Concentrated Awesome

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time blogging about my attempts to overcome my blah mood. I failed. A lot. Today, I was pulled out of my blah mood early in the day when I was reminded of my friend Katydid Howhow. Basically, thinking of her made me realize that I'm a whiny little bitch who deserves some undefinable horror to happen to me for even entertaining the idea of a bad mood when I've been so incredibly blessed in my life.

You see, Katydid has been going through a generally rough time, which you can read about on her blog Bathroombound. The fact that she's going through a lot should already be enough to convince a me that I don't really have the right to be in a bad mood, but, usually bad mood days are also particularly selfish days, so it's usually not. But, what makes it impossible to indulge in a state of utter misery when thinking about her is the fact that she contains more awesome per pound than any person in the history of awesome. Even with her recent weight loss, it seems that rather than losing awesome it's just concentrating into some sort of super dense awesome goo. Apart from hoping that she doesn't lose more weight because of her health, I'm also concerned because I don't know if the awesome can concentrate any further without catastrophic complications for all (like a nuclear bomb times a trillion). Read her blog, you'll see what I mean (not about the catastrophe, but about the awesomeness). Anyways, the point is, you can't be exposed to that much raw awesome without any specs of blah mood being completely obliterated.

I'm not sure exactly when my friendship with Katydid began. I was aware of her existence for a long while before we actually spoke, because she's one of those people you just know. Since I'm one of those people who likes to hide behind things and let people imagine I'm mute, I don't know if she was aware of my existence. Somehow, this year, we went from potentially aware of each others existence to joking every time we met that we hadn't seen each other in so long, when usually it had been maybe a day. That was our thing. When suddenly I actually wasn't seeing her in December, I assumed that she had become bored of our standard joke and was ducking into doorways and hiding behind plants when she saw me coming. It's one of those problems with being ginger, people can avoid you without difficulty since your translucent skin and fiery hair are easily spotted from a distance.

Eventually, I learned that she was not hiding from me, but I wish she had been, because stories of avoiding gingers probably would make-up an equally good blog and involve less overall pain for her. However, the amount of concern that I have about her is less than I would for any other person, due to the aforementioned superhuman levels of awesome, which make me believe she can survive 10000x what the average person could. I have seen nothing in happen in the last few months that could negate this theory. I haven't excessively theorized about where she might have come from, but I have a few ideas: one of those random Zeus affairs with human that pop up in Greek mythology so often and produce Hercules and the like, some sort of secret government experiment created by combining the DNA of John Lennon, Albert Einstein and Jim Henson, or, the most likely, she is a figment of my imagination. The third one would have been exciting, because she could have been my Fight Club alter-ego and we could have lived together in a creepy old house raising an army and making soap. Sigh. But, others seem aware of her, so it doesn't seem so likely. Another dream shattered. I'm hoping that when she's doing better, she might still consider doing it anyways (making soap I mean, not becoming my alter-ego, due to the impossibility), because it would be fun.

Apart from needing to write about the fact that her mere existence pulled me out of my funk, I'm blogging today because she's going in for surgery soon. I would give an exact date, but it would reveal my ultimate weakness, which is my inability to figure out Facebook countdowns. 5 days from a status posted on Thursday is....Christmas? Sometimes I think all countdowns lead to Christmas. I'm wrong. The point is, if you have some extra positive energy lying around, please send it to her, because, when she comes out the other end of this, she is going to be a terrifying force to reckon with, since from what I hear, what doesn't kill you will only make you stronger, and she was already pretty damn strong. So, let us send her some positive energy so that she's a happy terrifying force to reckon with, instead of the type that will opt for world domination and enslavement of the human race. As well as me requesting positive thoughts, I believe she has requested blood donations, but I don't think you're supposed to actually send it directly to her. I think I might try anyways, I do know where to find it.

Happy song of the day: Better Things by The Kinks. I actually discovered it listening to a Kinks cover album, so I also love the Fountains of Wayne version, since it's the first I heard. It actually manages to perfectly walk the line between happy and saccharine, or so I believe. It's best listened to while dancing like a crazy person. I myself opt for a lot of jumping and spinning, with some wild arm actions. It might just be the general increase in blood flow to the brain, but I can't get through this one without feeling like a thousand kinds of amazing.

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.

You think I'm going to zig...and then I zig

Some days I imagine I'll have more time that is temporally possible. Today was one of those days, by which I mean I frittered away my morning and over scheduled my afternoon, so I'm literally writing this as I walk to my friend Andi (to the) Maximum's apartment. I'm assuming I won't accidentally wander into oncoming traffic, but if I do, I'm hoping my iPod will survive so there is evidence of my attempt to blog.

As I listen to my completely randomized music I'm struck by the proportion of country I have (usually I wouldn't notice things like this because I skip a lot). This country-music-liking thing started pretty subtly, if you'd asked me if I liked country 4 years ago, I probably would have laughed at the idea. To be honest, I'm pretty sure it's Shamus and Lilliput's doing. Who started them on it? I don't know. Probably some sort of a leprechaun (or so Occam's Razor would indicate).

My favorite thing about country (or at least my random assortment of country songs chosen mainly for nostalgia purposes) is that it often contains a story and usually zigs for awhile before it zags, just to mess with you. Like there's one song about a poker game where they're all talking about who they would be if thy could be anything, and they all want to be famous and rich and generally awesome...until you get to the guy singing it. He's pretty much like "I want to be a good husband and a father, because my life's pretty damn good." If I had written that song, I also would have added "Now don't you all feel unappreciative. Booyah M.F.s!"

I also have a song about a horrible highway accident where the whole song you think it was the preacher that survived. Until, BOOM, you find out it was the hooker all along. I also like the added touch of a blood soaked bible immediately after that revelation. I don't get to spend enough time imagining blood soaked bibles, so I always appreciate when that one comes on, even though I already know the answer to the mystery (in case you didn't catch it, it was the hooker).

So, I didn't die from my iPod writing, although it was close. But it turned out it was unnecessary because our movie doesn't start until 10:30, so I have a chunk of time to write now. Oh well, now I know that I can do it if I have to, although I suspect people are driving by thinking "Stupid kids, attached to their electronic doohickeys." Actually, this chunk of time is less "blogging time" and more "publishing and then stuffing my face with food time", so I'm going to sign off now. Tomorrow, I promise more crayon drawings, even if both my hands are chopped off in a horrible lathe accident and I have to draw by gripping the crayons between my painful stumps. I guess I could do in my mouth too, but the taste of wax too easily brings me back to kindergarten, which would result in mainly heart people pictures, because for a few years, I would not draw anything that wasn't completely composed of hearts. Tomorrow, I will draw an example. But for now, I'm going to fend off starvation.

Blogirthday!

Today, I have officially been "blogging" every day for 1 month. It's my blog birthday, or blogirthday! So much can happen in a month. I got taller, but then I shrank, and then I grew again. That might have been shoe related though, like most people I have trouble telling. I nearly went on a hippo bus, but then I didn't. Other stuff happened.

Unfortunately, some things that I wanted to did not happen. For example: I really wanted the name Bark Montes to spread like wildfire, but not so much...yet. I was also hoping that someone would come to me on the street and say "I read your blog, here's a bag of money. Oh, wait, no, actually, here's two." Then I'm hoping that no police officers randomly shoot me because that person is actually a bank robber just looking to frame me. And then I look again, and it's not a person, but a bear wearing pants. Damn, they tricked me again.

Speaking of pants, today I saw the greatest pants ever. I could have taken a picture, but it would have been much too awkward, since it was a close encounter in an empty and ugly hall, so I couldn't even pretend to be taking a picture of anything else. I will draw a picture though.



The colours might not be exactly the same, and the buttocks are a little too large, but this captures the basic impression the pants made on me. They were like a reverse mullet: Party in the front, business in the back. I wonder if they're for people with mullets that feel a bit unbalanced. Like, if they work at a bar then they'd have the back of their head trying to move them to the party, but the front is saying "No, business." It probably causes more neck issues than we hear about. But not with these pants! Now your posterior and anterior can be equally party and business. Mullets everywhere are rejoicing, delicately, because they don't want to re-injure their cervical spine.

At this point I'd like to mention one of the many ways that blogging has improved my quality of life. I was scanning my pant diagram, when I thought, "Why does my pant picture look so much like my drivers license?" Then I though, "Wait, that is my drivers license!" And thus, were it not for the magic of blog, I probably would have left my license in my printer/scanner/copier until the next time that I suddenly found myself without vital photo ID. Which would probably end up being somewhere important, like a court date for robbing a bank that was actually done by a bipedal bear wearing zubaz pants (see how I just improved your ability to imagine me being framed by the bear. I bet that's called something exciting, but I never payed enough attention in English. Let's just call it "onomatopoeia" because I find the real definition rarely lets me use that word in an everyday sentence. "You just onamatopeoeiaed the crap out of that balloon when you put that 'bang' caption beside it then popped it!" See how it just doesn't work.) (I just realized that maybe you don't need photo ID at a court date. I kind of figured you would, because most serious things you would, but maybe they'd just be like, "We trust you, because we all saw the news report and subsequent YouTube video of you resisting arrest, screaming 'It was the bears, the bears I tell you, you have the wrong species, and I'm not even wearing zubaz pants.'") (I bet it's fun to decipher back to back parentheses.)

After encountering the greatest pants in the history of pants (which is a long and sordid one), I met my friend Saylinds Selfish who was doing inventory in the strangest storage room in history. She showed me how she'd found a bottle of Vodka (keep in mind, this is a school storage room), right above a tube of lubricant (which actually makes sense at our school, but it's more amusing to me if I don't really explain why and let imaginations run wild). Earlier, she'd found a vial of blood. If I found a vial of blood, I would probably try to clone it. I'm not sure why I'd only do it if I found one (as opposed to took one), maybe because I like things like kindersurprises, because even though the toys are cheap, Surprise! My random vial of blood clone baby would be like that. Either I eat through the chocolaty outside and inside is an awesome toy car, or I get through and find some sort of random figurine of an angry dolphin (or something equally inane). Now that I'm really thinking this plan through, most of my life's kindersurprises have either ended up in the garbage, or I've stepped on them and carefully removed them from my foot to place in the garbage. I think society might frown on me if I do that with my kinderclone. Which I guess means you win, random vial of blood....this time.

Grad photos = lie

My graduation photos were taken today. I hadn't put too much thought into them; in fact, I'd barely managed to remember to book them, which is why I got stuck with an early morning slot. But, my blasé attitude all changed last night when I realized: This picture is going to be around approximately...umm...forever. Long after my classmates have forgotten my witty retorts ("No, you are the one who is stupid") and aptitude for confusion, all they will be left with is this lone image of me.

"Damn," I thought, "maybe I should wash my hair or something." So, I got up early to get ready, but started thinking again over my morning coffee. Isn't making yourself up for a single day to take a picture to represent your time here until the end of days just lying? I mean, I've spent 4 years suffering to finish this program, and I didn't do it with perfectly coiffed hair and brilliant eye makeup. I did it with blood, sweat and tears (literally on all three counts...yes, even the blood, actually, especially the blood). And then I thought, "Am I suggesting that my photo shoot prop should be blood? Wait, I'm confused."

I think what confused me was the part of me that's a little vain (and not sure how to find blood at such short notice) and, therefore, isn't sure that the accurate representation of my natural appearance after these four grueling years is something that should ever have photographic documentation (the best description of my appearance upon waking would some sort of zombie-catfish hybrid...or if you want an image a little more easily accessible to the average person - I look like death). So, instead of trying to work out the confusion, I decided to make compromises. For example, I allowed myself to pluck my eyebrows...but only one side (I guess I should say, "pluck my eyebrow," but it just sounds wrong). Or, I could put on eyeliner, but I didn't let myself do it well (okay, that wasn't so much a matter of compromise as of skill, but the impact is still the same). Unfortunately, in the perfect illustration of exactly how bad I look on a daily basis, this half-assed effort was rewarded with countless compliments on my appearance today (secretly I wonder how many people substituted "Hey, you look less like a corpse than I'm used to," with "Hey, you look...umm...nice hair").

Anyways, it's still a lie. In reality, I look like death. But, in our graduation composite I will probably look like the living dead, a vast improvement and blatant distortion. In a few years I'll pay for it when I've had time to rest and live like a semi-normal human being (read: when I legitimately don't look like death) and I meet up with my school friends. They're not going to be able to compliment me on how unsickly I look, because they will have been looking at my lying liar of a grad photo for so many years. So, instead of having many years of people saying how good I look, I got just one day of hair compliments, and now I'll go through a lifetime of nothing. Then I'll die.

Stupid lying grad photo.