The Desert Mermaid

Yesterday's first patient did something spectacularly, monumentally gross.

And I'm not talking about the psychological sort of grossness where you come across a particularly horrific Tumblr account, or realize that the creepy old man over there is undressing someone (possibly you) with his eyes. For that, yes, you want brain bleach.

No, this was just straight-up GROSS. Physically, viscerally, unhygienically gross. The kind of thing for which you need ACTUAL bleach.

Well, and also brain bleach. Which is why I am not elaborating on the specific details of the incident.

Now, my first inclination is to feel sorry for everyone involved, including the patient. You know, these things happen to everyone, alas it must be so embarrassing, etc.. I felt bad for her right up until I found out the full details of the incident. Why's that? I'm glad you asked! You, however, probably are not!

I'm sure everyone has had a day like this. Picture it: you're cruising along, minding your own business, and suddenly, without consulting you, your body does something gross. It's not your fault. Bodies do that. But now here you are, in the aftermath of one of those unfortunate but non-threatening meatsack malfunctions.

Here are the two things I would expect you to think at that exact moment, depending on your scenario:

1. "Fuck. Well, thank god I'm not in public. Better clean this up."
2. "Fuck, I AM in public! I'd better slink off and get unpublic fast so I can clean this up!"

You'll notice that nowhere in this range of possible thoughts did I include "Fuck. Oh, well! I have an appointment with the lumbar surgeon! No time to clean this up! Now, to step into public!"

I didn't include it because HOLY SHIT, HOW CAN YOU THINK THAT IS AN OPTION?

So here is a PSA, for those of you who apparently didn't get the memo the first time around: if something nasty but non-life-threatening occurs, leaving you awash in your own filth, please do not hesitate to RESCHEDULE YOUR GODDAMN APPOINTMENT. Sometimes it is perfectly acceptable to break a commitment. Seriously, your doctor won't mind.

So! It's been an interesting week at the office already! Especially because Mom'n'Dad were also seriously considering that a completely DIFFERENT crazy patient was going to bust in and force a third crazy patient to help reenact a Grosse Point Blank-type shootout yesterday. I am still trying to decide which would be preferable, myself.

And now, for some reason, we're watching Alien: Resurrection.

RIPLEY 7: K ... k ... ill ... me ...

RIPLEY 8: *FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF EVERYONE'S FACE*

RON PERLMAN: Must be a chick thing.

MY SISTER: Great line. Seriously, Ron? What, like she's on the rag?

*pause*

ME: Shit, that's a frightening thought.

MY SISTER: Oh, JESUS, you're RIGHT.

ME: THERE GOES ANOTHER PAIR OF PANTS

MY SISTER: GAME OVER, MAN

ME: THE AGONY

MY SISTER: I DISSOLVED ANOTHER TAMPON

ME: THE PLUMBING IS ON FIRE

MY SISTER: GIMME THAT FLAMETHROWER SO THAT I MAY DO MYSELF IN

ME: K ... ILL ... ME ...

MY SISTER: ... yeah, that would be a legitimate reason to call it 'the curse.'

ME: I am not even going to think about what this means for the womb-having Alien Queen Brad Dourif was blathering on about.

MY SISTER: Yeah, massive hull breach. Leave them in space for a while, and the whole alien problem pretty much solves itself.

I've just spent the entire day trying to figure out if William Shatner and Peter Frampton's version of "Spirit in the Sky" is the best or worst thing I've ever heard. Either way, I can't stop listening to it.

I THINK IT MIGHT BE BOTH

Please remember that library books and toilet paper are TWO SEPARATE THINGS.

That will be all.

There are moments that test your humanity. When adversity strikes, the raw animal components of your personality must strike a balance with the more rational, neocortical ideas and values, allowing your true colors to shine in the most horrific of moments. It is a moment that hardens a soul, the great pressure crushing all the raw aspects of a personality into an adamantine ore that is the core of your being.

Like, for example, when you find a big dead cockroach in the middle of your room, you find out your diamond-hard core is made entirely of PANIC. I wound up spiralling into a horrible vortex of anxiety, shame, and a CLEAN ALL THE THINGS mania. ROACHES AAAAH. When dinner was ready Dad found me finally clearing the accumulated dust from behind the tea shelf and the jewelry pile.

He seemed really apologetic. "It's okay, we'll clean this up. Just use the Shop Vac, we'll get this done, don't worry!"

"Thanks," I said, "but I'm already over the anxiety attack. Now I figure I'll just use the energy while I've got it."

(Later I found out why he was so contrite: he'd declared that it was my messy room that had invited in the cockroaches, till Mom pointed out that they'd more likely chill in the kitchen, and anyway the reason there's so much stuff in my room is because I am keeping it IN ONE ROOM.)

The good news is that it's finally inspired me to clean my room. My room is a clutterspace--I try to keep ahead of it, but I accumulate paper stuff at an alarming rate, what with my obsessive notebook-keeping and my love of books. Even if ol' Roachy rode in on my pants cuffs from the Liberry, where we DID have roaches, all those books on my shelves and under the desk and at the foot of the bed and behind the TV could definitely use a dusting.

Meanwhile, if he DIDN'T ride in from the outsides, I'm going to seize on the most reassuring thing I can, even if it happens to be an article from Cracked. It's like having ants. Large, ugly ants.

Go with me on this. Nobody wants to see my diamond-hard core of panic again.

You know, even with all the many, many layers of WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU surrounding the whole chickenpox lollipops business, I keep coming back around to wondering just how the conversations go when parents are trying to get those sweet, sweet germs from their kids. You can fool the kid who’s getting the lollipop pretty easy ("Here, Susie, have some candy!" should do it), but it might be a bit awkward trying to yank the sucker out of the mouth of your unhappy, pox-riddled child.

"OK, Timmy,I know you’re itching and miserable, but here’s a lollipop. Enjoy it RIGHT THAT’S ENOUGH!"

"Waaaah!"

"Never mind, here’s another. A whole bag! Lick them each JUST ONCE, and then stick them in these individual Ziploc bags."

"WAAAAH--What? Why can’t I just eat one like a normal kid?"

"Because this way Mommy gets rich! Each of these will then be finished off by another kid so they can become immune to chickenpox."

"Teacher says that sharing food is sharing germs. Why are we making these kids sick? Do we hate them?"

"No, sweetie. Their parents love them very much. When parents love their children very much, they give them booby-trapped candy that they hope will cause horrible miserable festering diseases."

"W--What?"

"If they don't, they're bad parents."

"But teacher says they can get shots to make them immune without first being sick! Why don’t they do that?"

"Because THAT’S CRAZY."

"Oh."

"Now, if you’re good and finish smearing all kinds of bacteria and viruses on those delicious Tootsie Pops, you can have an entire one to yourself!"

"...

... Mommy, do you love me?"

"Very much, Timmy."

"... I don’t think I want a lollipop."

I kind of want to have opinions at you about the latest genius to confuse content with message, but as is so often the case, a point-by-point refutation of everything that is wrong with it would take away time I would better spend writing my own YA novel, or reading someone else’s YA novel. Plus, you already probably can guess my opinion. Hint: it is not "Won’t someone ~*~please~*~ think of the poor persecuted book banners?"*

Thing is, I personally dislike reading a lot of the “darker” YA stuff, but y’know what? That is my own damn taste. I’m really glad there’s some dark YA out there for people who like it. Fortunately, YA is a broad group, broader than indicated in that article, so there’s something for everyone.

Anyway, if you want to have a good time with this, cleolinda’s got a good roundup of the responses. Have fun!


*I want to make a crack about how they recommend Fahrenheit 451—only to boys, of course—when she’s making a case for censorship, but only because of the common misconception that it’s a book decrying censorship instead of yet another example of Ray Bradbury’s raging technophobia.

Then again, either way his point is that books are stirring, which this article does seem to be strictly agin.

So I just watched possibly the creepiest nature show I have ever seen, barring that one special where David Attenborough told me all the ways wasps are the scariest fuckers on the planet.* This special was about Komodo dragons and how they hunt, and it also involved David Attenborough.

So they were all excited for this special because this time they were going to find out how the dragons hunt, unlike the last documentary they did where David just tossed a dead goat onto the beach and stood around hosting a nature show whilst roughly two million giant killer lizards tore a goat apart at his feet, and the basic message of the bit seemed to be “I’m David Attenborough, and I am standing in front of a feeding frenzy of KOMODO FUCKING DRAGONS.”**

This time, though, they locked him in the sound booth while the cameramen went off to see what dragons eat when badass naturalists aren’t around to toss them goat carcasses. And what they found out was that the dragons feast upon DREAD AND DESPAIR.

So the crew finds a water buffalo and sits around waiting for shit to happen, and they’re like “There is a lizard right there, shit should be happening, it literally just poked that buffalo in the side with its tongue,” but the buffalo and lizard both just look sort of bored.

Then, a bit later, the dragon lunges and chomps a chunk out of the buffalo, and the cameramen are like “FINALLY.” But the buffalo is all “OW WHAT THE FUCK, DRAGON?” and kicks the dragon, and the dragon backs off like, “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t think you were using that chunk of flesh, my bad,” and then for a while nothing happens. The dragon goes back to staring intently at the buffalo, the buffalo goes about his business and bleeds a bit, and the camera guys are like “… That was it?”

And then they notice the other dragons.

As the day goes on, more and more dragons just sort of meander over to the buffalo’s vicinity. The buffalo continues to do whatever it is buffalo do, possibly muttering under its breath about asshole lizards, and the dragons make themselves comfortable. And just stare.

And the next day they are still there, staring at the buffalo.

They stay through the next day. And the next.

And this goes on for days, with the buffalo being like “Dragons, you are giving me the creeps,” but the dragons just KEEP STARING. Then the buffalo starts looking like it feels a bit under the weather, and moves less and less each day. And each day the dragons get closer and closer, all the time just WATCHING him, until finally THREE WEEKS LATER the buffalo keels over as the venom from that initial dragon bite finally knocks him down so hard he can’t get up.

AND THEN GIANT LIZARDS RIP HIM APART.

And then, a couple hours after the buffalo falls, they’ve stripped him of all his flesh, and they transform from a ravening mass of scaly eating machines to a bunch of lizards that just kind of wander off into the jungle, looking as though the past three weeks of glaring at a buffalo until he died was no big deal.

All that is left are the cameramen, standing there questioning the beliefs they held that there was any goodness to be found in the universe.***

I was going to watch the next special on the DVD—probably about penguins, since it’s impossible to do any nature program without at least half an hour of penguins—but first I had to check my closet for Komodo dragons. Facehuggers I can handle, but Komodo dragons? They’re just SPOOKY.


*Alien fans probably know that the xenomorph's life cycle is loosely based on the life cycle of the family of Ichneumon wasps. Many of the species in this family lay their eggs inside of a spider so that when the larvae hatch, they can eat their way out. The myriad ways they do this, it turns out, are WAY GODDAMN SCARIER than getting assaulted by a facehugger and then having the resulting ugly critter slam through your ribcage like the Kool-Aid Man. The ways the wasps do it make John Hurt’s famous death scene look as peaceful as getting carried off by angels while you sleep.

**This was also the series boasting a scene with the message “I am David Attenborough, and I am standing next to a FUCKING VOLCANO, which is erupting, BECAUSE I CAN.” This was back when he was a spry middle-aged badass and could film on location with only moderate wheezing.

***No, seriously, they had a behind-the-scenes bit where clearly distraught cameramen are confessing that they feel like they have become the dark harbingers of death as they follow this buffalo around.

Oh, man, y’all, somebody in HarperTeen’s marketing department needs a raise.

Look what I shelved today:



That’s right. They Twilified Romeo and Juliet. And also Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and a bunch of others.

Do you think this works? Does slapping a big red thing on a pitch black cover and typing in fancy font actually trick teenage girls (and frustrated housewives) into reading any damn book they’d previously spurned? Maybe we should try Gothing up the covers of books like On the Origin of Species and see if it’s true! I really see no downside to tricking people into reading that.

At least there’s some color on these, though. The YA novels are looking increasingly gloomy lately. Every cover is washed-out greyscale. Although that is starting to serve as a warning: if you see a grey cover, you’re safe in betting you’ll find a bland normal girl torn between her One True Love, who is TORMENTED because he is a demon/vampire/fallen angel/demigod/time pirate as well as a jerk, and some other red herring rival dude, who is also a jerk. It’s just when this cover style starts bleeding into books I like that we have a problem. Can you just picture Beka Cooper looking all sad and greyscale, with bright red rose petals falling from her hand? Or god forbid Tiffany Aching and the Nac Mac Feegle?

Okay, yeah, neither can I. Nor can I picture that with my own OGYAFE. But if it does ever happen, I suppose SOMEBODY will read them.

They just won’t know what hit them.

So my sister and I saw the Rifftrax for The Last Airbender.*

Wow. That was … impressively bad.

I mean, I’ve seen terrible movies, but I’ve never seen one that was so … artistic about it. There’s something sublime about the way they took a fantastic series—a truly sweeping fantasy story—whitewashed it,** and made it into an experience rather like … well, like watching my screensaver.

Yes, my screensaver specifically. My screensaver is probably a significant portion of my hard drive. It is a slideshow format that cycles through over 4700 images I’ve collected over a decade—concept art, photographs, portraits, drawings, anything that strikes my fancy online hits my screensaver. It rotates silently along, displaying random pretty images that have no real connection, no thread, nothing to tie them together. Just picture, picture, picture. TLA was rather like watching that. It did have pretty set design and costumes (no idea if they had any Asiafail, because I am not an expert, but it sure LOOKED nice), but the images apparently cycled across the screen at random.

Of course, the simile falls apart when you realize that the character sketches that also live on my screensaver were chosen because the characters—who cannot move or speak, as they are static images—were somehow interesting. This never happened in TLA. Nothing happened in TLA.

The attention to detail was the stunning part. Aside from the sets and costumes (which could still be wrong),*** I was impressed at how they managed to get every single thing wrong. Fun highlights:

-The Harpo Guy Jackson Rathbone being chosen for Comic Relief. Remember when you did Read Aloud Time in class and there was always a kid who did not understand that punctuation was there to change how you read something? That was Harpo’s line-reading strategy. He just ran through each word as fast as possible. I never thought I’d say this, but when you’re the comic relief, you do need to mug some, or it looks vaguely creepy. He needed Actual Sokka's advice to do real comic relief. ("Aang, would you say that you and Toph have a ... ROCKY relationship?")

-The pointless conversations between Aasif Mandvi (who is better than this movie) and Cliff Curtis (who is also better than this movie), one of whom can apparently teleport to the other’s house for their scenes. The Firelord is not the immediate antagonist in the first season; he’s a looming threat of Greater Travails To Come. Here he’s just an actor who is rather glad he hasn’t gotten killed in the first ten minutes of the movie, as usually happens to Curtis.

-Uncle E-I-E-I-roh’s accent. He is the only person with an accent. His nephew, his fellow officers, and his brother do not have accents. Nobody does. Just him. (MY SISTER: “You just know he went off to the Spirit World and came back with this pretentious accent—like when some American goes to the UK and comes back sounding like Masterpiece Theater.”)

-Pronouncing “Aang” like you’re a Honker from Sesame Street. My sister and I couldn’t help but honk back every time they’d honk his name, and then we’d collapse into giggles.

In conclusion: The Rifftrax wasn’t all that great, either. Don’t even bother with this movie. You want a good Rifftrax, go watch the OTHER Avatar, the James Cameron one, with Mike, Kevin, and Bill along, because that was goddamn PRICELESS. And then god dammit go watch the animated Avatar series. And if you want a badly cast, not-quite-accurate version of the show that’s actually interesting, the Ember Island Players already got that covered for you in the show itself.

Anyway, off to watch the animated duel between Katara and Master Pakku again. Just, you know, FOR COMPARISON.


*No, don’t panic, nobody got any money from me for that movie, except for the Rifftrax guys. And the public library would, because I got snowed in and couldn’t return it on time, but hell yeah I work there and don’t GET late fees. THAT’S RIGHT YOU WISH YOU WERE ME.

**As a white person, let me just say THANK GOD there were no nonwhite people among the protagonists. Such a thing would obviously have brought my tiny egocentric world crashing down around me because FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE the heroes wouldn’t look like me, and we can’t be having THAT. I was of course threatened enough by the Extras and Villains of Color. Can you imagine the chaos and of course lost revenue I would have generated if anyone in the foreground didn’t have blue eyes? Why, when I saw that the cartoon had no white people I had to lie down on the fainting couch for several hours, and of course I never spent any money buying all three seasons and the big book o’ concept art!

***And one inspired moment when ( they added a neat effect to that one spoilery thing that happened in Season 1 )