Psychic Drunks

I may have noted that Dona C packs like Roosevelt heading up the Amazon. Cuervito clicked his tongue at me, saying I was less that understanding about cultural differences. Other cultures are stupid.

She brought sixteen rolls of toilet paper! 50 pounds of oranges! 300 paper napkins in three different packets! (in case the other two get wet) Twelve cases of bottled water *in glass* to a place that bottles water. Sheets for all the beds in case the current sheets were unacceptable! The entire contents of her kitchen! Also, booze.

They were in town for three days.

The Unpacking Chronicles Pt. 6: The Madness of the Conquistadors.

I just discovered a sealed box full of packing supplies and cardboard boxes. While unpacking. You know, just in case we need more stuff to pack with in the future.

I had to talk and think about wedding plans for at least eight hours today. This evening, every single conversation I had was about some aspect of a nuptials. After dinner, I was standing in the kitchen with my father. He gave me the affixing stare of someone about to impart something essential about dress ruffles, speaking to seamstresses, or making wreaths out of broom corn. I braced myself as he leaned in.

"I've been wondering about the provenience of the type specimen for Nothrotheriops shastensis. The name indicates that it's local, but I can't find evidence of it except in the Southwest."

I love my dad.

My mother has never gotten out of the habit of making sure her children are still breathing when they sleep.

It's not a secret if you post it on your blog.

Some time ago I returned from work to find the following note:

"I found your mail from this week. It is under this note. I will be back at seven. Don't spoil your dinner. -Mom"

I rifled through the mail, and then responded:

"Off buying ice cream cone. Back soon."

Feeling that might be deliberately inflammatory, I felt compelled to add a short vignette about the tragedy of the alligator lizard. You see, the alligator lizard lives in environments that are only tolerable if one has ice cream, but the lizard lacks both the ability to purchase ice cream and the ability to leave said environment. It is very sad. I drew a short comic on the backs of various envelopes and cards, detailing the quest for ice cream of a disturbingly anthropomorphosized alligator lizard. I believe at the end, sated by ice cream, he walks into the light- here represented by the gullet of an eagle- able to face his fate with equanimity. Then I bought and ate ice cream. Then I sent back RSVP cards for two weddings.

The next day I realized that parts of the alligator lizard saga were on the back of the RSVP cards.

But I seem to have gotten away with it- I've since talked to the brides in question, and there was no comment about my artwork. Ha ha! Awkward explanation avoided! Illusion of sanity maintained!

Unless they read this post.

Me too, me too!

C's screed against Everyman reminded me of wedding planning. Everything does now, apparently.

We were having a guts and grime talk: what's important to us (cake and ribs), what's important to our families (not spending money and being insane), and what we can afford to spend (bupkiss). C, who has obviously been getting tips for grooms who don't want to get slaughtered before the Day, asked me if there was anything special and romantic that I really wanted.

I started tracing patterns on the floor with my toe and not making eye contact.

"Well," I said in a low voice "If you wanted to... If it seems like a good idea..."

"Go on", said Señor C in encouraging tones.

"We could maybe... possibly... go to a lawyer and get joint durable power of attorney."

"..."

"Oh, and living wills!"

"I thought you were going to suggest something romantic!"

"There's nothing more romantic than durable power of attorney."

I stand by that statement. I'm not good at being conventionally romantic- as far as I can see, it's all about blackmailing my partner into buying me things and getting him to stare at me like the creepy dudes at a bar- but I get all gooshy about legal commitments (I did just have a freakout about wedding invitations, but that's because they were horrifically botanically inaccurate. C's future includes a ten minute sit down with the first six pages of the Peterson.)

But Roth. While fidelity is an essential part of my relationships, I don't see it as essential to all relationships. In theory, there are times where cheating is necessary for the survival of a good marriage- but I read Everyman and found it so loathsome that I temporarily believed exactly the inverse of whatever the author professed. It's like the opposite of hearing Bill Clinton speak. C may be biased by the unpleasant.

Oh, and who else hates dinner parties with your parents? It's like an exhibit of all your unpleasant conversational quirks. (Oh please, don't talk about how your job has wronged you. Please don't cut an anecdote about marriage short because you recalled the person we're talking to divorced three years ago. Did you just snub someone for a slight from the '90s?)

The most useful thing I learned in high school

My Spanish teacher once taught us formal tenses by pretending to be a professor of moths. He was arrogant, insistent on extreme formality, and surprisingly callous about the loss of many of his immediate family members. Also, hilarious. Imagine some relic of the 19th century alive today, insisting on archaic etiquette. What a clever teacher to think of such an absurd character. Oh, how I laughed.

Not so funny now, really.

The most useful thing I learned in college was rock climbing. And to always ask where the free cookies came from.

Short Faced Bears.

Okay, this is just too awesome for words. It's an article about the Bay Area during the Pleistocene. There was a river to rival the Amazon! The continental shelf was exposed, resulting in a thirty mile band of coastal prairie west of Golden Gate Bridge! There were mammoths, cave lions, cheetahs, dire wolves, and giant ground sloths! There was a twelve foot tall bear than could sprint 40 mph!

If there were three huge rivers trisecting the Bay Area, the island effect would lead to speciation- populations would be divided, and you'd expect to see an unreasonably high number of endemics. And this is so! I've been fretting about the diversity of crazy rare plants in the Bay for a while.

The best part of the article is that it cribs heavily from a book on Paleobotany that is currently on my nightstand. I now have more reason to feel guilty about not reading it.

No, the best part is that the type specimen for short-faced bears is from Shasta Caverns- an entire skeleton! Oh my goodness, that is an awe-inspiring thing to contemplate.

I bumped into a friend of my parents in a field of poison oak behind a locked gate yesterday. He gave me a list of everything he'd found in the area, starting with a field stripped rifle (a 308, so nothing super scary) wrapped in several garbage bags, a couple of caves, a rare aster, a rare salamander, a feral pig skull, and a terrible allergy to Toxicodendron. Thus, I am inspired to find bear teeth. (I have previously stated that I maintain certain friendships primarily for entertainment value and exposure to truly insane schemes- remind me to do a post on R's first roommate- and I believe this man serves a similar purpose for my father. Except he's pleasant. And most of his schemes involve trail building and waterway restoration.)

Also, I keep bitching about poison oak in the abstract, fact-of-life fashion that occurs in the workplace, and people keep offering sympathy. At work, I'll say "I want to bite this skin and worry at the rash like a dog." and my coworkers respond "I'm so coated in tar I no longer do a spot check before peeing." On Facebook, I make a pleasant reference to Technu showers, and dudes start talking about how they once had oak balls whilst ladies try to sell me on pharmaceuticals.

I want to do a series on "Why I hate your Myers/Briggs personality type", but I think it may be unwise. Thoughts?

Family!

Yesterday my cousin* posted her disappointment with Obama's decision to skip the Polish president's funeral. (It's a trap! the want him to prove he can fly without a jet. You know who else can fly unaided? The Antichrist.) Today she posted extensive Leonard Cohen lyrics on a sadomasochistic relationship. (Possibly she does not realize.) Then she started talking about Sailor Moon and math being hard. I'm delighted.

*I have twenty-three cousins. Probably. I can't be bothered to think of awesome nicknames for each of them, so as far as you are concerned, dear readers, I have two cousins. One with a gender identity crisis, three different religions, anorexia, diabetes, Obamania and tea party delusions who lives in seven different states and occasionally France or Haiti. The other is Pete.

My Evening.

I went out dancing with the cousin and the cousin's girlfriend tonight. We took the beginner lesson, and then went downstairs to drink beer.

Speaking of ballroom dancing- it's apparently all about archaic gender rolls, which explains a great deal about how my outlaws dance. I suspect that DoNa Conquistador is very difficult to lead, which is why one gets the impression that Don Conquistador is trying to bodily drag her around the dance floor. But more to my point- I'm much easier to lead than one would suspect. According to the instructors, I am unusually easy to lead for a beginning American female.

Unless I'm dancing with my cousin, whereupon I am possessed by five generations of my maternal ancestors and become intractable.

The bar was full of dudes with incredible non-ironic mustaches. I have been told that the truly awesome mustache is very difficult to grow, so I must give props. There was also a man with mutton chops and a trucker hat, having a beer with a eight year old boy. With a rat tail haircut. There may have been a jar of pickled eggs on the counter.

Then my cousin's friends showed up, lowering the tone of the place considerably. *

There's my grandmother stealing my brain again. It's made worse by the fact that just when I was surrounded by scruffy mountain men in varying stages of advanced inebriation, my high school guidance counselor walked by. He gave me a look which reduced me to an teenager who has just been told to please stop making out during class, thank you very much. I resisted the urge to yell, "I don't know these people! I haven't fallen in with a bad crowd! I've had only one beer! I would never drive under the influence! It's his fault!"

*When I'm not distrusting his ability to take strange syncopated steps and disparaging his friends, I'm very fond of my cousin. He's cheerful, sanguine, hardworking, and obliging. He one of the few people I know who is not a bundle of neuroses. (I love you, bundles of neuroses, I really do. But when I spend time with him and any other member of my family, our average concentration of irrational antipathies is close to socially acceptable.)

My poor brother...

He's writing for the school paper- for some reason, he's basically writing about rural issues over and over again- and he often asks me to edit.

I have a rule that none of his descriptions of small towns can remind me of a 19th century novel's description of genitalia. It's tough going. "Nestled" is out. So is "deep" and "bosom". "Hidden gem" "Unknown treasure" "Headwaters" "Backcountry" are removed as a matter of course.

I don't know what I have against "discovered", but it's out too.

Disparate Topics

I was blathering on Facebook that I get to go to a party! An actual party! A costume party! Mike said that the theoretical lizards I killed to make my costume probably deserved it, and I was going to explain how they did not, but then I realized I have a blog for nonsensical ramblings- Facebook is for obtuse koans.

So. I go to Pilates Wednesday mornings. This Wednesday, my mother woke me up and explained that we were going to Pilates. It wasn't until we were halfway to the next town over that I realized she was talking about a different Pilates class in a different place. The instructor did not deign to show up for said class, so we ran on the machines and then sat in the hot tub. I was piqued about our miscommunication- and about not getting to do my stretches- so I was trying to be exceptionally nice to my mother.

Thus I mentioned that I was going to a costume party Friday, and asked if we might have any aquatic space Viking costumes.

We didn't. (I know that you are surprised.) We did have a WHOLE DAY to find and make a costume for me and a costume for C. I was gonna oil my boots, do some laundry, maybe find a funny hat... But now I have a costume. She's very excited because she has some lizard print fabric from 1998 that she finally gets to use. We went to the used clothing store and picked through their Halloween boxes in the basement, we hit up the neighbors for skin friendly adhesives so I could attach gills and we are currently dying gardening gloves and leggings into more acceptable colors. I... I live in a world where my attempts at pleasant conversation lead to me crawling around in the rafters, looking for the flippers from the penguin costumes.

Because we own nine penguin costumes. NINE.

Now, if I'm an aquatic Viking, I will necessarily be hunting aquatic reptiles. I have decided that they are some form of marine iguanas- pleasant animals, wouldn't hurt a fly. And I am thus reminded of the afternoon Darwin spent throwing an iguana into the ocean.

He grabbed a likely reptile, walked to a point, and hucked it into the waves. It swam back to his feet. He threw it in again. It swam back. And so on throughout the afternoon. Little bit of sadism on the father of the evolutionary theory, yes? And further examples of an animal reacting to stress by provoking more stress.

I was talking to the sibling figure about his lack of social life. Since it's agreed that he's the one with the 'people skills', it's a bit discomfiting. I said I had more friends at his age because I treasured the few that I made like precious gems.

The real reason? House full of pastries and kittens.