Speak, Raspberry Ale

I happened upon the blog of a girl who graduated from my college my year. I never met her, though I knew people who knew her, and I was kind of horrified to read how similar her blog was to mine. She wrote about biking to work, close calls with reckless drivers. She posted not-terribly-remarkable photos of things around her. A few days after New Year's, she lazily jotted down a few resolutions--"getting into grad school" was one--and mentioned that she should blog more often because her writing style is deteriorating: she noted, self-consciously, that she was forsaking structure. She then proceeded to blog sporadically. Just how many of us are there, anyway?

I have things to write about, but perhaps too many. It's 1:25AM and past my (wholly theoretic at this point) bedtime. I should go to bed, but I still have some of this raspberry-flavored beer to drink--a dubious purchase, at best--

M. left at 12:45. He's putting on a show Friday, so there are posters to be stapled to the telephone poles outside bars, flyers to be fanned out on tables inside them. I wonder when he'll be back and whether I'll be able to get to sleep in the meantime.

I know I don't blog often, but I still ought to introduce a few people to my unofficial cast of characters. At least one, for now: Nigel, the Englishman. We didn't even know this guy until 2007, but these days he and M. are inseparable. He rides with us on the train. He meets us for lunch sometimes. We go out together. We have dinner with him more than one night a week, usually just the three of us, but sometimes he brings one of his girlfriends. I think there are three now, or perhaps he's even down to two, but he's never had one at a time. I have heard there is a good explanation for this, but I have not heard the explanation myself.

Nigel is also throwing parties with M., and as I type they're flyering together. I envision M. getting home at an ungodly hour because Nigel is with him, and Nigel is slow.

This is not what I mean about having a lot to write about. It was M.'s birthday on Saturday, and Friday night was one of the wildest nights I can remember. And back to Nigel, I could easily write a book with all the mad, mad stories he's told us, and now that I've introduced him I may decide to spice up this blog with them.

The raspberry beer is gone now, so good-night.

The Mittens Affair

I'm reposting something I posted a long time ago, because (1) I'm lazy, (2) I have to work, (3) I'm too tired to come up with anything original, and (4), because I ran into the subject of the subsequent post yesterday. I was eating lunch in the courtyard--with my hands, because I'm a disgusting, uncivilized creature--and someone blond and bearded walked toward me.

He waved. "Hi--is that you, Penitent?" he said.

"Yes...?"

"Do you remember me? From a long, long time ago? Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. I just graduated, and I thought it was so strange that I saw you right before leaving."

Oh, yeah--suddenly, I recognized him:

---

There was a particular period of time near the beginning of my Junior year, when I worked in the Media center of the University Library, during which all the University's forces of Disquiet seemed to be assaulting me at once. There was the shadowy character who derived some enjoyment from speaking to me in affected foreign accents and thereby pretending to be different people in turn; there was the persistent Argentine law student and the desperate Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering, and there was the day that two separate people asked to watch Home Alone within one minute of each other.

But certainly the most memorable of these incidents was the one involving the Nightmare on Elm Street boxed set, a freshman studying philosophy, and a pair of mittens.

Every night I worked for a couple of weeks, a gang of three geeky-looking boys had been coming into the Media department asking for successive installments in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. One was tall and pale, dressed all in black, with white-blond hair and blond eyelashes. The other two were smaller and dark-haired; one wore thick-rimmed, black-framed glasses. Since I found it notable that anyone would care to watch all six of these movies, I began to recognize the boys and chuckled to myself every time they left with yet another Freddy Kreuger movie.

One night, as I handed Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare over the counter to the boys, I was met with a fit of hysterical giggling that I couldn't explain, but I had the distinct feeling that it had something to do with me. I narrowed my eyes at the boys as I asked for an ID card, but their giggling didn't stop. They left with the movie and I continued about my business (probably: working a crossword puzzle clipped from the student newspaper), but at some point I looked up and noticed that one of the little bastards, the tall blond one, was skulking about suspiciously and with no apparent purpose.

"Do you need anything?" I asked rudely in that brusque tone I had cultivated exclusively for library clientele.

The guy moved up to the counter. "I have a question," he asked.

"Yes?"

"Do you like mittens?"

This was not a question I had expected. I blinked.

"What?"

"Do you, like, mittens?" His tone was matter-of-fact, as though he were repeating a routine query that I was so deaf as to mishear.

"I...I don't think I have any particularly strong feelings about mittens, one way or the other," I finally said, extremely wary.

The strange boy nodded. "Okay," he said, and, evidently satisfied, walked out and away.

---

He returned, though, over the following weeks: sometimes alone, sometimes snickering with his conspirators. "So, have you thought about it: do you like mittens?" he persisted. I began to expect his visit. Often he would come in without his friends and, apparently, without intending to check out DVDs at all.

One night I took note of the name on his ID card and searched for him in the University directory. Therein I made the discovery that he was a freshman, a philosophy major, and a resident of a dormitory in which my acquaintance "Laura" worked as a Resident Assistant. The next time I saw Laura I told her about her resident's strange behavior and asked if she could provide an explanation.

"He's a little weird," she said. "Maybe he likes you."

She informed Mittens Boy of our little discussion. Mittens Boy, in turn, told me that she had told him. I told Laura that Mittens Boy had told me that she had told him. So it goes.

---

A lull in the Mittens Affair. And breaking the lull: a party at the co-op in which I lived for three of the four years of my undergraduate career.

It was a good party, I think, or at least a decent one. The party itself, though, is irrelevant to the story at hand. What is not irrelevant is what followed the party--I returned to my room only to find, resting atop my pillow, a pair of blue woolen mittens.

I was actually afraid. To this point I had presumed Mittens Boy to be essentially harmless: a little quirky, perhaps a little creepy, but not worrisomely so. Breaking into my room, though? I felt a bit discomposed. Running to find Laura, I brought her so she could see the unwanted gift. "Did you tell Mittens Boy where to find me?" I asked.

She thought the whole thing was very funny. (I admit that, abstractly, it was.) She claimed no part in the prank. "You keeping the mittens?" she wanted to know. "They're nice mittens."

I told her she could have them.

---

Some time later, yet another night in the basement of the library, Mittens Boy stood in line behind the counter. When he came to the front he was smirking.

"What."

"I heard some creep broke into your room and left a pair of mittens on your bed," he said.

"It's true," I responded. "What kind of a creep would do something like that? Someone really fucking creepy, that's for sure."

He laughed.

"You are very creepy," I insisted redundantly.

He laughed again, and left.

I went to Florence soon thereafter, and didn't see much of Mittens Boy after that.

Languages

If you were lucky enough to catch last night's inebriated anti-fun rant, you might guess that I've spent the day drowsy, resentful, and brain-dead. And you'd be right. I am not nearly sharp enough to function passably on three hours of sleep, even if I define "functioning" as "being able to write in a personal blog that hardly anyone reads." Not a particularly high bar, to be sure.

So instead, a few factoids from the exciting world of ethnic/linguistic geography.

- Papua New Guinea alone has at least 830 distinct languages.

- The Lemba tribe of southern Zimbabwe is descended from the Cohen tribe of Israel.

- Maltese is kind of a fusion between Arabic and Italian.

- Hindi and Urdu are close to being the same language, though written in Sanskrit and Arabic characters respectively. The language spoken in most Bollywood films is supposedly closer to Urdu than it is to official Hindi.

- Indonesia chose a version of Malay as its official language because it was easy to learn, not because any significant percentage of Indonesians actually spoke it--they didn't. Javanese was actually the largest language group in Indonesia, but the government considered it unworkable because it was a difficult language to learn.

- Don't be surprised if any of these factoids are somewhat incorrect. I am in no condition for fact-checking.

139

This post will be as brainless as possible. And that's a promise.

In other words, it will be one of those lame "list of things about me" posts that conveniently requires little thought, effort, or structure, while still sucking up a big chunk of time that could otherwise be used for, say, work or study.

Let the laziness begin.

1. I have no piercings or tattoos.
2. I am 1/8 Chinese and 3/8 "latina," whatever that means.
3. My mother's maiden name would be Li if her grandmother had not been bullied by her racist parents into rejecting her husband's conspicuous foreign surname. (Her family disowned her anyway.)
4. I loathe the feeling of heaters and of clothes fresh out of the dryer.
5. I still have dozens of chicken pox scars.
6. My dad grew up Mormon.
7. I really have no idea what he thinks of religion, but he seems to tolerate my mom's evangelism. He won't go to church, though.
8. My paternal grandmother sued my dad's younger brother for all he was worth. He was so
infuriated that he cut off all contact from the family, to the point that I don't know the name of my only female cousin on my dad's side, and we haven't seen her brothers since they (and I) were little kids.
9. I have never broken or sprained a bone or joint.
10. I have never really "dated" like normal people and I don't think I would be very good at it.
11. My latent OCD emerges when it comes to food.
12. I use my hands to dismember dishes containing questionable ingredients; I admit I am completely disgusting. In particular, I painstakingly remove fat and gristle from meat. (And onions from everything.)
13. I was an Ayn Rand nut in high school.
14. I'm not at all anymore.
15. I'm squishily a libertarian, though. More or less. I think some of the hardcore ones are loony, though.
16. I think my addiction to political news is an illness.
17. I think price theory is fun.
18. I worry that I'll never do anything about my social anxiety disorder because doing so would probably mean going to a psychiatrist and otherwise talking to people.
19. I think grammar, syntax, spelling--all those boring things about language--are fun.
20. I dated my first boyfriend for five and a half years.
21. Two weeks after I broke up with him, I started dating my current boyfriend.
22. I hate people who block the escalator when I'm trying to walk up.
23. I always walk up the escalator, quickly.
24. I have an excellent sense of direction.
25. I always plan walking, driving, or biking routes on the maps that are always in my head.
26. I once considered myself a patient person, but I don't anymore.
27. I think that the question of whether or not I get along with another person is nearly independent of taste or common interest; I almost see it as a "chemical" thing analogous to sexual attraction.
28. Sometimes I wear sunglasses only to avoid having to figure out whether or not to make eye contact with people I pass on the street. Believe it or not, this causes a lot of stress for me.
29. Talking on the phone is enormously stressful, too. I avoid phone calls to the point of handicap.
30. I rarely wear high heels, but I can walk in them when I need to.
31. I was hostile towards the color pink as a child. Reactionary, even.
32. I was also one of those kids who violently abused Barbie dolls and petulantly refused to accept them as gifts.
33. I was a complete loudmouth until puberty.
34. My shoes (today) are all white and fasten with velcro.
35. I'm enormously happy that my boyfriend is not a romantic.
36. In the first grade I nearly gave my teacher a heart attack when I caught a gopher snake during recess and brought it back to my desk. I became righteously angry when she dared to suggest that I had no way of telling whether it was poisonous or not: of course I did.
37. Relatively speaking, I think I peaked in elementary school.
38. I got sick from bad mayonnaise in the 4th grade and haven't been able to touch the stuff since.
39. My dad built the house I grew up in, with help from my grandfather and one of my mom's brothers.
40. I am not a fan of the marijuana.
41. I think the drug war is a disgrace and that most (if not all) drugs should be legal.
42. Flying scares the shit out of me.
43. I recognize this is irrational, however, and don't let it govern my traveling decisions.
44. I can't sleep without earplugs.
45. I also wear one of those dorky sleep masks.
46. I was creepily obsessed with Pink Floyd in early high school.
47. I think I desperately needed obsessions back then because I had no social life.
48. As a freshman I used to keep a journal in which I wrote "letters" addressed to Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.
49. I used to hide my CDs and tastes in music in the same way that my peers would hide their drugs and birth control.
50. My parents met on a blind date.
51. My mom didn't speak much English at the time.
52. I have eight uncles and one aunt by blood.
53. My mom's youngest brother is gay and my grandmother copes with the fact by pretending it isn't true.
54. My mom didn't tell me my uncle was gay until I was, oh, twenty? Not that I hadn't figured it out a long, long time ago.
55. I stopped believing in Santa Claus in first grade, but I kept pretending I believed in him (and the Easter Bunny) until the sixth grade so as not to spoil my mom's illusions.
56. I would be surprised if any of my elementary school teachers did not remember me, even today.
57. I hate shopping for shoes.
58. I get most of my clothes from a thrift store a block from my apartment.
59. The movie The Santa Clause used to give me nightmares.
60. So did Mrs. Doubtfire.
61. I almost cried when Gene Siskel died of brain cancer. I was in eighth grade at the time.
62. I hate to cry in front of other people and very, very rarely do.
63. The one person I had a "fling" with at the beginning of college ended up leaving school for a while in order to spend time in jail for drunk driving.
64. I like to forget about those embarrassing two months.
65. Everyone in my freshman dorm thought I was a snobby bitch. Apparently it didn't occur to anyone that I was just plain shy.
66. Freshman year was probably my worst.
67. I missed one final exam that year because I had to go to the ER as a result of a problem that I had a roughly 0.001 % chance of developing. Maybe less.
68. Once, I missed a final exam because I was under the impression that it was actually being held the following day, so I slept in that morning on purpose.
69. I grew up bilingual.

Here I am with my brother, back when we were cute, bilingual, and living in a trailer on the homestead.

70. I don't think I'm particularly bilingual anymore.
71. Sometimes I wonder whether I would never have been accepted to my alma mater if not for affirmative action.
72. I don't own a televison or want one.
73. I would like to have a projector in order to watch movies, though.
74. Paper mail stresses me out and I tend to ignore it. Late fees for medical bills, etc. often result.
75. I always carry a water bottle.
76. I enjoy punishing myself with spicy peppers.
77. I hate bell peppers, however.
78. I frequently make enemies by accident.
79. Lately I've begun to seriously doubt the idea of "free will."
80. This doubt is kind of upsetting to me.
81. If I could do it over, I would have studied something far more technical in college.
82. I am a chronic procrastinator.
83. I am chronically a few minutes late to just about everything.
84. Hardly a day goes by that I don't need to run somewhere. Usually in order to catch public transportation.
85. I am tired of most of the music in my itunes library, since I listen to it all day at work.
86. Some of the songs currently on my playlist are:
- "Mutiny in Heaven" (The Birthday Party)
- "Baby's on Fire" (Brian Eno)
- "Is This Thing On?" (!!!)
- "Pepper-Tree" (Cocteau Twins)
- "Diplo Rhythm" (Diplo)
- "I Love a Man in Uniform" (Gang of Four)
- "And I Was a Boy from School" (Hot Chip)
- "Gimme Danger" (Iggy and the Stooges)
- "Computer Love" (Kraftwerk)
- "Someone Great" (LCD Soundsystem)
- "Chelsea Hotel" (Leonard Cohen)
- "The Mystery of Love" (Marianne Faithfull)
- "Lose My Breath" (My Bloody Valentine)
- "The Ballad of Robert Moore and Betty Coltrane" (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
- "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (Roxy Music)
- "I'll Be by Your Side" (Sally Shapiro)
- "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" (Talking Heads)
87. I love sushi, especially the weird stuff that most people steer clear of.
88. I spend an absurd portion of my income on food. Maybe as much as half.
89. I own a credit card, but I have never used it because I don't trust myself to pay the bills on time.
90. The last time I cut my hair above my shoulders, I was in third grade. I kind of want shorter hair now, but I don't like the idea of visiting a hair salon.
91. I clip my keys to my belt so I don't lose them.
92. I spend more than two hours every day commuting to work and back.
93. The first time my boyfriend heard of me, his friend was describing me to him as "a girl who dresses like a kid in a JC-Penney ad." In the context of making fun of me, presumably. This was five or six years ago, and I don't dress like that anymore.
94. I have a bad hay allergy. Being around hay makes me miserable.
95. I have been writing about myself on the Internet, on and off, since 2000.
96. I was far more public about it in 2000 than I am now. (For example, I attached my full name to my website.)
97. My best friend from elementary school and my best friend from high school are both cancer survivors.
98. I don't talk to my elementary school best friend anymore.
99. The high school best friend is very close with my ex-boyfriend these days, which can make talking to her rather awkward. We exchange emails on occasion, but I haven't seen her for years.
100. Once, when she was angry at me, she convinced my ex-boyfriend that I was bulimic, even though that was not remotely true. An "intervention" ensued. This, in retrospect, is kind of hilarious.
101. I don't think I want kids.
102. I spend far too much time reading kooks' websites. It's really hard to stop. My "favorites" are the unapologetic misogynists and the Biblical hyper-literalists who believe, for example, that no woman should ever work outside the home or attend college. There's actually quite a bit of overlap there, but probably not in ways that either side would readily admit.
103. I'm a big fan of David Lynch.
104. Once during finals I watched the entire second season of Twin Peaks at the library instead
of studying.
105. In ninth grade, when I read A Tale of Two Cities, I developed a bizarre lit-crush on the pathetic character Sydney Carton.
106. The only vacations I ever took as a child were road/camping trips, with the exception of trips to Mexico to see family.
107. I have a vague memory of riding in a plane to Mexico when I was nine months old. I am not sure whether the memory is false. (The second time I rode in a plane, I was sixteen: not easily mistaken.)
108. Many of my memories from childhood and adolescence are still very, very vivid.
109. The most vivid memories are visual/spatial ones, e.g., where in a class I was sitting and who was sitting around me.
110. In high school I always performed well on multiple choice history exams because I could remember the location of the information within the text and then picture what the answer was.
110a. Relatedly, I have difficulty processing auditory information unless I write it down. A corollary: I am notoriously bad at understanding song lyrics, and when I sing along to them, I do so in gibberish.
111. My long-term memory seems to be far better than my short-term memory.
112. I did acid a few days before graduating from college. My experience was 100% positive.
113. Being disoriented is upsetting to me. I tend to avoid elevators because they make me disoriented.
114. In elementary school I was the district-wide long jump champion for two years in a row.
115. I was also widely recognized as the most athletic girl in school.
116. I hate watching sports.
117. My ex-boyfriend is unhealthily obsessed with pro basketball. I don't think he ever realized what a turn-off that was.
118. I wake up less than half an hour before leaving the apartment every morning.
119. I have never blow dried my hair. I don't think I would even know how.
120. I cannot begin to describe how much I despise all things cutesy.
121. Couples baby-talking each other make me want to vomit.
122. Frankly, it bothers me when people baby-talk babies, too.
123. I lost all contact with most people from my past when I stopped signing on to aim.
124. I routinely stalk people on the Internet, however.
125. I think I'm pretty good at it.
126. Perhaps I'd make a decent private detective?
127. I bike dangerously fast through the city sometimes, passing cars left and right. I probably shouldn't, but moving slowly would drive me crazy. At least I wear a helmet.
128. I'm almost always tired.
129. I like drinking Clamato, preferably with lime and habanero salsa.
130. I never needed braces. My teeth grew in remarkably straight all by themselves.
131. I suspect I am genetically programmed to reject religion.
132. I've sunbathed topless in Europe. (I'm not terribly shy about nudity, so long as I'm not alone.)
133. As a passenger, I get carsick if I don't watch the road, and I compulsively check over my shoulder every time the driver changes lanes.
134. I keep my nails short and don't paint them. I don't really wear makeup, either.
135. I think feet are disgusting. I kind of wish no one wore sandals. This is one of many aversions that I share with my boyfriend.
136. Never again do I want to live in my hometown.
137. No one I know in real life knows I have this blog, and I'd like to keep it that way.
138. I liked my old blog better.
139. I think I'm done with this list. Arbitrarily it ends at item #139.