Use the Meaning of Christmas, Luke!

And the award for probably the best True Meaning of Christmas post goes to Crazy Tracy, based entirely on the strength of this question (the rest of the post is just sentimental nonsense about babies; link removed due to brokenness, not sentimentality):

Are we to believe every person you see running around out there like a schizophrenic circus clown is being powered by the holiness of the Immaculate Conception and the resultant Virgin Birth?

They have to be powered by something, don't they? I'm picturing little manger-shaped holiness battery packs that rest on one's lower back, complete with little bits of hay to tickle one's butt and give one wedgies.

yami · 18:55 · 27 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Whimsy

Holiday Someones

Although I have a large amount of cryptic fan mail to catch up on (and when I say large, I am telling a gentle underwhelmement, as the spout box was held hostage a while back by a Flabbergastingly Bored Someone) it's all hiding in a file on my computer at home. So I'll pick up just where Someone was beginning to lose his or her tenuous grip on reality:

asdasda

I WANT TO KNOW

I DONY KNO

Indeed. Ask your Mother when she gets home. We've always thought your mom was a spy. And a big slut. She had shifty bedroom eyes. Just look at this:

i like flowera

i like hobbits

See? Disgusting. Communist. A danger to the nation's youth.

I am a hobit fancier >=D what are you?

Me, I'm into elves (as any democratic socialist of moral fiber would be) - though I still haven't seen the movie; no point in it since I'd only fall asleep half way through. Hopefully I'll get 'round to it after Santa's Birthday (it's now been three hours without Vicodin, and I only hurt as badly as menstrual cramps, hooray!).

Also in the news chez gabbro, I euthanised an old pair of jeans today. It's sad, giving up on something you've already patched past death - like losing a beloved pet that also helped you not have to do laundry so often. However, their memory will live on, as I used bits off their legs to fix another, more beloved pair, which I am bound and determined to transform into zombie-pants made of nothing but patches. Rest in peace in my grandmother's quilting stash, pants.

yami · 21:07 · 23 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Fan Mail

Twink

The most beautiful things in my house were made by my grandmothers. When I'm home, and don't have too much else on my head, I can feel a distorted echo of this humming right through me - a sudden desire to find a cheap apartment in Kitschville with a sleazy receptionist job that will allow extra time for the development of cleverly embroidered nose cozies. It gets really bad when I find instructions for making underwear from old T-shirts.

yami · 23:23 · 22 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal

Miss Manners at the INS

Dear Miss Manners:

I have no comment on the latest INS fuckup - after all, every government agency likes to make a big high-profile bust now and then, but when you're dealing with the INS you can't possibly expect a big bust that's not also a big fuckup - but there's a smaller fuckup with a heartwarming heroine that caught my eye. In short, they want to send a woman back to Afghanistan after giving political asylum to her eight siblings.

If I had my way, of course, being a woman in Afghanistan would earn you automagick political asylum. But that'll never happen, so I have another question. Let's say I'm a red-blooded American bachelor from Plano - would it be rude to ask this woman to marry me? She'd get a smoother path through immigration, I'd get lower insurance rates, we'd both be happy, right?

[link via Alas, A Blog]

yami · 19:46 · 21 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics

Product Review: Oral Cleansers

I've been hit on the head from every direction by products purporting to disinfect your mouth and promote healing. That's actually a bit of an exaggeration, but you know how it goes. First you have oral surgery, then you find out how many of your mother's friends used to be dental hygienists. I've been rinsing, swishing, swoshing and spitting these funny products with as much zeal as I can muster, because I desperately want to be allowed to eat popcorn again. Before the Vicodin puts me back to sleep, I'll write up some of my more scintillating thoughts on the matter. Just in case you ever need to know.

Amosan

I'll show a little favoritism towards Amosan, as Oral-B has a factory about a mile away from my house; I thought briefly about working there for a summer, before realizing I'd rather chew off my own leg. But whatever Amosan gains for giving me a shitty job prospect, it loses again for its dull package design and stale scratch'n'sniff sticker taste. The product comes in little envelopes full of powder, which you have to empty into tepid tap water. It fizzles rather nastily.

Peroxyl

You know this is a provocative, proactive dental hygiene product, because it's got a bright blue triangle on the package. How bold! How decisive! The bold blue triangle outside finds its spiritual complement in the great tasting original flavor inside - the kind of great tasting original flavor that smooths and tightens the back of your throat and the lower reaches of your sinus cavity. It's the kind of great tasting original flavor that makes you want to hawk up a loogie. It leaves the back of my mouth with a dry, tingling chemical afterburn.

Salt Water

You can't go wrong with salt water. It doesn't change the taste of your mouth (except to make it saltier) and it's okay to swallow. You can make it be whatever temperature you want, and it contains supplemental iodine.

Oh, here comes the pain killer. One of the lovely things about blogging is being able to see where the enthusiasm runs out of each entry, and never feel compelled to fix it. I would like to say, though, that the amount of crud I can swish out from my mouth is amazing. Probably an order of magnitude less amazing than the amount of crud I can extract from my nose pores with one of those pore-crud-extracting strips, but still amazing to an almost obsessive-compulsive degree.

Good night.

yami · 18:51 · 21 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: TMI, Ineffable

Public Health Enemy #1

It is quite clear that what I need is not more gory photographs of lung cancer, drunk driving accidents, or STDs - I need slide after slide of horrible, pus-ridden gums with bits of popcorn stuck inside them. Popcorn will be my downfall.

yami · 18:18 · 19 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: TMI

I’m Unsafe

I failed to mention, in and among all the jaw-busting tooth-extraction, that when I checked my suitcase onto the airplane, the check-in lady forgot to ask me if I had any exploding things inside. It was one of the most baffling things that has ever happened to me in an airport. Anyone could have handled my luggage, stolen all my underwear, replaced it with a big bomb, and I would have been none the wiser (strange people putting explosives in my luggage is the sort of thing I don't notice at 5 in the morning, you see, unless the check-in lady asks).

That lackluster anecdote aside, let me inform you that my bottom jaw hurts, even with the gigantic ibuprofen, because they had to drill sideways and upside-down all over it so the teeth would come out. Also, I'm getting a bit creeped out by my stitches - I've never had any before, and now I can just barely feel these little thread-things with the tip of my tongue, and they feel like pointy leeches or flesh-burrowing bits of hay. So a question for those of you who have torn yourselves up more than I: is this how stitches always feel, or is there just something extra-disturbing about foreign objects in the very back of your mouth?

yami · 20:00 · 18 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: TMI, Diary

None the Wiser

Here I am, back in Iowa minus all four of my wisdom teeth, which were removed this morning while I was under heavy sedation. Very heavy sedation - I don't remember a thing about the operation, except trying and failing to stand up when it was over. Apparently I was a hoot on the way home - I just babbled on unintelligibly, mouth stuffed full of gauze and lower lip numb and swollen, and Mom swears she had to pull over and ask me to stop lest she pee her pants laughing.

Twelve hours later, my head feels full of gauze, or Vicodin, or whatever, and I just spent several minutes stirring a packet of powdered cheese into a mug of warm milk, wondering why it wasn't brown and if those little white clumps were supposed to be fake marshmellows. But I can remember things that happened an hour ago, and speak in my usual semi-coherent fashion, so my recovery is well under way. The chicken soup must be working.

yami · 17:42 · 17 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

Dilemma Part 2

I am completely out of clean underwear. This leaves me with two choices:

  1. Go commando on the airplane.
  2. Do laundry.

Hmm.

yami · 15:01 · 12 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: TMI

Dilemma

Either I should still be working really hard right now, or I have already completed enough work to finish my finals in a somewhat leisurely fashion. I don't know which. The thing is, we were supposed to have one more data processing homework, in lieu of a final; the prof ended class last week with a promise to send it out "probably tomorrow." I'm not the only one who hasn't gotten any email from him yet... so if the world works as it should, the set will disappear. On the other hand, the world doesn't always work as it should.

Clearly, the correct thing to do is blog and play NetHack. And while I'm blogging, I feel compelled to address this thing about how Trent Lott is a big fat racist. There's been an astonishing lack of flack from the usual flack-flinging media heads (or so people claim; the usual flack-flinging media heads are quite different from the ones who appear in my textbooks), and I think it's because everyone is still living in fantasyland: we are far too advanced for a big fat racist to be elected to a leadership position the U.S. Senate, aren't we? He must have just eaten too much birthday cake, and his strong feelings about welfare reform and the Great Society got the better of him.

And that party featured a troupe of singing, dancing, flying pigs. But hey, if flying pigs allow us to think nice thoughts about the state of Mississippi, why not?

yami · 18:48 · 10 Dec 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics, Diary