We Spent Our Childhoods Being Told

We spent our childhoods being told by books and by movies and by cartoons that if we were just good enough, true of heart enough, curious and eager enough, bright-eyed enough – everything that children in storybooks are and everything that’s overlooked in real children – we would stumble across lands populated entirely by talking animals, discover underground caves full of treasure, have our cuts and bruises healed by magicians, fly through the air on the back of softly scaled dragons, and maybe, just maybe, become the ruler or leader of a land full of tiny thankful creatures; elves, maybe, or gnomes.

We tried to be true of heart, and curious, and eager, and all those things; we looked in the unlikeliest of places, hoping for magic. Mysterious doors set in the sides of buildings without porches – only invisible flying people must use these! Rabbit-sized holes in the sand at the city beach – must be sandcrabs who’ve eaten growth powder! Dog-shaped clouds – some very tall giant must be up there shaping them!

And as for the good enough part, and the true of heart part – we even did these, though more grudgingly, and certainly in private. No kid wants another kid to see him being a goody-goody, so I don’t know what anyone else did, but I would go outside after rainstorms and move the worms from the sidewalk so they wouldn’t dry out in the sun. It must have been years before the inkling slipped from my head that someday, while I was sleeping, the Worm King (complete with crown) would appear on my bed, awaken me, and proclaim me savior of WormLand. I would travel down into the dirt with the Worm King and pass vast chambers of bowing worms on my way to the throne they’d been saving just for me.

Then I would be shown a feast of feasts – a sumptuous, mind-boggling feast of foods never before seen by man (but somehow suitable for his digestive system) and let alone to sleep the rest of the night on a mattress made from layers and layers of the finest silkworm’s silk.

What did I get, though? What did we all get? Silk mattresses from the worm king? Dragon rides over the South Pacific? A gift of our very own invisible wings? Sumptuous feasts and cross-species storytelling?

No. We got adulthood. We got our parents telling us there was no Santa Claus once we were deemed too old for him. We got our stuffed animals being stuffed into plastic bags and given to the Salvation Army. And being true of heart, being eager, being curious, suddenly became being idle, being lazy, wasting time. Digging holes in the sand to find sandcrabs just wasn’t cute anymore, and it wasn’t tolerated until we had finished our math homework.

What kind of child-rearing philosophy is this, anyway? Whose idea was it to use magical creatures and stories as bait to create good, giving, open-hearted children, and then whisk them away and hope that the goodness would remain on its own? Did no one think bitterness and disillusionment would go along with the whisking away? That they would blame the world for misrepresenting itself? Did no one wonder how the children would feel as thirty-year-olds when they went to a beach and realized there was no reason to dig down into the sand? These thirty-year-olds will drink instead; down their piña coladas and doze and try to tan and think about swimming but only that, think, because there’s so many reasons not to, you know? Wet hair, wet clothes, sand sticking wetly to skin, and then sandy clothes. You’d have to take a shower or something. Too much trouble.

No, I get the original idea. I understand the motivation and I can understand how whoever thought it up thought it would go. As our minds matured, we were supposed to transfer our imaginations into something more honed and practical. We were supposed to appreciate the value of ordinary things without sticking long, trailing tale tails on them. They expected us to think: ‘I wonder what made that burrow under the roots of that tree. Hey! I should become a naturalist!’ Or, ‘That door that’s half-underground sure is bizarre… hey, I should become an architect and find out why anyone would build such a thing!’ Our thoughts were supposed to start gravitating towards what we will spend our practical adult life doing. They were not supposed to continue in the ‘perhaps that large burrow leads to an underground kingdom or a parallel universe’ vein.

The jump, though, seemed jarring to us. There’s nowhere that feels right for the sudden jump to straight logic and no lingering doubts. When I was fourteen I still winced at handling my stuffed animals in such a way that, were they alive, would kill them. I didn’t drop them on their heads, I didn’t throw them, I didn’t stuff them into suitcases, and I didn’t roll over on them in my sleep. I didn’t launder them or allow anyone else to launder them. Sometimes I would try, because my adult’s mind was butting in, telling me that I should be able to do these things without cringing, but my hands, my body, wouldn’t obey. There was still an off chance in my heart that they were alive and they were begging me mutely, like a pet, to take care of them and not to hurt them.

Even when we were children, eight or nine, we would have to psych ourselves up with a healthy dose of group insanity to be able to play the game where we toss our dolls into a moving ceiling fan to see where they’d be flung. And afterwards, we would all be depressed, preoccupied. I don’t know what anyone else was thinking, but I was waiting for them to leave so I could apologize to my dolls.

I miss having that now, that intense unconditional respect for helpless creatures or invisible kings. I miss it being revered as a quality and I think it still should. We’re not really supposed to have respect for anything intangible, with the notable exception of God. It’s not frowned upon, exactly, but it’s seen as kooky and a little bit stupid to be superstitious or to expect to find unknown magic everywhere we look.

To have respect for people and things, not in spite of, but because of the fact that we have absolute power over them – this fades in adulthood, and must be engineered to fade in adulthood. If it didn’t, where would we find our slaughterhouse workers? How would we make our engineers designing oil lines to slash through old-growth forests?

We wouldn’t. The slaughterhouse workers would secretly pardon animals whenever they could; pigs and cows would constantly be found running free in nearby forests. They might only do it because they thought the pigs and cows might come back with their friends and provide them with lifelong meat and milk, but they would still do it, because that’s what happens in fairy tales: save someone’s life and they’ll reward you handsomely. Whether that someone is an animal or a human or even an inanimate object, you will be rewarded.

The engineers assigned to the pipeline task would see agonized faces on all the trees, all the animals fleeing their habitat, and they would up and quit, only to be scarcely seen from then on. Well, of course! They’d have a cozy mansion sky-high in the highest branches of the redwoods and millions of sparrow and squirrel friends to cater to their every need.

And, tell me, what good would that do society?

Boulder's Boulders

During this last impromptu Weekend ‘o’ Fitness (Flagstaff Mountain and a 23 mile bike ride in the same weekend! Sorry, feet! Sorry, legs! I hope you regain feeling soon) Dan and I came upon a strange phenomenon: tourists. We had just started our descent down Flagstaff Mountain, and had come to the first portion where the trail intersects with the road. A car with Colorado plates pulled up to us, and inside were two people, a man and a woman, that looked almost precisely like the stereotype of Boulderites: the man was all slender muscle and khakis, and the woman was casually dressed with messed-up hair, but with perfectly plucked eyebrows and expensive sunglasses. So we were not expecting what came out when they opened their mouths.

“Hi! We were wondering how to get to some good boulders.”

Now, the Front Range of the Rockies is hardly anything BUT boulders. We were, at that moment, standing in front of a bunch of boulders; down the canyon, clearly visible from the car, was the back of the first Flatiron, Saddle Rock, and, maybe two minutes by car away, Crown Rock, a major bouldering destination. Boulders were literally everywhere.

Confused, I asked, “So you want to go bouldering?”

Their faces turned to the edges of panic. “No! No! Not… go…bouldering… what’s bouldering?”

Dan had to explain to them what bouldering was, only he inadvertently made it sound easy. Something like, “well, it’s like climbing, but you don’t need any rope or anything and the rocks are only about ten feet high.”

“Oh, wow, that sounds fun!” exclaimed the man. “Wouldn’t you like to go bouldering, honey?”

At which the woman exclaimed, “No!”

Now everybody was confused; if they didn’t want to go bouldering or even know what it was, then what kind of boulders were they looking for and why were they not seeing the boulders surrounding them at every turn?

I directed them down the road about a mile to Crown Rock, but as we came down the trail, I saw their car shoot right by it, as if Crown Rock weren’t a GIANT, OBVIOUS OUTCROPPING OF ROCKS WITH BOULDERING CHALK ALL OVER THEM, FLANKED BY A PARKING LOT THAT SAYS ‘CROWN ROCK’ ON IT. At the bottom of the road I wouldn’t be surprised if they also flew past Gregory Canyon (walls made of beautiful striated rock) or the Flatirons (huge park with jillions of hiking trails flanked by rocks leading to the most famous giant rocks in town) or, if they turned north, Red Rocks (tall spires of red boulders randomly shooting out of the top of a hill) and the Hogback Ridge (boulders that form spines on a mountain ridge like the hair-raising of threatened pigs).

Perhaps tourists are told that the boulders in Boulder are made from gold, or that they emit a soothing glow, or that they are bluish green in color, or that in some other way they look like no other boulders on earth.

There's really no correct answer to the question, "What do you want to do with your life?" but an especially super-un-correct answer is "I don't know." Actually, there are a lot of questions that I think up on walks, and in the shower, and as I'm falling asleep, were I to take the time to answer them, for which my answer would probably be wrong.

Why do I choose to take buses instead of walking or biking when experience clearly shows that I am exhilarated by exercise? Why do I have this perverse need to get to where I am going faster, only to have that perverse need clash with my perverse fear of too much free time? What is this rushing around only to languish at home wishing I was still outside? What makes me spend my days inside surfing the internet for useless information when experience clearly shows that this gives me a headache and makes me depressed? It's not like heroin; it isn't even that fun while I'm doing it. I'm not euphoric, high-energy and babbling to anyone about how excited I am, and I'm not slumped in a narcotic daze of perfection; what I am is hunched, tense, and slightly spellbound, but only slightly, at things that will not matter in the next second. Yet I will submit myself to this every day at the cost of the headache, and the depression, and, long-term, the complete waste of life it will make up, viewed as a whole. This is a question I would almost like to go into neurology just to be able to answer. Why we would evolve to have our base instincts be so dead, dead wrong.

Our instinct is to eat fatty, empty-calorie food, and it eventually kills us. Why? Well, I know the answer to that one. We haven't evolved past the human - nay, animal - drive to gorge, to stockpile, to be prepared for famine. I guess the question we don't know the answer to is, is is even possible to evolve past that.

Historically, the reason we have evolved to avoid certain things, or to embrace certain things, or to behave certain ways, is to make it at least past reproductive age, and to have greater reproductive success. We avoid poisonous food because it immediately kills us. And, to simplify this criminally, we perform certain social behaviors because it makes us more likely to reproduce. But our diseases now - depression, heart disease, diabetes - they don't kill us until we're old. They let us reproduce, before we feel the effects, and then they kill us, past the point where evolution has any hope of intervening. Sure, certain acute stress related things that result from severe, severe stressors can keep a young kid from making it, or at least from being fertile. But merely sitting around being lazy, unhealthy, depressed, and unproductive isn't making the human race any less prolific.

And on that note (being questions with no correct answer), why do bookstores make me so sad?

That's where I just came from. A Barnes and Noble, which, for some reason that may be worth noting later, makes me way sadder than libraries. I go to bookstores mostly when I'm in a wandering mode, and thumb through every section. It takes me hours. And I get sadder and sadder until I'm thisclose to crying and I have to leave because it's not socially acceptable to cry in a Barnes and Noble. One day I should just do it. Then I could write about it. Because the secret to happiness appears to be to do something unconventional and then write about it and happily be lauded as the expert on whatever unconventional thing it was that you did.
The only thing I'm an expert on is uncertainty. I guess I'm an expert at observation too. I can observe the hell out of anything. I can write about a girl eating and have her fork's journey to her mouth take paragraphs and paragraphs, mostly consisting of tangents.

But I am a record-speed-reader and a record-speed-forgetter. I estimate that in my life I have read about five thousand books. I have read, and been briefly fascinated by, completely obscure things that I immediately forget. The trajectory of asteroids. What scientists predict will happen when the volcano under Yellowstone Park erupts. Multiverses and how they would be stacked together in spacetime. How an aye-aye makes an omelet out of his dinner of bird eggs. The history of lesbian relationshops in feudal China. Do I remember any of these things? No. Do I wholeheartedly regret that I don't? Emphatically yes.

I would love to be a walking encyclopaedia. Going back to the beginning, my most accurate answer to the 'what do you want to do with your life' question would be, 'I would like to travel wherever my fancy takes me and keenly observe and record everything that I see.' And since I am a member of this culture, I of course cannot be satisfied with simply observation and recording; I must draw conclusions! I must come up with hypotheses and test them through stringent and rigidly controlled experiments! Having come up with a conclusion, I must now relate it somehow to the vast moving living library of human knowledge, find a niche for it, tuck it in there, hold it up somehow as a way for improving the human race.

And if I am to do that, the more things I can pull out of that squishy, lunging library to relate my observations to, the better.

Of course, for me, that isn't the real reason, or at least not the only reason. The primary thing, for me, is that it's fucking fun to know things. It is eminently enjoyable to sit back and let ideas and knowledge flood your synapses, even - especially - if the knowledge isn't originally your own. It's less tiring if it isn't. You get to bask in some stranger's knowledge, their epiphanies, without having to lift a finger or a synapse to do all the work that led to it.

That's why bookstores make me sad. I don't have time to know all this stuff. I don't have time to sit down and become acquainted with it all, and even if I did, the second I put the first book down to pick up the second, I'd forget the first. And even if I did remember everything I read, by the time I put down the last book I'd be an old woman, ready to die, without having fulfilled the crazy social pressure to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING! I would have just spent my life sitting around reading about everyone else's accomplishments, and that would be all the time I was given.

I've forgotten already all the names of the books that I grabbed for hungrily, only to stuff back on the shelf in my thirst for another one. I don't carry a notebook with me even though I keep telling myself I should. Instincts again. Wrong again. It is not easy to do the 'right' things. I don't have an answer for the questions that I ask myself because it is not easy to answer them.

I was about three or four and in a group music lesson. We were taking a five minute break and another kid caught me in the corner picking my nose and sampling the contents. Between her 'EWWW!!!' (she was about nine - I was the youngest kid there by a good four years) and her inevitable tattling on me to the teacher and all the other kids, I was able to convince her that my family came from Russia and in my family (and all over Russia, presumably) it was a ritual we did for good luck.

I discovered a new sensation walking to the bus stop this morning: thick snowflakes falling on sunburned skin.

It's a Midwestern rainy day in the desert. I've got a glove with a coat hanger twisted through the fingers making the 'rock on' sign in the corner, and a wasteland of chocolate wrappers surrounding me. I have a surprise birthday party coming up that, yes, I am supposed to know about, but not the details, and the details being a surprise is enough for me. I also have a surprise birthday dinner coming up that was wholly a surprise until I figured out the clues in a burst and rush of lucky guesses this morning.

It occurs to me that if this were a story, trying to 'illustrate' my happiness, to 'show and not tell' the details that made me that way, it would probably sound forced, but since it's real, and I'm not trying to write, and this is a fleeting feeling, it reads real, at least to me.

We, this stranger and I, were using the Scrabulous chatbox to chat to each other about rambutan and its availability in the United States versus its availability in Canada, which is of course the best possible use for a Scrabulous chatbox. I told him it was near-impossible to get them here unless it was June, and he assured me that the stores were crawling with them in Vancouver, that they were just as prolific there as pineapples or grapes. I was distracted by this beautiful spectre, plus had racks like either 'AUUNOII' or 'CCRZBVX' but never mixed together, so he was winning for most of the game, and was friendly as could be while he was doing so, even bordering on flirting, which skeezed me out a little but was innocuous enough if I just sidestepped it.

Until I started to win. As I got closer and closer to his score he got more and more stroppy. His compliments became sort of backhanded; his comments more guarded. And when I had just one tile left, and was leading by just fifteen points, he probably knew he was going to lose, and so typed 'wow so why do your turns take so long when it's obvious you're using a [Scrabble solver] program' and then left, only to return the next day to finish out his loss with only silence.

What a classy gentleman! I love playing games with those who think that if they don't win, the other person must be cheating. But there is a bigger issue at stake, and that is that the rambutan availability in Vancouver has been thrown into question. I can't trust the claims of someone who turns into a five year old at the first available opportunity! What if Vancouver ISN'T really a fruitful paradise spilling over with rambutan? What if it turns out it's just a cold, rainy, grey city with only oranges and apples to offer?

Every Tuesday I sort of wish it will snow so there won't be a softball game. This, after I spent all my time looking up a softball league that would have me after ten years of not playing at all. I wanted something that would get me into shape in a nonthreatening way (rugby, my last try two years ago, turned out to be a threatening way indeeed; the warmup mile run alone was too much to start with, and the fact that I was the lightest person there at 150 pounds was practically a guarantee that I would be in the hospital before the end of the season) and would shape my week a little bit, force me to compartmentalize my time.

But now I just wish it would snow. Snow or be warm. As much as I want to have something to do when I'm alone in my house, when I do have something to do, and it's stressful, I wish it were optional. Actually, it's probably simpler than that; softball, for me, means biking four or five miles down to the fields on the outskirts of town, and when the game's over and I'm exhausted, either biking back (all uphill) or going out to the main road and waiting a half hour for a bus - this all when it's at or around freezing and the wind is howling. For everyone else, they just have to jump in their cars, drive there, play, jump in their cars, drive back. Simple as that.

It's a sacrifice I make, not having a car, and I like to think it's for the good of the environment, so I can gloat, and not just because I don't have the money, which is probably much closer to the truth. I oscillate between liking it and not. Sometimes when I'm struggling against the wind with both handlebars wobbling with the weight of my groceries and it's starting to snow and cars are sweeping by me at close range and sometimes honking, I get frustrated and angry to the point where it's not even in line anymore with the situation. But later, thinking about it, I think, what do I not have that these people in their cars do?

I used to think nothing. I used to think I had nothing less, and that I was actually gaining something - exercise, and time spent outdoors. Things like that. I disagree with myself now. I'm definitely short on something these people have, and that's the freedom to just go out at a whim and have fun without getting weighed down with the consequences of when's the bus running, what are the intervals, how cold is it, will it snow, which way is the wind blowing, can I ride my bike into it, has someone stolen my bike light, how long will this take, will I be able to get any sleep tonight once I get home?

Because of all these questions running through my head, I often decide just not to go anywhere because it's too much trouble, and my life becomes more monotonous instead of more colorful. And yes, I realize that this is ridiculously whiny and specific about a problem that's not a problem at all, compared to the rest of the problems of the world, and yes, I realize that I could just not think about all those things and go anyway and deal with the consequences as they happen, but that's not who I am, and these are the consequences that riding a bike has, for me, and this is how it's been and now I go nowhere more often than I go somewhere. It makes me sad.

Since many of my 'injuries' over the course of my life have been faked, or at least exaggerated mightily, I discovered last week that I don't actually know how to respond when something is actually wrong with me. I'm not used to it. What I am used to is swallowing my malaria pill wrong, suffering throat and chest pain, and thinking 'oh my god I have bird flu/am having a heart attack/my lungs are collapsing... I better not talk or move or do anything except lay around whining, faintly and dramatically whisper out my last words, or secretly do Sudoku puzzles when no one is looking/is around to whine to'. What I am used to is ditching my crutches when no one is looking, because, man, my armpits hurt and I can actually walk on this thing. What I am used to is pinching my cheeks until I'm flushed and lidding my eyes... Mom, I can't go to school. It is an impossibility. Really - an impossibility.

But my only real injuries have been either when I was too young to remember much (broken finger, age 4, broken arm, age 5, my only real sprained ankle, age 12). So when I got a softball slammed into my leg straight from the bat during practice, I kept playing. I figured that even though it hurt like hell, it would probably be better if I played through it. I walked on it all week like nothing had happened. I played catch. I played pool. I played in a softball game. I played in two softball games. Three triples among them. Sprinting. All the while the bruise was getting worse, and blood, under my skin, was filling my foot. After the last run around the bases, my foot looked up at me, tears filling its eyes, and said 'No more.'

I thought I'd been subconsciously making up the pain, exaggerating it even to myself, making it out to be more than it was. I thought I could make up for my past by staunchly NOT acknowledging it, refusing coddling, refusing help.

Wrong. Now I'm on crutches for real. It sucks.

Is there anything that kills these squirming remnants of creativity quite like the blink-blink, blink-blink of tiny vertical line on a blank screen?

So nobody figured that one out, huh (or else nobody cared)? Those bolded words were Scrabble words. Scrabble words! I attempted to curb my addiction by making the threat to myself that if I chose to play Scrabble instead of doing something creative, then I would be forced to write a story using every single word on the finished gameboard. But instead of working for me, it worked against me; I played Scrabble anyway, and I ended up actually having to do it. Thus the wonderful, convoluted, cheesy story you see before you that morphed into disgust and reader challenges that no one took.

Anyway, I've been having apocalyptic nightmares lately, all right in a row, like some sort of sign - if I believed in signs. The string ended (hopefully; it might not actually be over since this one was just last night) with my stealing a bus from my job to go on a road trip, crashing it, worrying about how I was going to return it without anyone noticing, and then realizing it didn't matter because (a) I was awake and (b) the world would probably end before I got fired or reprimanded.

Notice that I had been having so many apocalyptic dreams lately that my being awake (and I was awake) didn't in any way dim the certainty that the world was going to end. I've just been taking that as a given in the mornings. Fireballs, nuclear war, asteroids, zombies taking over. All in a night's work.

When I entered her room, it was dark except for the weak flame of a mandarin candle burning by her bedside. The room smelled, unsurprisingly, like mandarin, but under that, something sour. "Pardon me," she yawned, "but I feel as though I've got a touch of the ague."

"The ague?" I asked. "God, it's been so long since I've heard anyone say that. So long that it was probably before I was born. I didn't think people got the ague anymore. I thought it was eradicated... whatever it is."

"Uh, I don't know," she mumbled as she turned over and half rose. "I just woke up. I was just talking. I was just using it as a general term for being sick. Like men is sometimes a generic term for humans, even though it doesn't mean the same thing at all."

"You're cute, jo." I smiled and walked over to her bedside. Her frocks were all crumpled up in a heap at the foot of her bed and spilling in a fat pile into her closet.

For some reason, that sight had me riveted. As my feet beg(a)n to drum unconsciously against the lines of her wooden floorboards, I started remembering fruit vendors in Mexico in their fancy dresses with beads of sweat rolling down their faces as they sold slices of flan and children freed themselves from the impossible folds. They never got their dresses dirty. Never. They were always as clean and shiny as the day they were made. Eons and eons of dirt falling on their dresses wouldn't have even smudged the fabric.

The thought made me want to jot something ridiculous on the dresses on the floor with a marker, like Greek letters - mu or xi or something - just to see if they would make a mark. But then, I knew, she would hate me.

As if to make up for the mere thought, I quickly mustered up an offer. "Would you like some rye toast with butter?" I asked. But she was asleep. I couldn't have given it to her if I had tried. She wouldn't have et it, anyway, with her stomach that ailed her. So I exit quietly.

The qi in the room was blocked from her illness, and the awkwardness that we had, and from my unkind thoughts, so I went back downstairs. The qats in the yard bent under the weight of the sun. They couldn't win, either; their future was rigged. They weren't meant to be in a yard in the hot, wet South. They were meant to be in the Middle East, just as the faux wats in yuppie towns across the country probably felt far from home when they thought of their native Thailand.

No od here, no escape, just like the endless march of numbers in pi, or an el car when the tracks are broken. Okay, that was just terrible. Possibly the worst metaphor I've ever written in my life. Zap this before it gets any worse. And for what? No idea yet, eh? Un-believable. How about by now? Is it obvious yet? Must I hit you over the head with it, like maybe with a bat? Or a bucket of hot aa? Ha!

And lo! It has hit you! Or, has it?

Anecdote. Seemingly profound thought. Another anecdote that has nothing to do with said profound thought. Aimless wanderings capped off by offensive statement. Apology for offensive statement. Explanation of apology for offensive statement that nullifies apology.

Paragraph break.

Sentence that is meant to be deep, so probably has some superfluous alliteration. Pregnant pause. Several sentences written while being talked to by someone who has no idea that I am not listening. Second pregnant pause while I consider whether to include this in my diatribe. Awkward sentence that results from me deciding not to include it.

Paragraph break.

Attempt at summation. Awkward sentence that does not belong at the end of an entry. Second attempt at summation, this time including awkward sentence. Second awkward sentence that is so awkward that the summation won't even deign to include it.

Maybe the reason I seem like such a jerk to ethics professors is that I tend to look at things from an entire-earth point of view, instead of from a human point of view.

The first thing anyone does when they're trying to convince you that you're not really a moral relativist, that there's no such thing as moral relativism, is ask you how the Holocaust could possibly be viewed as morally OK.

This is not a hard question to answer, in my opinion. It not being a hard question to answer has nothing to do with me not thinking, personally, that the Holocaust was horrible. I do think it was horrible, which is so obvious as to almost be unnecessary to say. I would have lost relatives in it had they not very recently immigrated to the U.S.

But it's still easy to answer, even though the questioner will think you're dodging the question and must therefore be anti-Semitic, homophobic, gypsyphobic or whatever the word for hating gypsies may be, etc.

Anything that so drastically lowers the number of humans on this earth is of direct benefit for virtually all species of animal and plant. Our system of ethics is based on humans. We don't think of it in a big enough picture to notice this; we think we're being objective and all-encompassing. We're not. The death of the entire human race would be such good news for everything else on the planet, that upon hearing it, they should all burst into their version of celebrating and getting wasted.

This says nothing about my personal opinion of whether it should be worth it. You can't ask a living being to discuss the morality of the obliteration of its species, no matter the benefits for anything else. Biology precludes it. But I do think it funny that ethics professors think there is no way around the 'Holocaust Question'. All you have to do is love animals more than humans. And though I'm not one of those people (close, but not quite), there should be more than enough 13-year-old girls and angsty farm boys on this earth to pretty much tip the balance the animals' way.

Maybe it isn't a serious issue now, but when our population reaches the point that the death of millions, perhaps billions, will save OUR species (all other species aside) from extinction, this is going to have ethicists' underwear all in a bundle.

There is too much music in here to write. There is too much music in here to write. It’s too hipstery to play Scrabble in with friends and I want to say it’s too crowded, or it’s trying too hard, or the kids have much too contrived haircuts, or are too snobby, to hang out in by yourself, but really, except for the music, I like it, and I only don’t like the music because it’s too amazing for me not to feel bad that I didn’t create it. I have this problem often. Any music that isn't good hurts my ears, literally hurts them, and as for the music that is good, I get jealous of the artist and can't enjoy it. My favorite music is music that somehow escapes either of these two extremes. I realize that this is not healthy.

I've been sick, which serves me right since all I've been doing lately is pompously bragging to anyone who'll listen about how awesome my immune system is. How my parents didn't make me wash my hands after every time some kid sneezed in the next block somewhere, how I ate everything served to me, sometimes off the ground, how I flew in planes all the time and was therefore exposed to every airborne, foodborne, sandborne, dirtborne virus known to man. How now I snigger at people who carry moist wipes everywhere they go, open doorknobs with towels draped over their hands, won't use public restrooms, won't eat uncooked fish or any food that hasn't been blasted to the FDA-recommended stage of burnt, and still manage (unsurprisingly) to contract every bug that blows by in the wind.

But even though I generally do still agree with myself that it's healthier to get your hands into everything, run around barefoot, and eat whatever you please (and do also agree with general society that you shouldn't go around LOOKING for illnesses by eating month-old yogurt and using Port-a-Potties willy-nilly) a healthy immune system doesn't always work, and sometimes you get slapped with the stomach flu AND a cold at the same time right after you've finished bragging about how you never get sick. And when that happens, everyone you've bragged to has every right to make fun of you and make faux-puking noises and waft rich, nauseating foods under your nose, and make goose honks behind handkerchiefs.

Instead, upon whining my plaintive whine, I was brought Saltines, grapes, and soda water, and got my back and legs rubbed and cold washcloths placed on my forehead. I always crack about how life is unfair, but forget all those times it is unfair in my favor.

I do think I would be satisfied if I spent the next two years getting on planes and jumping in cars or on boats at the slightest of whims to follow my taste buds around the world. I know that there is a term for this, and it's called a super-mega-important-sought-after restaurant reviewer (also known as: in your dreams). But really. If I were to suddenly become a gazillionaire, after I gave away 80% of it or more, depending on how much a gazillion dollars really is, that's what I would do. And yes, I know that if I suddenly craved Tibetan momos, the craving, and my good temper with it, would probably be gone after 18 hours on an international flight, three different customs forms from three different countries, a tiny wobbling plane struggling through the high winds around the Himalayas, and the crazy long-ass nap I would take upon finding a place to stay. Still. It would be a good jumping point for all sorts of adventure that I wouldn't know how to look for if I just sat here and thought, 'Now, where shall I go look for adventure?

Last time I was down at the creek, four weeks ago, maybe, I happened to be by myself, and the creek happened to be just teeming with ducks: ducks sliding down waterfalls with little bobs, ducks ruffling their feathers as they righted themselves after hitting the bottom or those waterfalls, ducks standing up on rocks stretching their necks and displaying, ducks pecking at other ducks' tail feathers, ducks attempting rape indiscriminately. (If you know me in person, and most of you do, you'll have already heard my 'ducks are the major brutal rapists in the avian kingdom' speech, so I'll spare you hearing it again.) This description, so you know, doesn't even become to come close to making it clear to you just how many damn ducks there were. There were so many, the water was hardly visible. Ducks were coming down waterfalls three, four at a time. Territorial disputes, nay, wars, were going on over three-inch-square patches of sand, or tiny slivers of rock poking out from the water.

Although I called people frantically to get them to come share in this freak-of-nature event, nobody showed up fast enough. I sat on a bench shivering and staring at the quacking, flapping duck quilt until clouds came out and covered the sun. By the time Chris and Eugene showed up, the duck covering was merely patchy, almost a normal level of ducks (if ducks came in levels, like humidity or temperature), and they thought I had been dreaming, or making it up or something.

Anyway, I was down there again yesterday, with Dan this time, and there were still straggler ducks hanging out in the part by the library. They were pretty much done raping each other by now, and were more interested in pulling who-knows-what from between the icy rocks of the bottom. We sat down to watch them, and presently a man with headphones showed up with an entire loaf of freshly bought Safeway bread and started throwing whole slices into the water.

We actually hadn't seen the man at first, but when a slice of wheat bread landed lightly like a Frisbee on the surface of the water and fifty ducks dove wildly into the middle of it and started frantically pecking each other's feathers out for the mere chance at a sliver of the bread, we saw him, nearly next to us, preparing to throw another slice.

There's really no story here. He split the rest of his bread evenly between himself, a man with a dog who wanted nothing more than to have a duck lunch (the dog, not the man [probably]), and Dan and I. We spent some time feeding the ducks and it was good. I hadn't done it for years. The last time I did was probably close to the time I was about seven and fell into Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles trying to crouch down on a mossy rock to get closer to my target duck. Echo Park Lake is more used syringe than water, or was at that time. My whole body itched for days.

Guest posted over at Nora's place today with my miraculous weekend internet that only pokes its head from his shell on very special weekends.

I started typing and it started transliterating into Malayalim! Oh my God! I had to figure out how to make it stop and while I was doing that everything I wanted to say just flew right out my ears. I have a fever and I'm at work and I have a terrible haircut. This is all that's left. I've been trying to decide whether to cut my losses and just cut the stupid haircut all off, which would leave my hair chin length, which I KNOW looks terrible on me, but it's tempting because I think that the current cut looks more terrible. For awhile now I've just been going to Great Clips and everyone keep telling me Great Clips sucks, but they've been so good to me, and the second I betray them by going somewhere else, God suddenly goes completely insane and gives me a Haircut-Specific Smite in the form of an Middle-Aged-Woman Haircut. God and Great Clips are apparently friends. I don't think 'smite' is a noun. I don't know if I have the appropriate writer credentials to just force it to be a noun.

Speaking of forcing words to be different parts of speeches than they're used to, I was in a friend's car coming out from a Chinese restaurant, and a car honked, or didn't honk, or something happened that involved either honking or the conspicuous lack of honking (see... this is what happens when I don't allow myself to embellish, and my memory isn't exact) and he said something like, 'Should I have horned at him?'

'Horn' should definitely be used as a verb all the time. 'Did you see that guy? He cut right across five lanes of traffic to get to the on-ramp, and everyone was horning at him, and he just flipped everyone off!' 'Should I horn at that hot woman in the Kia, or would that be crass?' (Do guys ever consider that, just maybe, it might be just a LITTLE bit crass to horn at women from cars?!)

The innuendo of sexual advance just makes it better. But I supposed there's no innuendal benefit to changing 'smite' into a noun. Scratch 'smite'. But we'll consider 'innuendal'.