Baby Geese + Fluoroquinolones = Unemployed Optometrists

Today, I'm in class again. You know what I love to do more than anything on a Sunday morning? Learn about anti-fungals. Am I alone in this? No, I'm not. I'm fairly certain that only those who are a demon or of the demon variety would disagree.

I went for lunch with Yelsel D'Stupid, Neyney Charmin, and Lysha McSomji. We took the subway and as we were getting off, we saw EMS putting someone on a stretcher. There was a busker playing "Que Sera Sera" on the saxophone, which made me think exactly how awful it would be, after a horrible subway emergency, to have to stare up at the ceiling worrying about dying and listening to a song about the unpredictability of life. I also might start believing that I've actually passed on and this is God's idea of a funny joke. By the way, God, if you're reading this, it's not. It's just not. I got Neyney to promise me that if it ever occurred she'd run over and request another song. I think "I'm Alright" could be a good one, although I've never heard it on the sax, so it's hard to say for sure.

Normally, in emergency medicine (which we also covered today) you start every scenario with a scene survey, meaning you look for fire, wire, gas, glass and blood before approaching the victim to help. This is to avoid dying (or, alternatively, losing various appendages). I suggest that list be revised to also include "ironic music". Wait, is that irony? I don't know, I guess all my English teachers were right to be angry at Alanis Morissette for confusing an entire generation about the definition of "ironic" The point is, I want people to listen for music that would suck to die or near-die to and include eliminating said music in their initial emergency procedures.

Walking back to school, we were hoping to see the baby geese that have been hanging out around the tennis courts lately. Neyney kept calling them ducks. She said it was because she doesn't like geese, but I think she was just never good at "Duck, duck, goose". She was probably that kid who just kept going around the circle saying duck until the teacher felt so sorry for her that she would just start snack-time. Yum, cheesestrings!

Anyways, she said she loves baby geese but doesn't like the big ones. I mentioned that the little ones do grow into the big ones. She said, not if we give them Fluoroquinolones (we'd just learned that they will arrest bone growth if given to children, and we're nerds). The image of tiny, but adult looking geese disturbs me, but also kind of intrigues me. It would actually be pretty dangerous because you would see the goose, but think it must be very far away. You probably wouldn't realize the error in that assumption until it has already pecked your eyes out, preventing you from making the same mistake twice. So, unless you are an evil mad man/woman looking to take over the world by blinding people with optical illusion geese, please think twice before making a tiny novelty goose. Although, if all the geese were tiny, it would probably decrease the total amount of goose poo I could stumble upon, which would be positive. I think what I'm saying is I need to do a more in-depth risk/benefit assessment of mini-geese, before I make a final recommendation on the creation of them.

The other day, Shamus messaged me to say that I haven't been blogging about him enough lately, and that he's pretty sure that's all people want to read about, so I should increase my average Shamus percentage in my posts. I wasn't so sure, but then I remembered that I could add a poll. Actually, I've been looking for something to poll about, because polls are super fun and I don't get to do enough in everyday life. Please answer my poll question and I will reward you by either listening to or ignoring the responses.

To end off, I'd like to say that every emergency medicine course I've taken has been totally useless, because they never include what to do in the event of a bear mauling. Yes, it is helpful to know how to deliver a baby, but what is the ideal method for delivering a baby while a bear is eating your left arm? And how do I do CPR when a bear is clawing my face off? They just never give the important information, that's all I'm saying.

You Can't Buy Happiness, Even if you Can Buy Monkey Butlers

It was my first day waking up on my BC trip, which means that I was up at 6am due my inability to sleep-in regardless of how late I stay up combined with a 3 hour time change. It was good because I got to see my brother Shamus before he went to work, but bad because then I spent hours waiting for anything interesting to happen. Periodically I would decide to try to befriend Alfred Von Bunnikins, but I think he must have somehow sensed my similarity to Elmyra from Tiny Toons and was smart enough to hide in his igloo whenever I came close.

Since the rabbit clearly wasn't planning on entertaining me, I found a book on baby names and leafed through it until it offended me, as tends to be the case with most books. It had a section on the first impressions that names make with lists of names under titles such as: "Arty", "Charming", "Friendly" etc. I thought, where are the negative adjectives? Then I found it, "Cranky". And what was there, nestled below "Doreen" and "Myrna"? None other than "Sharon". Really? And yet the name "Stormy" is under "Cheerful"? If I ruled the world, I would destroy all copies of this book. Wait, maybe my reaction is a bit cranky. No, I think it's normal, because that book was clearly out to get me. Also, evil.

It also had a list of famous pairs, I guess for those expecting twins. If I had twin boys, I probably wouldn't have much issue with naming them Bert and Ernie. They're solid names. I might call them Robert and Ernest for awhile, just to make it look like I didn't do it on purpose, all the while knowing that eventually someone is going to realize the obvious nicknames and then it will spread like wildfire. I guess it is true that some people shouldn't be allowed to have children, most notably my parents for giving me a cranky name.

So, after thinking about baby names for awhile, my mind drifted to yesterday, when I was at the Edmonton airport waiting for my connecting flight to Abbotsford and trying to steal WiFi to kill time. As you probably know, if you've read my other posts, I have no technical abilities, so I don't know how I did it, but I managed to get a few minutes of Facebook time in before it caught onto me and tried to make me pay. It was just enough time to notice a posting by my friend Birchington Wongstein that perked me up. I hadn't realized that I needed perking until I was perked, but was quite glad it had happened, because I really did need a good perking up, if only to allow me to overuse the word "perk" in my blog today.

When you wake up hours before anyone who might entertain you, it gives you a lot of time to think about things that perked you up (if you're wondering, I am trying to break the record for most instances of the word "perk" and its derivatives. It would probably be easier if I had some idea of what the record is, but I think I'm doing pretty well). Birchington is one of those people who doesn't really need to work to perk up someone's day. Once I tried to tell him this, but it didn't turn out well. First I tried, "You're special.....but not 'special' with quotations," then I went for "No, no, I don't mean it that way, I mean it more like you're precious....but not 'precious' with quotations." So, sitting there, WiFi-less, I spent the time thinking about the number of friends I've been lucky enough to have that can't be adequately described without a word that is also used in quotations when humoring "special" people.

I worry that this blog might be quickly descending towards a rather mushy side today, but I think I need to say that I feel like I spend a lot of time thinking about things that I want, like truckloads of money and monkey butlers. But, even a million monkey butlers could not replace knowing someone like Birchington Wongstein, Yelsel D'Stupid, Neyney Charmin, Byla Rong, Katarina Yashtastico, Bark Montes or the dozens of other magical people that I am yet to create clever pseudonyms for. Even if they were to all suddenly disappear from my life, I was beyond blessed to even know them for 2 seconds, so I should probably stop spending all my time thinking about how I might acquire an army of monkey butlers and appreciate what I already have instead. Yeah, I lied when I said I was worried about getting to mushy, because I totally went there, but I'm going to publish this anyways.

To make up for the mushiness, I'm going to tell you my truck stop laundry story. It begins with: Once I was doing my laundry with friends at a truck stop. There, we met a trucker, who we asked if we could drive his truck. He said he would be happy to let us, but didn't think we could handle the 18 gears. I think it was 18, it doesn't matter exactly how many though, because what really matters is that he then said, "That's more than I can count on my hands and feet." At that point you could see everyone looking at there hands and feet, trying to do some quick math in their head and thinking "Wait...somethings wrong..." After the proper timing for optimal effect he said, "That's right, I only have 2 toes" (or 3 toes or something...it doesn't matter, the point is, he was a trucker who was missing multiple toes and clearly used it as smalltalk on a regular basis.) The strangest part of the story is that I don't think anyone in our group thought to ask him how he lost his toes. Or, if they did, I don't remember it, which doesn't seem like me. I usually remember stories that involve anything being severed. So, like most of my stories, this has a lesson: If you meet a trucker and they tell you they are missing any organ or appendage, ask them how, because you'll regret it if you don't. I know I did.

What about cows?

Today I went on an adventure with my friend Yelsel D'Stupid (disguising names is hard, leave me alone). To be honest, just spending time with her is an adventure, because, based on countless interactions with her, I have come to the conclusion she has no mental filter. Or, at least, if she has one, she chooses not to use it most of the time.

For example, we were planning a camping trip and thought we should invite our friend Neyney Charmin (just be glad I don't get to name a small child...yet), and I said "It's a good idea to bring Neyney, because if a bear decides to eat us, it'll go for her first because she's a vegetarian, giving us some time to escape." I thought it was a well known fact that herbivores are generally more delicious than carnivores, but Yelsel seemed unaware of this and asked for more explanation. "Think about it," I said, "you don't really hear of people eating, say, wolf. Most things we eat don't eat meat." To which she said, "What about cows?"

For awhile, on this brilliantly sunny day, we ended up walking behind a woman in a raincoat. My suspicion is that she woke up and thought, "It looks like rain, I think I'll wear my yellow raincoat with my yellow shoes. Yes, that's a good idea." Then, after she realized that there was not a cloud in the sky she thought "Shit, if I take off my jacket, my shoes will just look stupid."



We met some people giving out Pringles Stix samples on the corner. This product confuses me. There are only two reasons I might eat Pringles. One is that I'm craving potato chips, but don't want to have to imagine that they have any relation to actual potatoes. The second is that I want to put two back to back in my mouth and pretend I'm a duck. Pringles Stix don't fulfill either of these criteria. Instead of a tenuous connection to potatoes, they have zero potato ingredients. Also, if you try to put two in your mouth to look like a duck, it's a lot of work and you end up looking like this:



That seagull was mocking me, so I imagined that I was crushing it's head with my giant beak. I also noted that Pringles Stix contained pork extract, which does have to go in the pro colum, because, as I mentioned earlier, there is an inverse relationship between meat consumption and deliciousness. They should include that in the advertising: "Pringles Stix: The snack of choice for people who don't want to be eaten by bears."

We also met a lot of rude people. When we went to sit and eat by the water some people started shouting "Ginger...hey ginger....ginger". As a redhead, I was highly offended and said to Yelsel, "Are they trying to mock me? Seriously, I have a name." She said they were trying to call their dog, but I watched carefully, and it had no response to that name. It wasn't even ginger.

Today, in a continuation of my lessons from the zoo, I learned about pigeon mating. It turns out that pigeons are not that different from giraffes when it comes to sex. From what I can gather, the male hangs out for awhile until he assumes that the female has stopped paying attention, then he suddenly goes for it and she's like "Seriously, how would I not notice that?" and runs/flies away. Then he repeats.

We sat for awhile watching this occur over and over again with completely uninterested females. Yelsel thought for awhile and then said, "I just don't get it. Why doesn't he just take the ones that are already bending over? That would make a lot more sense." I think that it is good that she is human and not a male pigeon, because there are already too many pigeons. Also, pigeons don't talk, and she amuses me.