Hooray. Hooray. I’ve just gotten an email notifying me of the incredible opportunity to take another class, one which is worth exactly zero credit but which I must nevertheless take before I graduate. In summary, it’s this: write a paper about science, for a non-sciency audience. Hooray. Hooray. I’m so fortunate.

It’s not that I don’t like to write, or that I can’t take horrid schoolmarmish pleasure in revising my own work. And I’m used to giving up valuable fuckaround time for little reward. But when I look at the turgid prose common in journals, and then read a bunch of clear, cogent popular science articles, I start to wonder just what exactly the core curriculum committee was smoking when they decided we should aim for a non-technical audience.

I could rant about this forever. Alas, I must instead select a topic and write a paragraph about how I plan to make it look more interesting than organizing your uncle’s bottlecap collection. I’m trying really hard to be excited. Hooray.

From the Department of Search Requests: “using tea bags on pimples.” I know nothing about this, but I have heard that putting chamomile tea bags in your arm pits is a good way to reduce frightful body odor.

I’m going to start tutoring at a high school down the road. Algebra. I hope I can remember how to explain things without using matrices or making absurd nerdy references to Euler’s theorem, but it should be good fun regardless.

Of course, before I am granted the privilige of entering some of the many hallowed halls in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I must prove myself worthy by filling out some paperwork. Probably I’ll tell them, in triplicate, that I’m not some wacko with a legal settlement hanging over my head stating that I must never be allowed anywhere near a school ever ever again on pain of gigantic civil and criminal penalties, on account of a previous kiddie porn scandal. This doesn’t disturb me in the slightest; after all, my fourth-grade teacher’s husband was exactly that kind of wacko, and in the absence of this simple legal hurdle they let him come back on school property to instigate a whole new kiddie porn scandal. Oooops.

What does disturb me is that I have to submit a tuberculosis test, because I can’t remember when I last had one and I’m certain it’s the sort of thing I ought to remember. I remember when my last tetanus shot was, and I don’t have tetanus… so maybe my dripping sinuses and intermittent hacking cough aren’t allergic reactions after all! I could have TB! This would be cool if it were a gentle wasting illness like in Moulin Rouge, where my skin would develop that ethereal translucent glow, inspiring the frantic denial of hordes of lovestruck followers before I am finally saved by the miracle of modern antibiotics, but it’s actually not like that at all. Oh well.

In other matters, I am now quite enamored of dollarshort.org. It soothes my cockles rather nicely. As a side note, where are one’s cockles anyway? Are they near the hackles? I don’t generally keep many shellfish in the cupboard, so I was quite surprised to find that I had cockles to soothe. Something new every day, I tell ya.

It seems like all the half-assed holidays are in winter. Except Columbus Day. And Veterans Day.

There goes that theory.

By all rights this ought to be a very trendy holiday, since there are infinitely many people who can talk about modern-day nonviolent protest movements, the detailed biographies of the 2020 Supreme Court justices, how to overcome racism using astrology, how they were only 20 miles away from a protest march once or something else equally relevant, and they’re all willing to do it at your organization’s luncheon. Furthermore, we’ve made the exactly right amount of progress eliminating racism to have a really good holiday about it: we can all feel proud of ourselves as a culture for not having slavery or segregated water fountains, and we can also feel superior to our neighbors because we just finished a sensitivity training course and they didn’t. But, this is January and crappy picnic weather for most of the country, not to mention that we’re all paying off our Christmas debt.
So I think I partook of some aspect of national consciousness when I felt a very weak impulse to do something frivolous or commemorative with my day off, maybe eat free food at a community picnic while some old coot reminisces about Selma, and then went grocery shopping and did homework instead. Happy Martin Luther King day. Or Wellington’s Anniversary day or whatever your banks are closed for this week. Try not to be a racist while you do your laundry.

Today I helped lead a hazing ritual that involved making macaroni pictures. Now there’s one of them hanging up on the fridge in a communal kitchen. It’s shiny.

One of the cheapest and dirtiest ways to avoid “really oughta post” angst is to empty out some kind of “blog later” folder. Here are some things.

• This page isn’t all that entertaining on its own. What’s great is that someone made a pretty decent midi version of “Stayin’ Alive” under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health. The government wants you to use the BeeGees to teach your kids to read.
• How about a picture of monkeys doing monkey things?
• Dude. Dude. It’s the Tree of Life, with pictures and technical description from crenarchaeota to red algae to sloths. And more use of the “ae” ending than anywhere else on the Internet.

In other news, there’s been a disturbing lack of disturbing search requests in my referrer logs lately. I must clearly redouble my efforts. Young girl naked with elephant.

So I filed into an appendix of a hotel lobby, sat on an uncomfortable and not-very-stylish chair, and listened to fifty questions about stuff. I answered some of them, and may even have gotten a few correct. What disappoints me, though, isn’t that I failed the preliminary test - I knew that was going to happen. I’m disappointed because I failed to write down “Joan Jett” as the answer to all the ones I missed, and because I didn’t steal any of the hotel water glasses so fetchingly arrayed at the back of the room. Silly me.

I left with two questions. Maybe one of you can tell me the answers.

1. Why were there so few women trying out? I didn’t think to count, but the ratio was noticeably worse than any graduate physics course I’ve accidentally barged in on. The program itself, of course, is pretty well balanced, so I always assumed that the tryouts would be as well.
2. What’s the threshold score for making it into the contestant pool? I was expecting an evil professor-style test, where the high score just barely cracks 60%, but that’s not what I got.

My friend did indeed make it into the “contestant pool;” while he did the interview, the rest of us sat around in the lobby playing Set and doing homework, so I can’t tell any fun stories about that. I would have maybe tried to sit in, but there was one of those women doing the organizing who yelled like she was excited all the time and I hate that. She scared the utter crap out of me.

1. If there’s enough car space to get me downtown (and this is not by any means a sure thing), I’m going to try out for Jeopardy! tomorrow.
2. I don’t expect to make it on the show. No, really, I don’t, not even a little bit. In my wildest dreams I am barely knowledgeable enough for the watered-down college version. If they had lots of questions about goats then things would be different, but as it is I can’t even spell knowledgeable without counting on my fingers. But, someone else was organizing the trip and you get a free pencil for trying. It should be both painless and fun.
3. I do expect a friend of mine to pass the test and win billions and billions of monies, of which he will probably give me not even a penny. Nor will he allow me to bask in his reflected glory. But that’s OK, I’ll always have memory and incoherent mumbling to keep me company in my old age.

I should also say that I’ve had my head half-pulled into my shell for the
past few weeks, but it feels almost (not quite) safe enough to come back
out. So if you’re awaiting some kind of response from me, be patient, it’s
not that I don’t love you it’s that I’ve almost stopped writing to even my
mother in favor of wandering around in some kind of daze.

Though I like to think of myself as a spontaneous, unstructured person -
and I am, too, in many ways - I also need a sense of routine to be very
productive. Ho hum.

It’s raining, it’s pouring,
The old man is snoring

Winter in Southern California always makes me really gleeful, in part because I love rain and in part because I love to watch other people suffer through trivial indignities like getting wet. Particularly when the other people involved are big sissies who have lived here too long and wouldn’t know real weather if it blew their roof off. Hee hee hee, snork.

And then there’s me, all set to boast about how I’m finally on the road to health after three weeks of random upper respiratory infections when a chain-reaction coughing fit has me paralyzed for a good three minutes. Oh well. I’ve still got the use of a nostril and a half, that’s something anyway.

While I’m in the spirit of book-mentioning, I should also dredge up The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, which was one of the ones that got me through the train ride in good humor. It may have cost me my only shot at a train friend, as I made some damn odd noises at the funny bits, but that’s all right. And finally - some of the Amazon reviews may lead you to believe that this book is nothing but America-bashing by a curmudgeonly expatriate, and this may even be true. I found it to be a rather uplifting aid to my own repatriation, a good reminder of all the bizarre, wonderful, and absolutely hilarious shit strewn along this country’s highways. Probably this is because I’m an absolutely hopeless basket case. Whatever.

My old dear housemate just lent me a book called Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, which by all rights should be a perfect allegory of my life. I am after all half asleep, and wearing frog pajamas. The pajamas are a cheap silky set from Santamas, and I’m wearing them in a sense of vague protest because I’m not allowed to simply put my life on hold whenever I’m ill and grumpy. The being half asleep is normal.

The trick is that the book revolves around a stockbroker, so I’m really not sure how any of it applies to me. Maybe it’ll all make sense once I get to the part about monkeys.