on the fringe

I am voraciously watching Season 3 of Fringe, gobbling up two or three episodes a night. I love this show.

There is only one problem, which is that I can't handle scary things. I certainly can't handle ghost stories (I have walked out of movies before), and it turns out that I can't handle the paranormal very well, either. Even when the paranormal is, as in Fringe, generally explained by tv-science.

One day a few weeks ago, I was afraid to walk out to my car from work at night because my car might have been affected.

Another day, I was walking toward my front door at night when I thought the fog was coalescing to chase me.

The episode I watched today involved re-animation of a corpse, and I may not sleep tonight.

I am a 'fraidy cat when it comes to scary stuff. I am a 'fraidy cat when it comes to the paranormal. I am a 'fraidy cat when it comes to dead bodies.

(Again with the irony! - if I'm right about what irony is; I am never sure - that I ended up in Rwanda eight years after a million people were killed in a tiny country. You know they haven't found all the bodies. It's just impossible. I swam in that lake. But never alone. Oh, no, never alone. You know what bothers me the most about bodies? There used to be people in them, and now the people are gone. There is just something spooky about a body that no longer is a person.)

blech

Let's use our imaginations.

Imagine that I am a gigantic horseshoe magnet. You know the kind: you played with it when you were a kid. You stuck things to it, and used it to pick up things.

Now imagine that you have a pile of little metal shavings. Remember how they stick to the magnet and lift right off the ground?

That is EVERY COLD VIRUS IN THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. Drawn to me. Attracted to me. STICKING TO ME.

My friend D. and I were talking online last night, and I wondered about getting another strep test. My throat has hurt so badly since the weekend that I wanted to reach my fingers down there and scratch it. I hear that doesn't go so well, though, and I seriously doubt that adding stomach acid to my throat would improve it. (Ew.)

And then I woke up in the middle of the night with my nose stuffed full of phlegm (you are welcome).

Ding! Ding! Ding!

The winner is yet another cold. They love me.

roasting

Roasted chestnuts are perfection on a winter evening.

It is, after all, winter, no matter what the calendar says. Winter begins after Thanksgiving. The wind knows it, even if we don't.

I roasted my chestnuts in the oven, in the absence of an open fire (fire hazard). One of them exploded with a pop like a far-off gunshot, but it tasted just fine.

cross

When asked to discuss my cross-country skiing experience, I was forced to confess that the entirety of my experience consisted of putting on multiple pairs of socks, stuffing the resulting large, lumpy appendages into Dad-sized shoes with three little spikes in the toes, attaching them to c. 1972 skis that my dad picked up at a garage sale, and tromping around our neighborhood in the Mitten. I would hardly call it experience. AN experience, maybe, but not really experience.

Undeterred (SHO did say that it was okay for beginners), I rented cross-country skis and joined a crowd of people heading up into the mountains.

People. Cross-country skiing is awesome.

Okay, I fell four times in four miles. The first time I fell directly forward, landing on my elbows straight in front of my skis, and I laughed, because who falls that way? That's how little kids fall on downhill skis, and you can't believe they can contort themselves like that.

The two middle times I just fell sideways.

The fourth time, I clothes-lined my backpack on the gate to the road we were skiing on. I bent down to ski under it, and I caught my backpack and fell. That one made me laugh, too.

But in-between were quiet woods and swish-swish-swishing. I skied much of the two miles in by myself, and there is something about snow and silence and spaces between the trees that made me much less nervous to be alone than I would be in the summer. I liked it, in fact, where normally I am afraid of what might be in the woods. (I would still never - shudder - go cross-country skiing alone in the middle of the woods. I needed the others just around the bend before and behind.)

On the way back, I talked with friends, and that was lovely, too. It's like hiking, all the good things about hiking: the nature, the strange (code word: interesting) people, the conversations, the being outside, but you can do it in the winter! It's %*#& brilliant.

shopaholic

I called my lovely momma today, and she asked if I had done any shopping yesterday.

The answer is yes. I bought a book of stamps, a cup of coffee, and four grocery items at Trader Joe's.

But somehow I doubt that counts.

I did also walk into Old Navy, but I fled as quickly as I always do. There is something about that warehouse feel and all the chaos of colors that makes me feel slightly dizzy immediately upon entering the store, and I can barely give it a walk-through before I turn around and high-tail it out of there. Seriously. My tail is in the air.

(Side note: have I recently, if ever, mentioned that the Kinyarwanda word for goat, ihene, is apparently related to the word for naked? Or so I was told during my two years working with goats and using the word ihene innumerable times. Apparently this is because goats walk around with their tails straight up exposing their little behinds. And apparently, although this may or may not be related, when you give a goat to someone in Rwanda, you never tell them that you are giving them a goat. You tell them that you are giving them a sheep, and somehow - I don't know how - they know what you are really giving them and are grateful to receive a goat instead. Because sheep = almost useless,* and goats = food.)

If you have not totally lost the initial point, I feel obligated by honesty to say that I also squandered approximately 23 minutes in TJ Max because I was too early meeting a friend. No purchases were made.

* I feel like I have mentioned the sheep thing, but I just searched the blog and did not find it. Sheep, to my admittedly somewhat limited knowledge, because I was working with all goats, all the time, have virtually no use in Rwanda. No milk, no meat, no wool. Their only evident use is to accompany cows, because they are said to divert lightning from cows to themselves. I don't get it, but my former boss, who studied animal stuff, said that he thinks there may be something to it, or at least some reason why this is thought to be. Body chemistry, maybe?

mini break

I am considering this weekend a little bitty vacation. I'm not going anywhere, except cross country skiing on Sunday, but I'm treating it like it is a vacation: sleeping in, eating left-over honey pecan tart slowly while looking out the window, sitting around in a coffee shop for a couple of hours, going out and listening to bluegrass at night.

Now that I write that out, I realize that this is the stuff I do every weekend. What makes it feel like a vacation is not so much what I am doing, it is that I refuse to feel guilty about doing it instead of something more productive, in exactly the way one does on vacation.

forget about it

After I broke the thermometer, I sighed to myself, blogged, and went into my bedroom to put on clothes reasonably appropriate for entering a grocery store (i.e. not my pajamas).

While I was standing aimlessly in my bedroom trying to decide what civilization-appropriate clothing I should put on, I glanced at my watch, realizing that I might be cutting the time a bit short.

Then I realized something very freeing: I do not have to make beer cheese bread.

I had forgotten that holidays are not made by perfection, but I remembered it in time. Instead of going to the store, I made hot chocolate, I put on music, and I made the two things I had the equipment for: sweet potato biscuits and a honey pecan tart.

And then I went off to Thanksgiving dinner. There was plenty of scrumptious food and plenty of excellent company.

Nobody missed the beer cheese bread. Not even me.

figures

My beer cheese bread turned out perfectly, two days ago. I needed that candy thermometer, though.

Today, as I started out making the official Thanksgiving Beer Cheese Bread, I knocked the thermometer against the pan of hot water.

"Oh, that would be just like me," I thought, "to break the thermometer as I start the actual batch of bread."

I didn't really think it was broken, though. It was a very gentle tap.

But it was broken, and now I am about to run out to the store on Thanksgiving morning to get another thermometer. I didn't want to make this bread on time, anyway.

It wouldn't be Thanksgiving if the beer cheese bread went smoothly.

punch

My fighting class instructor asked me today if I want to go to the annual conference in February. I was almost as pleased and embarrassed as I was when they announced that I was student of the month.

I know that I should be used to this by now, now that I've been in my fighting class for over a year, but I am still surprised that there is a sporting activity involving physical coordination that I appear to be able to do. And, to be fair, there appears to be only a minimal level of coordination required. The rest is just pure determination.

That, and showing up every single class, which I also do.

I almost never even consider skipping class. Even on days (today) when we run and jump and crunch and flutter and pushup until my lungs are burning, and that's just the beginning of the warmup, I love being there.

I could never make a bat hit a baseball. I could never line my shot up with the basket. I could never connect with the ball in the right place to make it soar into a goal box. Even when I liked the sport (soccer), I never could really enjoy it, because I sat on the bench so much.

But I can kick, and I can punch, and I love that. I love doing it, and I love that I can do it. Maybe all those fights with my brother* were good for something.

* My brother and I literally fought fist and foot, and sometimes knife and door. If someone had wanted to call the police over some of the fights we got into, either of us could easily have ended up in the juvenile justice system. I think of this sometimes, about how class and race can protect you from or expose you to involvement with The System. If we had lived in a poor apartment complex where people could hear us fighting, or if someone had thought our parents couldn't or wouldn't discipline us because of their stereotypes about the color of our skin, we could have ended up somewhere very different than the stable and adult places we are now.

adventures in baking

I practiced my beer cheese bread tonight. I think I have successfully made beer cheese bread approximately once, and never without help, because of my (formerly) gimpy arms. (Yay, pushups!)

Actually, I am not sure I have ever successfully made any yeast bread product without help. I am a terrible estimator, and that goes for temperatures as well as crowds, distances, etc.

I am serious now, though. I bought a candy thermometer. I read up on yeast on the internet. I proofed my yeast before I added it to the flour.

And the bread rose perfectly through the first rise. The only problem is that I can't bake it until tomorrow, but I want to bake it in the morning, so I have to put it in the fridge overnight.

I just checked on it. It's still rising in there.

Help?

...

I discovered, in the course of compiling bread, that the cupboard was full of ants. The almost-gone flour and the very-full sugar were, anyway.

It is very tedious getting ants out of sugar. Neither my roommate nor I have any sort of small sieve or sifter, so I had to take small bowlfuls and pour them slowly into a bigger bowl, stopping to remove ants when I saw one.

Fortunately, I also found, in the dough, the one that had made it into the yeast/water/sugar mixture. I thought I saw an ant in there, but I shook it off as just seeing bugs everywhere, which one does after living in the tropics for a while. This was before I discovered the depth of the infestation.

I realize that removing the ants from the dough, and from the sugar itself, makes me a bad missionary/ex-pat worker. I should have just left the ants and considered them protein.

The problem is that I only have white sugar for the purpose of baking, and I only bake when I am sharing with other people, and it doesn't really seem all that nice to offer anyone, on this continent or another, baked goods with ants baked in.

So I hand-sifted the sugar after putting it in the freezer long enough for the ants to die.

You can all thank me later.

Trooper

I pulled into a parking spot next to an Isuzu Trooper. It felt weird. Those don't belong here, not at all. It's on the wrong continent.

We used a Trooper, borrowed from another missionary family, when my sister was born. We were staying upcountry, at Compound Number Three, not far from LAC, the Liberia Agricultural Company, that had a better hospital, but between us and the hospital was a huge mud pit in which cars and trucks got stuck.

Somehow, I got it into my almost-eight year old mind, as one does, that in order for the stuck vehicles to block the road, they had to have been stuck sideways.

I have since learned better, having maneuvered vehicles around stuck vehicles in mud pits on several occasions.

Anyway.

The Trooper got my parents to the hospital in plenty of time for a screeching little being to be born.

We thought she was going to be a boy.

I'm kind of glad she was who she was, instead.

in which i attempt to post a recipe

The jollof rice turned out surprisingly delicious, considering that I somehow managed to ruin the rice-cooking portion of the endeavor, and it took an hour and half to cook the rice. So it was slightly mushy jollof rice. It still tasted really good, and I enjoyed it for lunch yesterday and today.

Here is how to make jollof rice (I am doing this as much for me as for you, in case it is four more years before I make it again):

Cut up an onion, a green pepper, 4-5 cloves of garlic, and a chili pepper. (More peppers if you are guaranteed an audience who can stand them. One gives a nice flavor without being hot.)

Fry them in some oil. The internet claims that you can add other vegetables: carrots, green beans, cabbage. Up to you.

Fry some meat in the same pan with the vegetables or in a different pan. Whatever. I used Gimme Lean vegetarian sausage, and it had a really nice flavor, but you can use real sausage or chicken or fish or really anything. I think the package I used was the equivalent of one pound of meat.

Add some water and a couple of cut up tomatoes and some tomato paste (I used a little can of Hunts, but whatever. Whatever is a common theme here. This is a very flexible recipe).

Add some salt and pepper and some Maggi Cubes. I can't find Maggi Cubes in the US so I used, as previously mentioned, some vegetarian bouillon cubes and some Maggi Seasoning in a bottle. This mixture should taste pretty salty and bouillon-like.

At this point, you probably want everything in a big pot, because this is a family-sized recipe I am talking here.

Add some more water. If I were smart, I would have kept track of how much water I added in total and added a little bit more than half as much rice (i.e., 5 cups of water, 2.5 or 2.75 cups of rice). I didn't. Well, I kind of did, but extremely inexactly.

Add some rice. See above. Whatever. Stir.

Turn stove down, but not as far down as you would have turned it to cook rice alone. (This was my mistake. A mixture this thick simmers at a higher temperature than rice + water.) It should be just high enough to simmer.

Cook until you no longer get steam billowing out when you wiggle the lid. I have no idea how long this will take, because I had mine at sub-simmering temperatures for quite a while.

You can probably freeze lunch-sized portions and let them defrost during the day. I kept the pan in the fridge for a couple of days, and it re-heated really well in the microwave.

There you go. A completely incoherent recipe that somehow turns out delicious. Even I cannot ruin this recipe.

free day

I wondered, during the insanity of working seven long days a week, what I would do with just one totally free day, and today I got to find out.

It was wonderful.

I went to a mixed martial arts class in the morning. I've never been to an MMA class before, and I never would have dared to go if I hadn't been going to my fighting class for over a year now, because MMA seems like such a guy thing. I was worried about being surrounded by super dedicated martial arts guys. Plus I know the instructor of this class (he sometimes attends and/or fills in teaching my fighting class), and his idea of a warmup is my idea of can I go home and sleep now?

It was a very small class, although the one other person there did lap me multiple times during the run-sprawl-some-sort-of-knee-recovery. And I did indeed feel limp like an overcooked noodle after the warmup. I recovered.

One thing about this instructor that I remembered from the TRX class I once took with him is that his classes are longer than an hour partly because he likes to do a yoga cool-down.

I can't stand yoga. I know some people love it (hi, SHO!), but I despise yoga. Partly this is just because my wrists are gimpy. Anything that requires staying in one position with weight on my hands gets almost unbearably painful really quickly. Partly it is because I am ever-so-slightly hyperactive (my sister thinks our entire immediate family is), and why on earth would you choose a sport for which you stay in one position for any amount of time when you could be HITTING THINGS?

I survived. I felt quite the tough person for making it through the class.

It turns out, if given an entirely free day, I will do the following things in addition to a crazy men's fighting class: go a bookstore, get a pedicure, do an obscene number of loads of laundry, play on the computer, and watch a movie. (This movie: Saved. I was most amused.)

It took me almost three hours to get around to making myself something to eat this evening, not because of the popcorn I intended to make (with butter and brewer's yeast and salt and pepper, yum), because it seemed like so much work to cut myself an apple. Yes, I was stymied by an apple. Yes, I know that is ridiculous. Yes, I did eventually cut the apple.

I did not, however, get around to cleaning the kitchen. That, I believe, is why weekends have two days.

jollof rice

So the jollof rice is cooking. Hopefully it will taste okay. I remember virtually nothing about ratios except that your sauce has to taste pretty strong and salty before you add the rice or it will be tasteless when you are done.

And I have no idea how much rice I was supposed to add. I added... some. I think that it might be okay to open the pan and add water later, even though it isn't okay when you are making straight rice. I hope. It has been way too long since I have done this.

The US does not appear to have Maggi Cubes, and I don't know if they are vegan, anyway. (I have to make my jollof rice vegan today due to food restrictions at the event I am attending.) I bought some Maggi Seasoning instead, in a bottle, but it appears to have a soy sauce flavor. I also added some vegetable bouillon cubes.

I did remember to pick up a hot pepper, though. I bought a chili pepper, because it's red, and I used green bell pepper. It seemed like a good idea to have the hot pepper be visible in case people want to avoid it. Very likely a single chili pepper will be laughable in terms of hotness compared to any dish made in Liberia.

It will turn out okay, I think. My fingers are firmly crossed.

recovery

When everything unexpectedly calmed down, I came home at 1 pm and slept for three hours. (I had, after all, worked almost 18 hours yesterday. Guilt: there was none.)

I almost feel human again, as long as I don't think about the towering stack of things that I will face in the morning, that I ignored while I poured myself into getting ready for the two Major Work Events.

I went to fighting class still half asleep, and we did a lot of boxing. I began to regret having upgraded to 16 oz boxing gloves. Those suckers start to feel heavy.

Tomorrow I have to remember how to make jollof rice. I used to make it a lot my last year of law school, right after I came back from Liberia, but then I discovered that the fake sausage I put in it was giving me heartburn (this was simultaneous with the amoeba, too, which didn't help), so I gave it up. This means that it has been probably 4+ years since I have attempted jollof rice, and since jollof rice is pretty much experimentation, I maybe should have, uh, experimented before I committed myself to bringing it to a friend's potluck.

I have been way too busy in a manner incompatible with life.

whine

I have not maintained a perfect blog posting record this November. I missed the 16th, it seems, and I don't even feel bad.

I could not post on the 16th because I got to work at 9 am on 11/16 and left it at 12:20 am on 11/17.

I don't want to talk about it.

I don't want to talk about it even if I could talk about it, which I can't because it's work, and work is not internet fodder.

Alright, fine. If it weren't for the fact that I can't talk about work on the internet, if you and I were at a coffee shop on Saturday morning (WILL SATURDAY NEVER COME?), I would talk about it, telling you about ALL THE HOURS I WORKED SO MANY HOURS, probably until I annoyed you.

But now I am going to sweet, sweet sleep.

Call this November 16. It isn't the next day until you go to sleep.

too long

Some days are just too long. Some days should be cut off around 3 pm and banished after that, because everything after that is useless.

I felt that way today, but it didn't seem to matter. The day just kept going on.

I think I've seen 7 pm at work every day (including today) since last Friday. 7 pm? How about 10 pm, most nights.

I need a day off. A weekend day would serve just fine.

The problem is that the next weekend day is still three days away, and in between is another Major Work Event. A day off is a distant dream.

I would settle for a day that ended at 5, actually.

alarum is actually a word

I am having an alarm clock problem.

I really hate alarm clocks.

Actually, I don't own an alarm clock. What I own is an old mobile phone, which automatically updates time and date with the towers, but no longer bears a calling plan. I set the alarm on it, and it wakes me up.

The reason I prefer this method to an alarm clock is two-fold: first, I despise that beep-beep-beep of an alarm clock (radio probably wouldn't wake me up unless it was really loud, because it's so easy to incorporate into a dream), and second, I get kind of panicky about how much time I have left to sleep and why am I not sleeping oh no the night is almost over and I haven't gotten enough sleep help help help if I have a clock with visible numbers during the night. I do not want to know what time it is when I am supposed to be sleeping.

The old phone is a perfect solution until the day when it is at one bar of battery and I forget to charge it even though I know of its tendency to just up and run out of battery without warning at that point, and I wake up to discover that I can actually be fully ready and at an important work event within 50 minutes of getting up.

And I was only 30 minutes late! Not cool.

And then there is the other problem (usually a benefit) that you can set the phone to go off only Monday through Friday.

This is sheer brilliance until the day you set the alarm for 8:30 expecting to get up and meet a friend at a new church on Sunday morning and then wake up ten minutes after church started to send her a sheepish text message because you are still in bed.

Two alarm malfunctions in one week does not bode well for the future of my old phone-turned-alarm. Or perhaps, for my brain.

ickety

You know what's really (not) awesome?

When you (I) wake up the Sunday before a week of two Major Work Events (Major = I have only had two of them since I moved to Universe City, and I have two more this week), with an earache and lopsided sore throat, and have to leave work (where I've been every day of this three day weekend) to make my first trip ever to Urgent Care just to make sure it is not strep throat.

(Spoiler: it isn't.)

(Additional spoiler: that doesn't mean I feel less icky.)

Is it weird that the doctor prescribed some sort of steroid to reduce the inflammation in my throat so I can make it through the week?

It seems weird to me. I haven't yet decided whether to fill the prescription. I suppose it depends on how icky I feel in the morning.

Webster

A couple of weeks ago, my coworker and I were talking about how handy it would be, sometimes, to have a portable way to look up laws.

Not 24 hours later, I found myself buying this:


His name is Webster. (Also, I need to work on my photography skillz.)

I am still a little surprised, myself, even though I had been thinking about it for a while, ever since I last went to the Mitten and faced the eternal dilemma: bring the heavy laptop, or be without internet access in a size big enough to actually respond to emails. Last time, I brought only my iPod touch, and trust me when I say that it was massively annoying, when I wanted to answer an email, to have only such a tiny screen. (And Winifred's battery life sucks. All my iPod touches - I have gone through three and spent an obnoxious amount of time in the Apple store in Gone West trying to get them fixed - have suffered from that failing.)

The beauty of Webster is that I actually use his calendar, because I can type on his screen. I send emails from him, ditto. Scrabble is big and easy to see. His speakers are good enough to play music. His battery lasts me almost a week.

But the best thing about Webster? Angry Birds in HD.

Yea, you know it. Worth every penny.

the ones

I'm taking back everything I said about the chiropractor (under my breath). I have been very careful to sit up straight today, but things are much better. Which is good, because I worked most of the day on a federal holiday that was supposed to be a day off, and there are few things worse than working on a day off, except maybe working on a day off with incredible back pain.

I set my alarm for 11:11, both a.m. and p.m.

I like the ones.

furthermore: ha

The beauty of having a wee little blog in a corner of the internet that only a few people read is that, particularly in the month of November when you are blogging every day and running out of things to say, you can ramble on about things that interest only you.

So, let's talk about how my back hurts.

My back hurts.

Like, a lot.

My back hurts enough that by lunch time I squirm in my chair at work. I went to the chiropractor for it yesterday, and she told me that I had pulled a muscle right under my shoulder blade on the right side. She worked on it for a while.

The result is that it now 1. still hurts just as much, and 2. feels bruised. Sweet.

She also told me to ice it and to do something she called, "resting it." I don't know what that means. Rest? What is that? Have you ever heard of it?

Apparently part of this rest thing is not doing push-ups or punches.

I can only respond like this: ha. And furthermore: ha.

Normally, I would use any excuse to laze about, but this is fighting we are talking about. I can't give it up. It's like an addiction.

I did planks instead of push-ups yesterday, and since it was just me and one of the instructors tonight, we skipped push-ups in favor of practicing the core strengthening exercises that his physical therapist has him working on. (Side note: ow.)

I did not stop punching, though, nor did I skip practicing elbows. And I recently bought my own boxing gloves, which are 16 ounces instead of the 12 I had been practicing with, so just holding my hands up at my temples is work.

Which possibly explains why my back hurts more than ever.

weirdnesses

I never flip that little lever on my rear-view mirror at night. I can't stand how it distorts things. Instead, I just deal with the glare. Somehow, moving my head feels better than moving the mirror.

Things that seem like a waste of time: showers, brushing teeth, peeing, cutting nails, basically every hygiene task. They are so tedious. Don't worry, I do them. I just get annoyed sometimes at how they never end. DIDN'T I ALREADY PEE TODAY? WHY MUST I DO IT AGAIN?

I brush my teeth in hot water. It seems strange, I know, but there is a reason: it makes the toothbrush bristles softer, and that feels better on my gums.

Twenty-one and a half years after my family left Liberia and moved to the US and got a telephone (what? Buchanan was not wired for telephones in 1990. or, say, now. or ever.), I still fear making and receiving calls, just a little. Again, I do it. I just don't like it, much.

i keep losing my keys

Last night, I couldn't find my keys. I looked around in all the normal places - the giant key on which I hang my keys, the table by the door, the counter, the dining room table, the coffee table in the living room, my coat pocket - you know, the usual.

They were nowhere in the house.

Finally, on a brainstorm, I check the door of the house, which I had locked from the inside.

Yup. Keys in the door, on the outside.

I feel like that has happened before.

elections

The times when I most miss being in Liberia are not when things are going well there. When things are going well in Liberia, I am mostly content to live in State of Happiness, if not in Universe City, because I know that things are generally improving in Liberia, and so it's fine that I'm not there.

When, as now, there are problems in Liberia, even problems so very much smaller than what has gone before, the distance hurts. It feels like I should be there. Why, I don't know. I can't do anything. I can't fix anything. It's just that, well, I left. I left, and I've talked about this before, and I was ten, and I didn't have a choice.

But still, now, I feel like I should be there, because I can. I can, but I'm not. And that feels like a betrayal.

I'm here, and I have to be here, but I will not be here forever.

I will not give that up forever.

roller derby

I went to watch women push each other around on roller skates last night. It was entertaining. It was also confusing.

So there is this thing called roller derby. These women are hard-core. You think I'm hard-core because I get myself beaten up for fun? No way. I've got nothing on these women. These women knock each other off a track with their hips. At high speeds. While on roller skates. Wearing very little in the way of clothing.

Roller derby is a whole bunch of women wearing hot pants - much - shorter than the top of the pattern on their tights. The main official was wearing fringed hot pants over torn fishnets. Her butt cheeks were on display. And she knew it, and she reveled in it, and there were children present, and no one seemed to notice that the women were wearing very little and everything was an innuendo. I kept expecting her to whip off her shirt.

I think I experienced some culture stress. We just don't... do that... where I'm from.

Her shirt stayed on, by the way.

It took most of the evening to figure out what was going on, despite having watched a youtube video describing how it all works. The teams kept changing who wore the star on their helmet, and we never could tell why a person got a penalty. (The video said you can only knock people around with your body, not your limbs.) The points were even more impossible.

All I know is that there was a lot of shoving, and every player should have, by rights, been damaged by the end of the night, but they all seemed to be fine, and I was awed and impressed.

I would try it, but have you ever seen me on roller skates? I don't even need other people running into me in order to fall. It would be a bad scene, and not because of the sight of me in hot pants. More because of the blood and broken bones.

how to

How to stop or start a conversation instantly, depending on your crowd:

Ask, "If you had diarrhea in a place with no toilet paper, would you use your hand or your scarf to wipe it?"

That is a slight paraphrase, but I think it says something about the people I hang out with that this topic started a conversation rather than shut it down.

I also think I fell asleep during the concert.

It had been a long week, but that concert nap revived me just enough that I stayed out until 12:45 am. I don't remember when I last stayed out until 12:45 am (unless I did on my birthday?), and I probably wouldn't have believed it was possible in this town, but there we were, in the lounge section of a restaurant-turned-dance-club, watching girls dressed in short skirts and tight tops dance with guys in sweatpants and flannel.

My answer, by the way, is that I would use my hand. You never know whether the scarf would ever come clean again, but skin is pretty washable.

still falling badly

So, I have mentioned that I can't fall.

I still can't fall.

No, really. I used to be able to at least fall on the not-thrown-straight-back falls, like when someone steps through with their foot behind you and spins you so you end up landing on your side underneath them. It's much easier than just a straight fall.

Except I can't even do that anymore. I must never again take a week off to go to the Mitten and then have another holiday (Halloween) in there. Two weeks without falling has made me incapable of any of it.

You are supposed to fall on your back, sort of rolling along the length of your back to spread out the force, with your head tucked in and your arms out to slap the ground.

I apparently fall in a fetal position, like a stone.

It hurts.

this is what my life has come to

Guess what! Guess what! Guess what!

Yesterday, I walked through many leaves, and they crunched.

Perhaps that was only exciting to me.

This autumn has been long and colorful, here in Universe City. There have been many more brilliant, warm days than seems usual to me, which is only fair given that the summer didn't even start until August. The trees are still flamboyantly colorful here in November, and the lack of rain means that they are not plastered pathetically to the pavement like they usually are this time of year.

Crunch.

I started taking pictures of the particularly pretty sets of trees. You'll get those here in probably several weeks, considering that I have yet to download the pictures from my trip to Michigan. I am spectacularly bad at that sort of thing, even when I know that there are adorable nephew-and-niece pictures on there.

Crunch.

sweatpants

I am sitting on my couch contemplating the fact that I need to run to the store but I am already in my pajamas.

It's tedious to go to the store in your pajamas. It's even more tedious to change. I would never go to, say, Stall-Tart in my pajamas, because I have standards, but maybe I could go to the grocery store over by campus. College students shop in sweatpants all the time. Admittedly, in order to blend in, I should roll over the waist of my sweatpants several times so a thong shows above them (I don't think I own a thong), but maybe only the college students will notice if I wear my sweatpants at a normal height without a thong showing.

I am old.

I kind of like being old. It's much more interesting than being 20 and spending all this time trying to show off your thong so the boys will think you are hawt.

Okay, I'm going to the store. In my pajamas.

...

Well, that was fun. It's cold out there. It's also raining. I was glad to have my cozy sweatpants on.

avoiding a ticket

The other night, I was driving from downtown Gone West to the K.s' house. I stopped at the light to get on the freeway next to a police car, and when we accelerated onto the on-ramp, I was ahead of it.

That silly police car followed directly behind me for five miles before it finally took an exit, and I drove exactly 56 miles an hour the entire time.

Cars around me were passing me and passing the police car. I kept driving 56 miles an hour.

The rain fell harder. I kept driving 56 miles an hour.

And I kept staying steady in the middle of my lane.

It wasn't that I was worried about a crime. I had sipped about 3/4 of a drink over 2.5 hours before I left my friend's party. I could have passed field sobriety tests.

I just didn't want to pay for a speeding ticket, or a failure to stay within lane ticket. Traffic tickets in this state are incredibly expensive. My dad got one for $300 for something when he was here - what, he was never really sure. If you can get a ticket and never be sure what it was for, things are bad.

I refused to speed up because I refused to spend $300 of my paycheck on a traffic ticket.

Also, I have a perfect record so far: I have never been pulled over in this country.* I'm not going to ruin that now.

...

* Countries in which I do not have a never-pulled-over record: Rwanda, Uganda, Liberia.