|
|
||
|
the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
|
Someone on the other side of my office has decorated her cubicle with the freakiest Valentine's Day decorations, they are freaking me the freak out and I want you to come over here, hold my hand, and feed me Valium until I feel normal again. This woman's entire cube is covered with these big-headed children, "I Wuv You This Much," Precious Moments style, and I guess these hydrocephalic monsters are supposed to be in love? Or something. There is one in particular that I cannot deal with, it features the hydrocephalic boy and the hydrocephalic girl facing each other, with a lot of bubbly cartoon hearts around them, and they are holding a kitten between them. To me it looks like these children are moments away from tearing the kitten apart and stuffing its kitten flesh into their creepily similar pink rosebud mouths. Like they are just about to smear their extraordinarily creepy child-sized wedding clothes with kitten blood. I don't know about you, but hydrocephalic Precious Moments children with moist blank eyes dismembering and eating kittens does not exactly scream HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY to me, and on my way to the fax machine I have to run by this woman's cube with my eyes closed, and let us just hope she takes it down promptly on Monday because I do not think I can take it much longer. It is all fashionable to hate Valentine's Day, and indeed it is, in my opinion, culturally damaging to fetishize romantic love in such an outrageous manner, but maybe this factoid will perk you up and induce you to celebrate it: All that Christian propaganda to the contrary, Valentine's Day was originally a sexy Roman fuckfest, the original Ice-Storm-esque key party, and thus the entire holiday is about pleasure and should be celebrated as such. You do not need to be partnered to indulge either. Throw some conversation hearts into a bottle of vodka (thus forming CONVERSATION VODKA) and load up your favorite porn. Save the feeling alienated for Saturday---this is your time. Other suggestions from me to you include eating a bunch of Indian food, building a shrine to the person you are currently stalking out of common household objects, or dressing up in pastel wedding clothes and eating a kitten, no, I am just kidding about that last part, please don't eat any kittens. Ahhhh! Perhaps I really was meant to pluck out my own eyes and drop them in someone's martini like grotesque olives because first the horrifying Valentine's Day decorations and now this. And the rest of the thrift store art too, although that first one bothers me the very most. Timeline of Hypertext History. I love this. I don't know, Drew (#2) is kind of cute, in a sysadmin sort of way. Woo hoo! I am such a nerd. Also, can anyone tell me why it took me so long to "discover" Jonathan Lethem? I have been on a binge ever since I found As She Crawled Across The Table. Speaking of books, I had excellent luck at the library yesterday, scoring Assorted Fire Events, which is a bunch of rather chilly and pointy New Yorker-style stories, and some cultural-criticism type stuff that is probably just going to send me off on a bunch of mental tangents, further hampering my ability to attend to my everyday tasks. Wilder Penfield (what a incredibly Romantic name!) was the first guy to map the brain, and one of the first to do epilepsy surgery. His technique was often successful, but his experimental surgery led him to an even more dramatic discovery. Stimulation anywhere on the cerebral cortex could bring responses of one kind or another, but he found that only by stimulating the temporal lobes (the lower parts of the brain on each side) could he elicit meaningful, integrated responses such as memory, including sound, movement, and color. These memories were much more distinct than usual memory, and were often about things unremembered under ordinary circumstances. Yet if Penfield stimulated the same area again, the exact same memory popped up -- a certain song, the view from a childhood window -- each time. It seemed he had found a physical basis for memory, an "engram." If you could stimulate bits of the brain at will, out of the surgical context, say with an implant or something, that would put video games to bed forever. There must be areas of the brain that relate not just to memory, but to imagination and fantasy, so just think if you could turn on a certain brain-piece and get "meaningful integrated responses" with "sound, movement, and color." Implant me! At the library I was waiting in line at Circulation with my bag of textual bounty. There was an older bearded guy over by the newspapers wearing complicated layers of tattered clothing, and it is fucking cold outside so I am glad that the public library does not make a fuss about the homeless hanging out in the building, at least, as my library buddy Sarah* puts it, "as long as they are doing library stuff." (In other words, reading or using the Internet = fine, sleeping or exposing themselves to patrons = out on the street.) This guy was kind of stretching the definition of "library stuff"----he was sitting at a table strewn with newspapers and had a huge notebook, as if he was busy transcribing all the news of the day, but at that particular moment he was rhythmically and loudly chanting the following: Hey mister you are a DOCTOR. By the time I left a security guard was on his way over to this guy. Maybe some doctor complained. *LT makes fun of me for going to the library so often that I am recognized there, and sometimes chat with hot waifly library-working babes like Sarah about what books are coming out soon, and the Circulation security guard recognizes me too and says "More books!" and I say "Yes." BAKING POTATOES! BAKING IN THE Call your homies and get ready to PARTY, because today is a holiday on two fronts: First, it is the anniversary of Sylvia Plath's famous life-ending bake-off in 1963, which is not exactly something to "celebrate," but I think it merits going out for a drink or two. Better to commemorate it that way than, for instance, to feel all trapped by domesticity and frustrated in your life's work and have big-time daddy issues. Bottoms up! Also! The heaviest known crustacean, a lobster weighing a whopping 20.2 kilograms, was caught off Nova Scotia today in 1977.
Happy Lobsterplath Day! ---mimi smartypants speaks double Dutch to a real double duchess. back/forward |
