internet frustration

I moved into my new apartment on Friday. The internet was supposed to be turned on but it was not, and the technician could not arrive until Monday, and therefore I spent the weekend without internet.

This was pretty inconvenient while I was trying to move in and coordinate with sources that can only be reached online. I created several really odd analogies around 1AM last night to explain how I felt.

Analogy One: Comcast is a witch that made me do manual labor.

Not having the internet means that instead of doing your work, checking your email, and finding out crucial information online, you must instead busy yourself by cleaning your apartment and unpacking things. This unpacking is fraught with the idea that if you had internet, you could take breaks to be on your computer doing things that were equally productive.

As for the witch thing, I don't know. Apparently I personify Comcast as wearing a pointy hat.

Analogy Two: Making transactions on your smartphone is like trying to play Monopoly with a tiny gnome.

The gnome wants to play Monopoly. But the board is way too small for your giant fingers! You must make purchases and transactions, but you keep putting hotels and houses on the wrong properties. You don't even know what the properties say. You have to ask the gnome to read things to you, but he's not very talkative, so you just struggle along by yourself, slowly hemorrhaging money.

Gnomes and witches are in league with each other. They have a club of pointy-hats.

Yes, the number of accidental amazon and peapod orders I had to cancel was pretty monumental.

Analogy Three: Maintaining a positive attitude during an internet outage when you are moving is as much of a no-win situation as having a staring contest with your cat.

You can never win a staring contest with your cat. Even if you think you won, the cat still thinks he won, and basically that is tantamount to losing. Even if your cat were giant or you were really small, and you were therefore on equal ground size-wise, the result would be no different.

But in the end, my apartment is unpacked, the internet is back, and my cat just lost the staring contest I tried to have with him. So everything is good.

That is all.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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!

migraine headache

Yesterday, I had the worst migraine headache I'd ever had.

I basically only get migraines when this happens:

So after I have finally finished my exam, or written that paper, or whatever else I was worried about, I want to be doing this:

But instead, my brain has me doing this:

The funny thing about my migraines is that they happen so infrequently that I don't notice the symptoms. It usually goes like this:

This has happened to me several times, and yet I still never see it coming. When it comes to migraines, I react the way I imagine a medieval peasant reacted to eclipses.

Watch out for migraines, people! Recognize the signs with this handy acronym!

tattoo

Many people think that tattoos are a terrible idea. That is what they keep telling me.

Actually, I think this flowchart is flawed. I have determined that getting a tattoo can be a really good idea in certain situations. Here are the situations in which getting a tattoo would be an advantage.

1) You have an evil twin.
An evil twin is always trying to impersonate the good twin. Sometimes, the evil twin has some defining feature that sets him apart, usually a mustache.

However, what if the evil twin were to shave his mustache? The good twin should get a secret, identifying mark that the evil twin does not know about. That way, when the evil twin tries to steal the good twin's identity, he will be quickly found out.

If you have an evil twin, I suggest you get a tattoo like this one:

2) You are really, really terrified that someday, you might get amnesia. [NOTE: THIS IS MY REASON.]
What if you wake up one day in a hospital with amnesia? The doctors can't describe you well, because your description is "Young, female, black hair, brown eyes." There's a million people described that way, so it is hard for anyone looking for you to find you. In that case, it would be useful to have some identifying mark so that your husband/parents/family who are looking for you can easily describe you to others. (Make sure it's something no one else has, otherwise it is useless!)

You have to get a really weird tattoo in this case, that your family can write on any missing person notices. I suggest one like this:

Yeah. Who doesn't like narwhals?

3) You are a farm animal.
Farm animals always have ear tattoos. I think this is so that farmers can tell them apart, but I'm not sure. Either way, you'd be really out of place if you were the only farm animal without a tattoo.

Farm animals usually have tattoos of numbers, but I think you should be more creative.

Here is the revised flowchart:

getting married is the same as colonizing mars

In college, we thought the idea of getting engaged was really terrifying.

This was partially because, according to all the Meg Ryan movies I watched as a child, finding your lifelong mate is supposed to be some amazing journey full of serendipitous circumstance. Like a chance-encounter-turned-masquerade between book-lovers (You've Got Mail). Or a slow realization of love for a life-long friend who keeps re-entering your life (When Harry Met Sally). And even if you end up with that person, THAT guy might be the wrong guy, and in fact the right guy is some dude on the radio you've never even met (Sleepless in Seattle).

Whenever I asked fellow movie-goers about why those two people in the movie ended up together, the answer was inevitably: "They are right for each other."

"'Right for each other?'" I'd echo in dismay, "I really have no idea what that means."

The answer? "You'll know when it happens."

The incredibly vague nature of this statement has led to a certain level of anxiety during first dates.

Also, it made me worry that if there hadn't been at least one serious, drama-generating fight worthy of amazing screen-time and great cinematography, we were NOT "right for each other."

Clearly, "right for each other" is an incredibly vague and stupid metric that has caused me some level of anxiety. I have come up with a more specific and better test.

First, a backstory.

I like to fantasize about colonizing Mars. When I was a nerdy child, I did not go to sporty outdoors camp like the rest of the kids. Instead I went to nerd camp and took a class called Astrobiology, where we talked about what it would be like to live in space and discover new life forms. We learned about things like the habitable zone, and the evolution of new life. We sculpted clay aliens. It was awesome, and it made me want to colonize Mars.

So, when I talked to my friends about marriage, I realized that marriage is basically like colonizing Mars.

Here is the situation:

You live on earth with everyone you know. And then people are like, "Oh hey, please go colonize Mars. We have everything set up for you, like a basic living environment and everything. You don't have to have any special skills to live there. And you can bring only one person with you."

The question you have to ask yourself is, who do you bring? Would you bring the person you are currently dating? Might you bring them, if things continued to go well for another year?

We always ask each other, "Am I right for this person? Are they right for me?" But that's super vague. That's not a real situation. Instead, I ask, "Would you bring them to Mars?" If you wouldn't bring the person to Mars, and you don't think you ever will, you probably shouldn't be dating them.

pet optimization does not work

I enjoy optimization, but I am not good at accounting for all of the variables. A hilarious exhibition of my non-optimal optimization skills occurred last year, when it was suggested that I get an animal for my one bedroom apartment.

It was hard to choose a pet. When animals are easy to take care of, they are not very entertaining. When they are hard to take care of, they are much more fun, but also more stressful. If you don't have unlimited time, it's hard to get a fun animal.

The relationship indicated by this scatter plot is shown in the best fit line below:

Cuttlefish, an outlier, has been eliminated.

If no other reason, I liked cats because they were very close to the origin of this graph, optimizing enjoyability and ease of care.

I decided to get a cat.

After further research about the different breeds of cats, I realized that felines have many variables that can be optimized to one's lifestyle. At the time, I decided that the primary three were level of shedding (light vs. heavy), coat length (short vs. long) and playfulness (calm vs. active). Here are what I considered to be optimal cat traits for my lifestyle.

I settled on a Devon Rex cat, which had a good deal of playfulness and moderate fluffiness, along with a nice, low-shedding coat.

The Devon Rex is a semi-hairless cat. Although their coat length can be similar to that of a normal cat, they do not have the same kind of long, obtrusive guard hairs that most cats shed when you pet them. Instead, they have a downy coat of soft under-hairs. They are intelligent and playful throughout their lifetimes. A Devon Rex kitten, I thought, would be much easier to care for than other kittens.

Unfortunately, I failed to take into account the "wild card" factor of cats. Cats cannot be optimized. Cats cannot be controlled. They seem to have an uncanny connection to the karmic element of the universe. Attempt to control a cat, and they lash out to destroy your well-laid plans. I tried to obtain a cat, because cats are fairly low maintenance. This is partially because I enjoy sleeping, and had been told repeatedly that cats also enjoy sleeping.

Unfortunately, my cat enjoys the following instead:

This is apparently pretty typical of some cats but not others. This disruptive feline behavior has rendered my pet optimization ineffective. There are too many variables in cats and other animals. From now on, I will stick to optimizing equations.