beyond eurydice

..because I am a bum and can't write on topic.

So, no mysterious roommate disappearing story, at least not until I can get home and find time to write. And also feel inspired, I think. I can tell the story all right when it's verbal, although it gets shorter with every telling. But writing it down? Not nearly as interesting.

So here, just for Charlene, is an alternate snippet of my life, written down while slightly tipsy at an indie rock concert in Fremont. It even has footnotes!

( Cafe Metropolitan, was the name of the bar. )

This stuff, it just keeps on rolling in.
( family = comedy gold. )

Methods to change said status:
http://qntm.org/destroy

What are you waiting for, folks? Get cracking!

Also, perhaps a little dated, but still applicable:

Smashing! Hand! With Hammer!

That's my political cartoon quota for the day. Bed time.

This is awesome:

HUGO CHÁVEZ
MAY HAVE ANGER
MANAGEMENT ISSUES.

A prescription for those with cold or flu, courtesy of McSweeney's:

Theraflu Hot Toddy

Submitted by Lily Valentine

I don't often get sick, but when I do, I have a strategy. I'll ignore illness when it comes into my body, going out of my way to indulge in risky behaviors like not sleeping, starvation, and making snow angels naked. I like my coughs, colds, and influenzas to get nice and comfortable in my steaming little 98.6-degree internal jungle. Then, when they've finally settled in, I nuke the shit out of them.

My arsenal is made up of four or five medicines taken in tandem shortly before I go to bed. Theraflu makes up the vanguard, flanked by NyQuil and Benadryl. I'll usually bring up the rear with some Robitussin and drop a couple of Aleves into the melee just to kill off any stragglers. My T cells, in jungle camo with faces stained with mud, materialize from the mist and wage war on the invading virus. The battle usually takes 16 hours, during which I am blissfully unconscious, sleeping off the overdose of medications.

The last time I was sick was different. I don't know what it was, because I don't have health insurance, but I was losing the capacity for coherent thought at a surprisingly rapid rate. And so, as I was taking my first sips of the warm and lemony Theraflu, I hastily dumped two shots of brandy into the steaming liquid and used the mixture as a deliciously warm and heartily sour chaser for the other medications. What happened next is a little fuzzy—it reminded me of cold winter days, wandering around the Dickens Faire drunk off my ass, trying to affect a Cockney accent. My housemate found me in the morning, unconscious on the kitchen floor with a smile on my face.

And a prescription for other situations:

Kellogg's S'mores Pop-Tarts

Submitted by Marshall Norton Jr.

She shoved me under her bed and told me not to move. Her father had gotten home earlier than expected. As the minutes passed, I inventoried the various pieces of dirty laundry and discarded plates under her bed with me.

A little later, her face appeared, upside-down. "They're leaving soon. I'll come back when they're gone. Here, have some," she said, offering me a piece of the Pop-Tart she'd brought up on a plate. I thought it best not to ask about the other plates for the moment.

I (very consciously) can't remember why we were talking about these things anymore, but I'll leave it to you to imagine the context:

"I need to raise an army of undead ghoul organ grinder monkeys with jaunty caps and tiny cymbals."

"I probably wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire either, although the logistics would be more difficult, given my gender."

On Brazil: "There's no race. Just a finish line and a prize."

"We are in rare form tonight. So rare, the cow isn't even born yet. It's *embryonically rare*. Pre-veal. The mama cow's in the pasture, daring us to eat its baby. *That's* how rare it is."

[EDIT:
"I will update it for now, and later look for a monkey."

"I don't want you bleeding stupid all over me, so I'll refrain from stabbing you in the face."

"And next thing we know, we had palm fronds, burros, and a Mexican word we cannot remember."

Charles being very meta about our speech patterns when we talk to each other: "It's roughly two parts random, four parts erudition, and one part retarded. Baked in a loaf pan of overly-verbose."]

Not that I particularly care about the Bible...but this link was too much to resist.

I've decided Dorothy Parker, New Yorker critic, columnist, and caustic depression writer extraordinaire, is (was?) fucking awesome:

"I wish I could drink like a lady
I can take one or two at the most
Three and I'm under the table
Four and I'm under the host"

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

"It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard."

"Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word."

"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."

"He (Robert Benchley) and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery."

Finally, my favorite to date:

"Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words."

If I were the sort to adopt role models, she'd be first on my list.

Not that I'm intending to take up bitter poem writing or suicide attempts, mind you.

Taken from Uncyclopedia, on masturbation:

Moral Implications

In many cultures, the living principle (principa vitae) is regarded as being in the male sperm, or seed; the female womb merely providing a fertile place where the seed can grow. This being the case, if abortion is illegal in the grounds that "it is murder", then an argument exists for making male masturbation (spilling one's seed on the ground) illegal on the same grounds.

Interestingly, when one attempts to argue agains this, the arguments one comes up with

• It's ridiculous to treat a wad of semen as a living person


• It's my body, and therefore my business


• Ejaculations happen sponaneously all the time, and no-one seems to mind


• Why is the government snooping on me in this manner?

Are precisely the same as those that women use to defend "choice".

Well, it's something to think about.

Currently sitting in a very dark coffee shop, figuring out my own recipe for good tea. The catch? I am armed only with the usual accoutrements that a cafe would normally stock for free: namely, sugar, milk, cinnamon, and the occasional straw.

So far this is the process:

1.) Order Dutch tea, which is promised to have ginger and lemon with it in a large cup.
2.) Be told that they are out of lemon.
3.) Choose Darjeeling tea, because the package is purple, as opposed to any arcane tea knowledge you evidently should have learned in your youth.
4.) Be given the wrong size (too big), but charged for the correct size, "because we're out of lemon."
5.) Realize that the ginger slices + tea alone is not that great.
6.) Take one packet of sugar from the tray, find a nice corner to sit and sip.
7.) Realize one packet is not enough to salvage this tea. Promptly bring the whole mug to the sugar table.
8.) Add three heaping teaspoons of sugar. Add a dash of milk for good measure.
9.) Mourn the lack of lemon, but realize that the milk would not otherwise go.
10.) Sit back in your corner with an absconded spoon. Sulk.

Yesterday I went to an Irish pub up in Wallingford with a bunch of friends, including shikattanai. Re-established my limit for drinks as 2 minimum (if one is a long island), and sat by this nice fireplace with comfy chairs. All in all, nice atmosphere, although difficult to hear conversation over the loud dance club-wannabe music.

In the middle of a rousing convo about WoW, this guy, slightly scruffy and a bit wide/wild-eyed, walks by our table, stops dead, and starts staring hard at us. After a minute or so, he sits down in the empty seat across from me, and starts touching the tabletop.

guy: Excuse me. Sorry, sorry. But is this table..... copper?
us: I think so. It looks like copper.
guy: I just had to ask, because... you see, I like copper. I *really* like copper.

He pulls up his sleeve, shows us coils of copper bracelets along his wrist. He then proceeds to start stroking the table.

everyone: o_O
guy: Copper is... without copper, humanity would not be where we are.
friend: Er... if you'd like, when we're done, you can sit here at the table...
guy (oblivious): No one seems to understand! Copper *made* us. Our tools, everything, comes from *copper*.

Me, being the smartass I am, couldn't keep my mouth shut. I need to work on that.

me: Well, tools were made of iron, too. I think we had bronze going on for a while.
guy: Ah, we have an anthropologist here? Yes, yes, iron and bronze, many metals. Do you study anthropology?
me: Er, no. I happen to know the names of a few precious metals.

So I ended up switching to English teacher mode and had an involuntary five minute conversation about copper and tools and how evidently copper aquaducts singlehandedly brought about the downfall of Rome, but China got it right because they made theirs out of clay, which is apparently ok.

I pointed out that there are types of clay that are poisonous too, but I think at this point I was making shit up to throw him off. But I suppose it didn't matter.

I was finally rescued when shikattanai and her coworker friend stood up and said to me, "We're going to the bathroom, yo. You wanna come along?"

Her friend added, "Yeah, that whole girls going to the bathroom in packs? Wanna come?"

At which point I was thinking, Thank god.

We left the guy with the coworker's fiancé to take care of. By the time we got back (laughing madly, because we're cruel that way :P) the guy was gone.

shikattanai insists the guy was making a pass at me. I sincerely hope not. If this is the best I'm going to get, I might as well get out of the running now and join the nunnery.

*shakes head* People are weird, yo.

This morning before farmer's market I checked my phone, finding that my mother had called and left a message for me to call her back. Turns out she was having trouble connecting with the wireless network at home, so she called me for technical assistance.

A little bit of background: when I set up the network, I made my youngest brother name it. He looked very thoughtful for a moment, then said, "Mr. Puffles."


Which spurred the following conversation this morning:

mom: I can't get Mr. Puffles to work.
me: Well, what's wrong with Mr. Puffles?
mom: I don't know. I can't connect.
me: Are you getting a signal?
mom: I can't find Mr. Puffles.
me: Did you try manually connecting to Mr. Puffles?
mom: No, I just set the computer to automatic. Shouldn't it be able to find it?
me: Well, yes, except Mr. Puffles is in stealth mode.
mom: How do you spell Mr. Puffles?
...
mom: I called your brother about this, but he wasn't very helpful.
me: Did you make him spell Mr. Puffles?
mom: Well, he was going to lunch, and he was walking around all these people, so he didn't seem to want to talk about it right then.
me: You could point out to him that he's the one who named it.

Some days, this is how I feel when I'm being spoken to in Japanese.

God, I love McSweeney's archive.

Found on the board fandom_wank, discussing how widespread Shakespearean knowledge is (or isn't):

"The plot of Hamlet is totally "Rocks Fall. Everyone Dies."

Even better comment down-thread:

"Shakespeare is like CLAMP.

If you're not supposed to be laughing, EVERYONE DIES."

Watching my brothers play their new X-Men game is mildly entertaining, but only on a brain-dead basis. I ask them questions occasionally on Marvel lore, just to keep my brain occupied.

On the other hand, hearing Professor X (aka Patrick Stewart's voice) trash-talk his opponents is mildly brain-breaking.

( I am not obsessed with Batman Begins. I swear. )

This prompted my conversation with shikattanai on aesthetic vs. hormonal reactions to visual stimuli. Which is a fancy way of saying, "We threw around a bunch of celebrity names and played Are They Hot or Not? for half an hour."

(I really must be bored.)

I was going to do this whole elaborate post, triangulating my tastes and all that jazz based off of that conversation, but I'm suddenly tired.

Yes, still watching. We've started creating an alternate dialogue now for the storyline.

Obi Wan vs. Anakin:

Padme: Obi Wan told me! I can't believe you killed babies! You're so evil!
Anakin: He's turned you against me. You're having an affair, aren't you?!

*Obi Wan conveniently appears, superhero stance*

Anakin: You! *looks at Padme* You are so totally sleeping together. I keel you dead!

*Padme chokes, thus negating the entire reason for Darth Vader's existence*

Obi Wan: Stop! Don't hurt her!
Anakin: *attacks Obi Wan* That's for sleeping with my wife!
Obi Wan: Dude! She's not even that hot!
Anakin: What did you say?! You insulted my wife. Prepare to die!

*lightsaber-ness everywhere*

My youngest brother's fault. He wanted to see it, since he heard it was good. >_<

It wasn't very long before it quickly devolved into an MST fest.

( it burns, the stupidity )

And so on. You get the idea.

I want my two hours of my life back.