dream preparedness

My dreams are really weird.

What is weirder, though, is when real life sneakily introduces itself into my dream.

This happens to everyone to a certain degree. For example, people dream about missing an exam they will actually have to go to next week. Or, sensory input from the sleeper's environment makes its way into the dream.

But my dreams are weird to begin with. So when real life influences my dream, the result is even weirder.

I saw a documentary once that said, dreams are your brain's way of preparing you for hypothetical situations. This seems perfectly logical. Except my brain seems to think it is equally likely that I will have to protect my household from a pirate attack as it is that I will have to study for my exam next week.

Some people have said that my brain is weird, but I think that my brain is just helping me be incredibly prepared for life. I always have a carton of eggs in the fridge, thanks to that velociraptor attack. I always study for exams early, because of the pirate incident. And if ninjas ever attack while I am buying a carton of eggs at the grocery store, I'll know what to do.

mushrooms

I have no problem with mushrooms. I think they are delicious and nutritious and even aesthetically pleasing. So I do not know why mushrooms keep making me nauseous when I eat them. It's probably because I am allergic.

But, still, my allergic tendencies have not obscured the greatness of mushrooms. Every time I see mushrooms on a menu, I kind of want to order them. They are really cool and tasty, and often come on a dish that tastes delicious in other ways. When I want to order a dish that might have mushrooms, I weigh the pros and cons.

Usually, reviewing this list leads me to the conclusion that I should not eat mushrooms. But sometimes, a mushroom laden dish just looks too tasty. It looks so tasty that having only one item in the "con" column makes the list feel empirically imbalanced. At these times, I have to think of at least three more reasons to not eat mushrooms in order to make it an even contest.

Here are some reasons I have used in the past.



Mushrooms looks like guys in hats.

Thanks to Disney's Fantasia and the Mario video games, I am constantly anthropomorphizing mushrooms. I just think of them as little guys in hats.

It doesn't help if the mushroom has been cut up. If you cut the mushrooms, it's like a ton of little guys in hats that have been massacred on your plate. :(


Mushrooms make pigs into scary animals.

Pigs are really cute. Generally, I like them. But a truffle mushroom is afraid of pigs, because pigs eat truffles. They hunt them. To a mushroom, a pig and its owner is a terrifying hunting dog and an impassive master. Mushrooms, you have ruined my image of pigs.

To a mushroom, a pig apparently looks like a dragon.

Mushrooms look like houses.


When I was a kid, I thought that fairies lived in mushrooms. So every time I go to eat a mushroom, my inner child thinks I am contributing to fairy eviction. Somewhere out there, there is fairy standing at her address, surprised to find herself entirely homeless.

These three reasons allow me to balance out my pro and con list.

Confronted by the ideas of mushrooms as people or houses, and pigs as evil, evil creatures, even the tastiest mushroom dish doesn't seem worth it.

Sometimes, I still feel grumpy about missing out on mushrooms. I comfort myself by drawing pictures. Like the one below.

But the mushrooms do not thank you, all you non-allergic people. They do not thank you at all.

meeting an ex

Meeting a significant other's ex is not very fun. It is true, she is always someone incredibly different from you.

(In my case, usually someone who does not enjoy fuzzy green hats or own a bizarre, misbehaving cat.)

It also never goes well, due to extreme awkwardness and the sneaky feeling that the ex might somehow be superior to you. However, while you are thinking all these negative thoughts, remember the theme of this meeting:

Quietly remembering that you are THE WINNER will help you avoid two prominent examples of natural, embarrassing, ex-induced behavior:

1) the sneaky lap-crawl

2) the monologue

These behaviors are not typical of the winner you are. Just be a nice, cordial, good person. If you start feeling insecure again, consider these analogies. The ex you are talking to probably falls into at least one of them.

Here are the explanations for these analogies:

Geocities: people are embarrassed to say they used it to build a website.
Wordpress: people are excited to use it to build a website now.
Dreamcast: Soon after purchase, people realize that it had no lasting value
N64: Despite time, people look upon it with fondness and nostalgia
Beanie babies: not awesome.
The fact that people no longer collect beanie babies: very awesome.

cooking

Cooking is weird. There are a bunch of things that naturally taste good, like nuts and berries and other fruits and raw vegetables. Or even cooked vegetables. But cooking seems to specialize in making totally inedible stuff taste really good.

The evolution of this art puzzles me.

It's almost as confusing as the evolution of beer.

Lately, some of my friends have been asking me about cooking and how one cooks well. I'm not really sure, since I don't consider myself to be a cook. But, from what I can tell, cooking just means adding as many tasty things as possible to something which is naturally untasty.

When I cook, I often must decide whether or not to add a particular ingredient. When this occurs, I ask myself: tasty, or untasty?

If tasty, I add. If untasty, I do not add.

There are some exceptions to this rule. One must use common sense: will this tasty go well with the current level of untasty?

Note: In the case of tasty bacon (pictured above), the answer is almost always yes.

loud noises

I have recently realized that I don't like noise. This is possibly because, when you add sound to anything that does not require sound, it immediately becomes more annoying.

Clearly, unnecessary sound is very grating. Unnecessary volume doesn't help things, either.

Once you notice that loud noises are annoying, you start into a downward spiral of anger and bad moods. You attempt to reduce the amount of noise around you, but that only makes annoying noises seem louder when you go outside.

There are not very many good solutions to this problem. Ignoring it is hard. Moving to a more quiet place is expensive and inconvenient.

You could try to blot out the sound using ear coverings, but that is a little conspicuous. Here are some suggestions for protecting your hearing, incognito.

No matter what you do, you will be existing in a happy bubble of noise reduction. You can once again be happy in the presence of noisy objects.

Of course, reducing your hearing can be dangerous. It can expose you to obvious dangers, such as not being able to hear a car coming when you cross the street. Plus, there are other dangers. If you are employing all three methods at once, you will certainly be living in a bubble of silence. You may think no one is talking about you, but that's only because you can't hear them.

Ignorance is bliss, people!

reasons for a 20-something to have a cat

Most twenty-somethings without pets claim that having a cat is lame. I find that especially dudes tend to argue that, if you have a cat, you are basically on your way to being a cat lady.

However, I think there are some very good reasons for twenty-somethings to get a cat. Such as:

1) You can't afford to pay for heat

2) You need to renovate your apartment

3) You want to be better with kids
See this post.

However, the reason that guys should keep in mind when their lady-friends wish to acquire a feline is this:

A cat will turn nearby men into firemen.

Like fires, cats cannot be easily controlled. Like fires, an unruly cat is controlled by applying water.

And in the most basic sense, your boyfriend will be like a fireman because he will retrieve your kitty from high places, like firemen always do in movies and cartoons.

In other words...

Turn your boyfriend and other friends into a firemen with a cat!

how to date a baker

Are you dating a baker?

Does your significant other enjoy making delicious desserts, rather than dinners?

Does your boyfriend or girlfriend bake elaborate cakes, delectable brownies, and perfect cookies, but then eat a frozen pizza for dinner?

If so, you may be dating a baker. Being a baker, I have some helpful tips for how to date one of us.


Keep a well-stocked pantry.
Flour! Butter! Sugar! Fine kosher salt (not coarse salt)! Semisweet chocolate chips! Keep these kinds of things around, and your baker will be drawn to your apartment like a bee to a field of wildflowers.

Learn to cook.
Many bakers don't cook. Cooking stresses us out with its wishy-washy imprecision. Chances are, if a baker is making a savory dish, it's not in the way that any normal cook would.

If you learn to cook, your baker will think you are awesome. You do something that the baker does not, and therefore are interesting. Since you cook, you also provide sustenance that a baker cannot provide for him or herself. If a baker is a monkey, you are like a banana tree. Basically, you are the best thing in the world.

Make sure your baker is not stressed.
Since baking well is fairly time consuming, some of us do it only when we have time, and many of us do it when we don't have time but are incredibly stressed. If your baker is making cookies at an illogical time, make sure to talk to him or her, to determine if something stressful is going on.

If you do so, your baker will think you are an incredibly sensitive and awesomely observant individual!

Also, don't be a dirtbag (general good advice for any relationship) by stressing your baker out on purpose just to get baked goods. I've never heard of anyone ever doing this, but I do wonder if it happens since so many bakers I know produce cookies when stressed. We are like some kind of oddly evolved animal with a TERRIBLE survival mechanism.

When purchasing baking things for your baker, use caution.
Baking is practically a science. The people who like it are precise about their ingredients and picky about their tools. If you want to get your baking significant other something for the kitchen, make sure to take requests before you go out and buy something. Otherwise, your baker will feel like a pirate who has received a not-very-piratey hat.

Follow these tips! Be good to your baker, and you can look forward to a relationship full of delicious cookies, amazing pies, and awesome cakes. Good luck!

injuries

Injuries happen. If you are me, injuries will occur regardless of whether I am doing anything dangerous or not.

For this reason, I feel like it is important to play a sport. Because, I don't like explaining how I get injured, but I also don't like to lie directly.

If I play a sport, I can just make statements about my life, and allow people to draw their own conclusions.

Sometimes, though, playing sports is difficult. In this case, I think it is important to acquire a potentially dangerous job or hobby that actually contains no danger at all.

That way, injuries created for no reason at all suddenly have meaning. Hooray!

hail

I really dislike hail. Disregarding ultimate consequences (floods, snow-ins, etc), it is the only weather pattern that is immediately dangerous when it falls on you. This makes it really inconvenient for everyone.

Actually, my least favorite weather pattern is "wintry mix," because I always want it to be an ice cream. But it never is. It's just gross, wet, cold mixture of rain, snow, and hail.

I do, however, like imagining what goes on inside a wintry mix, because I bet that the rain and snow feel the same way about the hail as I do.

I guess the only advantage to hail is that, as a word, it is used in many non-weather phrases. Which makes me laugh.

In political programming:

In sports or religious programming:

And, perhaps most prominently, in sci-fi programming:

Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a weatherman!

bell collar removal

We recently decided the bell collar on our cat was too loud and removed it. But now, the cat is totally silent all the time. We never know where he is. So it is like we are living with a ghost.

Stuff disappears, and we don't know where it went. Stuff gets thrown around, poltergeist style, seemingly from nowhere.

Moreover, though, the loss of my cat's collar has made me feel like my cat is a weird deviant. I mean, a collar is the only scrap of clothing a cat can have. Once that is gone, a cat is totally naked.

Loss of collar causes opposites.

My cat seems to really enjoy his time without his collar. Which partially makes me feel like he is a weird kleptomaniac deviant who loves to run around naked and steal all my pens. But mostly, since getting him to wear the collar in the first place was a struggle (he hates having things around his neck), I feel like he's flaunting his nakedness as a symbol of his freedom as a naked wild animal.

But the joke is on him, because I got him a sweater.

A winner is me!