It always seems like the worst part of being sick is not being able to sing. It’s been days since I could carry a tune…it’s like whatever was making me sick is all, “Well, maybe you can take me down, but first I’ll hit you where it hurts!”

Anyway I am working on a song (wish I had a piano! I wonder whether the community college across the street has practice rooms, and whether I could sneak in and use them?), and there was one line that really sounded awkward, so I sat there stewing and stewing over it (unable to sing it out loud, just going over it in my head)…and then a word came to me as the solution. “Aha! ‘Cumulonimbus!’”

…It never would have crossed my mind that “cumulonimbus” could smooth a line. I mean, come on! I guess there is a place for every word…

So…I woke up this morning from a really good set of dreams (lots of sensory input, like balancing on stones as I crossed a creek and then getting my feet wet, and feeling sunlight on my head and shoulders, and picking up a towel that turned out to be wet…the mind is amazing [before it's destroyed], I mean, I woke up and my feet were still toasty in their socks and the room was dark, etc….also in the dreams I got to see some people I hadn’t seen in a while [Jessie, Tina C., + Ian, all of whom I did have conversations about yesterday so not so surprising]). So good mood. And then, joy of joys, I go out to my mailbox and find mail! Yay! A book I ordered, some bank stuff, and oooh, what’s this with a pretty picture of a beautiful buck on the front…

Wait, that looks like a subscription magazine. Er…“Field and Stream” is a nice title, but what is this “Fall Hunting Special” stuff? They probably wouldn’t be sending me a copy trying to get me to subscribe or whatever if they knew I was so very vegetarian. Ah well, might as well flip through it, that is quite a nice picture…hmm, first page, first text I encounter*:

One of the obvious–and most enjoyable–fringe benefits of QDMA management is the opportunity to view and hunt adult bucks. Watching a buck that you passed up a shot on as a 1-1/2 year old grow into something special is a common experience for QDMA practitioners. Whether you harvest the buck or not is rarely as important as just knowing he’s living on your property!

AUGH!

“HARVEST“?

…It’s rare that I come up against such a different frame of mind in my reading that I find myself so completely horrified while realizing that someone else (some typical person, not a serial killer reading a thriller or something) might be reading along nodding with a smile on his/her face. (Is it bad that I really wanted to leave it at “his” to keep some distance?)

Okay, let’s take this sentence by sentence:

1. Starts sane, then suddenly we’re at “view and hunt adult bucks” and you realize that the “obvious fringe benefit” that the person was including you in (as though you were think-alike buddies) is KILLING THINGS. What? And then there’s the double take of “Holy shit, they said ‘adult bucks’ as though the usual was to kill ‘em as calves or adolescents!” They made it sound like killing them before they’re adults is business as usual, not the special treat of killing the adults! And of course that is because they rarely get the chance to grow into adults, as hunters slaughter them before then!
2. Honestly, I am having trouble putting the deep disturbance that this second sentence stirred in me into words. I mean, a) they are holding up the experience of “Gee, that buck grew into something special! I’m glad I didn’t murder it years ago!” as a really cool thing…like way out of the ordinary that you’d be glad you hadn’t killed something…b) I have this sense that the cool experience they’re alluding to is not “Gee, I’m glad I didn’t kill it!” but instead, “Gee, I’m glad I didn’t kill it YET! Take aim!” c) Watching something “grow into something special” to me has a VERY STRONG CONNOTATION of watching a CHILD grow into a SPECIAL PERSON. To use those words to describe watching a living creature mature into something you can harvest–AUGH, I have no words!
3. HARVEST THE BUCK!?!?!?!?!?!?

I am having trouble getting past “harvest” as applied to a creature that will struggle and bleed all over you. But if I did get over it enough (HARVEST THE BUCK!!!!?????!??????!?!!!!????) to analyze the sentiments in that sentence, I might (HARVEST! HARVEST! THE BUCK! HARVEST!) be completely staggered by the disgusting arrogance of the apparent feeling that “he’s living on your property” (as though human property divisions were at all applicable to other creatures!)…well, it sounds like “having” the buck living on “your” property and being happy about it (a feeling I can relate to, minus the appropriatory** tone… “Cool, there’s a gorgeous animal living nearby!”) is supposed to be *almost* as good as having a HARVESTED BUCK ON YOUR WALL.

I am so completely horrified by contact with this totally alien (not the friendly aliens that kids in an adventure novel might meet and get help from–I am talking horror movie aliens) mindset! There went my good mood! And my hunting-virgin mind! AUGH!

…I seem to remember saying something when describing my stance as a vegetarian, something like, “It’s one thing to hunt food you need for survival, and another to lock generations of sentient creatures in horror-movie factory farms.”

I think I will have to be VERY careful to EXCLUDE exoneration of THIS kind of “I own the world” mentality hunting from any such comments I make in the future!

AUGH!

*Yes, it’s an ad.

**Yes, I made that up.

_______________________

3 minutes later:

I just scanned 2 more pages and OH MY SPATULA WHY DID I DO THAT. AH! EEEK! The really really scary part is the TONE! And the attitude of “Woohoo, I drew a tag for a rare oryx depredation hunt in the San Andreas Wildlife Refuge, now I get to kill something exotic, look how long these horns are!” The, “Look what I killed!” I mean, I have seen cultures this scary invented in fantasy books and if I saw this in a novel, I’d be like “Oh my god, they thought of everything, some people in this culture scorn hunting on public land, they argue about the amount of meat vs. the ‘cool antler’ trophies, this seems so real!” Only, it’s real! It’s a real live horror that I know have to live with the knowledge of! AUGH!

_______________________

1 more minute later:

OH MY GOD THEY DID NOT! OH MY GOD THEY DID NOT!

Take a film canister, glue a clothespin to the outside, and stuff a cotton ball inside. Pour in your doe urine, and let the cotton absorb the urine. Then, simply clip the canister to a tree limb near your treestand. After the hunt, simply snap the cap back on and hit the trail. This has worked for me more times than I can count. It’s small enough to keep in your pocket, and it won’t spill.

They use DOE PEE to give the deer families the sense of security that comes from feeling like mom or wife was relaxed here! And then they wrote it out in the style of directions for craft projects that you’d design for 10-year-olds!

AUGH!

An example:

1. Notice annoying music.
2. Decide to use noise-canceling headphones.
3. Search all over for headphones. After multiple trips to car, searching under bed, fearing I left them at work on Thursday, etc., find them in first place I looked (desk). Eyes must have skipped them, thinking, “Gee, those noise-canceling headphones are irrelevant to my search for noise-canceling headphones.”
4. Put on headphones.
5. Discover that headphones cut out white noise really well, helping me to perceive the music louder and clearer.
6. Take off headphones and put them back in desk.

The free bedframe I got matches the dresser so precisely that there is no other explanation.

::Sigh::…yesterday I had all this energy for moving, but today…there is none. By the way, I am moving. Not very far (about a 5 minute drive). So far, I am happy. Except now I am too lazy and energyless. Also: why does no one carry drawer liners? What is with that? The closest I’ve found has been contact paper. No, I don’t want to ruin by drawers by gluing paper to them, thanks. I simply want to line them with scented paper, purchased for that purpose. Is that so strange? Is that not something people do? I ended up buying wrapping paper and using that. Er…meaning, I bought the wrapping paper yesterday when I had the energy, and everything was moving. And, um. Now it’s sitting with all my clothes, asking me why I didn’t do it last night when I couldn’t sleep anyway and had the energy, but I couldn’t find a pair of scissors…

If Snow White’s mother lived in the eighties, she might have wished for a child with lips as red lip candy, eyebrows as bushy as, er, bushes, shoulders so strong no shoulder pads were necessary…and (now we come to the point) hair as poufy as a dandelion tuft.

This last part is applicable. Anyone remember that moment in Firefly when River is freaked out by the shepherd’s hair? (Zoe: “River, honey, he’s putting the hair away now.”) Well…unless my hair is wet when I brush it, that is exactly what happens. It’s like I was born in the eighties, and my mom asked a fairy to my christening, and the fairy “blessed” me with The Hair That Never Needs To Be Teased.

Wait a second. Mom, you didn’t…?

The food has an aroma, and the aroma tells me: “I am delicious. If you put me in your mouth, you will be very happy.” And when I put it in my mouth, I find the aroma has told me true, and I am very happy.

That is why I bring food to work. The food is a note of honesty amidst the project costs that always exceed what was promised, the “No, I don’t have any POs to request,” the “next month will be better” kind of statements.

…with zero (or so thin as to be completely insignificant) atmosphere: What would the sky look like, in the daytime?

Just…black, with a bright sun? What effect would the sun have on the stars around it (i.e. would they be more difficult to see because of its light, or would it be just one’s eyes/attention that made it hard)? Would the surface of the planet be, well, kinda dark? Or would it look as light anyway (because there is the same amount of light, just not refracted)? Would shadows be darker, because the main source of light would really only be coming from one direction–no ambient sky-light?

Questions, questions…

1. Your hair gets shorter.
2. Um. Excuse me. You didn’t spend enough time looking at item one. You just read right on. You don’t just blow past something like that! You’ve got to muse on it, you know? Now think about what you did. And when you’re done, go back to number one.
3. When the haircut is over, your hair isn’t as long as it was when the cutting began.

I think my work here is done: with that kind of reasoning, you all understand perfectly well why a haircut is a Bad Idea.

What was I thinking? AUGH! I was a couple of inches away from sitting on my hair, and now it falls a couple of inches below my shoulders! I am very traumatized. Look me up next year, when my hair has comforting, ratty ends again, all the way down my back.

P.S. Mom, I blame you, and your bad, bad advice. I mean, 8-10 inches of split-endish hair isn’t so bad as shorter hair, is it?*

*Don’t be cute and try to answer this. The answer is clearly NO.

The Paul Park zone has been active here all weekend. I forgot how much humor and awesome it contains…clearly a defense mechanism to protect oneself from unfairly bright memories once you are no longer in the Paul Park zone.

Unfortunately, the Paul Park zone is not effective on the weather. It was eighty on Saturday–most dismaying, let me tell you. A few more days like that and I’ll be trying to bring the siesta into style up here.

In other news, the short story I was writing has bloomed into a full-fledged…er…I am not going to call it a novel yet. It is at least a novella (already broke the novlette boundary), and it clearly has aspirations toward YA novelship, but my inclination (seeing as I already have a novel-in-(now-suspended)-progress) is to fight every expansion that wants to creep in.

(Oh my. Has it been nearly two months? How time flies when you’re stressed tired deadlined working hard.)

Stupid yoghurt brands that are pretending to be like the brand I like but taste HORRIBLE. But no more! I have vanquished the last of the yucky yoghurts.