Time travel

I think I’ve been managing it after all: every night, I try to imagine myself waking up in the future, in September, but instead of time traveling to September, I time travel straight to time-to-wake-up.

Why me?

…

My eyelashes have split ends.

…

Does this crap happen to anyone else? Am I missing vital nutrients? Do normal people trim their eyelashes to prevent that sort of thing?* Have I been remiss in applying eyelash-moisturizer? Or is this my X-man mutation?

*Don’t answer that.

Distractions

True: I don’t like to make fun of people. I don’t like the thought that anyone might feel bad because of things I say.

How, then, do I rationalize my hilarity at John Scalzi’s snarkety tour of the Creation Museum? $27 million went into the thing. That’s a lot of donators and laborers and people who see things visionaries…and while I was practically in tears laughing at his photo tour, I was completely aware that (hundreds? thousands?) a lot of people would feel insulted/hurt/etc. if they could see/hear me. My usual criterion for my own behavior: if it would make someone feel bad, I shouldn’t do it.

But…

Maybe I just can’t get my mind around the concept that people–human beings, ones with brains arranged similarly to mine–believe this stuff. These “people that might be hurt” by Scalzi’s comments and my complicity in linking to his entry…I disbelieve their existence only a little less strongly than I disbelieve the contents of the creationist museum.*

The first picture that had me in truly hysterical laughter? Descartes’ being offered as the opposing viewpoint…Don’t they keep track of their biggest supporters? Or maybe they don’t want to accept support from someone who proceeds from logic. It seems like the overwhelming message (I’m not paraphrasing, even, this is giving them their full due) is “Different Starting Points”, so maybe because they start from a set of assertions and force the facts to fit**, but Descartes started from fact and moved from there to faith in God, they consider him to represent an (offensively?) different “scientific” viewpoint. Other highlights: the likening of the Apostle Paul to Ian McKellan (I don’t know why I found it so funny, it was just one of those things that hit me right), “Apparently there were several sources of water,”“*** vegetarian dinosaurs, Creation Cappucchino, and the sign that said, oh-so-reasonably, “Dinosaur fossils, like all fossils, don’t come with tags or photographs telling us how dinosaurs lived or when they died.” To me, the implied next thought is: so we ought to use other clues, like the context, measured decay of elements, etc., to establish a timeline. Apparently what they meant to imply was this: so the fossils are really just a blank slate on which to write our agenda theory, which is a different point of view born of a different starting point.

*This is about fundamentalists, not Christians. I do believe in Christians. I cannot, however, let their incredible creative works^ in marble, architecture, paint, orchestra, boys’ choir (omg, Angel Voices, you have to listen to it), etc., etc., etc., tear me away from the Spatula God.

^Note: I refuse to lump in the Creationist Museum with the other incredible creative works produced by Christianity.

**They’re not hiding it!!!!!

***Refers to the flood. Whoops, forgot to capitalize: The Flood.

…

I wasn’t going to write anything else or think anything else about Chalice but OMG SOMEONE HAS THE GALLEYS AND HAS ALREADY WRITTEN A REVIEW AND WHY DOES SHE GET THEM AND I DON’T AND AAAAHHHH! If I believed in souls I’d sell mine to get my hands on that book! ::cries:: Now this is a reason to invent time travel. Recently read Time and Again by Jack Finney, and am tempted to use his (very plausible and conveniently low-budget) methods to make an attempt. If I go missing for several months it’s only because I’ve traveled to September and was too lazy to come back.

Karaoke, again

Yay for dragging co-workers out! Notably, I put in for the only version of “Bye Bye Blackbird” they had, expecting a slowish, sad song, only to get hyper upbeat shooby-shooby-do-wop version. Unexpected. I took it in stride…sounded terrible!

Songs they didn’t have that I wanted to sing: oh, I can’t even begin the list, it’s much too long. I have to buy some karaoke CDs. “Not About Love” by Fiona Apple tops my current list (because Regina Spektor seems not to be available, beyond “Fidelity”, which they have already, and I sing almost every time).

Chalice. Chalice Chalice. No. I have to think of anything else. I had better live until September. (How will I survive?) I will now divert myself with chocolate.

Running through my head

Is a song (well, poem) fragment from Fallowblade, by Cecilia Dart-Thornton, whose prose I dearly love, but whose unequivocally happy endings I wouldn’t mind seeing dimmed on occasion:

“If it’s going to rain, it’ll rain,
And if it’s going to shine, it’s going to shine,
And if you’re going insane, you’ll go insane.
Now you’ve lost your mind.”

Last night I went to sleep listening to the rain.* As for losing my mind, it seems that I’m always losing it but it’s never completely lost. I think that’s actually a typical state for a human…? Currently I’m drinking equinoctal tea. Not much of a celebration, but I may follow it up shortly with some key lime pie. I wonder whether fireworks are available around here at this season?

Good books that I picked up recently, thinking they looked like my sort of trashy, but turned out to be in fact excellent:

• Shadowbridge by Gregory Frost
• Thunderer by Felix Gilman

While I’m talking about books: I cannot cannot cannot wait for Chalice. Whyyy can’t it come out before September? Chalice! Chalice Chalice!I’m not even going to mention The Hidden World**, which I’ve been waiting for so long that I can’t even think about the fact that it will come out next month without exploding from impatience.

*Well, the “wintry mix”–euphemism for sleety snowish rain that could be any of the three at any given moment. When you’re skiing, the term is “needles in your face.”^

^Term by Maura.

**Oops.

You know you aren’t functioning correctly when…

…you prepare some ramen noodles, sit down at the table, lift a steaming bite to your lips (with a fork, tragically, and not chopsticks–an already trying circumstance), and catch yourself thinking, “Hmm, this could use a little salt…”

Spring forward…into can’t-fall-asleep-at-night-can’t-wake-in-the-morning hell.

On spring forward day, I drank my first coffee drink. (A cold-brewed marble mocha, with extra chocolate. SBC cold brew tastes very tolerable, not at all like hot coffee or espresso.) It was that bad: I work at 8 am on Sundays.

On another note, I’ve just finally noticed a cultural difference between here and Florida. People use first names here. I mean, from people I know, I almost never get, “Hi!” It’s always, “Hi, Meghan!” I only noticed this when I got Hey-Meghan’d six times in under a minute the other day. I didn’t used to get Hey-Meghan’d. It was usually just, “Hey!” And that’s how I usually greet people. If I use their names, it’s because I’m reminding myself of their names, because I can’t remember that well. If I know them well enough I never use their first names. I think that’s how it mostly was in Florida…? In fact, when people would greet me by name, I used to get the feeling that they were challenging me to remember their names. (“Hey, Meghan. You remember my name, too…riiiiight?”) So I am left perpetually feeling like people I know well think I don’t remember their names up here.

On a defensive note, someone at work challenged my use of the word “wont” (as in, “I am wont to have a bigger vocabulary than most people trying to put me in my place”) the other day. Granted, it’s a bit archaic, but it’s a real, English word, dammit, and it even shows up in lousy Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionaries, as I showed her.  So, ha.

On a dangerous-for-my-figure note, three really really really incredibly yummy new deserts have been rolled out where I work. Spatularific, even. Mmmmmmmm. Except, uh-oh.

On another, very sad note, I’ve been asked to stop leaving “messages from god” (spatular) in the logbook at work–apparently it’s “distracting.” Even though everyone else coming into work always is asking (looking forward to) more messages from the Book of Flippance.  Ridiculous!