RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

Ohhhhhhh where to begin?

I drove to the LNFU today because it was raining, and I managed to parallel park Phyllis perfectly, on the first try. That has never happened. I did have quite a bit of space in which to maneuver, but still.

Then I had a conversation with a fellow subatomic office particle about the fantasy novel she's writing. The main characters are a teenage necromancer and her sassy gay friend. She (the author) was worried about the subject matter, given how popular zombies are these days. I told her not to worry. Zombies are very meta. Teenage necromancers with sassy gay friends are much more relatable.

Later a postdoc doing foreign-government-funded research told me he's interested in doing a micro CT scan of a leech. "It's alive," he said. "Well it won't be when after you X-ray it," I replied. Then he asked me if I wanted to see the leech. Who wouldn't?

He was keeping the leech in some water in a jar on his desk. It was surprisingly beautiful. The grad student who gave it to him told me she knew people who let leeches feed off them, because they wanted to know what it felt like. I asked how long they let the leeches feed.

"Until they were full and fell off," she answered.

Then she proceeded to tell me about how one day she was eating lunch and a girl came in with gauze on her arm and she was going to have lunch too, but then she started dripping blood despite the gauze. Public service announcement: if you let a leech have some of you for breakfast, you're going to still be bleeding at lunch.

The whole leech thing reminded me of this.

Later that day, as I walked back to perfectly-parked Phyllis, I passed a white kitty and a marmalade kitty sitting side-by-side in a first-floor screened-in window. I said hi to them. They did not say hi back, but then kitties don't speak English.

Almost a year later

It's coming up on one year since my whirlwind tour of Europe with cousin B. The lovely ladyfriend he met shortly after inviting me to join him overseas, an invitation he offered in part because he had no special person in his life, is now his fiancee, and in just a few short weeks will be his wife. They are going to Disney for their honeymoon.

Goodwill

When I was at the thrift store this Friday a Middle Eastern man came up to me and handed me a nifty vintage casserole dish, complete with lid and chafing-dish-like apparatus. "It is nice," he said. "And a good price."

It was both those things. I took the dish and thanked him.

Once when I was in NYC eating at a Middle Eastern restaurant the chef came to our table and asked where I was from. When I told him, he insisted I follow him to the kitchen to inspect his griddle. "It is very clean!" he told me. "You have never seen such a clean griddle in McPolacktown." Well I'd never been invited to look at anyone's griddle anywhere but I wasn't going to harsh his mellow. I told him it looked fantastic.

Anyhoo, here's the point of this post: I think we'll win over the Middle East not with unmanned predator drones but with overwomanned carpet bombing. Just parachute in thousands of sweet busty blonde ladies. The Taliban won't know what hit them.

Tricky

Yesterday I went to my first yoga class in quite some time. The teacher asked me to demonstrate something, without telling me what that something was. I was game. I like the teacher a lot, partly because she is not afraid of my feet. And my feet are scary-looking.

Anyhoo, she had me lean over and put my hands on the floor shoulder-width apart. I walked my feet back a bit, until my torso was lined up with my shoulders. Then she had me look forward and raise one leg in the air.

She then held my ankle rather lightly and had me kick up with my other leg. Interesting. We tried it a second time and on this round I was able to push my hips forward slightly. The teacher kept telling me to squeeze my legs tighter and all of a sudden everyone else in the room made wowish sounds. Because I was balancing in a handstand in the middle of the room, all by myself.

It was amazing.

Turning my body upside-down tends to awaken the chicken of fear that lives in my brain. A chicken of fear is useful and important. But occasionally overprotective. Yesterday, the teacher's constant repetition to me to squeeze my legs was loud enough to drown out my fear-chicken's bawk-bawking.

Of course as soon as I realized what was going on, the spell was broken, and I fell over. Gracefully, thank goodness.

Wowzer

I'm all about this today.



Which brought this to mind.

Went on a long walk with KW. Her bf works doing project management of a sort for UN envoys to Libya and Sudan; he may go to Libya at some point. He worked in Sudan several years ago; the living conditions were very primitive. He loved it. The extreme conditions and close quarters meant there was zero room for bullshit or posturing. Everyone's equal.

I had my retinas scanned at the LNFU on Thursday so I can access a machine on which I will take 360-degree X-rays of pickled fish and pickled fish parts. Upon completion of the scanning I was told "You have been identified" by a computerized lady voice straight out of science fiction. Spooooooky. Afterwards I visited my cousin T's lovely gf, who was working on her MFA in the FA library. She had her laptop in front of her but was also surrounded by books.