The Life Experience ~ Summer '07

National Holistic Pet Day
Birthday - Fred MacMurray (actor)
Birthday - Ted William (baseball)
Huey P. Long Day (Louisiana)
Saint Rose of Lima Day (Peru)
Victory Day (Turkey)

 
What I Learned This Summer:

• Don’t get your tongue caught in the drill at the dentist. (Yes, really.)
• If you want to evolve for flight, six limbs get in the way.
• Johnson & Johnson’s baby lotion is a good way to neutralize Pangolin Power.
• Director Guillermo Del Toro keeps little “world” building notebooks for his movies, just like I do for my stories. Cool!
• If you want to take your friends on a hike that features a steep slick rock incline in the desert in June, make sure none of them have multiple sclerosis before starting out.
• After two days working in a doctor’s office, you’ll already be jaded.
• Paddling in sync in a boat is a lot like bowing in sync in an orchestra.
• Swearing by Optimus Prime is more fun than swearing by Jesus Christ.*
• A well-placed compliment can endear you to someone forever.
• In Mombasa, the acceptable outfit for a woman is an ankle-length skirt and a shirt that covers the shoulders.
• It’s not too hard to give a doll an acceptable haircut.
• The average lifespan of a parakeet is also about 10-12 years.
• Living in a nursing home sucks.
• Invisible thread is hard to work with, and not just because you can’t see it.
• Although it’s tempting, it is unprofessional to shout “Silence, miserable flesh creature!” into the phone when you want to end an argument.
• The mere mention of a cat is enough to trigger my allergies.
• You can make a pretty good guess which cervical disk is herniated by the way the patient carries their arm.
• My mom loves to watch me cry because I make cute faces like when I was a baby, even when the drama is painful. (This hasn’t changed from when we were kids, and when we were sobbing our hearts out she would—this is true—take pictures of us.)
• Doctors have their own little lunch room where they go to eat cafeteria-type food and one-up each other without those interfering patients getting in the way. Doctors, it turns out, can be just as arrogant as people imagine they are.
• Some days are touchier than others for everyone.
• It is possible to pack everything you'll need for four months into a middling internal frame backpack, an overnight bag, and a small daypack. If you can stand the heavy lifting.
• Cats appease Moon People.
• My sister is an excellent cook.
• Ex Officio makes underwear. AND IT IS AWESOME.
• Corollary: The nice thing about getting older is that you’re actually excited to get underwear. Especially AWESOME MAGICAL EX OFFICIO UNDERWEAR.**
• The Matrix is a godawful movie. Thank god for Mike Nelson.
• Things have a tendency to all happen at once.  For example, the same week you take off to study abroad, one of your grandmothers may turn 90 and the other might be terminal, and nobody will be around to see you off except the little sister you’re abandoning.
• On the other hand, the fact that you’re studying abroad trumps all that and more. Kick ass.

 

*Go ahead, next time you yell a “What in ___ is going on here?”, make it “What in the name of Optimus Prime is going on here?” You will so see what I mean.

 

**Actually, I do recall one time when I was about five or six and got really excited about underwear. It was when I got a few pairs of boy’s underwear with Super Mario on ’em. And not only that—the underpants had fucking sparkly bits (man-sparkly, of course). I wore them backwards so the cool stuff would be in front. That was the best day ever.

Time-Wasters

Did anyone else stay/get up and watch this? It was awesome. Unfortunately, my own observation equipment consisted of 1) my glasses, and 2) squinting really hard, so it didn’t look quite as spectacular as this picture, but still—it was pretty awesome to watch it actually happen.

 

Also, behold!—I bring you time wasters, because I love them so much myself and want to share:

 

gwalla introduced me to this one: TV Tropes. You can spend hours going “Somebody else noticed that, too?” and laughing at the trueness of it all.

 

Since reading The Science of Discworld and liking the idea of narrativium, I’ve wanted my dimension-hopping superphysicist character Lucy to visit universes where the Rule of Cool is an actual law of physics. (I didn’t know that people called it the Rule of Cool, but I understood the principle.) Since universes can have different natural laws, I wanted one where coolness was an objective, measurable and definable force—making the five fundamental interactions of physics into strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, gravity, and awesomeness. It would be measured in hot dogs.*

 

And that site led me to Tales of Future Past .  It’s a gallery of old visions of The Future, which we would now define as “about twenty years ago.” I love this stuff. I love it so much. It’s gorgeous and surreal and colorful and fun. I keep wondering how the stuff I write will look in a few decades. It’s definitely worth a look. Enjoy! Enjoy, I say!

 

 

*“Awesome like a hot dog?” “Like a hundred billion hot dogs, sir.”