The Desert Mermaid

Same-sex marriages are happening in Illinois! MARRIAGES FOR EVERYONE!

My only regret is that I didn't get to be the flower girl for one very specific couple. But I do have a trip out that way tentatively planned for June, so I'll just have to pelt them with flowers a few months late.

Congratulations to all the newlyweds!

Well, at least they struck down the Defense of Marriage Act. I've never been entirely clear on just how an act limiting who can get married is supposed to defend marriage, anyway.

What I Learned Since The Autumn Equinox:

• It's a bit painful to win the trust of a shy cat and then have to destroy it again when you have to give her eye medication every few hours.
• Those profoundly stupid-looking Breathe-Right strips you stick on your nose? They help ENORMOUSLY when you have swollen sinuses.
• Awesome animator Friz Freleng would concentrate so hard on animating a scene that you could literally set fire to his desk while he was at it and he would not notice. His friends discovered this through several practical experiments.
• Some gallbladders have really recognizable problems, like gallstones. Others just slowly croak over several years.
• Trunk or Treat is not reserved for just Utahns.
• Sharpie makes good pens that don't give me a headache now!
• Quenya has an extensive case system, but it's also kind of weirdly redundant. Seems Tolkien had trouble making up his mind about a lot of things.
• If your political party forcibly ejects anyone who demonstrates even an iota of rationality, it will not go well for your crazy-go-nuts party come Election Day.
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is known as the movie that invented the twist ending, but what I didn't know is that it was invented by accident because the studios thought the original untwisted ending was too macabre. Studio execs--messin' with your movies since 1920.
• It may be sad to leave your cross-town library job, but dang is it a relief not to have to drive that far all the time.
• When I observed a couple of years ago that Kevin Clash has gone mad with power, I was more right than I knew. (I was talking about the supersaturation of Elmo in everything! I didn't expect THIS! DAMN YOU, KEVIN CLASH)
• A single episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway? on Youtube exactly equals one medium session of boring WiiFit Free Step. Time flies when everything is hilarious.
• There may be another unexpected upside to switching narrators in my Doctors! story: my former narrator gets back all the weird characeristics that got in the way when he was narrating! Why didn't I do this sooner?!
• That butter-and-flour mixture I've enjoyed making for years as the best part of soup-cooking is called a roux.*
• The ch in "chalcedony" is pronounced as a k.

*I know how to do a lot of things in the kitchen, but I don't know what to call a bunch of them. So years after I've learned something I'll find out there's a word for it. Clearly I need an authoritative 1950's narrator looking over my shoulder at all times.

I believe the phrase "Blitzkrieg of Bullshit" sums up my fatigue with politics over the last few years. I've been advancing my own political theory that the immensely stupid statements that seem to be streaming from Tea Partiers are part of a strategy designed to leave sane people so completely speechless at their ignorance and nastiness that they have no idea how to respond, allowing the crazies to step in and TAKE OVER THE TRI-STATE AREA!!! GOVERNMENT!!!*

Come on, guys. It's really hard to talk to you like grownups when I'm still trying to figure out if I'm on Team Evil or Team Stupid when it comes to figuring out your motives. Give me another option.


*Which would make it a far more coherent plan than Paul Ryan's Secret Plan to fix the deficit. He seems to have the same gift for strategy as the Underpants Gnomes.

Oh, Utah.

I really wish I’d kept the pamphlets we got in eighth grade sex ed. The cover alone was priceless: it was a closeup of the fly of a pair of jeans. A giant chain ran through the belt loops, and right in front of the zipper it was secured by a GIANT PADLOCK. It’s a good thing my mom was the kind of crazy hippie who felt that it’s totally fine for kids to know about how bodies work,* because I’d never have learned it from school.

Well, I say good luck, Utah, in your quest to let hormone-crazed adolescents learn about sex from their parents, unless their parents are as squeamish as the politicians they vote for, in which case the teenagers will learn about it from those completely reliable sources of TV, magazines, the internet, and each other. Let me know how that works out for ya.


*We never had a big formal The Sex Talk. Mom mostly answered our questions when they came up. Interestingly, while I remember her explaining things from the time I was three, so from then on I could explain mechanics of acquiring a little sister, I distinctly recall that it was much later—at maybe age nine—that it actually sank in how the sperm got into the vagina. My brain had glossed over it before that. And I remember it clearly because suddenly, whole new aspects of the culture were now opened up to me. I still can recall the first time I understood that two sitcom characters were joking about THE SEX. Yes, I was kind of slow on the uptake in some respects. Still am.

I’m beginning to suspect that the monumentally stupid things the Tea Partiers—and even the more general GOP candidates—keep saying are in fact part of a strategy. If your opponents are concerned with analyzing assumptions and relying on facts, all you have to do is make a short statement that is so mind-scramblingly, brain-torquingly wrong on so many levels that it’d take a full-on graduate thesis to address every problem within it. Congratulations: they’ll now have to spend weeks compiling and organizing facts and statistics, and by the time they have it together everyone will have the sound bite so firmly in their heads it’ll be impossible to dislodge.

And hey, if you spout out several of these in a row, they’ll NEVER catch up!

Maybe we opponents should just stick with the slightly less fact-based, but age-old, counter-strategy—simply pointing and laughing at the stupid. At least it’s less time-consuming.

Good news, everyone!

Mubarak stepped down—for real this time!

Yeah, yeah, long way to go and all that, but this—this gives me hope.

Criminy, I tell you, I am having mood swings with regard to Iran. This is some scary shit and some exciting shit and I keep oscillating between YOU TELL THEM, AWESOME PROTESTERS and CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG and OH THE HUMANITY.

I feel like that’s about all I can do. Much as it’s tempting to try to swoop in and fix all the broke shit, that’s not really possible in any sense—we might get rid of a few old problems at the expense of a giant crop of new problems. And anyway, that’s not really what we’re for, anyway.

Mostly, I regard foreign policy with a similar attitude to my own social policy—that people can deal with their own problems, and if they need my help, they’ll ask for it.

So for now, I think the plan is to watch and hope my first mood is the prescient one.

Iran is an amazing country—the disjointed history I have learned speaks a lot of ordinary people trying to live ordinary happy lives despite the fact that ordinary happy lives are heavily frowned upon. It’s one of the most straightforward tales of how very alike humans are, and how resilient the will to Live—a will sometimes completely at odds with the instinct to just survive—is. I hope one day it gets easier.

… And we have a real president.

Remember, folks, the office of President of the US of A has a lot inherently wrong with it in terms of power to the individual and assumptions about patriarchal leadership—and I’m not just talking about when some douche gets in there. Our tendency to assume that Daddy will fix it is not a great one.

But for today, as long as we’ve got this president thing going on, doesn’t it feel damn good to have a competent guy in there right now?

What I learned since the Autumn Equinox

• Pennies no longer count as money in some vending machines.
• You’re supposed to cut divets out of the seam if you’ve sewn an outside curve so the fabric lies flat properly.
• Skin-picking is a horrible, horrible disorder affecting millions of Americans and its tragic consequences cannot be properly recorded. I learned all this from a website where you can pay $29.95 a month for a subscription that will apparently help you master the compulsion. In due time, of course. These things are not instantaneous. (And here I always thought it was just a bad habit.)
• Black holes have a region outside the event horizon called the ergosphere, where space gets sort of tangled up in the spin of the black hole and moves faster than the speed of light. Which matter can’t do, but which space apparently can. Dude.
• If you are going to make disgusting lewd comments to the doctor’s receptionist, do not be surprised when the doctor refuses to see you.  Especially when the receptionist happens to be the doctor’s wife.*
• I am not cut out for customer service. I don’t care enough about what I’m doing.
• Don’t use windshield wiper fluid on a cold day.
• Americans are willing to vote for the competent guy, and don’t let silly things like whether he’s black trump the fact that he’s competent.
• On the other hand, Hollywood still feels that an all-white cast playing nonwhite characters is an improvement on a story.
• Hooper’s sign is a test you do on the leg muscles of paraplegics in which you massage the muscles of one leg while holding the other leg as well.  You are feeling for countermovements of the muscles there. And if Hooper’s sign is positive, your next step is to call a psychiatrist, because the person is not actually paralyzed. (There is a whole battery of tests doctors do to see if you’re really paralyzed. My favorite is the test to see if a patient's arm is actually paralyzed: lay the patient down and hold their arm straight up with their hand over their face.  If they’re really paralyzed, their hand hits them in the face.)
• The newspaper is being held up right now by two groups: old people who can’t figure out this newfangled internet, and Coupon Ladies—frazzled-sounding housewives who obsessively chase after bargains, to the point where they demand four Sunday papers in order to get the coupons out of them. And who get very upset if their K-Mart or Harmon’s ad is not included.
• A lot of people don’t quite understand human rights versus stuff you can vote on.
• My brother loves The Sandlot the way I love It Takes Two—nostalgically and unconditionally.
• The infamous 9999 Damage Geno Whirl in Super Mario RPG is not a myth.  And it is awesome.
• When you say your company is going outta business and everything must go, you attract a whole lot of vultures and the customer service you pride yourself on gets flushed away in favor of just keeping track of everyone.
• Vulture-shopping is different from normal shopping: you treat stores that are going out of business like you are looting them. Shoppers become much less observant and impatient and instead of waiting for you to take their rejected clothes they just put them back themselves, which never goes well.**
• “High definition” really is.
• They really trowel on the makeup on non-HD shows.  While this makes sense because, as Roger Ebert pointed out in his smackdown on Expelled!, nobody looks quite right on TV without it, this has become a drawback now that I have an HD TV and can see that my wimmin doctors’ faces are pretty much masks made of pancake.
• You can actually browse the stalls at the Hyrule Castle Town market in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
• Street performance has a lot more to it than just going out and juggling or whatever.  If you’re doing it properly, like street_show, it’s a pretty complex but very worthwhile profession.
• Originally when Jim Henson came up with The Dark Crystal, he wanted to make all the dialogue in Fantasy Language—actually, a whole host of Fantasy Languages for the different characters.  His buddies were like, “Jim Henson, no.” But I now know about this and love him even more.

*Since some of you are not aware, the doctor in question is my dad, the receptionist is my mom, and the creepy patient is gross and inappropriate enough that we're wondering if we should send him back to the scan people to take a look at his head for tumors.  Except we found out he was gross with every single person there, too, and they may refuse to scan him.

**Dear shoppers: I appreciate the thought, but for the love of god don’t put clothes back when you’re done trying them on. Customers never seem to notice that all our pants are hanging up a certain way, they never button the shirts, they frequently put the stuff back in the wrong part of the store, and in the rare instances they find the correct spot they mix all the sizes up and hang the wrong sales tags on them.  Not to mention we have to at least try to account for the clothes.