The Life Experience ~ Autumn '09

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Autumn Equinox:

• Hans Christian Andersen wrote “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
• Dexter the show is awesome. Dexter the book series is only allowed to exist because if it did not, the show wouldn’t either.
• People CHECK OUT BOARD BOOKS. FROM THE LIBRARY. Sometimes, they check them out after PUTTING THEM ON HOLD.
• Twitter can make for some interesting new ways to do fiction—character studies, point-of-view stories, etc.
• Unless the characters involved are Pintsize or the Yelling Bird. Seriously, don’t go there.
• There are very few resources to help out the college grad who has moved back in with parents, but plenty of tips for parents on how to put up with the kids.
• A totally awesome historical figure I had never heard of before is Nzingha Mbande, a 17th-century queen of a couple of Mbundu kingdoms in Africa. She fought Portuguese slave traders all her life, sometimes with armies and sometimes just with pure badassery.
• Virgin coconut oil is apparently a good substitute for other vegetable oils—especially if you have PCOS—due to its medium-chain fatty acids and ability to stimulate the thyroid. But this is hotly contested.
• Stephen Hawking has co-written a kids’ book with his daughter! It is about science.
• As I had long suspected but never bothered to confirm, it is indeed possible that I have PCOS—a conclusion arrived at because I fit all the symptoms and don't have any of the other hormone imbalances that those symptoms go with.
• toast_zombie is a pastrybender! Man, those Danishes were good.
• Not everyone realizes that geeks are a specific subculture.
• The Colorado School of Mines does a full convocation for graduates mid-school year, because so many students go for 4½ years.
• The phase of the moon directly correlates with where it is in the sky and when—something I’d never really thought about before.
• You can get athlete’s BOOB WHAT THE FUCK.
• If you add a spoonful of peanut butter to a raspberry smoothie, it tastes like a cold liquefied peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Calvin was right!
• Driving a grandma car means you get treated differently on the road. And by that, I mean you get bullied.
• Self-Revelation #1: I Kirk when I talk. I just realized this. I add punctuation where there is none. Also, sometimes even trail off completely because I assume the rest of my sentence is implicit. Perhaps I need a reminder I keep having to give The Hive—“Dude, not everyone is you.”
• Self-Revelation #2: I literally don’t know what to do with group projects. I mean, I knew I hated them, but it just occurred to me recently that I usually start with gusto, then find myself wondering if I’m getting in the way or working at cross-purposes, ask too many questions to try to straighten it out, conclude that the other group members are bugged, and gradually fade away because I honestly don’t know how to work together.*
• Self-Revelation #3: I … actually like The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask better than Ocarina of Time. Finally, the years of lying to myself are over.

*This may have something to do with my other, already-discovered tendency to leave things the way I found them because I assume that it is there for a reason. It’s like the Somebody Else’s Problem on steroids: there could be a dead squirrel in the middle of the living room, and I will figure that somebody put it there with a grander purpose, and I’ll leave it there for them to return to when they want to. I feel that this is courtesy; those I live with do not.**

**On the other hand, the message crosses both ways—I have had people “tidy up” so that my carefully organized system, which is of course completely impenetrable to outsiders, has been blown sky-high. They think they are doing me a favor.

Comments

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Self-Revelation #1: I Kirk when I talk. I just realized this. I add punctuation where there is none. Also, sometimes even trail off completely because I assume the rest of my sentence is implicit.

Does this mean I'm not the only person in the world who regularly ends sentences with a clause consisting entirely of "so"? Woo!

(As in: "I meant to get out to the library today, but then I got caught up in TS3 again, so.")

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

No, you are not!

That is actually more complete than many of my sentences, which may end at a Kirk pause. "I would go to the store, but." "I just don't know if." "I'm just trying."

It probably bugs the shit out of people--because when Dad does it, it bugs the shit out of me.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Husband-san is very adept at translating this kind of sentence. I kind of think it's a family thing - both his parents and my parents are the sorts who speak this way also.

With me, however, it's a toss-up as to whether I think the rest of the sentence is implicit or whether I had another thought in the middle of it and forgot the rest and/or got distracted. In the latter case, asking me what the rest of the sentence was will produce owlish blinking and confusion.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I've done that too, but for me it's usually places where I think it really is fairly easy to figure out where I was going: "Yeah, I was going to do the dishes, but then someone linked something on cracked.com and..."

Everyone knows how that scenario ends, right?

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I do that too. I realized during my last quarter of Japanese that I use ", so..." almost exactly the same as sentence-final "ga" is used in Japanese (it technically means "but", but the entire following clause is usually dropped if the meaning is implicit, so it becomes a marker of hesitation and also a way of making an implied request. And now this parenthetical comment is longer than the rest of the paragraph.)

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

I have been trying to decide if that sixth post was supposed to be two separate ones. There's something... right... about the conjunction of moving in with parents and a kick-ass queen who fights slave traders.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* No, it was not--thanks for the catch. This is why I almost never do rich text mode, except when I do bullet lists, and then it always bugs up.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

As I had long suspected but never bothered to confirm, it is indeed possible

Is this an example of SR#1?

On checking out Board Books: I just re-read Hogfather. Assume that whoever's doing this is actually Banjo Lillywhite ;)

I totally have that same problem you mention in the first footnote. It especially becomes a problem at work, where the different stations are pretty compartmentalized, and often don't really understand the others' processes. Sometimes it's intentional when 10 Pounds of Butter is left sitting out on a rack, sometimes it's not, same with so much other stuff. Is that measuring cup finished with and needs washing, awaiting use, or simply forgotten?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Son of a bitch! This dang entry and its rassinfrassin bugs. That's what I get for writing it over the course of three months. I have fixed that; thank you.

(Probably it is SR#1. I mean, I couldn't have ended that sentence any other way than that I have PCOS, right?)

And I am VASTLY amused that I am not the only one whose mind instantly went to Banjo marking his place in a board book when I found out about this weird bit of library science.

You just KNOW that as soon as you put the cup in the dishwasher someone's going to come along and be like, "HEY WHERE'S MY CUP YO."

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Banjo was the first thing that popped into my mind when you first posted about people checking out Board Books. Couldn't help it.

Someone actually donated a few to the Bakery as a Reading Box for kids of customers, and one of the owners pulled it after a couple of days because they were starting to get beat up. My response was mostly "Well, that's what kids of the age for these do. If they're not beat up and chewed on, that means the kids don't like that one. You can't expect 3 year-olds to treat things they love the same way an adult does."

[broken-moons.livejournal.com]

Heh, you have learned a lot! I am not familiar with the term board books - why is it odd for people to check them out from the library?

Also, your footnotes are a bit confused, I think. That is, you have three ** and only one *

[broken-moons.livejournal.com]

Also, I leave a lot of my sentences unfinished as well, but mostly because I realise they're not going anywhere anyway and we'd better move on to a more relevant subject.

... I have no Star Trek icons. I really need to remedy that, someday.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the footnote comment--I always have trouble with the What I Learned posts, as I write them over three months' time, so there are always a few bugs.

Board books--y'know, those cardboard "books" of about eight pages, designed for babies to gnaw on? They usually have about one sentence or word per page and lots of bright colors. They don't seem like something you want to check out or take home--partly because they're pretty gross after the accumulated effluvia of other babies have gotten all over them.

Also, you're welcome to any of my Star Trek icons, as they're already stolen. ;)

[beccastareyes]

I think I want to know more about Nzingha Mbande as well.

(Also, this is the second time something I've said made it onto your quarterly lists. Glee.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

She is a total badass, yes.

And you are quite informative! That is very cool.

[beetzart.livejournal.com]

I actually did a book report on a child version novel written about Nzingha in the 5th grade.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The Royal Diaries one, right?

[beetzart.livejournal.com]

Oui! That would be the book.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Ooh, story Twitters? Do tell. 99% of all Twitters are completely useless.

I like Majora's Mask because it's so replayable- after beating it once, you can go back into the same save and replay any dungeon or sidequest, in any order you want.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Majora's Mask just had some good dark elements for me, too. And yeah, it's fun to get hold of the Fierce Deity mask and go back and kick the bosses' asses.

[hrhleia.livejournal.com]

"The Everything After College Book" (part of the Everything series) does have a section about the pros and cons of moving back in with parents, and some advice and suggestions that I found helpful.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I could never get very far in Majora's Mask. :(

(I also have never finished Wind Waker. That's not really a matter of difficulty, though)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

I have had people “tidy up” so that my carefully organized system, which is of course completely impenetrable to outsiders, has been blown sky-high. They think they are doing me a favor.
Oh, I've had people to that to me all the times. Is that the most frustrating thing in the world or what?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I know, right? The worst part is that they're thinking they did something nice and are all happy about it, and I can't really get pissed at them. But it's hard to diplomatically explain, "No, it was like that for a REASON."

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

"Geeks usually know what they're doing, even though you may not."
Now that should have been in the book. >_>