Reasons Why

That is a title of phenomenal inanity, but maybe I'll unearth in this process a reason for having titled this thus.

It's so damn gloopy that I spent 15 minutes, tops, outside today. For the unfathomable plodding remainder (cloudy days in Maine can't help but plod), I peeled wallpaper. We will be moving soon (although I definitely want to have secured sustainable work first)―most likely to Montpelier, Vermont.

Given that looming, which causes my ears to get hot and my pulse to quicken (because I tend to see myself as a mutated miscreant that's unwelcome everywhere), we've set about trying to optimize our home for alternate occupancy. So, I'm peeling wallpaper, which would be fine if it weren't a mainstay of the walls in EVERY ROOM. But I kinda dig it, in its way, as it is both meditative and methodical.

But then, the boys take to conducting themselves in uncharacteristically age-appropriate ways (i.e., causing each other injury and/or committing some grave material injustice), or the phone rings (although I can't read the display on my phone since a toddler's fit of pique damaged it), or something plucked from the hat full of factors in a way that might seem arbitrary, but in fact, is expertly calibrated to derail most doings.

I've got it!

Reasons Why Authoring a Short Blog Post Is Preferable to Authoring a Long Blog Post:

* I don't fall asleep.
* I don't forget about it.
* It's open-ended.
* It can be more frequent.

By the way, there's a book out, and there's a link to it: excuse me.


And, just to be that way, here's "Bite My Knee": yikes

Birthday Surgery

Hi. It's the morning here, so good morning!

It has been said that at least two things would be or have been addressed by this point. For starters, I have been promising to detail the workings of the Birthday Surgeon. Well, dig what follows, please.

Alright. Everybody knows that we age. In fact, we've done it with every sentence that we've read (please note that I am trying to make this worth your aging while). See? But how it happens visibly is a different creature indeed. One might think that it's nature or whatever, but I know different. It's the BIRTHDAY SURGEON.

So, this brings us to something else entirely. The Birthday Surgeon (I say that like there's one, but I imagine that they're an entire subspecies). At some point around your birthday (and this is the "official" reason that it's impossible to change your own birthday convincingly), the Birthday Surgeon will appear during your slumber or coma or what have you, and work his or her (although I think that the self-identify largely as male, which figures) deleterious magic at your expense.

And the difference... well, it shows! Bit by bit, you are transformed into an incontinent, immobile version of your former self!

For instance, do you ever wonder where that effed-up, 3-inch, wiry, almost-pubic hair on your chin appeared overnight? The Birthday Surgeon bestowed it unto you.

Have you inexplicably just gained several pounds without any obvious cause? They were a collective gift to you from the Birthday Surgeon.

Forget something? You know, like everything? Well the Birthday Surgeon knows Neuroscience, that's for cure, and he is only too happy to apply his skills in this way.

For those among you that might be thinking, "This is pablum, Benb. Sheer, unquantifiable mythology," I counter, with way more dignity than any of us deserve, that I have actually obtained photographic evidence. This dates from the eve of my 24th birthday, 3/26/2002:

How the Birthday Surgeon found me at R. Stevie Moore's house in Bloomfield, NJ is beyond me, but I gotta go now. More soon, I swear.

Help Me Understand

12/8/2010, 1:35 PM

Ev'ry time that I enter the site that a person enters in order to post another posting or to check on some other nonsense, I'm confronted with a gigantor, dull-red, full-screen warning that a "security threat" to my computer (which, for some, easily outranks 75% of appendages) COULD exist. One of the options given to me read, "Help Me Understand" (among the others: "Return to Safety"). Anywise, I didn't select it, because I didn't (and don't) want to understand that ilk of unwarranted arseness.

An exchange with whomever devoted any of his or her time to this rubbish would proceed thus:
----------------
ME: Hi there! How is everything going?

THEM: Hold on, sir... are you trying to tell us that you don't understand what COULD lie in wait for your computer?!!

ME: Well, no, because anything, ever, could be lurking anywhere, always. I just don't quite understand the urgency of your warning.

THEM: Okay, no. NO. This is a POTENTIAL THREAT!!! DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT COULD OR MIGHT HAPPEN?!! THERE IS EVERY POSSIBILITY THAT THIS LEGITIMATE, ACTUAL, AUTHENTIC POTENTIAL THREAT COULD, IF IT WERE A REAL THREAT AND/OR IF IT SO CHOSE, DESTROY YOUR LIFE!!!!!

ME: I'm pregnant with cats, and I have no idea how the heck I'm gonna get 'em out. Help me understand.
---------------
In other news, I had a 10:00 telephone interview for the job of Technical Writer with a distant snowplow-manufacturing company. I wouldn't ordinarily consider myself to be a candidate for considering this position at all, and it was suitably awkward. The woman phoning me was entirely inoffensive but for this bizarre scoff that (a) resembled a giggle being stifled; (b) was never accompanied by any pardon-me display of manners; and (c) followed nearly every answer that I gave to her variably terse questions.

I was increasingly disconcerted by this tendency to laugh, with its sometimes erupting to interrupt and disrupt a theretofore-articulate answer that i'd be in the midst of giving and all. I have no way of knowing (and I will probably never know) if this was gauche or graceless or what have you, but after 15 minutes or so, I asked her: "Ma'am, are you laughing?" She wheezily responded that she was attached to an oxygen tank, but even that expenditure of air was a bit much for her, judging by the fits of "laughter" that followed. I was most embarrassed. The interview proceeded and ended like a helium balloon deflates over days, except in seconds.

Three telephone interviews, out of 300 best-foot-forward entreaties to facilitate my being remotely functional/economically independent. I suppose that I am grateful to have made it to the 1% threshold, and I've twisted myself into all sorts of shapes and sizes for maximal accessibility, but I'm thinking that maybe it's "things" that need to be different.