In the Future, Everyone Lives in Space

We Survived the Human Race, But We Don't Know the Words to the Songs of the Ocean

2009-01-05T19:30:00.002-05:00

I think the base of operations is going to be mostly over here for the time being. I may still post here now and then, but I can't think of a reason why I'd use Blogger instead of my fancy new website/blog combo. The intended audience is largely the same.

The future is here, gentle readers, and it turns out that it's not terribly different from the past.

Yes, We Did

2008-11-06T01:30:00.004-05:00

It's been some time, gentle readers. I know I made a commitment to this thing and then promptly forgot about it, and for that I apologize. It just occurred to me that this is the best place to congratulate our new President-elect, Barack H. Obama. High-fives all around.

Honestly, finding out that Obama won by a landslide gave me an overwhelming sense of relief and validation. So this is what it's like to vote for the candidate who wins! Now here's hoping that Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress can get some useful things done to turn our economic frowns upside-down and improve life here in Americaland. I know at this point all my conservative friends and relatives are like, "Obama's not the messiah, you know, he won't be able to fix everything!" but you know, at least with him in office I feel like it's possible for something about the status quo of the last eight years to change for the better.

I really think the best two guys for the job got it. Congrats, Obama and Biden. You earned it.

BONUS VIDEO:

RHOMBUS!

2008-08-29T10:33:00.001-04:00

Oh wow, this is totally sweet news. Looks like Cartoon Network is picking up "Adventure Time" for a full series.

I gotta admit, this makes me want to pay to receive Cartoon Network. "Adventure Time" is hilarious. The original short cartoon can be viewed at the link above.

On Barack Obama

2008-08-21T00:51:00.002-04:00

I was thinking today of the weird opposition some people have to Barack Obama. I'm not talking about not liking his policies or the Democratic party's platform--those are both very valid reasons for not voting for a candidate. What I'm talking about is people who pick candidates based on personal like or dislike, having little or nothing to do with their actual policies.

If you're like me and catch yourself reading CNN.com on a regular basis, you've probably noticed that it's made the news more than once that some people think Obama is "elitist." I guess this is a fairly common opinion about the guy, despite the fact that most middle and lower class people would probably benefit more from Obama's policies than from McCain's. Obama favors tax cuts for the middle class, after all.

The problem people seem to have is that Obama is young, smart and well-spoken. He looks and acts like an educated man. A lot of people voted for Bush because they like the idea of an "average Joe" in the Oval Office, drinking a Bud Lite on the White House lawn. But (ignoring the fact that Bush was born into privilege and is not an average Joe in any sense) I just have to wonder why that image is so popular. Don't get me wrong: I love my family, most of whom are blue collar folks. But given the options, I'd keep them as far away as possible from the buttons that launch the warheads.

I'd keep myself as far away from those buttons as I could get, too. That's the point. I don't think average people have any business making the kind of decisions that could destroy our country or the world. I think we as a group usually have the good judgment to tell when someone is doing a bad job and try to get them out of there (only usually; see Bush), but there's a reason why we elect our leaders. It's because most of us would be crummy presidents.

An example: You don't know how many people I've heard suggest that we nuke the Middle East. This would be a bad decision that would set off a chain reaction that results in the deaths of us all. No one who says this kind of thing should be president, but it was what a lot of average Joes were saying right after 9/11.

I don't know about you, but I want my country's leader to be smarter than me. I want my president to be more educated, charismatic and skilled than the average person. I want him or her to be the voice of reason. If that means our president is elitist or someone I don't personally like, well, I'll deal with it. I'd rather be in that position than the one where I'm thinking to myself, "I could do a better job than this bozo."

Another Month, Another Update

2008-08-12T23:22:00.003-04:00

It's been another more-than-a-month and of course a lot has happened in that time.

The main thing is that I finally went about getting my wisdom teeth out on July 18, which has just been one disaster after another. The first couple days were peachy-keen. Then, about three days into my recovery, I developed dry socket in the two lower sockets. Every few days I returned to the oral surgeon to have the dressings replaced, until eventually the dressings stopped helping with the pain on the right-side socket (the left one had stopped hurting by this point). When I mentioned this to the dental assistant (surgical assistant?), she said perhaps the dressings were interfering with the wound closing, causing the pain. They gave me some more ketoprofen (a non-narcotic drug, an NSAID like Advil except much stronger--apparently it's commonly used for horses) and sent me off, saying I'd probably be fine in a few days.

Famous last words. In a few days I was in unbearable pain and, though it was a weekend, I paged the doc. He called in an antibiotic prescription for me. Thank God, that actually helped a lot and I am doing much better now. That infection was probably brewing in there for a while because when it became painful enough to surface above the ketoprofen, it was pretty bad.

In unrelated news, one of my rats sprouted a large tumor and a smaller tumor friend for it almost overnight. As always, the rat who is sick is the one I like the best of the two (Chloe's Eyebrows, the one that is more tolerant of being picked up). I took her in to the local exotics veterinarian, assuming that these lumps were abscesses as a result of rough play with her cagemate, especially with the speed that they appeared. The veterinarian wasn't sure what the lumps were just from feeling them, so he did a few tests. Of course it is malignant cancer (rats are very susceptible to mammary cancer which often appears near the armpits and groin, which just happens to be where these two tumors are). He recommended against surgery, largely because these tumors always grow back, often quite soon after removal, and usually the cancer has already spread to the internal organs by the time the tumors are removed.

His recommendation was to keep her alive until her life is no longer pleasant for her, and then to put her to sleep. I felt this was a reasonable suggestion, since although one of the tumors is large, it doesn't seem to be causing her any pain, and she's still able to get around easily. When either of those changes, we will be going back in.

That was all very depressing news! In a more pleasant update, my dog is adorable. This picture of her was taken on the 4th of July weekend last month.

Valuable Lesson Learned as a Small Child

2008-06-19T23:46:00.001-04:00

If you want a sick puppy to survive an operation, do not name it Lucky.

Pit Bull Party

2008-06-03T18:20:00.001-04:00

It's time to update you on the pit bull I am fostering. Her name is Sadie and she is really a superb dog in every sense.

HELLO I AM A PITBULL

She is a very clever dog and has caught on to basic commands quickly, even though she has not had any training in the past. Since I've been cleaning up my old apartment I haven't had as much opportunity as I'd like to work with her on commands, but she now knows "sit," "down," "leave it," and "off." Those are the main ones she needs to know for the time being, but soon I will be enrolling her in obedience classes so she's better about doing her commands amidst distractions.

And besides being good at stuff, she is just super cute.

What Has Been Going On

2008-05-16T02:42:00.001-04:00

Once again, due to the fact that my life is extremely dull, I've gotten out of the habit of updating. I'll just give you the bullet points:

I have moved into a duplex, and it's pretty nice. I still technically have the other place until the early part of June, so a bunch of my stuff is still there. I am gradually moving it in my car a little at a time. Regardless, the duplex is R-A-D.
Fostering a dog starting this Sunday. She's an adorable pit bull from the Colorado Pit Bull Rescue. From meeting her I can already tell she is a fantastic dog, but I will try to keep my dear readers up on that.
I went out of town with Steve to a wedding last weekend. This wedding was in Atlanta, Georgia, which is one of the worst places in the nation to drive. Our rental car was a Ford Focus, which is not nearly so bad as it sounds, and we spent hours on the "express" way immediately after we flew in--just in time to hit the rush hour traffic. Awful! The party itself was a blast though.
Since I was only gone for a few days, I stocked the cats up with big food and water dispensers and left them at the house. When I came back, it was clear that Betamax had eaten so much cat food that he became rude and raunchy.

That's all I got for now, folks.

On Naming

2008-04-05T15:47:00.001-04:00

Naming things is a sacred process. To name something is to take ownership of it, and in doing so you instill it with some kind of intrinsic value you might not have assumed it had before. Automatically you are humanizing it--even if it's an inanimate object. It becomes an individual, and suddenly it is imbued with a soul. No one ever named something and then cared nothing for it.

You may argue that people name slaughter pigs things like "Breakfast," but no farmer actually calls the pig by that name, even if he jokes about it. If he did call it by a name, any name, he'd end up caring too much about it, and slaughtering it would feel more like murder. That's why, at the end of the day on the farm, every pig is just "pig."

Domino

2008-03-31T01:21:00.003-04:00

I think one of my little rats, Domino, is at death's door. Her sister, Daisy, had to be put down a month or so ago after developing serious pneumonia.

Domino's been acting progressively more sluggish and sneezing a lot. She's not dropping weight, but she certainly doesn't look good. I have been kind of expecting to walk over to the cage one morning and find her dead--which, to be honest, would be much better than finding her dying. Which is what happened with little Daisy. I missed work in the morning to rush her to the vet to get put down.

I am very tired of all my pets dying. After all the rats are in the cold ground (bless their souls), I don't suppose I'll be getting any more. Rats are such nice animals, but they are frail creatures. And the way they all die is dreadful.

Tiamat and Chloe's Eyebrows (the white lab rats I got last winter while I was in college) are both still fine. They are over a year old, yet still alive and not showing signs of disease. They seem to be, if not immune, then resistant to the common mycoplasma pathogen that destroys so many pet rats. The bitter irony is that they are the only two rats I've ever had that have utterly despised me.

Maisy Had a Bad Day

2008-02-20T01:10:00.001-05:00

Don't worry, it's nothing serious. She just has a "hot spot" right under her tail from licking at it too much -- the doctor supposes it was initially an allergy or insect bite that caused her to start at it, and she irritated the area so much it kept getting worse.

So she had to go to the vet today. They don't think it's infected, so she just has to wear the Elizabethan collar and get anti-inflammatory ointment put on her butt for a few days. The other option was a pill, and the struggle to get a pill into this cat every day would have been worse for both of us. So regardless of how angry she looks, it's all for the best!

Maisy's Weight Loss Status

2008-02-03T01:37:00.001-05:00

I have some photos so you can compare. This cat has lost some serious paunch in the last couple months.

Before (sometime in mid-December):

Now:

Still fat, but profoundly improved!

How to Get a Cat to Lose Weight

2008-01-29T01:28:00.001-05:00

You have no idea how many times I googled the title of this post (and similar phrases: "cat weight loss," "cat diet food," "obese cat," and so on).

Basically what I learned from my venture is that dry cat food is packed with a huge amount of calories per unit volume and most of those calories are starch. Cats don't do well with starchy food and tend to overeat it to try to get protein and fat, the nutrition they really need. They don't feel full after eating the appropriate portion to supply them the correct number of calories, so instead they eat too many calories to "fill up" on the food. Sooner or later we end up with a very fat cat.

Maisy was this very fat cat. She's still overweight, but she's definitely lost enough weight over the last month to start feeling better--well enough to play again. I was (foolishly) free-feeding, since I had never had a problem with free-feeding before with other cats. All my other cats before had always been well-fed as kittens, though. Maisy had spent some time as a stray before she ended up at the shelter, and cats who have starved are more piggish than cats who haven't. They gorge themselves. Maisy gained weight VERY rapidly.

So I started feeding twice a day in progressively smaller portions. And it's working: she's losing weight. So is Betamax, who was getting a little chubby before. He's getting very close to his ideal weight, though Maisy still has a while to go.

The problem is that a cat who is hungry early in the morning is a pretty irritating animal. In my e-research on fat cats, I found that a) foods with higher protein content are more satisfying to cats and b) wet food provides a more filling meal for the same amount of calories (due to the moisture). So I am going for a twofold diet change: switching to a premium cat food and changing the evening meal to wet food. Their current food is dry Diamond Maintenance, and they are now switching to Castor and Pollux Natural Ultramix Adult Feline for their dry food. I'm testing a few different canned foods with them--Natural Balance, Castor and Pollux Organix and Avoderm. I gave them each a quarter-can of Avoderm chicken meal tonight and they LOVED it.

Here's hoping that this new diet helps resolve the "cats are hungry at terrible hours" problem. After I finish the gradual switch, I'll probably have to tweak the portions to make sure Maisy keeps slowly losing that fat.

I know what my cats are eating isn't interesting to most people, but it's interesting to me. I'll keep you all posted regardless. :)

Christmas

2007-12-26T01:11:00.001-05:00

So I am spending Christmas in Michigan with my family. My boyfriend Steve got me a new camera (!!!) so I took some photos.

Christmas Family Adventure 2007

Even if you don't care to look at pictures of my family, there are cute dogs present in this album. Viewer discretion is advised (due to the presence of adorable animals).

Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow

2007-12-09T15:26:00.001-05:00

I finally put pictures of my cats on the Internet.

Meet Maisy and Betamax, a ragtag team of misfits joining up to fight crime in the mean streets of Boulder, Colorado. Or they might just be two cats who like sleeping and eating, I don't know.

Adorable Pets

Changes

2007-11-22T01:06:00.001-05:00

I remembered tonight that I have this blog. I've never been really great about keeping journals, nor have I ever been great about keeping blogs. My life just isn't that interesting.

I could mention how I bought a 2008 Toyota Yaris, or that I now live in a kind of crummy "apartment community" with two cats. One is extremely overweight (her name is Maisy) and the other is a hyperactive kitten (I call him Betamax because he is tiny and black like a video cassette). They both have a great capacity for being extremely annoying, but I don't know what I'd do without them. Probably sleep better without tiny claws in my neck, but I digress.

I also got two more rats, Daisy and Domino. I got them from the humane society and those were the names they came with. I don't really have many feelings about them even though they seem amiable enough, and that's somewhat distressing for me. I adored Shiva and Enid.

I had a dog for a while, two dogs, but neither of them worked out. One was unpredictably destructive while I was asleep, and the other had separation anxiety and cried all day while I was at work. I really like dogs better than cats, but having to give up a dog that you love, that loves you, is the most basic kind of unbearable grief.

Captain Fitzgerald McPiddles, Esq., my guinea pig, died last month. I thought the persistently healthy little creature live forever, but I also thought he was a boy until a few weeks before he spontaneously started showing symptoms of illness. I was wrong, he was really a girl, and I'm not sure why I never noticed until so late in his life. One day he had a limp, I took him to the vet for antibiotics, and the next morning he was cold but still alive, whispering out his last breaths as I drove him to the vet.

I know this post makes it seem like all my life is a tragedy, but it really isn't. My life is, at worst, devastatingly mediocre. The sad things are just more interesting to talk about than how I saved $5.00 by using a loyalty card at the Kroger or might have accidentally drunk spoiled milk.

Moving

2007-06-01T13:18:00.001-04:00

I'm sorry I didn't say anything sooner, but earlier this week I moved across the country. That's right, I made a three-day trip across the U.S.A. from Michigan to Colorado with my boyfriend. Wild!

I hired movers to haul the bigger stuff and boxes (they are actually coming a lot sooner than I thought, probably next week), and I drove my pets and smaller items in my creaky old 1993 Chevy Lumina.

The trip was pretty uneventful, all things considered. The car held up remarkably well. We didn't encounter many weirdos or oddballs -- just one drunk guy who was standing in front of a gas station in either Indiana or Illinois. He said we looked like rockers and asked if we "rock and roll." I told him, "Not too hard." He seemed disappointed when he realized we weren't any kind of rockers.

We saw some very scary clouds in Nebraska and I figured I'd see a tornado, but we didn't see anything of the sort. We mostly smelled the reek of feedlots and large-scale hog farms, which are apparently something you can smell even when they're far enough from the road that you can't see them. There was one smaller pig farm that stunk to high heaven, but we couldn't see any of the others. We saw a couple cattle feedlots; they were sad places. Especially when you contrast them to the happy cattle running around out on the range, eating grass.

I arrived in Boulder on Monday evening. I hope to have a job very soon so I can get an apartment and have a space that is my own. I very much miss Ann Arbor and the things there that I loved, places and friends alike. It's hard not to spend a lot of time looking back, but I'm trying to look forward instead.

Something I Hate

2007-04-06T04:26:00.000-04:00

One of the feelings I hate the most is that of not being the best. I don't like coming in second.

Making Garfield Funny, Part 2

2007-03-31T22:27:00.000-04:00

The Garfield Randomizer. It just so happens that removing Garfield's dialogue isn't the only way to make this comic strip funny.

Baby Rats

2007-03-17T14:28:00.000-04:00

Well, Shiva and Enid have both been dead for about a year. I have finally gotten another pair of baby rats.

My mother put me in contact with a man who works as an animal caretaker and sort of ethical/humane conduct supervisor at the labs here at the University of Michigan. When she had sold him a pet rabbit, she found out that he occasionally adopts out lab rats that either don't need to be killed after their experiment is up or are unsuitable for experimentation for any reason. I thought that perhaps this would be a good way to get a pair of rats in need of a home without buying them from a pet store.

What I later found out was that one of the rats he had adopted out had been a pregnant female whose crate had broken during shipping (I guess a transport cart had run over it! She was fine, though). Since she could potentially have been exposed to outside parasites or pathogens, she was unsuitable for the laboratory. She did get a home, but she also had given birth to twelve babies. These babies were in desperate need of new homes.

So, naturally, I agreed to take a pair. Both females, of course. I'm not sure on their names quite yet. I usually pick mythological or historical figures, but it's always a little hard to think of any female characters from mythology or history who don't suffer a completely horrible and tragic demise.

Last night I took some photographs of them in fairly rapid sequence. It will give you a pretty good idea of their personalities (basically one is like HELLO and the other is like STAY AWAY FROM ME).

"That's What Friends Are For"

2007-02-19T00:29:00.000-05:00

When you're lost
In dire need
Who's at your side
At lighning speed
We're friends with every creature comin' down the pike
In fact we've never met an animal we didn't like

The Jungle Book was never my favorite Disney movie, but it had some good songs. My favorite is actually "I Wanna Be Like You," the one sung by King Louie, but no one on YouTube has the English version posted.

Similarly The Aristocats is really unbelievably dated and visually mediocre, but this song is fantastic:

Like that little kitten says, "It isn't Beethoven, Mama, but it sure bounces!"

I think a lot of Disney's features' success depends on these soundtracks. They're always fantastic, even when the movie is kind of lame.

To Be Forgotten

2007-02-16T03:50:00.000-05:00

The Sumerians didn't have a very sunny view of the afterlife, nor did they believe anyone could escape it. Humans could never achieve immortality in the conventional sense of the word. We're all doomed to the decay of the flesh.

However, they believed there was a way to achieve another kind of immortality, one that they supposed was even more important than living and breathing on the earth's surface. Men who achieved great things would live forever in the memories of the living. Only when everyone alive had forgotten him did that person truly die.

My worst fear is being forgotten.

You May Say I'm a Dreamer

2007-02-02T19:12:00.000-05:00

...but I'm not the only one.

"Imagine," John Lennon

A Pirate's Life Is a Wonderful Life

2006-11-15T15:05:00.000-05:00

A pirate's life is a wonderful life
Sailing over the sea
I'll have a career as a buccaneer
It's the life of a pirate for me
Oh, the life of a pirate for me!
-- From Disney's Peter Pan

I'm not sure about you guys, but when I was a little kid, I loved adventure stories. You know, the sort that young boys read in the 1800s: Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, Robinson Crusoe, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I also had a little volume reprinted in cheap paperback from a book published in the late 1800s or early 1900s, full of stories ripped from The Iliad, The Odyssey, Herodotus's Histories, Thucydides, and other Greco-Roman sources. It's true that this wasn't my only reading material--I had modern favorites, certainly, but they never had the same appeal as the old stories.

I just ate this stuff up, ancient heroes and pirates and desert islands and sword battles and all the works. Those kind of stories were (and still are) immersive for me in a way that nothing else can be.

I guess there was always a part of me that wanted to run away and live on a pirate ship or on a desert island and have that swashbuckling kind of life I read about in books. I'm not sure if I really thought it would be better than the lonely life I actually led or whether I just wanted something exciting and dangerous to distract me from my loneliness. So many afternoons were spent imagining that I was something else somewhere else, on the battlefields of Troy or swordfighting with pirates or hiding from dangerous, cannibalistic savages.

I still have this fantasy sometimes of going to a different time, a different world, and mingling with Roman emperors or pirate captains. Or having people from the past come to our world and be amazed by modern marvels like ice cream, records, and computers. There is something very appealing about that fantasy even though I don't understand why.

Powerbook Peril

2006-11-05T17:44:00.000-05:00

Well, I had some serious trouble with my Powerbook G4. I could tell it was a hardware problem of some kind: the thing would start to hang on some pretty average sorts of tasks (like typing or clicking on things), but tilting it or jostling it a little could temporarily bring it out of a hang. Seemed to be associated with disk accesses, judging from the Apple Activity Monitor.

I took it to the University of Michigan computer repair guys, the ones who fix departmental computers within the university. They looked at it and essentially told me that all of my computer's symptoms were coincidental, which I didn't believe for a second. So I got in the car and took the thing to the nearest Apple Store, a 30 minute drive away that turned into two hours with highway construction and rush hour traffic. After a long time waiting and messing around, the dude got my computer to act up by running some diagnostics on it that heated it up to about the operating temperature where it starts freaking out. Decided it seemed like a hard drive problem.

It turned out that he was right. The hard drive was going kaput on me--cost me a whole heck of a lot of money to replace that sucker, plus I bought a big brick of an external drive (a LaCie model, very nice) to use both as a backup volume and storage for the stuff that was rapidly filling the 60GB hard drive on my laptop.

They couldn't salvage all my data--just my home folder with my personal files--so I'm out of luck if I want to use MS Office for now. Most of my apps weren't for-purchase stuff, so I'm not suffering too bad here, but I really need my MS Office CD and my system discs so I can replace Office and the software that came on the system but isn't included on my Tiger DVD.

I Should Update This Blog

2006-10-27T15:04:00.000-04:00

I really ought to update this blog more. I have a voice to the entire Internet here. The Internet is my audience! It is time to be loud about my opinions!

Actually, a lot has gone on since my last update. A series of tragedies, basically, but things are okay now. Both of my rats, my hamster, and my old dog all died. I had a very difficult and unpleasant problem in my relationship with Steve, but that is resolved now and we are still together. I stayed with him over the summer.

I'm in the middle of fall semester now at the University of Michigan. My last year. It feels very strange. It seemed like high school lasted forever, but college went by incredibly fast.

Valentine's Day

2006-02-15T21:37:00.000-05:00

I've never really been a huge fan of Valentine's Day. I'm not one of those people who gets excruciatingly depressed about it or hates other people for their happiness or anything like that--that's beyond even my scope of selfishness--but to me it's always been just another day. Last year was really the only exception to that. My boyfriend sent me a dozen roses last year, and even though he was still far away, that was absolutely fabulous.

This year it was a pretty unexceptional day, though. I talked to my boyfriend on the phone and loved him just as much as I do for the rest of the year. Neither of our cards for each other had arrived yet--I assume they'll be appearing in the next couple of days. That's all right, though. I don't need a special day to think this dude is pretty much the most spectacular in the world.

How did this happen?

2006-02-07T22:29:00.000-05:00

Someone on the Internet managed to make Garfield funny. Impossible, right? Everyone knows that Garfield is just about the least funny thing on the planet. What could anyone do to turn this mass-produced disaster of mediocre cartooning and terrible writing into something humorous or even remotely entertaining?

It turns out, when you remove all of the cat's "sassy" dialogue, suddenly the strip is hilarious.

There are fourteen of these suckers, too. Whoever this guy is, I salute him.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Ну, Погоди!

2006-02-07T00:51:00.000-05:00

Bizarre Soviet cartoons are pretty much the greatest thing ever. My dear Steve put me onto Nu Pogodi! (he was taking Russian and his professor showed it in class), and I daresay it is one of the outright funniest cartoons I have ever seen. Who knew the Ruskies had such a great sense of humor?

Nu Pogodi! is sort of the Russian equivalent of Tom & Jerry or Roadrunner cartoons. Dialogue is minimal and consists mostly of the title phrase (which means either "Just you wait!" or "I'll get you!" depending on who you ask). The story I've heard is that the show was played on TV only once or twice a year, and children would dash inside if they heard the theme song playing. Only eighteen episodes were made from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, so that story makes sense. The last two episodes are a little strange compared to the rest of the series. Capitalism, corporate sponsorship, and product placement made the cartoons a little scary and much less funny.

There's a torrent of the entire series up for you to download if you're curious.

And By the By: Explanation of Absence

2005-08-13T06:35:00.000-04:00

I spent the entire month of July in Boulder, Colorado, with my boyfriend. He lives out there. I guess I didn't really bother writing about it here under the assumption that I don't have an actual audience on Blogger, but you can never be sure.

Because he lives so far away, I don't get to see him much throughout the year--that's part of why I wanted to hang out at his place for a month. I also wondered whether we'd get sick of each other kept in close quarters like that for a month straight. We didn't get tired of each other. We're both pretty good at taking cues from the other or saying, "I need to be alone for a little while," so it worked out (we're both the sort of people who like our private time sometimes). I thoroughly enjoyed living in his little tiny apartment with him, even though there wasn't any air conditioning and it was inhumanly hot for a couple weeks straight.

I got back at the beginning of the month, and I have missed him pretty bad ever since.

Achewood Redux + Web Comic Advice

2005-08-13T06:22:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite Achewood strips of all time.

If you have good taste in web comics, perhaps you would also like to read A Lesson Is Learned (But the Damage Is Irreversible). I mean good taste in web comics. Like you do not read Megatokyo and like it.

Every Living Thing Dies Alone

2005-06-06T07:11:00.000-04:00

I had one of my budgies euthanized the other day. It had gotten to the point where he was unable to perch without falling off, though he was still eating. He was wagging his head around like he had had a stroke or something. The vet said he'd probably had a concussion and suggested possibly an injection that might help it. I declined it--the poor creature had suffered long enough, I thought.

His death was the most violent thing I've ever witnessed. I've watched dog and ferret euthanizations before, but with birds and other small animals it's different. Injection in the heart, nothing to knock him unconscious beforehand. The poor little creature flailed and squawked for some fifteen seconds in the puddle of blood forming around him. It was pouring out of his little chest. Dr. Patterson gently held the bird's wings to keep him from fluttering off the table. He's not a cruel man by any stretch of the imagination, and I could tell that this is the part of the job that he hates most. Angel of Death isn't a job anyone wants.

It had been a long time since I had seen anything die. It was surreal--after the violent squawking, the creature subsided into unconsciousness, his chest rising and falling with rapid, shallow breathing. The doctor lay him on his side and let go of him. In those last few moments, that little body looked so quiet and dignified, a little soldier who had fought bravely in a battle he was sure to lose. He was dead in a few moments, and Dr. Patterson wrapped him very quickly in the paper towel that was to be his funeral shroud. The doctor offered to dispose of the corpse for me--"take care of him" was the euphemism he used--but I politely declined. We have always buried them at home. This little soul would not be an exception.

I didn't cry at the vet's office. I wasn't that attached to the bird himself--he was a nasty little thing that I bought as a breeder, and he tended to bite hard. I didn't start crying until I had gotten into the car with that little bloodied paper towel lying in the bottom of the cage.

He didn't even have a name. The vet's office named him for me--they called him "Bird."

A Walk With a Rat

2005-05-22T05:41:00.000-04:00

I took Enid for a walk today. Since Shiva's been sick and been stuck with poor balance as a result of her unfortunate circumstances, I've been trying to get Enid accustomed to riding about on my shoulder outside. I always wanted to do that with Shiva. It's too late for Shiva to have adventures, so I am making up for it with poor, shy little Enid.

I only took her a little bit down the road. Regardless, she got a little scared as we got further from the house, and she eventually dropped down off my shoulder and into my hands. She climbed back up once we got back into the yard. Hopefully she comes to enjoy adventure the more she goes out--I would kind of like her to be gregarious with strangers and have all kinds of exciting new things happen to her. A part of me quietly hopes that rats have some form of language we can't understand, and she tells Shiva stories about her adventures. Shiva should at least be able to go on imaginary adventures. She deserves that much.

Riding Along in my Automobile

2005-05-20T06:33:00.000-04:00

Man, I really love my car. It's a 1993 Chevrolet Lumina, maroon, the most resilient little car I have ever laid eyes on. The door handle on the driver's side sticks when you pull on it--a person has to push it back in themselves, usually. In back, the trunk is covered with dents, which I affectionately refer to as "fat man damage": the idea is that a very, very obese man made a habit of leaning all his weight on his elbow on the edge of the trunk. My theory about the previous owner's corpulence is corraborated by the broken-down driver's seat. Feels a bit odd if you're not used to it.

It came with a CD player inside already. That was pretty exciting to me. I was a little less excited when someone broke into the car and tore off the front panel in a feeble attempt to steal the CD player. The cops found it a couple of houses down (I guess the kids were on a spree of stealing stuff out of cars). Didn't really expect it to work. I figured I'd have to replace it. But I sort of jammed it back on, and it still works, but the display's glitchy and the plastic holding it in place is really mutilated.

Gives it character, I think.

Nightmares

2005-04-09T23:16:00.000-04:00

I've been having strange nightmares lately. I'm not sure why--maybe I'm just stressed. I think I might be growing accustomed to not getting a full night's sleep, waking up every few hours feeling distinctly unsettled. I haven't read or seen any terribly spooky media lately, and what little I have been exposed to really has not been anything like these nightmares.

In one of them, I discovered that my stepfather was an amputee. Not so scary, maybe, but he had these horrific, crude robotic arms and legs that looked like they came from an automotive assembly line. It shouldn't have been as unsettling as it was, I suppose, but where the flesh met the metal was difficult to look at, and I woke up feeling distinctly ill at ease.

I had another one, last night, about some strange and powerful man trying to murder me at some kind of strange mall. I knew the mall--it's been in my other dreams before. It starts out busy and full of life, but then at some point in the dream it becomes empty and terrifying, with a sense of doom lingering over it. Two men ran down in the direction we were going (in this dream I was babysitting a girl about seven years old, for some reason--she was supposed to be my niece, I think, but she was definitely not any of my real life nieces), as we were headed back to our parking space. It was dark outside. The men were panicked, and they told us to run. I knew something was wrong, but I had to get to my car, I thought. The rest of the details are hazy, but I do remember the man commanding a floating knife in the parking lot as I dodged around my car, barely avoiding injury as I tried to get both the girl and myself inside.

I woke up right after that.

I have no idea what these dreams mean, or if they mean anything. Neither was really exceptionally terrifying, but they were certainly unsettling, making it very difficult to go back to sleep.

Busy Busy and Mad in Love

2005-04-09T21:42:00.000-04:00

Man, I have been all kinds of insane busy lately. I've been working on projects and homework for college classes, and coupled with my work on the Gargoyle, it's really been eating up my time. I can't wait until I'm finally free for four months of summertime. I'm looking forward to hanging out with some of my e-buddies who live very far away.

I'm also looking forward to spending some time with my boyfriend, Steve, who I am pretty much mad in love with. Normally, I'm not a huge fan of long-distance relationships (I always figured that they didn't work), but this guy is seriously the most amazing dude I have ever known. I've never felt this way about anyone before--and believe me, I've had my share of very serious crushes that I had thought were love. Unreciprocated, though, in those cases. This is mutual adoration.

For all of my life since I was a young teenager, I have felt like I was missing something, attuned to some distant frequency that was letting me know that there was a piece of myself that I needed to find. I think I've found it now, in the form of a handsome, skinny guy in glasses with just about the quirkiest sense of humor in the world, who likes math and beer and cute animals, who is comfortable wearing a t-shirt with My Little Pony on it. Likes to eat pie straight out of the tin. Scared to death of Silent Hill games but plays them anyway. Able to see the beauty in mediocre things and the beauty in beautiful things.

He's what was always missing.

There's a beauty in that, you know.

iPod People

2005-02-17T20:47:00.000-05:00

They've carried me away to space and replaced me with a clone who likes Apple products.

But on the bright side, the laser engraving was free.

The Cure

2005-02-16T05:25:00.000-05:00

You should all read Achewood.

Once Philippe Is on the Scene, Everything Is Peachy Keen

2005-02-16T03:48:00.000-05:00

The thing that makes me happiest is knowing that I've taken a weight off someone else's shoulders.

I wish that people felt more comfortable with straightforwardness and honesty in general. Not that I'm any different, mind you--I'm just as awkward and insecure as anyone else, and I'm not good about breaking down my walls, even with my friends. I'm trying to get better about that, though. I think that friends should be able to trust each other, and I find that I like people a lot more when they're willing to reveal their flaws, their worries, their problems: the things that make them human. It adds a whole new dimension to a person. It pulls them forward into reality. Makes them something tangible. I like that.

I guess what I am saying is that if any of my friends out there have any problems they want to talk about or need a hug or something, I am here for that kind of thing. None of you are any kind of burden to me. I wouldn't be working on a humor magazine if I didn't like to make people smile.

Ruminations on the Origin of Things

2005-02-11T01:25:00.000-05:00

I've always been rather intrigued with ancient cultures. When I was about ten years old and first discovered the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and Romans, I was completely fascinated. I mean, I chose to take Latin the very next year (I was homeschooled and had considerable freedom to pick and choose my electives). I fell in love that year--with Achilles, with Xerxes, with Anubis, Isis, and Osiris.

When you're a child, to have distant legendary heroes and dead gods as your closest friends is a rather strange thing. But that's how it worked out for me, and it was all right, since I didn't have many friends outside of books to begin with.

I never really knew what compelled me to be so eerily fascinated with the distant past, but recently I have begun to realize what it is. It is a search for truth. Where did we come from? Where are we going? I guess it's sort of an Atlantis idea, where if we go back far enough we can see what secrets were granted the ancients, who, being closer to the beginning, were closer to God. I'm not sure whether that makes sense or not, to consider God to live not in a specific place but at a specific time, which He can go out of whenever He likes but always comes back to.

Everything always comes back to the beginning. The beginning was all God and nothing else. I need to look at the beginning in order to clearly see God for what He is--His desires, His motivations. Nothing is ever as simple as it looks, and least of all a being Who is quite beyond our comprehension to start with.

I am distrustful of what fallible man has assigned to Him through millennia of biased copying and miscopying, translating and mistranslating sacred texts. However, if we look back far enough, though the pieces are fragmented, we can try to put things together. I don't suppose we'll ever have a full picture, at least not until we die and find out what the end really is, but we can do our best to puzzle things out on the journey.

It's a long road, full of thousands upon thousands of things to wonder and marvel at, and all of them have small secrets hidden in them. Whispers floating on a breeze. Some would ignore them for folly. If you listen, though, you can get a peek at the middle of the universe, the source from which all things come and to which all things return.

Welcome to the Future

2005-02-10T18:47:00.000-05:00

This is a blog about the future. It is also a blog about the past and the present, but we'll ignore those for now. They're not nearly as rad as the future. For one thing, no one lives in space in the past or the present--or if they do, they sure aren't speaking up about it. But a simple matter of fact is that, in the future, everyone lives in space. That's a pretty big advantage over pretty much any other time, there.