Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Friday, May 30, 2003 Reader Mail Slot, Episode XIII First, thanks to everyone who passed along tips and good wishes for our Hawaii vacation, including Marla, Corduroy Ninja, Bella, and, in an eerie coincidence, Carol: I have no Hawaii knowledge, aside from knowing that it's our 50th state and it tends to be humid, but picking up tiki idols for good luck should be fine as long as there are no Bradys around. Those idiots bring bad luck to everyone. Also, make sure that Vincent Price isn't lurking. Not because he's bad luck, but because he's dead and all. That would just be creepy. I appreciate it. Not that we could have had a bad time there if we’d tried. We actually did try for a couple of hours there, but we couldn’t maintain the proper level of misery and ended up having fun despite ourselves. And we learned a valuable lesson in the process. At least I didn’t get sunburned; as a coworker I barely know was kind enough to observe when I returned to the office, I look “as white as ever.” What a relief. Sarcasma feels my pain, because it is also hers: My god, may I just commiserate here? Sounds like I have the same colouring (brownish hair, blue eyes, eerie glow-in-the-dark complexion). Last summer was the summer of idiots making comments about my skin tone. Like, actual total strangers, commenting on the colour of my skin like it was somehow ruining the quality of their life and I could do something about it if only I wasn't so useless and stupid and inconsiderate. You know the tone used for comments about a woman's fat ass? Yeah. "Get a tan, bitch." "Get out of my face, Casper." "Get some sun, cunt." Um... what? Wow, I was actually exaggerating a bit when I originally talked about it. Nobody’s been that rude to me about it for a long time. Especially that last comment, since the person who always used to say that no longer works for me. You know what else doesn’t work for me? Trying to get all deep. Look what happens: Here's something that you might find apropos. I read it this morning in Nicholson Baker's "The Size of Thoughts." It's in the essay titled "Lumber," in which Mr. Baker tells us the history of the usage of "lumber" to mean the information in our heads. Quote from Sherlock Holmes: "A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it." (A Study in Scarlet) Interesting how I ran across both that essay and your post today, when I'm having mental discourses on thinking and thoughts. Not deep, mind you, just cerebral. Or something. See, one of the great things about being a Damn Hell Ass King is that it fools all kinds of smart people like Fish Dreamer up there into reading me. That raises the question of how smart they really are (especially the ones who stick around), but I don’t want to seem uncharitable. However, it sometimes puts me in the situation of a tourist in Puerto Vallarta who asks “Donday esta banno?” and gets sprayed with a flood of incomprehensible Espanol and, shortly thereafter, his own urine. The thought that someone can read Nicholson Baker and me in the same day and actually draw a parallel between us is rather humbling. I have to be humble for a minute now. Okay, I’m back. Robin has this to say on the subject of air mattresses that turn into flaccid bladders overnight: Have you ever tried Aerobeds?? I swore by them in college. The pump is attached, and it inflates just by pressing a button. Most comfortable air bed I have EVER slept on. They just came out with a new bed, for outdoors/camping/etc. with a rechargeable pump and everything. Here's the link. And here’s what throws me: the phrase “Minute Bed Sport.” I’m not sure if they mean “minute” or “minute” but either way, why do they think I want something called that? I don’t know what kind of spyware has sneaked onto my system, but these folks seem to know just a little too much about me. Creepy. Folks have also been pretty helpful about my allergies. At least two people have pointed out that “severe” and “acute” are in fact not necessarily synonyms when used in a medical context. And Catness (like Fish Dreamer, a Chicklit contributor) was nice enough to share some allergy-related info I could use: One method that Mr. Catness uses for his allergies is to eat a teaspoon of local honey every day. Honey has all the traces of pollens and other allergens in it, and local honey, obviously, will have those native to your area. By ingesting it, you're building up a tolerance and immunity to the local flora. In Atlanta, Mr. Catness was plagued by horrible hay fever and allergies until he started with taking honey. When he moved up here to Seattle, and he had a whole new set of pollen producing plant life to get used to, a month of local honey got everything under control. Makes sense to me. I haven’t actually found any local honey yet, but I’m not sure if it makes a difference because after the Hawaii trip, I’m now fairly sure I’m just allergic to the cat. So I ate him instead. Thanks, Catness! Whatever disappointment I felt in the lack of response to the pudding bug story last month, it was more than made up for this month by the reaction to my terrifying combat with a gigapede from Hell. Up to and including a shout-out from Strega in this season’s penultimate Angel recap. As Liz put it: What is it with you and the ability to make me shriek, jump out of my chair in horror, and go into convulsions? Actually, I have that effect on a lot of women. This is the second time that's happened to me while reading your blog. Oh, that’s what you meant. I knew that. The first time was when I read about the "pudding incident." When that bug jumped on you... eeeeeeahg. Maybe the creature was an angry descendant of your little pudding hitchhiker. I have to go consider sedatives now... I never even made that connection. Worse yet, what if it was the Swiss Miss-fit himself, reincarnated in a form that would allow it to seek revenge? Thanks, Liz. You can just rock me to sleep tonight. And now I can’t even run away to Antarctica, thanks to Obb: See now, Antarctica isn't the place to flee to avoid Lovecraft-esque beasts of terror. His short novel "The Mountains of Madness" involves intrepid but naive explorers from Arkham University being driven MAD MAD MAD by the unholy abode of eldritch gods of chaos at the pole. Although actually it might still be preferable to the terrifying…ladybug? you just boldly vanquished, since I mean, the explorers were basically driven mad by…evil geometry. I mean, geometry. I had some creepy math teachers, but I can't think of any angles that particularly haunt my dreams. But I can see how having, say, Mr. C. H. Thulhu as a math teacher could send a person to therapy. But it's not like the attack of the 50-foot ants or anything. I have no idea what my original point was. That last sentence alone qualifies Obb to take over for me. Even Hawaii isn’t completely devoid of diabolical representatives of the astral plane. While driving around, we caught glimpses of a couple of specimens of something that appeared to have the body of a ferret, the head of a cat, and the gait of an electric Slinky™. I had no idea what it was, but I was glad to see it was running away from us. As I am running away now, because I have no ending. See you in June, and may your weekend contain a marked lack of nightmarish beasties, leaky air mattresses, near-fatal allergy attacks, rude people, and Nicholson Baker. I have no idea whether any of those categories overlap, but I thought I should cover everything just to be safe. posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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