Cardigan

So today I bought a cardigan at Goodwill (with cables! and it'd such a good color, sort of slate blue). I'm not a very imaginitive person (I might not be as linear as other people but I don't just think things up from nowhere) so most of the timeI spend on the internet is spent on wikipedia, google images, or wists.com looking up things that I happen to see or interact with that day, such as "US Mail" "credit card" "beeswax" "mango allergy" "shampoo" and the like. Sometimes it's dead boring, like "Wells Fargo", but sometimes it ends up being amazing, and "Cardigan" is one of those:

"In an assassination attempt similar to the incident that took the life of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, former Bulgarian state radio editor Vladimir Kostov survived an attack in Paris as he was leaving the subway when a Bulgarian secret agent injected into him a ricin-coated platinum pellet hidden in the tip of an umbrella. The agent failed to kill Kostov because the heavy woollen cardigan he was wearing that day kept the pellet from penetrating his skin too deeply. "

Cardigan's also a town in Wales. And then there's Cardiganshire. Which might be a farmtown or might be a steeltown but to me it is filled with librarians and teachers in little stone cottages overlooking rolling hills.

Mangoes- Friends or Foes?

Would a friend swell your lips so they sting for days? (3 days and counting). On the other hand, if I hadn't been eating my friends it wouldn't have happened... but I'd do it again in an instant, I'm not a coward, I can take a little swelling and some stinging and even open sores, for I am human and God gave me everything in his creation to use as I wish. And what God didn't give me, human ingenuity has provided me with, such as Neosporin and also chapstick.

Shopping

Like most people, I love new things and beautiful things, the sort of things that can be attained by shopping. However, shopping is one of the dreariest things ever because almost every aspect makes me uncomfortable. Mainly, of course, I don't like the people- they seem much ruder and also uglier than the average person. I don't like shoppers no matter which shop, a yarn store or a shoe store or the grocery store or a bookstore is going to be filled with unpleasant people. They just seem vaguely desperate and irritable, and sometimes they touch me or complain about the shopkeeper to me and I just don't like it. I like people at the park or the library or definitely the train, but shops attract the worst people on their worst behavior. The other unpleasant aspects of shopping pale in comparison, such as the distance from my house (HELLO, I use my bicycle to get around, how exactly can I buy mirrors from IKEA without my parents driving me which they won't because they think I have enough, which yeah right like I even have as many square inches of mirror as I have square inches of body!)or the lighting and music in shops.

But, from now on I will never go into a shop again except for food, because I have got a Visa card with a low limit and also a job. So far I don't think I'm going overboard, because it is the first day I activated it and the first day is sort of special, but it is true that I have to dial it back for tommorow and so on. Also I love getting packages in the mail because it is exactly like presents! If presents were the exact thing you wanted and then eagerly anticipated and then found one day at your house in a lovely box with no thank you note to write.

Although today I believe I spent 3 times as much as I earned. And the night is young. Youngish. Actually, not young, but I am too excited to sleep.

Streamlining

A few weeks ago the neighbor children came to my bedroom door, which is an exterior door, and asked to play with my father. Apparently he found them poking the beehive with sticks and so he gave them each a drone to take home and now they are all best friends. You should know that my Dad is best friends with everyone, instead of favoring interesting or age appropriate or like minded people like most people do. Anyway, I was lying in bed watching the exchange and Dad went off to grab something for Show and Tell (maybe the bee bonnet?) so they turned their attention to me. "How old is you?" asked a very little boy. "15?" the other suggested. I told them my age. "You coulda BEEN moved out!" "Well, yeah, I guess."

I will be 18 and 11/12 when I finally move out- school starts on 9/22, I turn on 10/23. I did second grade twice. (In other words, I coulda been moved out.)

I'm in the process of reducing my collections by taking out the things I hate, and there's so much of it! I filled a garbage bag with clothes I hate and 6 paper grocery bags with books I hate. I was originally going to be hardcore and only keep the things I love but all I couldn't find anything because I am enlightened and don't cling to posessions. Also I don't have very nice stuff. Why do I accumulate things I hate?

I actually think it might be a way of insulating and anchoring myself. "I am a person, look at all of those items that I have purchased or handled!I exist!" Also, anyone who looks at my room will see a massive collection of items but not know which ones are important, which ones define my interests and, to an extent, me. I feel sort of naked with my nearly empty shelves holding only my Japanese textbooks, borrowed books, and glimpses of my soul. I think too much? Well, maybe next time I won't take a 6 hour nap in the afternoon.

Delicious

Now, I think in lists most of the time, which sounds Type A but when you think about it lists are more fluid and less restrictive than, say charts. Some things are not really worth talking about because they are so banal, like The Smoothest Pens List or the Possibly Recyclable List, but sometimes things make it onto a boring list that you wouldn't expect to find there- new to the Delicious List is ginger with peaches. I found out while eating a candy and drinking peach tea, but I think it would also be delicious as a pie or a smoothie.

The Delicious List
-Balsamic Vinaigrette salad dressing
-Carrots
-Ginger
-Peaches
-Peaches and Ginger
-Pad Thai
-Cheese Pizza
-Focaccia
-Gnocchi
-Peppermints
-Coconut
-Parmesan Cheese
-Creme Soda
-Chicken Soup
-Fudge

Man, now I am super hungry, I wish I had massive platters of everything on that list, except the soup and dressing could be in bowls instead.

The Never Eat List
-donuts
-cold tea
-Hershey's chocolate
-things that may have molded
-jelly beans
-mayonnaise
-ranch dressing, and all dressings besides mild balsamic vinaigrette
-things which have sat uncovered in the refrigerator absorbing smells
-hamburgers
-desert wine
-cold tortillas

And now I am not hungry at all. Well, hungry for not havign my stomach empty but not hungry for putting things in my mouth.

edit: Oh, I hate myself- while I was typing that my TEA got COLD.

Crap.

Man, you know I have Mammal Powers, to protect little kids and get along with mammals in general really well, but MAN! There is one little neighbor girl who is completely unwilling to live past ther age of 4. More later. My legs are still shaking. Geez.

Racism

Remember the Never List? The list of things I will never, ever do voluntarily? "Discuss Racism", a longtime component of the list due to the inescapable emotional component of the issue suspending rationality and thus making discussions terribly unproductive and also frustrating, is off the list. And I haven't even started at my social justice college- I've only put my first assignment into my netflix queu.

I was reading about skin lightening (because no one at my office has a job for me and after half an hour of asking I decided to stop drawing attention to my uselessness) and wow, the colonial mindset is insane. And white privilege is interesting but I don't think I'm going to think about it in those terms because white people don't have special things that they don't deserve, it's more that many people who do deserve them don't get them.

Also there is something called being a race traitor, which would be using white privilege to reverse systemic racism by interracial marriage and promoting minorities in your office and things like that. Although I was planning on marrying an Irish person because the actors on The Black Donnelys are so fantastically attractive. And then there are the voices, like on the site I think I posted about before, the bbc dialect recordings. However, this has technically only been my plan since yesterday afternoon when I found the show on nbc.com, so I suppose I might revise the plan at some point. Although I do really like the way those actors wear sweaters, it's amazing. I think I need to move to the UK, and I am sure they have some race-traitor tasks over there as well.

Keyboards

I spend more time than most people thinking about keyboards. I would share my passion with people in real life but for some reason I'm the only person in my house awake at 1:30 in the morning, which is prime prying-keys-off-of-my-keyboard-and-discussing-it time for me.

On a qwerty keyboard the letters are all over the place, grouped by frequency of use (by which I mean seperated by frequency of use), which is not random but it's close enough that it impresses me that my initials are both next to each other, and my most common keyboard shortcut. (little tiny signs like this are part of the reason I always feel vaguely special.)

Furthermore, if you make a little chart of the layout of a keyboard and then color in the letters of a particular word, you've generated an improbable visual representation of that word, which, if you are into tiny signs that show specialness, might entertain you for hours.

[ ][ ][ ][ ][t][ ][ ][i][ ][ ]
[a][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][l]
[ ][ ][c][ ][ ][n][ ]

I enjoy everything about the qwerty keyboard (it's called enlightenment) but I do have slightly small hands so I am teaching myself dvorak. And by "teaching myself dvorak" I mean "prying all of the keys from my keyboard and rearranging them and then realizing that I don't have system privileges to change the keyboard settings on my mom's laptop and giving up and trying to be satisfied with all of the good times I've had with the qwerty keyboard." Besides the indications of specialness described above, there was also... typing the word "were" and the japanese word for "carrot", which is "ninjin". And here comes the rationalization; I can feel it forming: ninjin has been my password at different times to almost every one of my accounts. I love it for its improbable perfection and convenience. Why is it so easy in a language that requires mental gymnastics to use a keyboard? Why did I choose the word carrot as a password anyway? With dvorak, that would be gone.

Personal Apocalypse

There is a movie about some policeman rescuers who got trapped in one of the twin towers. And I just thought I would make it known that if I am ever, you know, trapped in or under something or eaten by a polar bear (I think those are probably the scariest mammals) and then killed and the whole ordeal is made into a movie, there are some things I really need my character not to do. These are things I would never ever do but I thought of the posthumous portrayal as a possible loophole for these affectations to taint my life, and this post is really just to make sure I have all my bases covered.

Essentially: no using overcompounded words (insofar, inasmuch, everso).

Wow, I thought I had more behavior standards than just that one, but I'm not thinking of them right now. Hm. What else? It's not as big of a deal, but I don't really say "due to" except as a question. I use the implicative pause.

Pandora Radio

So I have a Pandora radio account with 20 stations and I sometimes find really good songs. But some stations really don't work- I tried to have a "Britney Spears" radio and it gave me everything that was super popular in 2002 or something, it was not what I wanted but I was, you know, still emotionally intact. But on my "Lily Allen" station there was an Emilie Simon song- "Never Fall In Love" - The Worst Song Ever, replacing Hips Don't Lie, even. But all day I've been kind of flighty and so I told myself I would listen to the whole thing and I'm not a wimp (I'll explain my Not A Wimp personal regimen later, but trust me for now) but by 2/3 completion I was gasping in my cubicle and I really should have stopped but my NAW training is such that I endured it and then went to wikipedia to check what the hell happened to that girl to warp her mind and vocal skills. And it turns out she's French.

Later, perhaps, I shall recover enough to explain my relationship with the French.

Skillz

So I spent yesterday sleeping and eating and feeling sort of gross and tired, and spent last night lying awake until 4 am, but I had work this morning and so here I am. But wow, I really do need sleep. Like I was in the kitchen looking for something that is easier than reformatting resumes and thought of eating the cereal the company provides and keeps in the cabinets. I opened the cabinet labeled "coffee/tea" and was sad to find that it contained no cereal, but elated to find that it contained tea! I love tea! Although my observation skillz apparently suck. Similarly, I got it back to my desk and discovered that it actually isn't very good tea, or maybe I'm too tired to make tea properly, so I got a green tea candy out of my bag to suck. Five minutes later the thought slowly formed in my brain "hey, the thing in my mouth tastes like the thing on my desk. That's sort of mysterious. I don't really like this taste. They taste like.. like... oh. tea. yes."

Religion

Now, normally worrying about the details of my religion is on my "Life's Too Short" list because there is so much data and the events that invite controversy were all so long ago... mostly I just enjoy the rituals because of the symbolism and tradition, and the teachings because they fit perfectly with how I was brought up (avoiding the 7 deadly sins and embracing the gifts of the Holy Spirit is second nature by now) and with the laws of my country.

I haven't been to church in a few weeks because I want an epic, thought provoking experience. I want church to be powerful and exciting and enlightening and what I get instead is church that's comforting and routine and practical, and a little self satisfied. I want latin mass with an organ, not reader's-digest-anecdote mass with a guitar, but I'm okay with the tenets of my faith. (No, I can't define the word tenets. It's not called faith for nothing.)

But do you want to know what I found on Wikipedia?

"Because the story the book of Exodus describes is catastrophic for the Egyptians — involving horrible plagues, the loss of thousands of slaves, and many deaths (possibly including the death of Pharaoh himself, though that matter is unclear in Exodus) — it is conspicuous that no Egyptian records speaking of Israelites in Egypt have ever been found. "

No! That's impossible! Really? Hmm. Have to find someone without a Life's Too Short List to process that and tell me what they come up with.

Accents

There are really no words.

http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html

here is one transcription:

So if you’re not having a good time there’s no point in you being there. And these people’ve paid a lot of money. OK, I thought a lot of them were ripped off, absolutely terrible, you know, the, the rip-off, you know. And it was, they were, they were moving away from that deep-rooted, what was holiday camp, if you like, working class holiday. They were trying to move it up a notch, you know. Therefore what they tried to do was take the Scottishness out of it and make it more like Blackpool. But they were getting English people coming up from down south for the Scottish experience and they weren’t getting it.

And, eh, I, I’ve found that, ehm, you could take the mickey out the Irish; you could take the mickey out the Welsh; you could take the mickey out the Scots; but if you tried it on the English, cause the place was full of English managers, now not that I have anything against the English, but I’d get warning letters saying, “Please do not slag the English”. And I, I’d think to myself, “But I’m not, I’m not having a go; I’m not having a pop.” I do it to the Irish, I do it to myself, I do it to the Welsh and if you’re Australian, ho ho ho, you know, nae luck!