ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

So a while back I said something about how I wanted to compile some of the better searches people use to get to me.  I get especially excited when I’m on the first page for a particular search, even if it’s on something obscure like Google Zimbabwe.  There are a few main posts I have that seem to draw people more heavily than others, although I get a ton of searches from people searching for “an accountant’s day” or “daily life of an accountant” and I assume they all go away disappointed because I only wrote one post about that topic before I got tired of it, and they all wind up on something that probably isn’t helpful, unless they really do want to know about the personal life of an accountant, rather than a generalized picture of what things will be like in that career.

On that note, I got a hit from for how much hours do accoutant in a day? which at first I thought was pretty funny because, ha ha, their spelling and grammar is really bad.  Then I also got a hit from how long collage was for a accoutant.  Boy.  I’m pretty sure I could score a record for longest collage if I really wanted to, but I’d probably run out of magazines pretty quick since all we have around the house is a few issues of The Atlantic.  What’s with people not being able to spell accountant?  I mean, it could be a typo, but I find that personally I’m much more prone to “accocunt” than anything else if I’m typing too fast.  I have to really watch myself so I don’t accidentally e-mail people something that will make them think, “Cunt?  Oh, my.”

I am on the first page for the following searches:

• gorilla hand ashtray on Google
• raccoons in trash on Google.
• little miss accountant shit on Yahoo!  Looking for office scat porn, or just female accountant equipment?
• in the heimlich maneuver, the first is pressed into the victims abdomen with quick thrusts at 45 degree angle on Google.  I don’t know why they searched when they already knew the answer.
• what’s fun about being an accountant on Yahoo!
• universal sign of choking while in bed on Google. 
  

And the second page for:

• i had to fuck an accountant on Google.  Well.  Don’t do us any favors.

I am #1 for the following searches:

• “bobby flay” “fucking mick” on Google.
• hey hey you you get out of my life on Google. 
• fat heart and nice raccoons on Google.  I love this.  I don’t even know what it means, but I love it.

I am the only source on the entire internet for the search:

• “i hate reed diamond” on Google.  This one thrilled me so much that I did an IP lookup on the person to see if maybe it could be Reed Diamond himself, but it was from Chicago.  Oh, well.  I doubt most actors are Googling around to find people who hate them.

I get a lot of hits for the travel pillow tutorial I wrote. Most are really what you’d expect, like “travel pillow how to”, or “car pillow directions”.  But earlier I got a hit for “make man pillow“.  I’m pretty sure it’s just because I specify it’s from a men’s shirt, but I’m curious what they envisioned when they typed this into Google.  What criteria must be satisfied for a pillow to be considered a man pillow?

Then lately I’ve been getting a lot of hits on the thing I wrote about Peta’s recent “sea kitten” campaign, most of which are people doing image searches for stuff like “ugliest kitten”.   One person searched for “babypuffer fish“, which in itself isn’t all that funny, but then I clicked through to the search page and realized that this is the picture that turned up for those keywords:

No wonder they clicked on this.  Any fool can see it’s no baby pufferfish.

Interestingly, I feel fine today even though I felt maudlin and pensive yesterday. Since I don’t remember being like this before, I think this supports my hypothesis that all this is a hormonal thing to be gotten through. I hope this isn’t how I naturally am and I just forgot because I was on the pill for seven years.

My coworker friend suggested that I find out about one of the IUDs that deliver low dose hormones to a localized area, but when I looked on the website they were pretty emphatic that IUDs are only for women with children. Not sure why, so I’ll ask a doctor sometime.

Thankfully, I feel fine about accounting again today. Also, exciting news: I am typing this on my phone on a brief break. I never use my work computer for blogging. It seems disrespectful somehow.

I’ll check back in when I think of something, anything, interesting to discuss. It seems unfair to subject you to more posts like the one last night. Thanks also to the people who actually contacted me to find out when I’d be writing again. How sweet and flattering to pretend you have nothing better to do with yourselves than listen to my self-absorbed palaver!

Just kidding.  But if I had to make a list of the things I wanted least to do over the last month, jumping out a window would admittedly be pretty high up on it.  Also high up on that list would be writing of any kind.  I just haven’t been in the right mood.  I guess I’m lucky I don’t have a job requiring anything of me beyond a continual robotic process, since I’m normally low on creativity anyway, and have been running on fumes for a while now.

So since I literally still cannot muster the inspiration to talk about anything in an interesting way, here’s what pathetic garbage I have to offer you: a boring ass list of things I did for the last month.

A few weeks ago we went to my husband’s grandmother’s 90th birthday party, which was out of town, so we spent the weekend with his dad and his dad’s wife.  There was a nice picnic and some nice brisket and while I was there his dad’s wife and I went to a yard sale and I found some interesting things there.  I found a collection of 1950s cooking manuals, which I bought because of the novelty, and I also found a pattern for Barbie clothes that I recognized because when I was little I had all the clothes from it.  My husband’s cousin’s family was in town for the weekend as well, so once I determined that they were not anti-Barbie I decided to make some stuff for their little girl, who turned out to be agreeable and cute.

I used the Barbie pattern to make some of the clothes I remembered.  The best one was always this hooded cloak.  My mom made it in a sort of dark maroon velvet and trimmed it with ribbon, so it was very dramatic looking and was perfect for basically any type of fantasy pretending.  It could be a princess cloak as easily as a wizard cloak.  It was soft and lovely and draped just right.

I found a red velvet remnant for mine, but it wasn’t quite as nice as the one I had as a kid.  Although, it did turn out rather nicely.  It took a long time to hand bind the edges with quarter-inch ribbon.  A lot of Fray Check was used.  You might note from these pictures that I own an odd number of Barbie dolls for a 27 year old.  This is the first time they’ve been taken out in years, though.

I also made two dresses before I lost steam.  I may regain my motivation at some point, but I didn’t want to push my luck.  I’ve been doing a little better than usual at finishing things that I start, possibly because I haven’t been on the computer as much.

What else?  I found this ad for a salmon sale at Hen House in the weekly circular and thought it was unspeakably strange and couldn’t begin to guess what made them believe it made sense or was a good idea.  Ladies and gentlemen, what the fuck?  My husband hates this picture and probably will stop reading the post after he gets this far.

We also upgraded our phones and we both got the T-Mobile G-1 Android phone, popularly known as the “Google” phone, since Google was the developer of the mobile operating system, which is completely open source.  The cool thing being, whoever wants to and knows how can develop applications for it.  I, the person who has long pshawed at the legions of Blackberry owners, have been sucked in.  And I have begun to take interest in, of all things, Twitter.

So…people change.  I guess I have a little crow to eat for feeling superior to people who use that service (I still refuse to call them Twitterers or their creations “Tweets”).  I have to admit it’s still pointless, but I now have joined those who use their phones to let the world know when they are stuck in traffic, enjoying a latte, or whatever other inane daily activities in which they engage.

I don’t feel like talking a lot about the features, but I have to say the G1’s touch screen rocks and I really like it.  I’m glad I have this instead of a Blackberry, and I’m also glad I have this instead of an iPhone.

I got an A on the paper I wrote about people who won’t vaccinate their kids for fear of autism for my critical thinking class.

I got an account on a website called Daytum that lets you track variables and display them in graphic format.  I sort of enjoy it.  It’s also interesting to browse other people’s displays, not because they themselves are interesting, but because I enjoy seeing what things they considered important enough to track.  Lots of people like to track their beverages.  More people than you’d think like to track how frequently they piss and shit.

I began to think for a while that I might be depressed, but I think it’s just the hormonal thing ironing itself out.  It comes and goes.  Just when I start to think I’ll cave in on myself like a dying star, it lifts suddenly.  I’ve stopped sharing my mood changes with people because I think it probably makes me seem a bit daffy and I’d prefer they think something else about me.

I also began to think about how much I’d like to win the lottery and…do what?  I may not be terribly enthusiastic about accounting at the moment, but the only thing I could think of that I’d rather do was stupid shit like raising sheep or being a chef.  What?  And clearly if you’re feeling low, it’s probably not the appropriate time to attempt any life decisions.  I mostly like being an accountant.  I think it’s rare that people get to make good money at something they’re truly passionate about.  Besides, I’m pretty much locked in to this career.  Considering the time and money I invested in the degree, which I’m still going to be paying off for years to come, it would be asinine to stop.  I’m dreading preparing for the CPA exam.  Maybe that’s why I don’t feel enthusiastic about things right now, because I don’t want to go back into school mode.

I learned how to make an omelet, which is something I’d always been embarrassed about never having done.  It is easy and now probably counts as the fastest thing I know how to make.  So on Monday I made myself an omelet filled with leftover Pad Thai.  For some reason I love to eat Asian noodle leftovers mixed with egg.  I have always been this way.  True fact.

I also thought about my 101 things list, which I haven’t taken much interest in for a long time now.  I think that after I made the list, a lot of things happened to change my priorities.  When my brother-in-law died, a lot of shit that I thought was important shrunk and didn’t matter to me anymore.  Having a list wasn’t a big deal to me over this past year.  Some of the things fell by the wayside and some of them were just sort of informally replaced.  I hit a couple of the high points.  I think I’ll take it down because it isn’t really serving me much purpose right now.

I feel like I want to do something with myself.  With my life.  Whatever.  Just something beyond being this person who goes to work and does accounting and reads books and whatever other pointless shit I use to fill my life.  What is important?  I feel like I used to know, but have lost track of it somehow.

Recently my coworker friend mentioned to me that she had been loaned the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon and I was excited about this because it’s one of my favorite books and I have read it many times.  I like everything about it.  Yes, including the cover, since my affinity for pleasant cover design was recently discussed.

Anyway, today we were talking on the phone and she brought up how on page 62 there is a discussion of a probability problem that most people have a hard time understanding, and the main character explains it a little, but not very much in depth.  She wanted my opinion on it because she wasn’t sure if she agreed with the solution he provides.  I haven’t read the book in over a year, so I couldn’t remember what she meant.  But when I went and checked it out, I remembered right away the problem she was talking about.  It is a very simple scenario, but difficult to understand from a mathematical standpoint.  The solution we think is right at first is not right at all, even though it seems to make sense.  Here is a generic description of the problem, and then I’ll explain why it is so confusing.

You are a contestant on a gameshow.  The host shows you three doors and explains that behind one door is a car and behind the other two doors are goats.  He asks you to choose a door.  You do so, but they do not open the door yet.  Instead, the host opens a different door and shows you that a goat is behind it.  You are then given the option to change the door that you picked.  The host asks if you would like to change your mind and pick another door.

What should you do?

This is more commonly known as the “Monty Hall Problem”, and I didn’t know at the time, but it is a famous logic problem.  The first time I read the book I made the same mistake most people do. I thought, the probability is 1 in 2 that switching will yield the car and since you have eliminated a goat, you are now choosing between a car and a goat.  But the answer is that it increases your odds of winning the car if you switch.  At first, this made no sense and I halfway didn’t believe it.  But the book has a diagram on page 65 that displays all possible outcomes (with only 3 doors, there are only six possible outcomes, so this is do-able) and from that I could see that it was not 50/50 odds.  I even made a couple diagrams of my own and went through all the possibilities, but I could see that he was right.

But what drove me crazy then was that I could see his explanation appeared correct, but I couldn’t understand WHY it worked.  It seemed to have as much logic as gypsy spells.  I could clearly see from flow charting the whole thing that there was a measurable advantage to switching, but this didn’t make sense to me at all.  I had to stop reading the book to look up information online so I could understand it more clearly.  One interesting thing about studying this problem carefully was that it made me understand probabilities much better than when I was taught them in school.  The whole thing is very confusing and most people, including mathematicians, do not answer correctly on the first try, partly because it seems so simple.  Also, most explanations of why this works rely heavily on formulaic explanations, which you can puzzle out and make sense of if you have a head for math, and which make you feel entirely stupid if you don’t.

But in words, here is why the 1 in 2 thinking is wrong mathematically even though it seems to make sense.  It is very confusing because when we find out that one door is not what we want, it seems like it is eliminated as a choice and that makes us think the odds are 1 in 2.

When you begin, each door has a 1 in 3 probability for having the car and a 2 in 3 probability for having a goat.  It might help to not think of the goat as a goat.  The only thing important about the goat is that it’s not a car.  So your two possible outcomes are CAR or NOT CAR.

With probabilities, the odds change depending on how many individual units of potential outcome you are looking at.  In this situation, the odds for one particular door to have a certain outcome is the number of instances of that outcome, divided by the total number of doors.  Since our possible outcomes are CAR, NOT CAR, NOT CAR:

So when you choose one door, the door you picked has 1/3 odds for CAR.

Then the host reveals that one of the other two doors is NOT CAR.

If the host had not revealed anything, there would be no reason to change doors.  Your choices would still be:

Pretend you picked Door 1.  It has 1/3 odds for CAR.  So does each of the other two doors as an individual unit.  If the host gave you the option to switch doors at this point, there would be no statistical advantage to changing, since all your other options have equal odds for CAR.

Now we know that Door 3 is not what we want.  But here’s the thing.  Knowing the outcome of Door 3 changes nothing about its mathematical probability of being CAR.

The thing that makes this so confusing is that Door 3 still retains its original probability characteristics of 1/3 for CAR, but to most people this is not intuitive.  Most people approach this problem with the assumption that knowing the outcome for any door would make its probability 0 for CAR and that its probability of CAR would transfer to the other doors.  They think that knowing they don’t want Door 3 means they are only choosing between two options:  Door 1 and Door 2.  But in actuality, nothing has changed.  Technically Door 3 is still an option.  The only thing that has changed is that Door 3 is no longer a desirable option.

We still have the exact same options we did before:

So even though our natural intuition makes us want to think we are choosing between two options since we no longer want one of the original three options, we really aren’t.   Practically speaking, we have two because we won’t pick Door 3.  Mathematically speaking, we still have three options.  Since we do know that we don’t want Door 3, we can group it together with Door 2, thus sort of artificially giving ourselves two options to choose between.

But since the reveal of Door 3 has not actually changed anything about the setup or actual probabilities of the doors, these are not two equal options and therefore the odds are not 1/2.  Your options are:

When you realize that of your “two” options, one has 1/3 odds for CAR and the second actually has 2/3 odds for CAR, it becomes more clear that you should switch to the second group with the higher odds.  Without the reveal, you would have no advantage because even if you picked Option 2 because of its higher odds, you wouldn’t know which of the two members of that group to choose.  Since you know that Door 3 is verifed to be NOT CAR, you can comfortably choose Door 2 instead and enjoy the benefit of its membership in the 2/3 group.

When I finished writing all this out, my husband asked me what I wanted to do for the night.  I said I was going to look up some books about calculus on the library website and think about relearning some of the things I forgot from school.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

“You’re just an interesting specimen, that’s all.”

Saturday my husband and I were sitting around watching TV and we watched a movie that I normally would have no intention of seeing, let alone disclosing to anyone that I’d seen it.   It was called You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and my husband and I were both thoroughly ashamed of ourselves for sort of enjoying it.  Then yesterday the unexpected Zohan suprise prompted us to watch another Adam Sandler movie, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which also wasn’t nearly as bad as I would have expected.

But what’s weird is that both of these movies made me cry a little, and not in the sense that I would cry if I had to watch the movie Beverly Hill Chihuahua, or whatever that awful movie was with Mike Myers and his giant head and a bunch of Hindi shit.  No, I was moved to tears by two comedies whose entire plots were, in Ebert’s words, a “skeleton for sight gags“.

So normally I’m not quite that sensitive about chubby firefighters with insurance problems.  Or the sight of John Turturo in a crazy Palestinian headdress.  And it got me thinking, WAIT WAIT WAIT…was all that anxious shit on Friday just some kind of crazy hormonal rampage because I haven’t evened out yet?  I mean.  It sure felt real at the time.

Anyway, I now consider the whole episode strongly suspect.  I knew at the time it wasn’t so like me to get all weepy like that, but I really thought I was having some kind of bizarre nihilistic epiphany.  Damn.  Now I can’t believe I was so emotionally invested in the whole thing.  We’re watching Pulp Fiction right now and I’m entertained, but I feel no particular emotion beyond interest in what I see on the screen. Hmm.

In other news, we bought a new Frigidaire range this weekend because the old one shit the bed last weekend.  It boils water at the speed of light and it has an oven big enough to actually cook a turkey in.

I took this picture because it was such a novelty to see a large range in the living room.  Also because the two front burners look like googly eyes and the handle looks like a little smile.  Goodbye, friend!

Sorry, I did a shit job of trying to explain this weird mental process I went through on Friday.  I think almost everyone who read it thought that

a) I hate humanity and think there is no hope for us as a race
b) I am some kind of nihilist
c) There is no possibility for progress, so why try?

Reading back through, I guess I sort of didn’t explain my final conclusion very well.  I felt great afterward, like I had just given myself permission not to feel terrible about our human failings anymore.  It was an optimistic feeling, like if I wasn’t being held back by my disappointment in human failings and being upset that I can’t just wave a wand and have people be magically cooperative beings, then I would have room for so much more positive action and growth in my life.  Somehow I managed to communicate none of that in what I wrote yesterday.  I sound sixteen.

Realizing that it’s not necessarily a terrible thing to be relatively helpless to change other people made me decide that it’s OK to relieve myself of the burden of constantly thinking in circles about it.  Working on being better in their own lives and in their own small circles of influence is enough for most people.  It wouldn’t be a terrible thing if I did that, too – instead of accomplishing little because I’m too caught up in my own depressing mental gyrations and then making myself suffer over it to boot.

This is going to sound nuts.

But I have decided I have to stop reading The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby because it is depressing me so much that I literally was moved to tears by it.  I don’t know exactly even how to describe what happened.  In a way it’s extremely strange that I can read novels that are emotionally engaging and in which terrible things happen to the characters, yet not be bothered by it, but I get three chapters into a book that analyzes the socio-intellectual structure of America from colonial times on and it brings on such a forceful attack of…existential anxiety..?…that I cannot bring myself to read any further.  Yesterday I was trying to explain to my husband why I found the book mildly depressing, and after bursting out with my childish frustrations, I realized I was starting to cry and perhaps “overwhelmingly depressing” might have been a better way to put it.

I don’t think it’s a depressing book.  It’s actually rather dry, and I think most people would read it, agree or disagree in part or total with it, and move on.  I also don’t think it’s the book by itself that upset me.  I think it just turned out to be the culmination of my upset over things that I think about all the time and can’t settle my mind about.  But let me try to explain.

I picked up this book because I had heard of Jacoby and knew she was a prominent secularist here, and also because I thought it would be interesting.  And it is interesting.  Jacoby is clearly much more liberal than I am, so I didn’t agree with all of her assumptions or statements.  So far the book simply discusses the history of American intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, how religion frequently plays a role in this, and also addresses the way in which society segregates itself on an ideological basis.  This is not a new development in human behavior, but one thing that stuck out to me was Jacoby’s discussion about the fact that overwhelmingly, most people’s intellectual and ideological objectives are limited to just seeking validation of their own personal preconceptions.

Then yesterday I had a long discussion with my husband about two other important things I’d been thinking about and the personal conclusions I’d reached on these topics after ruminating on them for a week or so, and since we were having this interesting analytical discussion anyway, as an aside I asked something like, “What do you think makes people the way they are, anyway?”  Without waiting for his reply, I kept talking and more and more questions tumbled out.

• Why are people happy existing in a subaware state?
• Why can’t people work together on things when the outcome would clearly provide mass benefit if people would only cooperate?
• Why do so few people even attempt to look at themselves with any trace of objectivity?
• Why are we doomed to constantly go through the same historical patterns of behavior, both as a society and in our personal lives?
• On a smaller scale, why aren’t humans better at remembering our past mistakes and learning to apply the lessons to other parts of life in a more general sense?

I wasn’t exactly asking why and expecting a real answer for any of these things.  In a way it’s juvenile to even pose these thoughts as questions, since they have no real answer.  They float around in my head and sometimes they bob to the surface and make me uncomfortable as I turn them over and come to no conclusions. I continued babbling and a ton of things that I hadn’t even articulated to myself were realized as they flew out of my mouth.  I suddenly understood, only as I was explaining it, why I hate politics.  How I can’t stand liberals because they have such good ideas that would work perfectly if only people would do what they were supposed to, but since people won’t, these plans are mostly doomed to fail.  How I can’t stand conservatives because they have such terrible ideas about what makes people fundamentally good and bad or even what makes people a family to begin with.  And both sides are equally screwed, because the point of politics is to attempt to change things, and on some kind of fundamental level, society as a mass organism does not want change.  People do not want to be challenged by new ideas.  People do not want to listen to someone else’s opposing view and pick out the good and bad and see what they can take away from it.  All they want is interdependent social relationships, more material possessions, and to have their existing beliefs reinforced by everything they encounter.

Having put this into words, that people can not or will not do the things it would actually take to accomplish social goals like ending poverty or eliminating racism, I suddenly felt indescribably bleak.  And I felt childishly angry that this stupid book even existed.  What is the point of talking about anti-intellectualism and having these lofty liberal goals and perspectives when the selfishness, indifference, laziness and greed that has plagued the human race for all of history is still there? And I felt even more upset that lots of people know about these problems and think they have solutions for them. Just like other animals, we are pointlessly destructive and selfish organisms attempting to act in our own best interest.  Our big brains and our lofty social theories are no match for our basic biological limitations.

And I had never really thought about it precisely in these terms before, but as we talked I began to realize what an oddity I am for constantly scrutinizing my own behavior, motives, and actions.  I thought about some of the people I know who just float pleasantly through life without giving these weighty subjects any thought, and then I thought about how weird and pointless they would find it if they knew that I exist in a bizarre, constant hyperanalytical state where I hypothetically work things out to see what I think the impact of my behavior is on other people, society, etc.

After a lot of one-sided explanation I was finally able to articulate this to my husband.  And his response was, “What measurable benefit has this brought you?”

And I realized that for all the importance I place on self examination, I am fundamentally no better off than the people who never give any of this shit a second thought.  Isn’t it important, I argued, to understand things?  How can we take away any meaning without thinking critically about, well, everything?

“Do people need understanding to have meaning?  Does that make them happy?” he asked.

Well.  Don’t they?  Or…don’t they.

“I think some people are capable of looking at things the way they really are,” he said, “but haven’t really thought about it.  It would represent such a radical change in the way they conduct their lives–their existences, actually–that most people wouldn’t see any value in it considering the effort it would require.  It doesn’t come naturally to everyone.”

Much later, I asked him, “This feeling I’m experiencing right now, is this what they refer to as existential anxiety?”

“Probably,” he said.  “Although frankly, I think most people get this out of the way when they’re much younger.”

“Does everybody have this?” I asked.  I felt unstead.  My entire worldview had suddenly been rocked.   Since, weirdly, apparently it was a huge surprise to me that other people might not get much benefit out of critical thinking even if they could be taught it in the first place.

“Certainly not,” he said.

I stared at him and I thought and thought about what he had said.

“Also, some people just aren’t smart enough to think about that type of thing,” he added. “Still other people see problems, and think that defining a problem makes it solvable.”

I sat quietly and thought about all of this while a few stray tears of frustration crept down my face.  Then.

Two things happened.  One of these is that I suddenly gained a new perspective on my place in the universe.  I am small.  It is big.  Clearly I knew this before.  But I suddenly understood that the way I am does not make me better or happier in any way when compared with other people.  It only makes me myself.  Chances are astronomical that I will not make a difference in society.  I will live my life and die one day, and in the end my memory will probably not live on very far past the people who knew me.  I am not unique or special like I want to be.  I don’t have to be morally impeccable, because I can’t be.  And…unless I want to continue being miserable and struggling with these things, I need to be OK with understanding all this. Everyone lives like this, with few exceptions.  I don’t mean I won’t still strive for personal improvement, but now it seems nonproductive to try so hard to be good, especially when it probably doesn’t ever occur to other people that they even need to do better than they already are.

The other thing is that I have decided that there isn’t as much value in some of my constant philosophizing on social topics as I always thought.  Certainly it doesn’t necessarily make me happy in its own right, unless you consider my false sense of intellectual superiority the same as happiness.  And maybe I did for look at it that way a long time.  Really, I don’t know that a lot will change about me.  I honestly don’t think I am capable of changing the way my mind works, and I enjoy picking something apart and looking at its component pieces.  But I think I should discard this idea that I will derive my life’s meaning from attempting to reassemble those pieces into some kind of elusive universal truth, particularly since no such truth probably even exists.

I don’t know why it took me so long to have this epiphany that (1) human beings are deeply flawed, (2) I can do nothing to change this, and (3) in light of those two, it is not necessarily helpful or meaningful to endlessly analyze the factual aspects of what is wrong with humanity.  On some level, it is enough to observe that we are the way we are, and it’s OK to stop with that.

To be realistic, I don’t think much will truly change about my life as a result of having my mind totally blown yesterday, but here are a couple of things:

(1) I will never stop thinking ideas and mental challenges are a good thing, but now I think that to a degree, some of them are of limited utility to my personal life.  It makes me sad to dwell on topics that have no solution, or for which a solution would require something that humans in a group are not capable of, so it seems a bit pointless to churn endlessly over these and upset myself.  I’m not a policymaker and I have very little impact on the world.  It’s OK for me to stop pursuing ideas for the sake of ideas if they are making me unhappy. In the scheme of things, it won’t make a difference if I close my ears to some of these discussions, and I’ll probably live longer if I’m not constantly experiencing alternate exasperation and outrage over the failings of humanity.  It’s human nature to try.  It’s also human nature to fail.  It’s sort of beautiful if you look past certain aspects of it.

(2) Last year I talked about my frustration over the election and about how frustrated I was about the fact that no candidate represents my views adequately.  I have decided that I will not vote anymore if my only reason is a vague sense of social obligation.

Love you guys, thanks for reading.  I know it’s possible nobody made it through all this heavy duty shit, but for some reason it does me good to get things sorted out in my head.  Once I can untangle something to my satisfaction and put it away in a drawer in my head, I start to feel better about it.  Just like I do today.

Here’s the deal.  I drank the three beers in the refrigerator and then my husband needed soda from Quik Trip, so I decided to go with him and buy a pack of Boulevard there.  So now I’m working on my fourth beer and eating a Three Musketeers bar – delicious! – while my husband and I are watching All the King’s Men and marveling over how bad everyone’s fake southern accent is.  Especially James Gandolfini, who sounds like a 45 year old man with down syndrome who has never left Jersey City in his life.  I don’t know if I can stand to heard Sean Penn say “a-rith-a-met-tic” one more time.

I drove home from work today in torrential rain, which often doesn’t bother me because I just drive steadily and concentrate on what I am doing, but I was listening to the radio and hearing songs I didn’t like.  The reason this is important in a situation like this is that if I were to get in some kind of terrible accident, how terrible would it be if the last music I ever heard was something like Hall & Oates or Steve Miller Band?  I guess I might be able to live with the Hall and Oates more than the Steve Miller.  How many people in this world died and the last song they ever heard was “Abracadabra”?  How depressing.

Not to worry!  I drove carefully through the rain and finally “Benny and the Jets” came on and I knew everything would be OK.  I squinted through the windshield and putzed down the empty highway and shouted, “Buh buh buh BENNY” along with the radio until I pulled into my driveway.

I’m not feeling organized tonight.  So here are some things I was thinking about:

If I couldn’t live in my own time anymore and I had to pick another decade of American history to live in, I’d pick the 1920s.  That way the Spanish flu is out of the way and I’d have some time to prepare before the depression hits.

If I had to have an accent, I would want Russian (or Ukranian) for a foreign accent.  For a domestic American accent, I don’t know.  It would be pretty funny to go around with a crazy affected Hamptons socialite accent.  Nevermind all that.  My real accent is a neutral Midwestern one with a mild nasal twang on some of my vowels.  But I’ve meet people from western Kansas who thought that wolves were “wooves”.  Out in those parts you have to make sure you don’t run into wooves when you’re warshing stuff down by the crick.

Actually I’d probably have a lot of fun if I had a Russian accent.  I would go around saying stuff like “Please to meet!” to people.  Well.  Maybe not.  Maybe my soviet hardships would have dulled my sense of humor.

I love haiku poetry and I wrote these while I was at work today:

Shopping at thrift stores
Satisfies my need for both
Class and elegance

As far as I know
Neighbor’s cat was never spayed
Howls too much for that

Tonight we were going to have barbecued chicken pizza for dinner and I came home and putzed around and around 6:30 I decided I didn’t feel like cooking dinner and consulted my husband to see if he was interested in getting some carryout.  We discussed briefly and then settled on Bob Evans, which is more or less my favorite chain restaurant of all time.  I know how lame that is.  Bob Evans is basically a place where old people go to eat chicken and noodles while they complain about the young.  But seriously, I pretty much never get tired of eating there. I have eaten at Bob Evans restaurants throughout the country.  Especially the one right by the Detroit airport.  I used to eat there every time I flew out of Detroit, even if my flight was not logically scheduled close to a meal time.

Which is really stupid if you think about it, because Bob Evans is all over the heartland states and it’s not like Friendly’s or Tim Horton’s where you can only find them in certain parts of the country.  The Bob Evans in Merriam is literally like six minutes away from my house.  I have to say, that’s one of the reasons I eat there so much.  But the other reason is they are so good.

Anyway, we got to the restaurant and I went inside to pay for the food.  After I paid and went to the counter to pick up my food, one of the managers came over and said slowly, “Hey…were you in here last night?”

Well.  Yeah.  I was. I said, “Yeah…I guess I eat here a lot.”

“That’s great!” she said.

Encouraged, I began to tell the Bob Evans employees how much I love their restaurant.  This news was received with considerable enthusiasm.  “I defy any of those other family restaurants to meet the Bob Evans standard!” I said.  The guy who had boxed our dinner rolls up nodded happily.  “I will never eat at Perkins again as long as Bob Evans is around!” I told them. Then I told them my thing about how I have eaten at multiple Bob Evans restaurants around the country and I am passionately fond of them even though I normally do not like chain restaurants very much.

The employees behind the counter seemed inordinately happy about this.  The manager said, “It’s great that you like Bob Evans so much…here, have a preview of our new summer menu!  It’s not out yet, but now you’ll know!”  She seized a real menu and gave it to me.  Seriously.  One of the nice laminated ones.  Not a carryout menu. In fact, this is one of the only times that something like this has ever happened to me.

“Bob Evans for life!” I told them.  The guy behind the counter used his hands to make a little “E” shaped gang symbol to represent the Bob Evans solidarity we shared.

Bob Evans loves me and I loves Bob Evans.  Our mutual affection is stronger than ever.

Also.  This is kind of sick, but I really want to try “apple pie fries”.  What is that?  I don’t even know.  The important thing is, fried fruit?

This is going to be obnoxious and mostly just a lot of partially unfounded complaining.  Also, I talk about female anatomy and touch base on…the stuff it does.  If you hate that, steer clear.  You were warned.

In March when I went for my “well woman” exam, AKA the one involving my tender lady parts being violated with a metal gynocological instrument, I asked the doctor about something I’d been experiencing and was told it could be a side effect of the pill.  She suggested that I try going off the pill for a while and see how things went.  So I did that and now I am facing my first non-pharmaceutically assisted menstrual cycle in years.  I have to say that, having spent a long time now without having to worry about my complexion, buying anything more powerful than “junior-lites”, and the uncertainty of life when you don’t know exactly what every 28 days will bring, this gig does not suit me at all.  And by “this gig”, I mean, “my body in its natural state”.  My side effect may go away when things even out a bit, but so far the main upside is that I am no longer paying $35 a month to forget how painfully female my body is.

Anyway, the whole thing has gotten me ruminating on the other things I don’t like about being female.  Generally I’m all right with it, but there are times I think it’s so awfully unfair that I’m not a man.  At least I’m still white and middle class.  I can’t complain too much.  Still, here are the things I don’t like, in no particular order:

Female anatomy. Not to be indelicate and mention a lot of stuff that you all know about but don’t like to talk about, but here’s the deal.  It’s all up in you, so it’s hard to tell if anything goes wrong with it.  It’s right by your other organs, so if it hurts you can’t always tell if it’s your dreadful uterus acting up, or you just need more fiber.  It requires more maintenance than the male equipment. It also points down, so gravity is never a girl’s friend.  You could also sum up this whole thing as: “Why didn’t we evolve with a menstrual bladder instead of our current nonsensical arrangement?”

Femininity as a social construct related to our born sex. What exactly is femininity, anyway, other than a pleasant sounding euphemism for being womanish?  Is it lipstick?  Is it heels and a skirt?  I like that stuff sometimes, but I hate feeling like it’s expected of me.  Also, have you ever heard “womanish” used in the nonpejorative sense?  My husband is okay on this front, but I’ve met men before who thought that women had a duty to look and act feminine.  Like, what?  I heard a guy in an airport once tell the woman with him that he prefers it when she wears makeup, because it makes her seem much more feminine.  I still don’t understand why she didn’t physically attack him.  He was wearing a pink shirt.  While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, I don’t always wear makeup and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, either.  Why didn’t she respond that she prefers him not to dress like an easter toy, because it makes him look much more masculine?

When men have the expectation that we are supposed to be “feminine”, I tend to wonder if what they are really looking for is a certain type of submissive genuflection to their maleness.  Is disagreeing unfeminine?  Is it really about lipstick and a certain way of dressing and accessorizing, or is it an attitude they are looking for?  Don’t get me wrong, one of the main reasons I’m not a feminist is that I don’t agree with the man-hating bitch-on-wheels approach to gender “equality”.  But seriously, I’ve never met a man who believed that women should be feminine whose masculinity couldn’t be criticized as well.  It’s obnoxious to think that someone’s sex means they have to exemplify some gender ideal.  Men like that make me want to cut my hair off and wear only coveralls.  But I have to look nice for work, so I’m still looking for the perfect pair of business professional coveralls.  Meanwhile, I hope my lack of femininity makes their peckers wilt.

Female hormones.  Hormones mess up our sex drive.  Hormones cause us to stand in front of the freezer at 11 PM on a Wednesday, jealously guarding the ice cream that we are eating out of a cardboard container.  Hormones give us pimples.  Hormones make us upset sometimes, and men figure this out, which makes them too quick to think that every time we are upset it is caused by hormones.  So in this sense hormones make it harder for us to be taken seriously.  Hormones make us known as the “weaker sex”.  Hormones make us gain weight even if we ate lettuce for 3 days.  Hormones write on the bathroom stalls at work and then lie about who did it.  Hormones shoot staples all over the carpet and don’t vaccuum and then let people walk barefoot over it.  Hormones don’t wash up after they pee and then they shake your hand anyway.  You get the idea.

Female accoutrements.  Since we have the anatomical maintenance issues and other trappings of our gender, these require various things to be kept near us in general.  At the very least, most of us prefer to keep a feminine product available in case of emergency.  What more convenient place to keep these things than a purse?  Yet, what more inconvenient pain in the ass thing to haul around with you than a purse?  If you’re shopping and you set it down for a moment, you might forget it and some jerk will buy $300 of power tools with your credit card.  If you want to walk around someplace and just do some sightseeing, you have this stupid thing to carry with you and your hands aren’t free to take pictures or pet strangers’ dogs or whatever. Sure, there’s the long shoulder strap option, but then it hurts your shoulder and it’s heavy and it slaps against your hip when you walk.

I suspect that the reason some women like to buy purses all the time is they are looking for the perfect one that will solve all these problems.  The error in this approach is that the perfect purse is actually a wallet.  Men may never realize how lucky they have it.

Women’s Work.  I just thought of this because we used to have a friend when we lived in Lawrence who had a friend in the military and he wanted to send this friend cookies.  He randomly decided that I should be the one to pay for and bake the cookies.  When asked why, he figured that a girl should do it.  I was annoyed, but agreed to do it.  Then he ate them all before ever sending any and asked me to make more.  And seriously?  Ghirardelli chocolate chips are expensive.  I didn’t agree to make more cookies, but if I had I would have used the Always Save kind in the toxic yellow bag that are made out of, I don’t know, dust and brown coloring.  That’s all I had to say.  My husband isn’t very sexist like that so I can’t complain too much from personal experience.

Conclusion 1. I hate people having expectations that I will fulfill certain gender-based roles.  That said, I still would rather cook and wash dishes than cut grass and paint things.  I just hate the expectation that I’m responsible for these things as a female.

Conclusion 2. I probably do lots of shit that is annoying too and I’m just not thinking of it now.  It’s OK.  Sometimes I’m just a hypocrite like that. But at least I don’t make my husband carry my purse.  It’s more polite just to lock it in the trunk and pocket some cash.

Conclusion 3.  I don’t like women who act like simpering idiots.  Even though it might have seemed like I was picking on men, I tend to prefer “average male” attitude to “average female” attitude.  Especially the ones who get married to get attention, get pregnant to get attention, buy a house to get attention, etc. etc.

Conclusion 4. I love advanced math and my husband hates it.

My accountant friend deserves a partial byline on here for giving me the starting kernel for this post when she e-mailed me this morning with her thoughts on the concept “perseverance”.  She had been thinking, she explained, about people who think that perseverence can or should be applied in the context of social relationships (romantic ones in particular):

With most things in life, we are told to never give up, keep trying until you get what you want, no pain no gain, etc.  I wonder if people incorrectly apply this philosophy to social situations.  [Indian lady] may think that if she keeps trying, it will all work out with you.  A man may think that if he keeps asking a particular woman out that she will eventually say yes.  The reality is that people either like you or they don’t.  Perseverance will not help.

In general, I think a lot of the things we are taught that stem from “conventional wisdom”, such as “never give up”, often get things all wrong and lead people in the wrong direction.  Are there times when we should keep going and refuse to give up or stop in the face of the hurdles that spring up in our paths?  Surely.  But to internalize this type of generic advice without applying sound judgment to it seems like a doomed approach to me.  What worth is there in suffering through something just because you’ve been told never to give up, or in feeling like a flop because you gave up on something and you’ve been taught that the only failure is in not continuing to try?

Here are some thoughts on why I think there is value in the concept of giving up.

I think civilization (well, the western world anyway) is enchanted with the concept of rags to riches, and also with the notion that perseverance and continued application of effort will always yield a favorable result.  Most of us are bombarded throughout our lives with examples and stories of people who tried and failed over and over again to do something, doesn’t really matter what, and eventually succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.  We’ve all seen a zillion movies where someone struggles to succeed, fails so spectacularly that they almost hit rock bottom and they consider just tossing the whole thing.  Then someone tells them, never give up.  At their darkest hour they discover that the scientific formula they trashed just needed eight more hours to set up, their invention’s failure was due to a paperwork error, or that the Chardonnay they spent every last dollar brewing only looked funny because it was too perfect.

The “never give up” model of success can be dangerous.  People get told an inspiring tale of someone who wanted to bring an invention to market so badly that they continue working on it even through multiple bankruptcies and other setbacks—and then they “make it” and become rich, or respected, or whatever.  They don’t get told the countless stories of people who spend their lives like that and still never get there.  Also conspicuously underrepresented in these stories is the enormous personal sacrifices that accompany the refusal to give up on a cause that may never come to fruition.  This kind of obsessive determination can consume lives and destroy a person’s social relationships.  How many stories like this have a minor subplot where the person’s spouse and family just can’t take it anymore and wind up leaving them and taking the children?

Even if relationships don’t suffer, this approach can result in a lot of wasted human productivity and energy.  If a person spends all their mental energy on something that ultimately will not pan out without the help of extraordinary circumstances, they are paying an opportunity cost in the sense that they are not exploring other options that might be more viable.  How many people spend years pursuing one path exclusively when they could have done much better for themselves in another area?

Still, it’s a popular theme.  And why not?  Stories like this are exciting and inspiring, and things like that do occasionally happen.  But is it reasonable to hold this up as a template for the success process?  I don’t know that it is.  Most people who “succeed” at something seem to follow a slow and steady incline over time.  They start out in a logical place and experience moderate success over time, rather than failing indefinitely and suddenly hitting the mother lode.  Unfortunately, it’s frequently not very interesting to hear stories about people like that.  Maybe without the heights of emotional drama that accompany the conversion of certain failure to success, there isn’t much to hold us to the story.  But in real life, it would be a shame to make it to the finish line, only to find that there’s nobody left in your life to be happy for you.

I think the “boring” version of success tends to prove out more frequently than its exciting alternative.    Most times when something isn’t going to work out, we know this on some level even if we aren’t yet comfortable admitting it to ourselves. So I think there is validity in asking oneself what the real cost of success at something will be, and then in evaluating that cost with a level head.  It’s also worth standing back from your path in life sometimes to gauge whether it is still what you want.  If you’re continually pursuing something and it never seems to work out, could it be that you simply love the idea of that thing more than the actuality of the thing itself?  If that’s the case, it’s OK to be frank about that.  It’s never a failure to have made a false start at something that didn’t end up working out.  In some ways I do regret the time I spent on false starts and mistakes I’ve made in life, but I also realize that I took away some valuable learning experiences from going through those things.

So.  What I mean is,

Keep trying when you know it’s really worth it.  Step back from yourself and turn a critical eye to your life from time to time.  Give up when a pursuit no longer inspires you, has become completely unrealistic, or when you’re not doing it for the right reasons anymore.  And don’t let nebulous concepts like society’s definition of success keep you from loving your life.

So I think I am beginning to develop a minor obsession with the author Shirley Jackson.  What happened is, years ago I read her short story “The Lottery”, which was considered very shocking when it was first published in 1948, and then I forgot all about her and her story and everything else to do with her.  Then a couple months ago I was browsing the book store at the Antioch library, which is one of my favorite places to go on payday, and I picked up a copy of The Haunting of Hill House, partly because I recognized her name and vaguely remembered reading “The Lottery” and finding it interesting, partly because I have always wanted to read that book, and partly because all the Penguin Classics books have irresistibly beautiful covers and this one is no exception.  The book sat around on my dining room table for weeks while I putzed around with other things, such as trying and failing to get through Dr. Zhivago, and wasting time on social networking sites.  Then I picked it up a few weekends ago and was immediately impressed with the first paragraph, which I considered unusually artful and compelling:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within . . .”

I just love everything about this.  The selection of larks and katydids, which are an interesting choice since they aren’t the first creatures that come to mind, and their names are the kind of thing that roll off the tongue, and who is doing all this supposing, scientists?  Or artists, who?  And more importantly, the implication that the house, not sane, is a living organism and therefore a character in its own right.   Most books, the first few sentences are almost throwaway.  You assume something good is supposed to follow, so you get through them and wait for stuff to get interesting.  This was one of the few books I’ve picked up where I was hooked instantly to the point that it was almost physically painful to have to interrupt my reading with comparatively meaningless activities like eating food or earning a living.  I read it so quickly that by the end I finished it before I’d had a chance to take it all in and then I wound up reflecting on it for days afterward.

In case any of you have some interest in trying this book, by the way, I won’t spoil things for you too much.  To some degree, it follows the stereotypical “ghost story” plotline in the sense that people who mean to investigate a haunting take up residence in a place reputed to be plagued by supernatural unrest, but as a whole the book is much more than that.  It’s an interesting character study as well as a horror tale.  In short, it totally kicks the crap out of the “Scary Stories” books.

Anyway, from reading this, I couldn’t believe how little known Shirley Jackson is.  I tried to talk to a few people about the book and most of them thought they hadn’t heard of her at all.  Some of them kind of remembered having to read “The Lottery” in school, after being fed some information about it.  But almost nobody besides my husband actually really knew who she was.  I don’t think they’re being dumb.  I think she’s really just that obscure now.  I looked her up on Wikipedia and found out that she died of heart failure in her sleep at before she was even 50.  I thought that was too bad.

As a result of my experience with this book, I looked for something else by her when I went to the library last.  I picked up this book called We Have Always Lived In The Castle and then I finished that in about two days.  Not that I’ve read enough by her to really pick up on a pattern, other than that she enjoyed writing semi-disturbing to mildly insane things, but something I like about her style so far is that she doesn’t feel the need to overexplain things for the reader.  She refers to things you have no way of knowing about and you just wonder about them and maybe you even flip back, looking for a reference that maybe you missed.  You didn’t miss it.  It wasn’t there.  The protagonists are just going along, telling the story in their own way, without any consideration for whether it makes sense to you yet.  She doesn’t spoon feed you anything.  At first this style felt a bit awkward, but I have grown to love it.

Anyway, I don’t want to spoil this book for anybody who decides to read it, but I want to remark that it takes you through a very interesting mental process.  What I will say is that it defies the standard relationship a reader has with the protagonist of a story.  In most novels, the reader has a static level of detachment from (or closeness to) the protagonist. I found that the way I related to the main character changed dramatically through the course of this book as I moved through the plot.  Not in the sense that my opinion changed, but in the way that I looked at her as a person.  And oh, what a weird person.

I’m now working my way through a compilation of her short stories, which vary in their quality and appeal.  Take my comments with a grain of salt, since I’m not a fan of the short story in general and don’t often read them voluntarily if they aren’t written by Stephen King.  Some I considered quite bad, such as “The Intoxicated”.  Others had slightly more character development and were more interesting, such as “Like Mother Used to Make” and “After You, My Dear Alphonse”, the latter of which I thought was one of the best in the entire book so far.

One thing seems consistent.  She loved writing things that must have made her readership squirm just so!  She really is not one of those authors who write books that are comfortable to read.  And really, I can’t look at this as a bad thing.  I thought about We Have Always Lived in the Castle for days after I read it.  Same with Hill House.  Both were disturbing on a profound level.  I love books that force you to ruminate on them for days after you finish the actual reading.  I think more authors should go for that effect.  Is it really entertainment to read books that provoke nothing but passivity in the reader?   Take my Nicholas Sparks outrage from the other night, for instance.  What a boob!  It’s hard to imagine that even the writing aspect of his books involved any thought.

I salute you, Shirley Jackson, and I regret your relative obsolescence.

Every time I’ve ever seen a Nicholas Sparks book somewhere like Borders, I’ve thought, I want so much to read one of those.  I’ve always been one of those people who commits the sin of judging books by their covers.  And the thing is, Nicholas Sparks books all have very well-designed, attractive covers.  So when we had a book swap at work this week and I found a copy of a book called At First Sight that he had written, I snapped it up and considered it a great find.  Then today I spilled water on the library book I am reading (True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo) and when we went to go pick up our old-people food at Bob Evans I had to find something else to read while we waited.

So I was sitting there in the car with this book and I opened it to the first page.  I was feeling really good about the whole thing because I had no idea who Nicholas Sparks was or what his writing was like.  For some unexplainable reason I thought his writing would be like Nick Hornby.  I know.  Let me continue.

The first page of the book, like many paperbacks, was sort of an advertisement for the rest of the author’s books.  I glanced at this briefly and then realized to my horror that Nicholas Sparks is the author of The Notebook.  I realized that I may have made a grave error.  But I was still clinging to how nice the cover of the book looked.  It reminded me of the time that my coworker friend and I were driving to the airport in Manchester and we had time to kill so we were driving through Ogunquit, Maine and stopped and snuck onto a resort and we sat in these white Adirondack chairs and it was pleasant.  Also, as my next door neighbor pointed out when I went over to her house tonight to rave about the experience, the font used on his covers strongly misrepresents him as having literary merit.  For instance, it implies he can write at a level beyond the 10th grade.

False.

I decided to give the book a chance anyway (that nice cover!) and literally could not make it three pages before I realized this book was not even a mere abortion.  The prologue was really so bad that I couldn’t bear the prospect of reading another sentence written by such a despicable person.  This book is the literary equivalent of Nicholas Sparks force feeding you a human placenta in word form.

Note: I paused here because I had started to giggle out loud.  I mean, placenta.  It’s a funny word.  I then read the previous paragraph aloud to my husband and told him that the abortion comparison makes the placenta joke apropos.  I then laughed again because, hey, turns out I’m the sort of person who thinks a placenta joke can be apropos.  Who’s surprised?

By the way, my husband was a bit kinder about Nicholas Sparks, comparing him to “the literary version of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light”.  But still.  DEEP BURN!

The beginning to this book was so awful that it made me want to drive home and immediately start a fiction writing career.  Since, if this shit is #1 bestseller material, what could a real writer accomplish?  I’m not a real writer in any way, but Mr. Sparks gives me hope that this doesn’t matter.  For example, the main character spends the prologue brooding about a lot of shit.  “Is love at first sight truly possible?” he asks himself.  That didn’t sound promising, but I went on.  He continued thinking about similar shit, like who is he?  Who was he?  Lots of other boring crap, and then:

On the surface, those questions seemed easy.  His name was Jeremy; he was forty-two years old, the son of an Irish father and Italian mother; and he wrote magazine articles for a living.  Those were answers he would offer when asked.

Really?  That transparent, faintly wimpy sounding bullshit was the best exposition you could do, sir?  Not to mention, I spit on your frail, dual-semicolon sentence structure.  The protagonist This guy then stands there thinking about joy and pain and how it would be nice to forget pain, but what if it made you forget joy?  Because, get this!!  He has concluded that pain and joy are both parts of life! Then he describes how he met his wife for the first time when he was in North Carolina solving a supernatural mystery and she is an orphan and they go to a cemetery because of these mysterious lights:

. . . Lexie instantly recognized them as the ghosts of her parents.

Jeremy had been touched by her story, moved by her loss and the power of innocent beliefs.  But later that night, after he too had seen the lights, he’d asked Lexie what she thought they really were.  She’d leaned forward then and whispered, “It was my parents.  They probably wanted to meet you.”

And just like that, I went from wanting badly to read a Nicholas Sparks novel to wanting badly for time travel to be real so I could go back and smother him with a toy elephant in his crib.  In a single moment I realized I could never read another word this terrible man had written, any more than I could ever set foot in the Thomas Kinkade gallery down on the Plaza or purchase an Anne Geddes product.

I’m going to get rid of this book and I won’t ever even consent to look at the cover of another one of his books.  Because they have his name on the front and he writes his name probably all the time.  It’s my vow.

So Thursday night I was lying there in bed looking at a piece of hard candy sitting on the nightstand and wanting to eat it but not being quite willing to actually commit.  Not for reasons of oral hygiene or anything like that.  It was sugar free.  No, my problem was that I was tired and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to eat the candy or go to sleep.  Because I certainly wasn’t about to eat the candy, lie down, and risk falling asleep and choking to death on it. Finally I decided to eat the candy, and as I sat there sucking on it in an appropriately upright position, it occurred to me, what if I did choke in our bedroom?  Was there a single thing I could use to perform the Heimlich on myself?

I looked around the room and decided that my dresser is the best bet if I suddenly were to choke while lying in bed.  “Is it possible to perform the Heimlich on yourself if you don’t have anything like a chair to put your weight against?” I asked my husband.  It had occurred to me that if a person were to choke out in the middle of the desert, obviously there wouldn’t be much around for them to save themselves from choking.

“Well, sort of,” he said.  He looked confused, so I filled him in on my idea about how screwed a person might be, choking on something all by themselves out in the desert.

“I mean, there are some awfully inconvenient places for a person to choke,” I said.  “Like a parking lot,” I said.

“Actually, you could use a car door that doesn’t have a frame around the window,” he said.  “Or the tailgate of a small pickup truck.  Or one of those shopping cart corrals.”

“I meant the empty parking lot of an abandoned mall,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.  “What about the ocean?”

How chilling.  I imagined myself floating in the sea choking on…what?  A fish?  A sea urchin?  What do you choke on out there?  Well, anyway.  “What, are you in a life boat, or just floating?” I asked.

“Just floating would be worse,” he said.  “A modern life boat wouldn’t be any good, either.  The old fashioned kind, you’d be OK.  Not the inflatable kind.”

“Could you just start gulping water trying to dissolve the thing you were choking on?  Like if it was bread?” I said.

My husband just stared at me.

“Oh wait, that’s just turning yourself into a choking victim who is also drowning.”  He nodded.  I hadn’t really thought that pony through before it left the gate.

Between the two of us we determined that being alone in the ocean with a rubber life raft would be a pretty awful situation for a choking victim.  I tried to think of some other stuff that wouldn’t be any fun.  Choking in a padded room.  At the top of a large, manmade concrete mesa.  In the center of a 40 by 40 by 8 foot Chuck E. Cheese style ball pit.  Then my husband completely trumped everything I ever could have come up with.

“Free falling through the sky,” he said.

“You started to choke and they just pushed you out without a parachute,” I said.  “Way worse than the ocean.”  I thought about how strong the air resistence is just putting your hand out a car window on the highway.  I moved my hands up and down to simulate the air that would be rushing past any choking victim this unlucky as they fell through the air.  “Not only would you be panicked because of the choking, but you’d also have a hard time doing anything.  Physically you’d be stripped of options, and mentally you’d be petrified by the fact that this is a terminal fall.  It would be hard to maintain any presence of mind.  You’d pass out mid fall and then die on impact.”

I wondered if anybody would figure out what happened from the autopsy.  There would probably be an investigation into the people from the plane.  Well, anyway.  None of that is particularly germane to the topic at hand.  Okay, sorry, one more thing.  Would that be the worst way to die, because of how terrifying it would be, or actually a really good way to die, because of the fact that lots of people are scared of a falling death and passing out before you actually experience impact would save you from that?

The next day I started to wonder about the Heimlich itself, so I did some online research (OK, not really – I read the Wikipedia article, but it cites sources that I went and peeked at) to find out whether the Heimlich is really considered extremely effective at reducing the incidence of choking deaths in adults or is really just the choking situation equivalent of teaching people to climb under a desk for protection from a nuclear blast.  Apparently it’s neither.  It’s considered somewhat so-so in the modern medical community and the AHA recommends a five/five application of five back blows to a choking victim, then five abdominal thrusts (applications of the Heimlich maneuver – they changed the name to a more clinical term) if the back blows do not clear the airway.  So basically, the first human instinct, which is to physically strike a choking victim, is the correct one.

Further notes about the Heimlich maneuver:

• Considered somewhat dangerous, which is probably why you’re supposed to just hit them on the back first.  You can cause bruising to internal organs and also break ribs and the xyphoid process.
• Should never be performed on drowning victims, according to the AHA.  It’s because it can provoke vomiting, which is almost never a positive development in a drowning situation.  Anyway, then the person can aspirate their vomit and drown on that instead of just coughing up a bunch of nasty water.
• So if your friend chokes on a chicken nugget, or perhaps even aspirates their own saliva, the AHA considers it more appropriate to hit them on the back than to damage their organs with the Heimlich.

Good luck, everyone.  And stay away from planes, the desert, and the ocean.  Just in case.

I just looked at that post I wrote last night and realized I used the word “basic” or “basically” like 150 times. There’s a part where I use a form of that word three times in one sentence. How awful. I formally apologize for subjecting you to that.

I just started to type “Because seriously, . . .” and realized “seriously” is a problem word for me, too.

I gotta regroup and get back to you sometime on this. I’m a hack.

So yesterday was the first session of the last class I have to take before I’m eligible to sit for the CPA exam.  It’s this business decision making course at Friends University, which was the only school in the area that was nice enough to let me in to take one single class without being a degree-seeking student.  Read: they aren’t so greedy that they kick somebody out the door for only offering to pay them a thousand bucks.  So, thanks, Friends.

Anyway, I get to the class last night and within the first five minutes the instructor has already used the word shit, which I interpreted as an extremely good sign that he is a reasonable human being.  Because what reasonable person doesn’t want to say the word shit to basically everyone they meet, even if they stifle that desire most of the time in an effort to conform to societal standards?  Then the teacher basically says, “Truth!  Is it relative or absolute?” and then I don’t remember what was said after that but basically the class began to respond and my basic reaction to this was that it’s relative, because I think of the word truth and it makes me think of every time anybody has ever told me that the bible is “truth”, or stuff like that.  After a couple people, like me, agreed that we considered it relative, another guy said it was absolute, and the instructor said he agreed.

Truth is true, he said, and truth is absolute because it’s just…true.  I didn’t like where this was going.  Even though he said the word shit.

“Why is it relative?”  he asked the class.  Nobody said anything, so I explained that maybe not in a clinical or a research setting should this be the case, but in a sociological sense, truth often just boils down to worldview and if someone believes something, on some kind of fundamental level that becomes their working reality.  Even if it’s not concrete or rational.

“I see,” he said. Then he began to talk again and I suddenly understood that what he really meant by “truth” was “fact”.  And I am so totally down with that shit, people.  He went on and said things like, lots of the time the “truth” of a situation is nobody knows, and anybody who says they do know something that can’t be proven is wrong.  And I was so excited.  I mean, you don’t normally meet people this rational just walking around in the world.  Most people have at least something they feel is true, so they consider it true.  But do they really know for a certainty?  No.  I’m not just picking on religious people, by the way.  Anybody with an agenda can be guilty of this.  I’m pretty sure I’ve done it before.  When a person feels strongly about something it’s tempting to state your opinions so strongly that they sound like facts.  They might be right, or they might not.  But feeling something isn’t ever enough to make it real.  Hearing someone actually verbalize this made me so happy that when the class took a break, I went over and tried to enthuse and I’m 75% sure I sounded like a total dummy.  Or perhaps just an ass.

Imagine, knowing as you do the way that I hate the practice of parents refusing to immunize their children because of the (never proven) idea that it magically infuses their kids with autism, how I felt when I learned that the study that suggested a correlation between the two was faked.  FAKED!  Naturally, I was happy to hear that because it validated what I’d been saying and thinking about it all along, which was that the parents of autistic kids were thinking with their feelings and not with their heads.  That’s kind of how I felt last night sitting there in this class.  I basically wanted to declare the instructor my new BFF on the spot, despite how creepy that would be.

Anyway, he went on to explain that while this is considered a business decision making course, he prefers to teach it more or less as a critical thinking course.  So our grade is based jointly on discussion participation and on research proposal that we will write. I’m considering doing mine on the topic of managed primary care applied at the provider level and whether this approach can really successfully reduce claims and provider costs while delivering the same or better quality of care.  I e-mailed the instructor to ask his opinion on my topic, since I’m planning to start working on it this weekend, and because I spent hours thinking about the literal meaning versus the common use of the word truth, wound up adding this stupid addendum to my e-mail before I sent it, discussing the connotations of “truth” versus “fact” and so on.  So he’ll either think I’m the most tedious human who ever lived, or merely someone who overthinks things to a nauseating degree.

Oh, and since I was already in creepster mode, I internet stalked my instructor on Facebook.  Sort of.  I don’t know how stalkerish it is when they have a public profile, but anyway.  He has a back tattoo of what appears to be the death of Socrates.  I am almost 100% convinced of this.  I love it.  Love it.  I consider this one of the more worthwhile back tattoos I have ever seen in my life.  If I were to consider a back tattoo, which I wouldn’t, but if I were, I would consider a Roman senate scene first.  But the death of Socrates, assuming that’s what it really is, is a pretty terrific choice.

Anyway, his tattoo is one of the few I have found truly thought provoking, so I think it’s actually pretty cool even though I am generally not into tattoos at all.  I thought about posting a picture, but since I don’t want to ask permission and come off like a weirdo, and it seems rude to just post a picture of a person without saying anything to them, especially as an accompaniment to a blog entry discussing them.  Even if you’re basically saying they are cool because they had Socrates tattooed on them.  The tattoo doesn’t look finished, but to give you some idea, here’s the painting it’s based on:

Which reminds me, I need to finish that Nietzsche book I started a while back so I can find out why he hated Socrates so damn much anyway.

Last Sunday my husband went to Topeka to help his friend wire and hook up the electricity on his new garage, so I devoted the entire day to spring cleaning since we’re expecting company for Easter.  And frankly, what I accomplished was remarkable.  I played the same four Elton John songs on repeat while I worked straight almost from ten in the morning till early that evening.  I also finished The Haunting of Hill House tonight and I thought it was very good.  I recommend it to anyone, but not at night.  And it was much better than that stupid Amityville Horror book, which I remember I read in college and even that old thing scared the shit out of me that night and I had to sleep with all the lights on and the window covered up because I was afraid a demonic pig would peep in at me.

But anyway, part of my big spree involved having to acknowledge to myself that when I moved into our little house with our very little kitchen, I had never properly downgraded all my kitchen shit that I don’t really have room for anymore.  So I went through and had to look at everything I have and ask, “Do I really need this shit?”  Like, if I have a star shaped bundt cake pan and a tube pan, maybe I really only need the tube pan.

So I now have a big pile of shit in my living room that has to go.  However, a lot of it is even nice stuff.  Just, stuff I don’t have the space for.  And it’s all going to leave my house.  This is your big chance, people, to claim my crap.  If you see something you want and you have a way to get it away from my house, let me know you want it.  Even if you don’t know me.  We’ll make arrangements.  It’s yours.  Free.

This is a pitcher that I thought would be so cool when I got it.  See, you make a beverage, but in a boring ordinary pitcher the pulp from the lemonade or whatever gets all settled at the bottom and you have to stir it with a spoon to get it all worked out – lame!  With this one you turn the handle at the top of the pitcher and the paddle inside stirs your beverage for you.  It’s perfect, except for the fact that I never make beverages and I sort of forgot that when I got it.

This is a sexy, sexy Christmas platter that shows a bunch of foofy animals gazing adoringly at…a tree.  I don’t use it very often anymore.  I will totally understand if you don’t want to have it.  I actually sort of like this because of how dopey they all look, but I don’t do a lot of entertaining and I don’t really need a large round platter like this anymore.

This is a mini-dipper crockpot (24 ounce capacity, I think) that you basically use to make and keep cheese dips warm.  I thought it was going to be awesome when I first got it, but then I remembered that, oh yeah, I don’t really entertain and, oh yeah, cheese dips have a lot of fat in them anyway so I doubt we’re yanking this guy out for dinner anytime soon.  I still sort of want to keep it, although I think I’m wrong and it’s just those festive little peppers telling me they want a home.  So somebody snap this guy up, willya?

This is a food mill.  It has only one blade, but that’s OK because I doubt it would be easy to remove this one to switch it out anyway.  I used to use it to make mashed potatoes, but a hand masher takes up less space, so it seems kind of dumb that I have this awkwardly shaped old thingy in here taking up cabinet space.

I don’t even know what this is.  It’s a glass pyrex type dish that has a raised up thing in the center and a sort of moat shaped area around that.  I got it for free last year at a yard sale and thought it would be cool to do…something…with it, maybe like a shaped ring of rice, which would be cool if I were entertaining, but as I said…I don’t.

This is an egg poacher.  You put water in the bottom part and then butter up the little cups, boil the water, and crack eggs into the cups.  Then you let the eggs cook like that.  Poached eggs taste good and frankly they’re my favorite kind of egg, but usually I’m too lazy so I either scramble or fry instead.  But if you haven’t had poached eggs, you don’t know what living is.

This is a small green bowl with a pedestal base, which I used to use for whisking eggs.  Now I just do it in a big measuring cup.

This is a set of four large (28 oz) white Corelle soup bowls that I don’t really have room for anymore.  These are basically ideal if you are the type of person who likes to eat breakfast cereal from a trough, or simply if you like soup.  Either way.  Also, the nice thing with Corelle is, it takes a lot to chip or break this shit.  So these would serve you well.  Nearly all my other dishes are exclusively white Corelle.  Because I’m boring and the least artistic person I know.

These are two divided containers manufactured by I think Rubbermaid.  They’re nice, but I don’t ever use them because, seriously, will you look at the size of the round one?  It’s been a long time since I felt the need to take a lunch that big to work with me.  The rectangular one has some scuffing on the rubber on the lid (you can see the light blue marks in the picture) from where I did something like drop it in a parking lot and then fall down and skid on it or something.  It’s in better shape than I was.

This a Longaberger brand mini-loaf pan given to me by a former coworker with whom I shared mutual dislike.  I don’t know why she gave this to me, probably it was supposed to be some kind of trap, and I have never once used it.  However, that doesn’t mean that you won’t simply love it.  I don’t know what it’s worth, but knowing how hyper expensive that Longaberger shit is, this probably retailed for $245 or something stupid like that.  Just kidding, but that crap is way overpriced.  She was a Longaberger dealer so I think it was cheap for her. Anyway, nice pan, I just don’t want it anymore.

Crazy cake pan.  OK.  Here’s the deal with this cake pan.  You pour cake batter into one of the two big bowl shaped things.  You have the option of a dome or a slightly rounded cylindrical shape.  Then you put this attachment on top of it so that your cake bakes with an indentation in it.  The rest of the batter bakes in the more normal looking round circle pan there at the bottom.  Then you fill the dome in the cake with some kind of amazing filling, slap on the circle piece, and frost the outside.  Until they cut into it, no one knows the cake has a secret inside.

This cake pan is actually pretty fun, but I only use it a couple times a year and I figure I should get back to basics.  If you want it, I will provide instructions on how the hell this crazy thing works.

I got this on clearance when the K-Mart in Lawrence was going out of business years ago.  Now I have a programmable one so I don’t use this one anymore.  It does the trick.  It’s a basic slow cooker with two heat settings.  It has a small crack in one of the handles.  But it’s free.  FREE.

This is a white milk glass dish with a pedestal foot.  When I use it, infrequently, it’s for serving something foofy at a party.  Cookies, fruit salad, other sweets, stuff like that.  It’s actually pretty nice, but as I said earlier, I’m cutting back on stuff that I only use for rare entertaining.  My plain Corelle should be fine for those occasions.

Two pans.  These are both small – the red 0ne is very good for making a small green bean casserole, and I’m only getting rid of it because I have another almost exactly like it, and the metal one is just…a metal toaster oven sized pan.  I basically only use it to put hot water in when I bake something like a cheesecake, so that the oven stays humid.  And while it’s the perfect size for that, technically I could probably use another pan for that rather than keeping this guy as a unitasker.

You know those extremely heavy duty bundt pans that weigh a ton and cost a small fortune at Williams Sonoma?  This actually came from Crate & Barrell, several years ago, but it’s the same type of deal.  This is a really pretty darn nice cake pan, but I have a tube pan already and pans like this are bulky and hard to store.  I’ll be honest, if one of you really likes this pan and wants to take it off my hands, I’ll gladly part with it.  But if nobody steps up, I might hang onto it a bit longer.  I don’t want it to go to a home that won’t appreciate it.

OK, so there may be more in the future, but there’s some of my crap.  If you want any of it, like I said, this shit is all free.  Comment or e-mail me to claim something.

My friend lived through the surgery. She is in ICU now and I don’t think I will try to visit.  Like I said yesterday, I’m definitely not in the inner circle, although I think she’s such a friendly person that it would be easy to feel that way.  We’re local internet buddies, basically, who meet for lunch sometimes.  So I don’t think that qualifies me in the top 10 or even 30 people who have the right to visit her in intensive care.

Sometime last night I got another e-mail saying that her kidneys were threatening to fail, so I went to bed not feeling very optimistic.  I kept dreaming about it all night and finally wound up getting up around six to check my e-mail, because I kept dreaming that I checked it, got a message saying she was fine, and then would wake up and realize that wasn’t real. When I checked this morning, there was a new message saying she had survived the surgery, which to me sounds completely crazy because 16 hours of people cutting and digging and sewing shit together inside your torso?  That’s nuts that anybody could make it through that.  I’m so psyched that she did.  And I must say, modern medicine is basically almost like magic to me.  They more or less said the next 48 hours are “critical” and it could still go either way, but to me it sounds like, shit, you should be practically home free now just on principle.

So now that she appears to be somewhat on safer ground, now is the time for me to overthink things and expound on things only tangentially related to this topic at all.  In a manner that will probably offend 90% of people out there, even though I don’t mean it that way.  Which is to say, I’ve noticed that at times like this, many people’s reaction is to pray a lot and encourage others to do the same, and I don’t get that.  I don’t mean that in a contemptuous way, I just don’t understand why somebody would pray rather than do something useful with themselves.  The answer, I’m sure, is that they do think prayer is useful.  So I