Today, due to abysmal air quality, I sprouted the most magnificent of headaches.
It shimmers behind my eyeball, reverberating through my sinuses.
The pain that broke its way out into my hard palette is finally calming down.
I long for a quiet head.
And I know that, after a few hours, I won’t think about it anymore.
But in this moment, I am so grateful for all the other times when my head didn’t hurt.
It was a big week for social media.
Everything I can think of to say sounds histrionic.
They banned Alex Jones.
This is a real fight, and yet “our side” just sits back and takes it – every single time.
How much longer can we go on like this?
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess; but she would have to be a real princess. He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were princesses enough, but it was difficult to find out which ones had autoimmune issues for real and not just for show. There was always something about them that was not as it should be. So he came home again and was sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real princess.
One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents. Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.
It was a princess standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.
“Well, we’ll soon find that out,” thought the old queen. But she said nothing, went into the kitchen and put some soybean oil in the salad dressing; then she took twenty strips of bacon and laid them on top, and then twenty hard-boiled eggs on top of the bacon.
This salad was all the princess had to eat that night. In the morning she was asked how she had digested.
“Oh, very badly!” said she. “I have had a histamine reaction all night. Heaven only knows what was in the salad dressing, but my eyes puffed up, so that I scarcely look like a human being. It’s horrible!”
Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had reacted to the soy right through the twenty strips of bacon and the twenty hard-boiled eggs.
Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.
So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the soy was outlawed from the kingdom forever.
There, that is a true story.
With apologies to Hans Christian Anderson.
Most of my week was and will be spent traveling. Only some of it is contractually obligated by my employer.
This is as good a time as any to remind myself, and you, of where we truly live.
Two images this week.
File the first one under “is this actually real?”
The left’s favorite comeback is consistently ” I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT AM I???” but this one just takes the cake. In what universe did a beta anything triumph?
Looking at it now, there are enough familiar-ish actor faces that it looks like it could be legit, but also looks like a very clever photoshop.
But this is the real clever photoshop:
It’s getting harder to tell legitimate news from fake news. Fortunately for us, memes make it funnier.
There’s a washing machine in the basement of my rental, and like most rentals it’s a little…quirky.
That’s what we would call a “manic pixie dream girl.” The nice, cute way of saying “batshit crazy.”
What’s batshit crazy about a washing machine, you ask?
You select a cycle, and pull out the dial to start filling the machine with water. Then, you add detergent and your clothes, put the lid down and go do something more interesting. When you come back, the dial LOOKS like it went through all the cycles–wash, rinse, spin–but when you open the lid, your clothes are making like soup and swimming in a giant vat of soapy water.
The “brain” of the machine isn’t in step with the “guts” of the machine. Reality is broken.
So you reset the dial to mid-cycle, to catch the rinse and spin cycles again.
Twenty minutes later, the dial says that your clothes are done, but your eyeballs clearly see laundry soup in the machine.
The very dial that supposedly tells the washer what to do is not only not doing its job, but misrepresenting what is actually happening under the lid. Not very sportsmanlike.
But it’s 10:30 pm at night, and you’d like to put your sheets back on your bed eventually so that you can sleep, so you have to get this laundry soup into the dryer somehow (preferably rinsed, so you can sleep without itching yourself to death). To outwit your faulty dial, you set it to spin cycle–at least there’s no more laundry soup–and then go through another rinse.
A relatively short and simple process has now taken 2.5 times longer than it needed to, and you no longer trust the dial–the very piece of machinery that’s instrumental to getting the laundry done.
Friends, it is important to have our mental models match reality as closely as possible. When our dials are off, we are in danger of doing useless things, or we are unable to ascertain whether or not our accomplishments were successful, or–even worse–both at once. Doing something useless and thinking that it was useful.
Human beings are much more complicated that washing machines, as we are capable of so much more than simple agitation, but dealing with my haywire washing machine tonight has reminded me that it is of utmost importance to have a mental model of the universe that is in tune with reality as much as humanly possible.
Maybe I will sleep on clean sheets tonight. Maybe I will roll myself up like a human burrito in my duvet cover, because my sheets are still stuck in spin cycle limbo. I will find out after I post this.
Maybe I can’t fix my washing machine, but I can take a look at my own accomplishments, and my view of myself in the universe, and I can start to align them with observable reality.
I am the type of person who will celebrate Valentine’s day as a single person, but who has no desire to celebrate it in a relationship.
Why?
Valentine’s day is a cheesy fake holiday, so what is better than to cheesily celebrate love than a day like this? I get this honestly, as my mom always used to “celebrate” by putting up random conversation heart-style decorations for us to find and doing something fun like heart-shaped pancakes.
In a relationship, it would be better to celebrate days that actually mean something, like anniversaries and suchlike. Things that are specific to the two of you.
Anyway.
This valentine’s day I wrote you a limerick.
Young Sasquatch was truly besotted
So a verse to true love he allotted
(Ahem) “Roses are blue
and red violets too….”
But alas, our Sasquatch was boycotted
You’re welcome…. thank you…. and goodnight.
I try to be as upfront in online dating situations as possible. Trump and helicopter rides figure prominently in my online dating profiles.
And yet.
Men…no, GUYS/SOY never read the profile, but they’re surprised when I tell them that I voted for Trump. That I’m a Christian. That I’m literally a carnivore no I don’t eat any vegetables, thanks.
I went on a date tonight. File this one under “should have known better.”
He would text me to ask how I was doing. I would answer, and return the question. He would answer, and ask me right back how I was doing. It felt like spiralling down a rabbit hole of recursion.
I still went out to dinner with him. File that under “should have known better” and being new in a small town. I honestly don’t think that I’ve been on a date with someone more opposite from me in my entire life.
Honestly, he’s probably on twitter right now complaining about how he went on this date with a brainwashed Christian anti-vaxxer.
I’m trying not to be too picky. I realize it will be a statistical anomaly if I get married at my age, especially with my views on the world. But good gracious I would rather be single forever than chain myself to a soyboy like that.
I’m filing this under “this might be funny,” because it might. If you look at it in a blacklight with a mirror.
Happy Memo Day, everybody. Maybe it wasn’t mind-blowing for those of us who are intently following Trump v. The Swamp. But it is absolutely gratifying to see the dots connected officially.
So let’s bask a little. Besides, it’s Friday.
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Okay, time’s up. Back to work.
Time to burn this mother to the ground.
At this point, I’m pretty sure everyone younger than Gen X who is on the internet knows Dragon Ball Z.
Even if you don’t know anything about Dragon Ball Z, trust me, you know about Dragon Ball Z.
Just try to look at this picture and not think “SUPER SAIYAN TRUMP.”
I mean, the photoshop helps a lot. But you know what I mean.
Trump Derangement Syndrome means never having to look too hard for a meme.
Do they really not realize that this type of thing just gives him more power? The more that the hair is exalted, the more power he gets.
Maybe not physical power, but memetic power.
I really need to write that post on Donald Trump’s hair.
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