"now let me smoke in peace..."

Anytime someone says that particularly alliterative phrase to me, this is what I think of. People like to think of Sherlock and Watson as being besties, but I like to think of them as a more profane version of the odd couple.

heat exhaustion

I had heat exhaustion.

That is all.


Also happy birthday to Steve!

plants

When I was in college, I was not good with plants. At first, I named them, but then I stopped because they kept dying.

This is because I had two modes. In one mode, I cared a lot about the plant and was terrified that it would die.

In the other mode, I decided not to care about the plant, out of fear that I would kill it.

When I left college, I moved into an apartment with terrible lighting. Despite many panicked attempts to prevent plant death, I accidentally killed my boyfriend's beloved and long-lived pet cactus. This, along with all of my previous attempts at growing plants, earned me the reputation of being a plant killer.

So, I took a break from growing plants for a while. Green things around the world rejoiced.

Then, on a trip to Hawaii, I got a plumeria cutting as a souvenir. This is basically a withered stick of a plumeria, cleared for transportation back to the mainland, and sold in basically every souvenir store and Wal-Mart in Hawaii. Since it seemed really unlikely that these dry sticks would ever return to being living things, my boyfriend and I decided to have a contest to see whose plumeria stick would 1) become a living thing again and 2) grow the tallest.

Deciding I did not want a dead stick in my house, I defaulted to a sunnier spot in a window at work. Many people there had desk plants, and one in particular was very good at growing things. I asked him how to plant my plumeria stick. Here are the instructions he gave me.

- Plant it in soil
- Make sure the drainage is good (put some rocks in the bottom of the pot)
- Keep it in a sunny spot
- Add water whenever the soil looks dry

Although I had thought this was what I was doing with previous plants, I rarely had done all of them at the same time.

So I tried to do everything properly with the plumeria. It helped that I honestly wasn't sure that it would grow at all.

Now, the plumeria has many leaves! It's so exciting. I have even tried growing other plants! I have sprouted an avocado and even re-grown my boyfriend's rare cactus from seeds I bought from an Australian guy on e-bay. So, in conclusion, having a "green thumb" is actually pretty simple. Also, I am naming my plants again.

Also also-- I won the contest.

no more candy...

Recently, a doctor told me I had slightly elevated triglycerides and needed to eat healthier food. So, I have cut candy completely out of my diet. Which is bad in a different way, because I usually eat a lot of candy. No one ever realizes, because I am pretty skinny and everything, but my purse typically contains enough candy for a witch to build a small apartment complex.

So the difference in my energy levels after cutting out all that candy is pretty drastic.

I keep hearing that fresh vegetables and healthy meals give people energy. So, that means I have to cook. Unfortunately, I am pretty bad at cooking, and the process tends to exhaust me. Which means that making a healthy meal has the completely opposite effect on my energy level. In fact, it induces a vicious cycle:

Somehow, I always get this suggestion from people who hear that I am tired a lot:

How do I feel about this? Let me say it with a graph.

Oh well. Hopefully it will get better.

mysterious cockroach incident

Yesterday, I walked into the bathroom to discover my cat examining the toilet closely and staring at a dead, partially dismembered cockroach floating in the bowl. It was horrifying.

It was like walking in on a crime scene. It was gross. My cat looked alarmed. I froze where I stood and wondered what possibly could have happened. At first, I could only come up with two scenarios:

Then, I came up with an entirely different, possibly more likely scenario.

To understand why I came to this conclusion, you first have to know that my cat does not use a litter box. Rather, he uses the toilet. It does not only happen in Ben Stiller comedies-- my cat uses the toilet to dispose of his waste. And apparently his cockroaches.

Here is what I think happened.

Upon discovering the roach, I was simultaneously grossed out and impressed. I wasn't sure if the cat should be punished for trying to eat a roach or rewarded for correctly disposing of it. I guess I should just glad he didn't do what I thought he'd do upon finding a gross bug:

nap problems

I become tired sometimes and decide to take a nap.

Sometimes, the result is this:

Other times, the result is this:

Scientifically, the best amount of time for a nap is 15-20 minutes, 1.5 hrs, or a full night. Anecdotally, this is what happens when I nap:

People are always coming up with those rhymes to remember what not to do (i.e. beer before liquor). I always thought they were pretty mediocre. Here's an equally mediocre one for sleeping:

fake excuses

Sometimes, a situation calls for an excuse.

Sometimes, it calls for an excuse/blow-off.

"I have to wash my hair" used to be the token great excuse to both remove yourself from a situation and blow someone off at the same time. But that's been a little overdone. Here are some better excuses in the same vein:

Said sincerely, the result of these excuses will be the original result of "I have to wash my hair."

Here is the formula for making a new, better excuse:

Go for it! Make your own! Enjoy blowing off skeevy jerks everywhere!

blue is not a food

I recently realized that all the food I really like is orange.

Orange is also my favorite color. Coincidence??? Perhaps, or perhaps not.

After all, people seem to prefer their favorite color of every object, whether or not color actually affects functionality (Read: early Apple iBooks).

However, maybe food is different. People seem associate the "correct" color of a food with the food being good and unspoiled. So, while you'd think someone whose favorite color is green would like green-dyed cookies....

...It doesn't really work that way.

With kids, though, food-dyed objects are often a great success:

My theory is that we form very strong associations between food and colors as we grow up. Foods that look a certain way should also taste a certain way. (Kids are awesome, because they don't really have this association totally solidified yet.)

I actually think many foods of certain colors fall into certain taste/health categories:

The colors shown above align like this, to give us The Colorful Food Map of Colors:

I like the color orange, and I also like sweet healthy foods. So this makes sense. But is perhaps coincidental, because I know many people who like the color green, but prefer foods in the brown/unhealthy/sweet category.

The most obvious thing about this chart, though, is that blue is missing! I honestly couldn't think of any foods that were naturally blue, other than blueberries. And Quadrant I was already getting crowded, so I decided to leave berries off the list. So sad.

Sorry, blue!

dog presentation

As a child, I was pretty much like every other kid. I wanted a pony, and a bike, and eventually, a dog. Our bus driver was fostering six beagle mix puppies. She was looking to give them away, after they had been vet-checked vaccinated.

A normal kid would go about asking for one of these puppies like this:

However, I was smart enough to know that this would never work out in my family. The children of architects have great spacial reasoning and structure. The children of professors have a great love for academia. My parents had worked for years in businesses. In my family, if you wanted a raise in your allowance or planned to tackle a large-scale project, you made a presentation. With charts and graphs. And at the very least, a clearly outlined budget.

My brother and I also used to get our allowance twice a year in a large, bi-yearly sum. We had to spend it over six months in accordance with the budgets we had made.

Feeling that asking for a dog ought to be done professionally, I set about formulating my presentation for a dog.

While some matters, such as how much a dog would cost and what the budget would look like, were straightforward. Other matters, such as why we should have a dog in the first place, were not.

My presentation, therefore, started out strong and then quickly went downhill:

Although my parents thought my dog presentation was good, they saw it as an opportunity for a lesson: just because you make a presentation doesn't it will yield positive results.

We did not get a dog. Later, however, I managed to get a cat through more traditional means.

THAT was the day that I learned the effectiveness of good visual aids.

swimsuit shopping never works

At the end of every summer, swimsuits go on sale, and I decide it is a good idea to go swimsuit shopping.

Nevermind that I rarely go swimming, or that I live more than four hours away from any beach. Swimsuits are on sale! Time to finally buy a swimsuit that fits!

Until I realize…

THERE IS NO SWIMSUIT THAT FITS.

The longer you try on swimsuits, the worse it gets.

This can be quantified by graph:

Unless you manage to find a good swimsuit at the apex of the graph above, you are basically doomed to not find anything at all. Even if you do find something, staring at yourself critically in the mirror for hours will cause you to think it looks terrible.

Solution? I suggest carrying around one of those those funhouse mirrors. Then you will ALWAYS look good.

classification of inanimate objects

People always accuse me of mis-naming things.

But some things are confusing! I understand that I am supposed to see objects like this:

Also, that's what everyone else calls it.

But instead, I see objects like this:

Objects have many different characteristics. I find this confusing. Thanks to the SAT, I also often mis-name them.

When I was a middle schooler, it was decided that all the 8th graders should try their hands at the SAT. And so it was that I read a reading comprehension passage about Carl Linnaeus, and became fascinated with the accurate classification of objects.

This is actually a part of a larger chart, simplified here:

I usually use "popsicle" as the order name for "cold things on a stick," although it typically is also associated with the more traditional frozen-juice popsicle. My technical name for an ice cream bar is "popsicle ice cream" whereas the technical name for a traditional popsicle is "popsicle popsicle." I usually shorten this, unless specificity is needed, to just be "popsicle."

Classifying stuff this way makes me feel better, but it doesn't really help when people accuse me of mis-naming things.

Oh well.

Fourth of July!

It is the Fourth of July! No post today. Posting will resume as normally either tomorrow or Wednesday, depending on if the July 4th festivities are so awesome as to extend into July 5th.

endangered animals

I feel weird about endangered animals. On one hand, we are supposed to save them. On the other hand, a real one could eat us, and most likely did in pre-modern times.

As weird as I feel about this, I am sure that the endangered animals feel much weirder. After all, they were once our predators and could still destroy most of us in a fair fight. And yet now, they rely on us to save them from extinction.

Although I am sure that the animals appreciate our efforts to preserve their species, I am also sure we come off as a little patronizing. I mean, imagine if creature we currently prey on were suddenly so powerful that we relied on its mercy for our survival. Like if a lab accident created a form of intelligent, giant cow that grazed on houses and fast food restaurants, completely demolishing civilization as we knew it. And if a faction of those house-destroying giant cows decided they wanted to preserve our species by rebuilding mediocre houses in a poorly conceived fashion.

If that happened, we'd be all, "Man, I wish I didn't have to be grateful to those giant cows. Wasn't there a time when we ATE those cows?"

Guess what? That's probably how endangered animals feel. Awkwardly grateful. Belittled but thankful. Someday, when they finally out-populate humans and can again prey on us, they will be fully happy. But for now, they will have to content themselves with grumbling about us behind our backs.