I don't know where Shamus keeps finding computers

My first poll finished last night with the following results:

Does this blog need more Shamus Van Nostrum?

Yes, because I am him and I love myself	7 (17%)
Yes, because I'm not him but I'm not mentally well	0 (0%)
No, he does not interest me	0 (0%)
I don't care/Who's Shamus?	3 (7%)
Don't you have another, more interesting brother you haven't even mentioned?	29 (74%)

I would graph it, but I have an angry computer, plus I'm lazy, a combination which leads to no pretty graphs. If you really need a picture, just close your eyes and think of delicious pie. Now eat the pie. Wait, the pie is not actually pie, it's a big lemon. Now open your eyes. Did you make a sour face? Isn't that a fun trick? Okay, close them again, now the pie is mainly made up of Mysterious Brother X, with a chunk of Shamus and a dash of apathy/confusion.

What have I learned from this experience? Well, first, I need to give a shorter time-line for polls because I really didn't care 3 days into this poll. Second, Shamus is a crafty one. It's lucky that I'm more clever and made an answer so obviously him that he had to reveal his evil plot by choosing it repeatedly. Third, I'm not certain people know what a question mark means, because I think they chose it assuming it was a promise that a more interesting brother exists, but there's every chance that the answer to that question would be a simple "no". That would be a waste of a vote.

To be honest, I don't really know the answer to the winning question. Yes, Mysterious Brother X (MBX) does exist, but is he more interesting? I have no idea, because, already being the most amusing child, I haven't spent a lot of time figuring out 2nd and 3rd place. I mean, as long as I'm around, it really doesn't matter anyways.

The unfortunate problem with blogging about MBX is that he is not fond of me telling all the best stories about him. I think I'm allowed to tell ones that involve both of us though, like how we used to sit in my closet, in the dark, and play farm. Yes, that's right, in the dark, because all we needed was the power of our imagination. I know it sounds odd, but, I've got to say it's a thousand times better than Farmville. It was also safer than playing in the old fridge in our basement, which we also were fond of. It was not a farm though, it was a club house for me, MBX and a stick of butter. I think our club house would have been way more awesome if my mother wasn't always "rescuing" us from it.

I'm not sure I have much more to say about MBX at this point, except for the many many things that would end in total alienation of 50% of my brothers. In general, I try to make a habit of not alienating family, because they're pretty much walking kidney farms. So far, my kidneys seem good, but, from what I hear, you never quite know when a night at the bar will end with kidney theft. If some med students do decide to steal my kidneys, I hope that they at least try to stitch in their initials when they sew me back up. Then I'll have a cool scar and a clue to the "Mystery of the Missing Kidneys". At first, I'll just know it's someone with the initials "JC" or "MF" or "BM", but, over time and through careful study with a tiny mirror, I will realize that they must have been right handed, and that they most likely grew up in the suburbs of Indianapolis. I don't know how I will learn this, but I'm obsessive, so once my kidneys are gone, I'll spend a lot of my time learning about handwriting and such. Eventually we will meet face to face and I'll realize that I still have a number of organs they probably wouldn't mind harvesting, and I'll run away, but not before snapping a picture of them to post on my blog. And all this will not be possible if I don't keep potential replacement kidneys on my good side (cause otherwise, they steal my kidney and I die, so no time for exciting learning and chasing).

Today's happy song is I Got You Under My Skin, sung by Frank Sinatra, mainly because, who knew a song about parasites could be so perky? Especially parasites that have already spread to your heart (deep in the heart, actually), which is rarely, if ever, a good thing. But, despite his obviously inevitable demise, the band keeps playing, and then I forget that he's probably going to die soon and it won't be a fun death. And the forgetting is what makes this a happy song. If I ever get drunk and someone steals my kidney, I'll sing them this song to them as well. We'll probably have a good laugh about it until I pass out from the pain.

Finally, the deal with the bears

Today someone asked me what my deal is with bears, and since it was not the first time I've been asked this question, I thought it was time for an in-depth exploration of that relationship.

But first, I promised a heart person picture yesterday, and heart person picture I shall deliver.



Note that the hearts are all intact. If you were to introduce a bear to this picture, it would be very different. This is one of my many issues with bears.

I was looking for a "Blood Red" crayon, but apparently that colour doesn't exist in either my 96 crayon set, or my various novelty crayon packets (personally, I think a sparkly blood coloured crayon would be pretty damn popular if they ever created it), so I had to use "Razzmatazz".

To get back to bears, I was not born with a dislike of bears. As a child, I once asked my parents if I could keep a baby bear as a pet. They said no. I said, "Why not? I could keep it in a cage in the back yard." We had a fair-sized yard, so I didn't see why we couldn't sacrifice a small chunk to my bear. My parents said, "But a little bear will grow into a big bear, and then it will need more space." And, of course, I replied, "Don't worry about that, I just won't feed it." This seemed like a perfect plan, given that I'd been taught you eat to grow, so if you don't want to grow, you just don't eat. I wasn't yet aware of the option of Fluoroquinolones . I kind of wish someone had taught me about them, instead of wasting time on useless information, like rhymes about piggies going to market. I just started thinking about that rhyme and realized I always imagined the first piggy was going to market to buy a pumpkin or something, but thinking about it now, I'm wondering if he was there to be sold and subsequently slaughtered for delicious bacon. Also, what kind of pig eats roast beef? Actually, I guess a smart pig that knows how to avoid being eaten.

Actually, the story of my dream of owning a pet bear contains a good lesson about talking to children. When you say "If you don't eat your broccoli you won't grow big and tall," always remember that the child also hears, "If I want to stay tiny and cute so that I can continue to manipulate these silly large humans, I should stop eating broccoli." A better way to phrase it is: "If you don't want to die a horrible death of scurvy then you should probably eat your fruits and vegetables. What? You don't know what scurvy is? Well, basically, your skin won't be able to hold itself together and then you'll bleed to death. It won't be pretty. So, eat your damn vegetables." This way there's no confusion about what the worst consequences of not eating are. It's also a good way to familiarize them with the various vitamin deficiencies and how they can kill you, which, like the adverse effects of Fluoroquinolone use in adolescents, would have been nice information to have ingrained early on to save me some study time this summer (I should probably note, there's a big licensing exam in August that's planning on taking my life and my brain...but don't worry, that M.F. doesn't know who it's up against).

Wow, I left bears rather quickly. Back to it. So, I did not get a pet baby bear in the end, which is good, because my ingenious not feeding him plan would have almost certainly led to death. By which I mean my death, because at some point I would have tried to hug my fuzzy baby bear and he would have hugged me back with his very sharp teeth.

The point of that story is that at one point I did not fear bears. In fact, I had a potentially lethal love of them. What changed? Well, my best guess is that it somehow relates to my brothers (Shamus and Mysterious Brother X), who both have had close encounters with bears trying to kill them. Bears are tricky though, from reading this blog and other sources, you might get the impression that they just wander around mauling people randomly, but, sometimes, bears also commit premeditated murder. Luckily, both Shamus and Mysterious Brother X both escaped mainly unscathed. To the best of my recollection (forgive me if there are errors, I have trouble remembering stories without me in them, you know, because of the boredom), Shamus was run off the road by a bear. I don't believe that the bear was also in a car at the time, but it might have been, because I just know he saw a bear on the road, and while one would assume that means it was running across, he very well could have meant it was waving at him from a red hatchback. My younger brother, Mysterious Brother X, had a bear walk right past another tent full of cookies to break into his tent and eat his bug spray. Clearly the bear didn't actually want to eat bug spray as much as he wanted my brother to be defenseless against the mosquitoes and blackflies so that they could kill him and no one would trace it back to him. How do I know this was his intention? Because I was that bear. Dun dun dun.

Actually, no, I'm not a bear. That I know of.

We still haven't reached the root of my bear fear, because if I feared everything that ever thought it might not want one of my brothers to exist, then I wouldn't be able to leave the house...or stay inside the house...or live inside my own body. No, I think it's more due to the fact that as long as I was around them, I knew that they would be eaten first, which was comforting. So, maybe my fear of bears is actually just that I miss having my brothers around.

Or it's because I had a nightmare in which a bear (or tiger...or bear-tiger hybrid, "teariger"...dreams can be confusing) ate the leg off one of our school's deans while we all watched in horror. Oh, and then another one where a family of bears chased me and a group of unfamiliar people up to an isolated cabin, and the dream ended with us hiding in the ceiling as the bears waited beneath. Periodically people would fall and then the bears would maul them to death, until I woke up. Then they stopped mauling/existing. Actually, that last one is probably the reason for the bear fear. And thus another mystery solved.