scalding coffee spilling all over my legs and feet. Which would have been an easier choice to make if I didn’t drive stick shift. Since I do drive stick shift, I got to do a fun balancing act all the way to school, using my right hand to shift as quickly as possible and only when absolutely necessary, and then grabbing the top of the travel mug before it toppled over.

Man, would I ever love it if Slashdot stopped using the word “girlfriend” as though it were interchangeable with “un-geek/clueless about computers,” as they do yet again in this article.

Friday night, the pinkhairedboyfriend and I were watching a movie (The Savages) at his house, when we heard this super loud screeching of tires and a huge crash that shook the building. The boyfriend’s building has a gated parking garage underneath it, and apparently someone had tried to steal a pickup truck parked inside, but without opening the gate first. (People are speculating that whoever it was thought that the gate would open automatically, but my theory is he had just watched too many bad action movies where people crash cars into gates and fences without it being an impediment to their escape.) End result: the truck got wedged under the gate, the dude who was trying to steal it ran away sans truck.

Everyone ran outside and was like “What the hell?”, the cops were called, eventually a flatbed truck came and hauled the mangled pickup away, the gate is now totally broken, my boyfriend’s car was unhurt in all these shenanigans.

A while ago, I had this dream that I was clicking links on this series of webpages where each page had a link that led to the next page, and someone told me “Whatever you do, don’t click on the penultimate link, or something very bad will happen.”  And I was like “The penultimate link is the one before the last one, how the hell am I supposed to tell which link is the one before the last one if I don’t click through to the last one?”

Which just shows you that I am huge vocab nerd, even in my dreams.  Although I think the logical flaw of not being able to tell which link is last would be present even if I was told not to click on the ultimate link, so maybe my subconscious was just giving my brain the little nerdy present of being able to correctly define penultimate.

I’ve also been having many, many dreams about my research project, but they happen about three times a week and usually don’t have any outstanding features.

I really like this quote by Wendell Berry, which I read in a Michael Pollan article.

“Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

This is how I try to live, attempting to make my personal choices in such a way that it minimizes the suffering of the rest of the planet, which is pretty self-aggrandizing way of saying that I try to remember to bring my big cloth “hippie bag” with me when I go grocery shopping and I really need to get better about turning my computers off when I leave the office.

Oh man, I want this Spice Rack more than I can say. I realize this marks me as a huge nerd, but I’m a huge nerd who recently dumped half a bottle of cumin all over the kitchen after it came flying out of our over-filled, completely un-organized spice cabinet. Seriously, we have every spice ever shoved into one little shelf in this cabinet, and it takes fifteen minutes to find anything in there. I’ve actually memorized the shapes of the tops of frequently used spices as it makes digging around in there go slightly faster.

So this weekend I was playing Apples to Apples with some of my friends. Apples to Apples is a game in which one person puts down a card with an adjective on it, and the rest of the people each put down a card with a noun on it that they feel best fits the adjective.

When it was my turn to put down the adjective, the card I put down said “Sexy” on it.

The cards the other players put down were “Plastic” “Having an Operation” and “Helen Keller.”

I will leave which one I chose as an exercise to the reader.