jf jfqa q

-Font page quote: "LETTEROMATIC ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890"-

Ha. I had a dream that I was a detective (again??) and found a body, which for some reason cued me to go over the border (through a hole that I had to lie down and shimmy through to manage) and meet up with some ancient Central American tribe. And also my cousin. Later, I was in my own house again, and it dawned on my to check my teeth. They were wobbly, so I concluded that I was in a dream! Unfortunately, my sadistic brain, which seems bent on keeping me from lucidity, put me in (to yet again quote Princess Bride) "a dweam wiffin a dweammm" so I (correctly) concluded that the "subdream" was a dream but thought (incorrectly) that the main dream was reality. Hmph.

I found a neat function on my phone: the ability to listen to music through the normal speaker rather than the outside speaker or headphones. This brings up the amusing mental picture of sitting in a bus or some such and raising one's phone to the ear just to listen to music. It would sort of be like the opposite of those awful bluetooth headsets, you know the ones that you can never see at first so you always think the person energetically saying "Hello!" is speaking to you, respond and make a dolt of yourself? But in this case, it would look like you're making a call, but you wouldn't actually be doing so. After a while people might start to wonder why you're sitting there on the phone without speaking a word... "Hey, have you noticed that dude's been on the phone for a couple minutes now without saying anything?" "Whoa, you're right! How weird! Maybe the guy he's talking to is really mad at him and he's waiting for him to finish yelling." "Maybe it's his girlfriend!" (pause while they watch) "How long d'ya think he won't talk?" "What if he hangs up without saying anything?" "Is he checking his voicemail?" "No, he hasn't pushed any buttons either..." (another pause) "He just smiled -- must not be someone yelling at him." "What if he likes being yelled at?" (laughs)...

Everyone wins. The "caller" gets to listen to his music while simultaneously befuddling his neighbors, AND they win because he's not briskly talking at "cell phone volume" (ugh) or blasting his music out of the outer speaker.

Reality check. Supposedly one of the reasons public phone conversations are so hard to ignore is because our brains automatically sense that there's only half a conversation going on, and feel like they might need to complete it.

nnq q

-Brother quote: "...or brooming the floor"-

There was a chocolate cake in my dream, and not much else I remember.

Sometimes I wish weird things really did happen like they do in children's stories. Like, for instance, today I was driving (well, not actually driving, but in a car) home when I saw a guy crossing the street. I assume he was a construction worker, because he was heading toward a worksite with a long, thin metal thing in his hand. Anyway, I was looking at him, and at the long whippy metal thing, and thinking, Wouldn't it be so awesome if he went up to the wall of the worksite and vaulted over it with his whippy pole thing? I could picture him suddenly starting to run, then unexpectedly (for everyone else, that is -- I would know what he was doing) spiking down the rod and leaping over the wall, almost flying.

Too bad that only happens in storybooks. All he did was walk mundanely to the site. But in a way, I guess it's sort of like it did happen (cue sappy music) because I took the time... (sappy music swells) to imagine it...

Or not.

Reality check. And it also happens in dreams -- though it would probably be me pole vaulting in that case.

fafjf

-EKey quote: "Your username is:"-

I had a dream last night that I was leading the resistance effort against a flock of murderous, carnivorous geese perched in the trees waiting to ambush. Which, if you know geese at all, is completely realistic. So I didn't become lucid (I notice that I say that phrase as if I normally do, which I don't. Look! It's a goose!!!).

I drank a slushie today as somewhat of an experiment. You see, I first tried carbonated drinks as a very small child, and proceeded to avoid them after that first sip. Well, the other day I was thinking, "Self, haven't you had many foods you loved as a child but now hate (see Tang, Jolly Ranchers, and Skittles)? And by a similar token, many foods that you despised as a child, but now, with an adult palate, find interesting (see cranberries and spinach)? Is it not possible that the whole carbonation incident was a fluke of a young, underdeveloped tongue?"

So I tried the slushie. Plus, it was in mango flavor, which is only my FAVORITE fruit in the whole wide world. I took a cursory sip. Sip. Hm, not overly noticeable. Another? Siiiip... AUGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Now that my tongue has stopped smarting, I have decided to continue foregoing carbonated beverages. Ah, the wisdom of youth.

Reality check. At least my teeth will be healthier.

aad ns7

-Search Results quote: "Discover why BlackBerry is the leading wireless handheld device solution. Phones and smartphones with video, software and services to connect mobile ..." (gotta love the trailing off in midsentence)-

So last night I dreamed of child actors. Lots of them. First one of them was being interviewed, then I was watching tons of them at some sort of camp. There was a line of trees in the camp (in a place which looked conspicuously like my kitchen, except outdoors) inhabited by a bunch of female pheasants. All of us (I mean me and the actorettes) got to see the mating rituals of the pheasants twice, once when two males approached the trees, then another time at night when only one male returned. The display at night was gorgeous. Picture several large pheasants per tree, joyously ignoring the fact that females are supposed to have drab plumage, spreading peacocky feathers stuffed around with smaller feathers from their tails. The neat thing was that they were an authentic drab brown until the male(s) approached, then suddenly their tails opened up to POW! Colors galore! And the night scene was under a full moon, so the tails glistened so. The actorettes were transfixed. It was marvelous.

Sometimes I think not being able to tell that I'm dreaming is a good thing. Maybe if I could tell, it would lose some of its wonder.

The sky looks a bit overcast today, but it's to the point where I can't tell if it's overcast or "overcast". I'm sure that they haven't gotten all of the fires contained yet, so it could be smoke. Still no windows open, just to be sure.

I got a cell phone yesterday: the BlackBerry Pearl. Hey, I figure if I have to get a phone to keep in touch, might as well get a fun one, and trust me, with AT&T, your options are limited. Also: Costco sells it for an unbelievably low price. I'm liking it so far; the predictive text works great. Every key has two letters, but you basically just start typing (pressing once on each key) and it figures out what word you really mean. Now, I've tried T-9 before, which is this thing that's supposed to anticipate what you're typing and stuff, but... it doesn't work. It invariably picks a laughably incorrect word -- you might as well just multi-touch it and be sure you're typing "hi what r u doing" instead of "help we ran under doggie-doo". But predictive text on the BlackBerry actually WORKS, probably because each key has only two letters, and the layout is qwerty, so letters that are next to each other are very unlikely to be used in similar places.

Reality check. Check out those pheasants...

q/

-Chat quote: "You are invisible. Go visible."-

Why, oh why is losing one's teeth such a recurring dream-theme? Is it because I can't feel my mouth? Do we just all have this repressed fear of it happening? Am I regressing to age 6 or something, when dropping teeth would be normal?? I did try to stick the tooth back in again in this dream, although it seemed wobbly enough that I was certainly glad to wake up and discover that my tooth never fell out in the first place.

Yay, not only is this post my 100th(!), but it is also my mom's birthday!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMMY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Reality check. Might want to try checking your teeth too.

nmqtnmqt

-Me quote: "Cheese warming"-

There was eating in one of my dreams. The other one... let's see, oh yes, another one involving Phantom of the Opera, although this time watching it instead of participating in it. Also, I was in Japan at the time.

Smoke's clearing a bit here. Still not to the stage where we can have a lot of windows open, but the sky at least looks tolerably normal. I had a generally gloomy day yesterday, in part because of this (which I found out after posting yesterday). He was one of the more active moderators on MystCommunity, and pretty young too. It was a bit of a shock.

Reality check.

fa

-Princess Bride quote: "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya; you killed my father. Prepare to die."-

Vaguely disturbing dream in which I cut out a chunk of my arm and shaped it into a fixed-width solid. Took my brain a while to realize that such a procedure would produce quantities of blood, but when it finally caught on... well, I was stuck holding a rapidly reddening bandage against my arm for the remainder of the dream. I blame lingering memories of the vaccinations I got a while back. Oh, and also, I found out when I woke up this morning that it is possible to cut off one's circulation in such a way that half of one's lip falls asleep. A very disconcerting feeling, let me say.

It is very smoky outside today. Surprising how much more oppressive the heat gets when the air is choking with particulates. Such is life in the Great Domesticated Desert of Doom^TM, I suppose. It does give the sky a beautiful grey color, almost like it's overcast and about to rain. Always makes the plants look so wonderfully green, instead of washing them out like a blue sky does. The fires are somewhat near my area, but not close enough to be dangerous, just smoky. And sneezy -- ash is, not surprisingly, disagreeable to one's lungs.

Somehow the ashy smell and the mugginess make people move slower, when they're outdoors, almost as if they're in some sort of sci-fi regime where all their movements are scripted. Makes the sidewalks suddenly seem so long and lonely. It's funny. Earthquakes truly don't faze native GDDoDers, but I guess even we can't be so lighthearted about fires. See, earthquakes are sort of amusing -- they feel like you're on a ship or something, just hit some swells -- and you can trick yourself into thinking that you can be smart enough to avoid getting hurt, plus the major ones don't come every year, and when they do come, they only last for a couple minutes at most. Fires... fire season comes every year. With fires, you know many of them are not just freaks of nature (granted, most of the ones now were started by lightning) but are the result of some person making a mistake or willfully throwing a ribbon of death. And the grass and the wind pick it up, and it is beyond control.

I think it's the heat too. There is enough heat, enough dryness, enough talk of water rationing, drought, and then a fire comes and makes everything worse. It's no wonder all the ancients were obsessed with fire. I see the pall of misty smoke outside, that all-stilling embrace, and I think I might have been obsessed too, if I lived then.

Reality check. Mild weather? Ha!

jfa

-Gulliver's Travels quote: "I myself heard him give directions, that one of his Pages should be whipt, whose turn it was to give notice about washing the Floor after an Execution, but had maliciously omitted it, by which neglect a young Lord of great hopes coming to an audience, was unfortunately poisoned, although the King at that time had no design against his Life."-

Well, I suspect in real life not too many cereals go about having slugs in them, but there you go. I still didn't realize at that juncture that I was dreaming. Other notable segments of dreams last night: a prince coming to a pool party (after being presumed dead) and me being a turtle, and visiting the castle of a dead king. Still as a turtle. I think my survival tactic of consuming a travel mug of water before bed -- on top of my usual 2-then-3 milk has the fringe benefit of increasing my alertness (as well as the main benefit of keeping me from cooking in the heat).

Just a random fun fact for the day. Turns out, the note divisions we have in music may not be arbitrary. They may actually reflect important tones in speech. Learning this (from Wired) started me thinking, ok, so what specific tones do the notes correspond to? Can you make a melody that (tonally) closely mimics a real conversation?

Reality check. Music is a strange beast... one that apparently only gets stranger.

mqm

-CnetTV quote: "Top 5 Worst Wii Games"-

I had a couple dreams that I remember having, but only one of the two in any detail. Highlights included an albino guide dog puppy and meeting an old friend of mine.

Oh, how about another storytime! This one will probably be shorter, due to the fact that the floor fan is blowing on me in a most irritating fashion.

Kh'aar

It happened some years ago that I was seized with the desire to wander the earth and see the strange sights on it. So I took my bag and began to walk across the tracks of the land, up and down, into forests and out of them, through villages and beyond the print of mankind.

I saw many curious things in my wanderings about, but one wonder outmatched them all. It happened as I was going hungry out of a certain city that I came across a nomads' camp, in a black clearing of the trees on the city outskirts. As I approached the camp, hoping that its inhabitants would be more hospitable than those in the town, I was surprised to notice that each slumbering form (it was a warm, clear day, so sleeping without the benefit of a tent was not odd, in itself) was yet encased in armor. As I walked closer, I was more startled to see that the resting nomads were several times my size, and of a most curious girth and form. I later learned that they call themselves the Kh'aars.

Being a confident, and essentially nomadic youth myself, I threw in my lot among them, and was rewarded the next morning when one of them had a stiff pouch of food in his pocket. As he was a good deal larger than me, his pocketful of food served as a full breakfast and extra for me. That night, I slept in their camp.

The Kh'aars are an insular lot, only banding together when they happen to use the same camp square. Indeed, the next day, all semblance of a camp was gone as each Kh'aar ambled off in their separate directions. I stayed by the side of the fellow with the food (I know my place!), eager to learn of this novel race. Information came slowly. His people apparently have strict taboos on superfluous speaking -- he spoke only in toneless monosyllables, and only then, when very agitated. Still, I could learn much simply from watching BOBS, as he called himself. The first order of business was the armor that so puzzled me that first night. The Kh'aars wear it nearly from birth, and never take it off until their death. As might be expected in such a permanent fixture, their metallic clothing comes in many different hues, and can in fact be painted at a whim.

They take the greatest care not to damage their precious raiment, as this in itself can lead to their demise. Their lack of verbal communication is well made up for in their visual displays, which I found quite stunning when I first witnessed them. If two Kh'aars are attempting to move in close consort, it is not strange to see first one eye wink, then the other, and thereby this ponderous people manage to manuever their bulked forms around each other with minimal discomfort. When more complicated movements are necessary, several staves are affixed to the ground, with either symbols or three winking eyes upon their capitals. In some arcane way, these staves further communicate how to travel around each other with the least mishap.

Their visual communication goes still further; even their very names are permanently emblazoned across their ever-present armor -- an invention I thought quite useful in reducing repetitive introductions. Their names may be legally altered, for a fee, but the display of their names is actually directed by law, with serious penalties for its absence. Furthermore, no two Kh'aars in the same region may have the same name. The purpose of these laws, or even their enforcement among such a scattered band, is still unclear to me. A more functional ordinance is that surrounding their eyes, as the organs are vitally important to their daily navigations. Should even one of their eyes fail, the Kh'aars are bound by the regulations of their people to have it doctored to health, or be relocated. Again, as they are a nomadic tribe, I found this penalty strange, but clearly there is a deep fear of such a punishment; at no time did I see a Kh'aar with less than perfect oculars. Nor did I ever see one lacking their ceremonial black boots, with their characteristic ripples all about. As roaming to and fro wears down the carefully carved ripple design, the shoes are replaced so that no individual lacks the acceptable footwear.

Happily, the Kh'aars did not hold me to such stringent requirements. I stayed observing their ways for some time, until I was forced to leave when BOBS was carried off with hooks by a rival clan, after camping too long in their territory. I continued my wanderings across the earth from that day, but I never did find a race so unusual as the Kh'aars.

I wonder if you have heard of them?

Reality check. Hum-diddly-huummm.

ns7

-Phantom quote: "Sir, I bid you welcome" (smacked way out of context)-

There was a large, multicolored bird in one of my dreams, and a pet ferret in another. The ferret was kind of interesting since ferrets are actually illegal in this Great Domesticated Desert of Doom^TM; of course my head conveniently legalized them.

I sit here writing from what appears to be a cave, since nearly all the blinds throughout the house are drawn, and I have to have the light on over the computer even though it is currently around noon. Whoever first claimed that the GDDoD had "mild" weather either 1) is a lying cad that I feel like kicking at the moment or 2) grew up in Shanghai, in which case I pity him greatly.

In other news, there is a bird that comes to my bedroom window every morning to bash his brains against it. Actually, what he's (she's?) really doing is gradually dismantling the window screen, presumably gathering material for a nest, but it really sounds like the bird is just bashing its head against the screen. There will sort of be this worried "edder-eeee" chirping sound, then "whupam! whupam! whupam!" and a flurry of wings and movement.

And another part of the screen flaps free. Our avian friend is very close to unmooring the bottom of the screen completely.

Reality check. Ah, birds.

jf jf

-Nurse quote: "Your arm's just a little sensitive."-

Well, dreamt I was visiting the royal family, and that they lived in Southern California. Pause, pause.

Yesterday was one of those days where I set out to have a bad day. Ever had one of those? My arms were very sore and a tiny bit swollen (especially random PPD). It was hot out, this now being insane-summer-of-Great Domesticated Desert of Doom^TM. Furthermore, some people I know were going to drag me out to look at cell phones. Whoopee-doo. Oh, and I was finally going to have my PPD checked, so that was a small relief.

So anyway, we drive out first to the AT&T store (blame my family for choosing one of the worst carriers -- basing the decision on its rollover feature -- then locking the rest of us into it by means of free in-network calling) to look at phones. For a long time. I find out that since AT&T is sort of evil like that, the phones that I had initially thought I could live with lack the features that I want. On top of that, the iPhones are all missing, so I can't even play around with those while the others in the group look at phones for themselves. So my mood is getting more sour.

But ah, relief. The next stop is to be the hospital, to get the TB skin test read so I can stop worrying about coddling it (to prevent a false positive). So we drive up to the hospital, and two of us jump out while the rest look for parking. We waltz into the building... only to find that the injection clinic has just begun their lunch break. It does not escape my notice that we would have made it if we hadn't spent so much time at the phone store, and my mood darkens again. Also, my arms are hurting worse, to the point where I'm afraid someone will bump them and I'll fall to the floor or something.

Then, lunch. I have had a late breakfast, so food does not hold any particular appeal to me, especially at this point, where I just want to go HOME. But the rest of my group is hungry, so we drop by a nearby shopping center. One notices a restaurant named "King Cafe" that he thinks is interesting, so we go there. The place is empty -- dead empty, except for the staff. I head straight for a corner table and wedge myself into a good woe-me position. The rest of the group piles around me, and the menus are opened. I am still not hungry. They look over the lunch specials, one of which is a spicy mango-chicken dish. That sounds interesting, slightly. I might be induced to try a piece of it if someone else orders it. Finally, the owner comes over to ask for orders. One guy in the group asks what

Potato Beef - East meets West!

has in it. The waitress replies matter-of-factly: "potato beef". Hardly very informative, but it does make me grin just a tiny bit. Orders are taken; I get nothing, but figure that I can always split with someone if the urge to eat suddenly returns. The waitress does, however, kindly include a soup for me, even though there are only three entree orders. It is Hot & Sour soup, and very good.

There is a particular wonder to eating in an empty restaurant. One is that you can tell exactly when your food is cooking... and that the chef is singing to himself as he cooks. I am an absolute pushover for singing chefs; they never fail to make me smile in glee. So by the time the food comes out, I am feeling much improved, and I polish off a good third of my seatmate's utterly delicious Mongolian Beef. Why is it that hole-in-the-wall restaurants so frequently have such good eats?

We head to Costco next, since its website claimed that it had all the highest rated phones, if a smaller selection. We tromp to the mobile section, and the AT&T corner has precisely 5 models. However, to our surprise, one of the models is an $80 BlackBerry Pearl ($30 with a data plan). Now, I may be a pushover for singing chefs, but I'm even more of a pushover for geekery, so despite the fact that I hardly need a BlackBerry, this was cheering news.

More cheering news -- we stopped by the hospital again, and they were out of lunch break this time. My skin test was checked, and I test negative for TB. Not that I had any expectation of testing positive, but still, it was just another little good thing. Even better, now I don't have to worry about creating a false positive by irritating the spot.

And to top it all off, I found out that Amazon sells the newest Casio Pathfinder watch (which is solar, atomic, and water resistant to 200 m, with a barometer, altimeter, thermometer, tide graph, and moon phase tracker) for less than $300, which was a pleasant surprise.

I sure feel silly about my surliness yesterday morning, in retrospect. Funny how these sorts of days seem to always turn out like this. It's as if God decides that He's going to have fun dumping blessings on me anyway -- in spite of my ungratefulness.

Reality check. Yup, I am a pushover for more technology than I really need. But you never know! I might someday get stuck on a mountain, in the middle of the ocean, 200 meters underwater and need to know what phase the moon is in!

jft jft

-Google Toolbar quote: "Bloomingdales" (one of the "suggestions" when I start typing "Blogger")-

Vivid dreams last night. One involved yet another twist-up of the Phantom of the Opera story (the most notable part of which involved me teleporting and switching to third person without realizing I was dreaming), and the other involved family relationships. Specifically, the family member in question was sticking his string bean into my glass of milk, even though I told him to stop, and I required counselling to learn to deal with my anger over this. Dreams=weird.

Turns out I spoke too soon about the TB PPD skin test. Well, I still don't think it's producing a positive result, but it sure is producing an irritating negative result. Which is to say: yesterday it slowly transmogrified from "a tiny bruise" to something more resembling a mild spider bite, pink, raised, and a tiny bit painful at times. I attribute this to the super-sensitive skin in which my arm is wrapped.

As someone I know so cheerily pointed out, medicine is like the opposite of the legal system: it is better that 10 healthy patients become miserable than for one sick patient to test negative and go untreated.

Reality check. If you can avoid them, skip PPD tests.

jft fqaq

-Pencil quote: "USA PAPER:MATE AMERICAN HB 2"-

I was surprised at how detailed my memory of one dream was last night, considering that the whole hurting-ness of the tetanus and meningitis shots began kicking in this morning. Anywho, the most unusual part of the dream was that I was driving merrily along when I came across traffic signals with... wait for it... ADVERTISING! In fact, I made a false start when a green logo (but not the actual green light) flashed on one of the lights. So you see -- pervasive advertising is not as bad as it could be.

Vaccination (& Co.) update. Chicken pox, blood draw, and TB test are completely fine by now -- at most there's a small pink welt at the blood draw location, and a tiny bruise where the TB skin test went in. But as far as feeling them, they're as good as not there.

On the other hand. Both of my upper arms feel as if I seriously overworked them in some sort of demented weight-lifting exercise. The muscle is not at all taking kindly to the idea of having foreign matter streamed into it. Furthermore, I can tell exactly which injections are causing the complaints: on my left arm, the TDaP (Tetanus/Diptheria/Pertussis) booster, and on my right, the meningicoccal vaccine. At least the diseases they prevent against are worthwhile (read: serious).

Of course, that's not the first thing that crosses my mind when I realize that every movement involved in getting dressed in the morning engages the upper arms. Yeowch. Funny how little kids are always overafraid of the actual poke involved, when actually the residual effects of the shot -- MUST ELIMINATE FOREIGN SERUM FROM MUSCLE NOW!!! -- are worse.

Reality check. At least typing isn't too bad.

nfjfj

-Newsweek quote: "What Would Winston Do?"-

No certain memories from my dreams last night, except for something about hair. Which is a pity, since it would be so fun to pelt someone with nuts again. ;P

I sit here typing after being speared to within an inch of my life at the hospital. No, don't worry, it was just a regular old checkup, but with that checkup came a good deal of... well, pokes.

In the order of appearance:

1. A tetanus booster on my left arm. Didn't hurt too much -- except that these always hurt like the dickens the day after you get them, so my hopes are not high.
2. A chickenpox booster, also on my left arm. I managed to avoid the pox for my entire childhood, and intend to continue doing so. My father, as it happens, got it in college, and he was miserable -- supposedly it gets worse with age. This particular puncture has protested the most so far.
3. Switching to my right arm, a meningitis shot. Recommended, but not required by the hospital... I figured I'd do it anyway, because meningitis is kind of nasty. Vaccine feels like it's bathed in some sort of scathing fluid, which burned my muscles quite ferociously on the way in, but hasn't really hurt since.
4. A tuberculosis test on my right forearm. Administered by needle, forms a loathsome pustulely white bump that has by now gone down. I'm fairly certain I don't have TB, so that should be the worst of it -- if I do have it, the spot will become pink, inflamed, and itchy within 48 hours.
5. Then a hike to the lab. Since at this point I knew what was coming next, I, ahem, got severely dizzy in the waiting room. Was revived by putting my head between my knees and sipping a can of apple juice.
6. The urine test. Not painful (for which I am eternally grateful), but a tad messy and difficult to collect. The just-consumed apple juice was helpful here.
7. And, finally, the big momma: a blood draw. However, they're actually correct when they say that it doesn't hurt as much as shots (of course, I thought they were just being reassuring at the time). The most painful part is really the tourniquet they apply above the site, and that isn't too bad -- it merely sits there squeezing one's arm for a while. Had a can of grape juice afterwards, which I don't even like. But I did not particularly care at that point.

On the plus side, the rest of the appointment was enjoyable. Especially since it occurred BEFORE all the prickings and pokings. Notably, the blood pressure cuff was much less uncomfortable (not to mention less error-prone) than the one at the grocery store.

Needless (or Needles?) to say, I am not feeling altogether charitable toward Edward Jenner right now.

Reality check. Removing the band-aids and cotton hurt, too.

aans7

-Arm quote: "[hair]"-

One of my dreams involved being attractive to a member of the opposite sex (what was funny about the dream was that the member in question is about the least likely to fall into such a state, particularly with me as the object), and the other involved staying in this awesome cantilevered hotel that you could rotate with foot pedals. To choose who got to operate the foot pedals, we pelted our choice with nuts.

Children's songs are so much fun. Especially the ones that are subliminally violent. There is a peculiar rush that comes from listening to saccharine voices sing:

The king was in his court, counting all his money
The queen was in the kitchen, eating bread and honey
The maid was in the garden, hanging up the clothes
When a blackbird came and snipped off her nose.

...followed by the more well-known part

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye
Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie
When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing
Now wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?

I realize this is an old rhyme with hidden political meanings and whatnot, but I have to say that hearing it put to music as a children's song, sung by children and high-voiced adults, was a profoundly hilarious experience, especially since they saw fit to include the nose-snipping bit.

Reality check. Need I say more? Oh, and happy belated Father's Day, by the way.

,,,

-Email quote: "(who will now read the above message over and over to uproarious giggles)"-

No memory of my dreams last night. Summer will, I think, be a harder time for this because I'm less likely to be able to fall back asleep when I wake up in the wee hours -- in which the sun is already rising. Hmph.

As mentioned elsewhere, I am soon to be somewhat bullied into getting my first cell phone. Being the sort of person that is not easily cowed into unhappiness, I was able to notice the funniest thing in the brochure for the different family service plans. Namely, it is actually cheaper to get a completely unlimited plan than it is to get any equivalent 6000 minute plan. Huh? In fact, it remains cheaper even if you add a third line to the plan; it is only when the fourth line is added that the unlimited plan inches past the 6000-minute plan in price.

Now, I could see getting the 6000 minute plan if it was significantly cheaper than the unlimited plan, and you knew that you'd never use more than 6000 minutes (I know I never would, but I would go with a still-cheaper plan with even less minutes -- I rarely talk on the phone). But why in the world would you buy a 6000 minute plan if it's more expensive than the unlimited one???

The only circumstance I can see working with this, is if you had an enormous family, but they never used more than 6000 minutes. Then, you MIGHT be able to come out ahead with the smaller plan, simply because adding an extra line is cheaper in that one, though the higher base price means that you have to add several extra lines to make it more economical than the unlimited plan (which, I might add, does have a higher actual value to the consumer to begin with).

Reality check. The telcos need one.

nn

-PotO quote: "Angel of darkness! Cease this torment!", the most random-sounding quote in the whole musical-

My dream was rather disjointed last night (like that's abnormal). The main thing I remember is taking those little "Magnetic Poetry" words and making them into the shape of a swan. I don't remember what I was actually writing with them, just that it was shaped like a swan's neck.

Why are power cords nowadays almost uniformly black? No matter how you look at it, it doesn't make sense. For instance, it cannot be that black is an unobtrusive color (for those people that dislike their power cords showing) since virtually no one actually paints their walls black. Or even very dark colors -- they're seen to make the room seem smaller, I suppose. So why did power cords shift from being all different colors (often white) to almost always being black?

It cannot be practical, furthermore, to have these BLACK cords sucking heat in either. Yet black, as we all know, is a heatsink. So why not make them white? Yes, on the electronic devices they're attached to, white is often not preferred, given the ease at which it dirties to an "unhip" beige, but cords are most often seen running against a wall or carpet, which, likely as not (especially in an unmodified track home) is an unhip beige. Perfect camouflage.

Unless, of course, the cord designers are like me, and actually like the cords to show. But in my experience, most consumers do not have a similar taste in industrial beauty.

Reality check. I've got five fingers -- do you?

nns

-Me quote: "Aaaand I'm back.", just now-

Well, no memory of last night's dream, probably due to the fact that I got in bed after midnight. Why? Oh yes. I watched a live performance of Phantom of the Opera. That more than made up for the loss of dreams, let me tell you.

However, in the time I was absent from Blogger, I had a couple singularly interesting dreams, such as the one where Gmail was taken over by a hacker named John Canseco (????) and I was a private eye searching for him. But then a bomb exploded, and a John Canseco died, but it was sort of like those creepy modern novels where everything is confused and there are about a billion John Cansecos and I had to visit each one to find the hacker. But the more interesting dream was a day or two before that, when I dreamt that, among all its other lovely free services, Google began offering

FREE FLIGHTS INTO SPACE.

I dreamed that I just had to fill out this sign-up form online, then go. I took my camera on the space flight, and asked that the pilot (is that what they're called in shuttles?) fly out a little farther so I could get the Sun through the viewport. The shuttle was WAAAAAY faster than modern spacecraft, although it didn't seem so, probably because we all have such a poor notion of how absurdly far apart everything is in space.

Of course, as dreams seem to require in such awesome situations, I began to have irrational fears, thinking about how a spacecraft was different from a plane -- in a plane, depressurization can be remedied, but depressurization in space is permanent. Eeep. As you might expect, since it was my brain controlling the plot line, the flight was aborted and we were returned home before reaching our destination. As ludicrously unbelievable as it sounds, I never ONCE realized I was dreaming in this whole sequence.

Reality check. After I got back to Earth, I resumed being a mayor (?) of several cities (!!).

7t7t

-Me quote: "My bellybutton itches"-

I had last night what I call (shorthand) a "frisna" dream. That is, I'm positive it was interesting, but I cannot access the content. I think there might have been some voice acting involved... but I could just be remembering yesterday.

Very creepy statistic: here in the U.S., only about half of the kids that drop out of high school do so because they don't get enough help with classes. The other half? Apparently they're bored smart kids!

And I can understand exactly how that would come about. Now, I wasn't a genius or anything when I was young, but I think I can say without bragging that I did -- do -- learn unusually fast. What people don't seem to realize about this subset of the population is that they're not just "regular" kids with extra intelligence tacked on. You see, the thing is, these kids (okay, we) do tend to have some common (sometimes unexpected) personality traits.

- They are generally terribly perfectionistic. My brilliant uncle, for instance, went through a period in school where he would do ALL his homework, but intentionally never turned it in because he was dissatisfied with its quality. He later became a nuclear engineer. I know I gave my mother her share of woe as I had to work long into the night (getting progressively more tired and irritable) getting every last insignificant detail PERFECT on some small piece of minutiae in a project.

- They can be intensely vain and sensitive. I'm not sure if maybe we just start out with this characteristic, and it's what motivates us to overachieve, but I think part of it is when teachers and peers coddle us and tell us how great we are -- CONSTANTLY, by their words and actions. At first, we try to ignore it, to be above their approval. But it is so grained into us (barring some courageous teacher that keeps us humble while still being truthful) from childhood that we do tend to get used to it. And miss it if it disappears.

- Of course, the obvious one that everyone knows but seems to forget: when an intelligent child is forced to go at a normal pace, he gets bored. You must understand, to a gifted child, going along with his age group is akin to his age group being taught with toddlers. It is not only dull and a waste of time he could be teaching himself something interesting (gifted children tend to be self-starters because they have to find some outside stimulation to make it), but actually demeaning. That is probably why many drop out -- they cannot stand the shame -- shame! -- of not going to their full potential.

- They tend to be a little more antisocial as children, mostly because they take the caricatures of social children (especially prevalent in kid's television) literally. In other words, the social kid is usually portrayed as an airhead, while the nerd is actually quite likable (even social, but he's never labelled as such). So bear in mind that if they do start experimenting with making friends and plugging into the group, they may be thinking inside that they're being a sellout. We may be "smart", but sometimes it takes a while for us to realize that socializing does not force us to relinquish the brains -- even though they still define our social role.

- As you may have picked up on in this post, they also tend to have unusually strong senses of justice. This is actually a really easy way to pick out the smart kids in a class: look for the ones that, if some policy of the school is unfair or poorly thought out, will simmer for months. The "average" child may get angry for a few days from his few canned reasons for disliking the measure, but a gifted child has the leisure (he can pretty much autopilot through class anyway) and capacity to think of all the logical reasons that the policy is flawed. This child is also more likely to be the one that rejects criticism of fair (but generally disliked) policies, but have plenty of ire for the truly bad ones, even if most of the student body is apathetic. Remember that intelligent children tend to have fewer ties with the social group. Their being accustomed to being right (see "vain and sensitive" point) certainly doesn't calm this tendency.

So the worst thing is, smart kids know that the current trend right now, of keeping students in their age group no matter what, is fundamentally wrong. They know that it helps no one -- not the struggling students, who must continue to struggle, not the slackers, who are coddled (and who may be smart and just giving up because they know if they put effort forth, it accomplishes nothing), and most certainly not the bright students, who are boxed up and screaming to be free to use their abilities. Their spare brainwaves will only be turned to something more interesting, even possibly destructive, so it is not in society's interests to hold them back either. Plus, I've noticed that the stuck-up-ness that sometimes occurs with these students disappears when they are put in a class where the other students may know more than they, and, trust me, that is a much more comfortable place to be than effortlessly, almost undeservedly -- or so it feels -- at the top.

I was blessed in this regard. After years of anger at the futility of The System (no doubt partially helped by Raging Hormones) I was allowed the chance to skip one grade up, in one subject only: math. I wished at the time that I could have skipped ahead in English, which was my best subject at the time, but to some extent, I took what I could get. And guess what? Three years later, I was taking calculus, and absolutely loving it. Why? Because in that subject, I actually got a chance to grow, instead of stagnate... I lost interest in many of the subjects in which I was still held back, even English, my previous favorite.

So, this is my message to students who are experiencing something like that: please, keep lobbying your parents and teachers to let you skip. I'm not saying that it will be easy waltzing into a class of students 5 years your elder, but the academic stimulation will be more than worth it.

To parents: You probably think your kid's going to be ostracized, don't you? You think Little Bobby is going to become socially isolated among all those big hairy older kids. A message for you: that's actually not true. Studies following gifted children have found the exact opposite to be the case. Students who were allowed to move at their own pace grew into healthy, well adjusted adults. Not so the held-back ones. They had all the stereotypical vices of nerds, a symptom of having so little in common with their "peers". And to parents of struggling students: Don't think you're doing them, or anyone else a favor if you make the teacher promote them to the next class when they're not ready. They will be so much happier if they can grasp the concepts first... in fact, extra attention may reveal that they really are gifted, they just have a different learning style.

To teachers: Let the blokes skip. And listen if they start complaining about school policy, because they probably have some surprisingly good reasoning behind it (although the fact they have time to grouse probably means that they need to skip to keep their minds busy).

Reality check. Oh, and I may not be able to update again until possibly Thursday. Which is why I gave you a lot to chew about this post.

mnta

-Chat quote: "holo n"-

Not much remembered from my dreams last night. Mostly a broken fingernail, which hurt, which is why I remember it so clearly.

Magix movie mixdown = sloooooow = insane boredom + inability to use computer (that would slow it down more) = finding pen + pad = disproportionate, albeit very meticulous, pointillism.

I actually drew the sphere first, then moved on to the face and other stuff. I'm displeased with the proportions of the face and body, but I have to admit that pointillism does have a singular way of making even ugly drawings look filled with light. I mean, look how the hair turned out! Of course, I messed up the eyes, which is why they were handily converted into sunglasses.

Reality check. At any rate, it was a very soothing way to pass the time.

jftfqa

-Flash drive quote: "1 GB mini"-

Ah, interesting dream last night. Well, actually quite boring, but it did touch on some themes that are on my mind a lot, such as 1) grandparents and 2) my mother's pineapple allergy. Have I mentioned my mom is allergic to fresh pineapple (canned is fine)? It's definitely one of the weirdest allergies I've ever heard of. And it's not just, oh, she gets an itchy mouth when she eats it but ACKKKKK ANAPHYLACTIC SHOCK!!!!!!!!!! It fairly well traumatized me when I was young, since nobody thinks to label food for fresh pineapple (like they do for peanuts), or make sure that none of the pineapple juice spills onto other dishes. I would nearly die every time we visited a Hawaiian restaurant, and even now the smell of fresh pineapple gives me a huge shot of adrenaline. The worst was one time when I was flying on an airplane with her, and the fruits they served with the meal included fresh pineapple -- and I knew that if she even ate the fruit touching that pineapple... well, we were flying over the ocean, and who knew how long real medical help would take? Anyway, in the dream, I was trying to convince her to get an EpiPen (that's this little pocket epinephrine injector that slows allergic reactions so the medics get to you badly swollen instead of dead).

After that cheery opening... I will share what is, in my opinion, one of the most freakishly ugly things on the planet:

Tween Girls Wearing Makeup

Ignoring the Are Our Children Losing Their Innocence? angle, well, look at them! A tiny, still slightly cherubic face, rimmed in ponytails, voice pouring out in still-high-pitched exuberance... wide eyes rimmed in overapplied, cakey mascara. The first problem is that these children seem utterly oblivious to the fact that the makeup does not make them look older. Where in the world did they pick that up? But it is obvious to the onlooker that they THINK people think they look older, which is just painful. Second, there's the flagrant lack of skill in application -- probably because they originally taught it to themselves, or are just over-energetic to begin with (think of how middle schoolers tend to glue things together -- i.e. piles of projects tend to adhere to one another as the copious white ooze of Elmer's glue seeps out in all directions). This results in that yucky scaly look as their foundation slowly drys and cracks like so much swamp mud, and their eyelashes gradually molt each giant black particle entombing them.

Furthermore, the most obvious point. They have perfect skin and cannot, therefore, possibly need makeup. So any tiniest sight of the gloppy mess is unallayed by thoughts of "necessity" (not that most adult women need the stuff either, but they never seem to learn).

Reality check. Sometimes middle schoolers need them.

nnt

-Email quote: "John Kimble (no subject)"-

Apparently the water I had yesterday at lunch wasn't too much of a problem. I dreamt that I was a two-trunked mammoth (say what?) fleeing from predators to the south, which I think actually corresponded to the downstairs floor of my house. Supposedly I was acting out the explanation of a discovery ("years later") of a mammoth skeleton on a beach much farther south than seemed possible. There was a lot of forest all around. Later in my dream, I was back to human again, but I had a rat as a pet (this is unusual since I've actually never once had a pet in my life) whom I was talking to about all the gadgets I'd give him. Then I decided maybe I shouldn't promise him so much since he'd only live to be a year old anyway, and many of the electronics required some months to save up the money for. Funny the odd bursts of rationality that pop into dreams.

I hold pencils like everyone tells you not to. Remember those days, back in primary school, where the teacher would demonstrate how to properly hold a pencil so as to prevent your hand from getting (what one of my old professors would call) Carpet Tunnel Syndrome? Yeah. Seems no teacher could convince me to shift my death grip off the very very end of the pencil, my fingers embracing the exposed wood bit for dear life. Of course, since I do this, my hand definitely hurt after even a short time of frenzied writing -- necessarily frenzied because for some odd reason I wrote slower than any of my peers. But even now, I get this vaguely terrifying feeling of lack of control when I try to manually move my fingers up to the intended spot.

I don't just do this with pencils, though. Connected desks, for instance, were the bane of my existence, since invariably the seat was attached farther out than I was comfortable sitting; I would always skooch up to the tippy front edge of the seat as I hunkered over my work. Books get a similar treatment -- held desperately up to my face at a distance where most people would see only a hopeless blur of too-close text. Indeed, when I played the piano, my music teacher had to keep scooting out the bench so I wasn't nearly on top of the keys.

I am also extremely nearsighted (my eyes are about 20/600, which means that something that can be read by a normal person at 600 feet only becomes legible to me at 20 feet. I am very close to being legally blind). I sometimes wonder whether all these habits grew as survival tactics to enable me to see increasingly distant objects, or whether my eyes developed a focal distance consistent with them. What I mean is, perhaps my perfectionist, exacting nature made my close-up habits develop, then maybe my eyes adjusted (afterward) to function better at that distance. Because I have no doubt that I have far better "close-up" vision than the average person, in fact I sometimes look over the edge of my glasses to read close up things clearly.

Reality check. One advantage of the pencil-deathgrip-of-doom is that I was able to continue using even the stubbiest of pencils.

,t mntq mntq

-Wikipedia quote: "Plesiosaurs (pronounced /ˈpliːsɪəˌsɔr/) (Greek: plesios meaning 'near' or 'close to' and sauros meaning 'lizard') were carnivorous aquatic (mostly marine) reptiles. After their discovery, they were somewhat fancifully said to have resembled "a snake threaded through the shell of a turtle", although they had no shell."-

I had a dream I traveled to Italy and met a man who lived in water (I think? It was all very confusing after I awoke, and in fact I completely forgot the whole Italy bit until I was lying in bed for a while) and had me and my younger brother in this elastic-y net-bubble thing. Which I'm not sure if it was good or bad. I was also (earlier in the dream) trying to grow some ferns from spores, though these spores were acting sort of like pollen, and sort of like nothing that actually exists, as they were making the already adult plants bloom (?!?! Which ferns DON'T DO at any time, and which even pollen doesn't produce in flowering plants). Very weird. Like I said, I get lively dreams when I exercise before bed.

Hopefully the fact that I only had one glass of water at lunch today won't impair tonight's dreams. We'll see.

The most frustrating neuroscience in the world has to be language development. I mean, by definition, this is a process that occurs in all humans, so there's this irrational thought that we SHOULD KNOW ALL THIS BY EXPERIENCE, but at the same time, it by nature occurs before we have the proper verbal skills to describe the process. Either that, or those "innocent little babies" are really part of a secret, worldwide gang that intends to keep hidden its secrets of operation (those secrets which enable its members to puke with impunity, evoke pity when they cry -- even for the billionth time in the night, and learn language from nonprofessionals faster than the best software can manage) so well that those entering loose-lipped toddlerhood are selectively memory-wiped.

But I suppose the whole "lack of verbal skills" might explain it too. There's been studies into this, and scientists have actually found that if they test a kid's vocabulary, then expose him to a memorable experience (say, some sort of "magical" machine that in fact operates by some stealthy substitutions of toys within it), if they ask them about it later, when they have a larger vocabulary, they will still describe it at a vocabulary level consistent with the first exposure. Thus, for the period of time we have no vocabulary, by and large our memories do not exist in a retrievable format (though they could be there, there's just no way to grab them or interpret them), and we just have to figure it out by what we observe from outside other babies.

Reality check. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." - Noam Chomsky (theoretical linguist)

fa

-Decorative lamp quote: "RISK OF FIRE"-

I had another of those frustrating mornings when I knew I had interesting dreams, but I could barely remember a shred of them. In fact, part of the dream was only revealed as such when I stopped by the bathroom and realized that the toilet paper was not where I remembered it being. The rest was boring stuff, like mixing down a movie I'm making in the wonderful program Magix, attending college classes, etc. But I'm CERTAIN the part I don't remember is interesting, it's just locked up in my nonverbal right brain. I had the essential 2 then 3 glasses of milk before the night and also exercised right before bed (an odd little thing that I've started trying out this past week, and which seems to make for livelier dreams). I think I'm probably not remembering dreams better because I'm too preoccupied again (this time with Google App Engine, which I so want to download but don't have the space on my computer to spare).

Today is my father's birthday! Yay! I think that constitutes a holiday enough.

Reality check. Does anyone else poke their nose when they think?