Boooo

It's that time again: I've got more work than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. A haiku

Dear Psych book: suck it.
I don't care about geons
or Chomsky, either.

The Suite Life

Well, it finally happened. After weeks of mouse trouble, one of them up and died in our wall. I found it amusing that, the day after I made a joke about stowing a body in a wall, we found out that a mouse decided to die in the wall between a bedroom and the common room and stink the whole place up. I must find something funny about it, because otherwise I think about the fact that our suite smelled like carcass for three days. Now it smells like special pest control air freshener and carcass.

The pest control people came in the first place because we'd smelled something funny on Monday. My roommate called me out into the common room. I should have learned by now that whenever someone says, "Hey, come smell this," you yell, "Hell no!" and run the other way. But, naive as I was, I went to the common room, which she claimed smelled funny. She had me smell the wall, right next to a bedroom's doorframe. I pulled away in revulsion, and she laughed hysterically after confirming that there was indeed something fishy (or decaying carcassy, rather) about the smell.

The best part is that they can't remove the body. Short of breaking down the wall, there's no way to do it. We just have to live with the smell until the "neutralizer," whatever that means, does its work. So we get the pest control equivalent of Febreeze and a look of pity. Pity won't restore my olfaction, buddy!

We called the pest control people that evening, and made the level of smell part of our daily commentary. It was our equivalent of small talk about the weather.
"Mighty stinky today, mmhmm."
"Eeeeya."

And on an unrelated note, here's a conversation I had with my freshman counselor when I asked to borrow his blender for a party on Saturday.
"So, you need it for Saturday night?"
"Yes."
"And what are you going to be doing with it?"
"...blending..."
"..."
"..."
"Delicious fruit smoothies?"
*pause* "Yes, that's right."

Laundry and I are not friends

Laundry is one of those things I can barely work up the energy to do when it only requires going down a flight of stairs. So having to go down four flights of stairs and to another building means that it gets done about as often as the boy who downstairs goes a day without smoking pot. Which is pretty much never.

To make the laundry process less painful, I have a 4 ft x 2 ft black, rectangular tote bag that sorts my laundry into three washing categories as I create it. It's a good idea in theory, but then it involves lugging a forty-pound bag of pre-sorted laundry around. People on campus, even when it's apparent what I'm doing, unabashedly stare. This bag is GIGANTIC; knowing the dimensions doesn't convey how impressive this volume of laundry is to behold. People feel the need to discuss it, to marvel at its sheer size. As though something like that could escape my notice; the likelihood of my being able to ignore the size and weight of the laundry bag when I'm carrying it is about that of my not noticing my having a 700-pound grizzly bear on my back.

When I was coming back up the stairs, one of my entryway mates, who had never seen me doing laundry before, stopped me.
"What is that?"
"My laundry bag."
"It's massive."
"It pre-sorts my laundry into whites, colors and darks, and it gets kind of full since I hate doing laundry."
"No, but it's really big. I mean, you could kill a man and sort his body parts into whites, colors and darks then carry him up the stairs in that."

He shook his head and wandered away. And then I stowed the body in the wall.

Snoooooow

Valentine's Day brought with it the first real snow of the year (and probably the last). More accurately, it brought wintery mix. I was delighted when I looked out my window and saw something not rain falling from the sky. I was less delighted when I stepped out of my door and discovered that what was coming down was sleet, not snow. It had snowed over night, and the sleet was slowly covering all surfaces with a layer of ice.

In my typical fashion, I was unprepared and had various encounters of the injury-inducing kind.
The city and the college made no pretense of plowing, much less salting the sidewalks and streets. So instead we took baby steps around campus. I was in a rush to one class, and went through a courtyard. I was running along the path to exit through a gate when one of the maintenance men called out to me. "Watch it over here, it's slippery!" I heard him just in time to slip and go flying eight feet into the gate. I slammed into and held onto the bars to keep from breaking my hip on the ground. I looked back to see where I'd come from, and noticed a nice 9 ft x 9 ft square of ice right in front of the gate.

Later that night, when my friends and I were walking back from a singles Valentine's Day dinner, the second mishap of the day occurred. My suitemate from California had never engaged in a snowball fight. We started an impromptu one. Five minutes in, though, she picked a nicely pre-formed ball from the ground. Before I could stop her, she lobbed it at me. She nailed me directly in the sternum with an softball-sized chunk of ice. I legitimately had a mild bruise under my clothing. But I guess it's a testament to how hardcore I am.

But now the snow/ice has gone from the nice stage it was at to the ugly stage. So instead of sliding around campus, I know have to climb over gigantic, pitch-black mounds of ice to get into the street or back onto the sidewalk. And then it all started melting today into giant puddles at all the corners. Mmm, the joys of winter.

A Day in the Life

Here's an email I sent to my suitemates over the weekend.

Hey, ladies!

It's been a while since I've sent a list of grievances, and I didn't know what to do with myself....until this morning. (The plot thickens!)

Text: "An Episode in a Moldy Shower"
There once was a girl who liked showers
And took them at all different hours.
She did look down the drain,
and it made her exclaim,
"Egads, a veritable hair tower!"

Summary
The narrator is unnamed in the poem, but we know, from the extensive letters between the poet and the Duke of Toilette discussing the collection of poems it comes from, that the poem is about a girl named M. Some believe this M to be the poet, Meredith Hitchcock, projected into literature. M is the poet herself, but also the everywoman, suffering the world's indignities. In the poem, the reader learns that she showers with frequency, and enjoys doing so at all different times of day. The narrative takes a dramatic turn when Meredith's favorite shower (she has a favorite sink, too, as far as scholars can tell from the fragment of a short story) floods in a dramatic fashion. Curious, she reaches down and pulls some hair sitting on top of the drain. The drain cover comes unstopped, and Meredith discovers a six-inch-long wad of various people's hair that has been hanging down below the drain cover for some time. What she has unsuspectingly pulled on is the dome of this extensive hair tower, braided through the grate. She expresses shock and displeasure upon finding this, and throws the hair wad into the trash.

Form and Themes
"An Episode in a Moldy Shower" is generally considered one of Hitchcock's more poignant poems. There is a contrast between the dramatic, upsetting content of the poem and the choice of a comic poem form, the limerick. It highlights the dark comedy of the experience for M. Note that the pain from the narrative cannot be contained within the limerick, and the last line of the poem has an extra syllable. The pain expands beyond any normal conventions, busting out from the restraints the poet tries to place on it.

So, in conclusion, please throw your hair away or knit a scarf out of it, but don't let it "go" down the drain. I know none of you are really interested in seeing my B-grade horror movie, "When Hair Wads Attack!"

<3
Meredith

P.S.
A short game. One of these things is not like the others:
1. aeronautical engineering
2. putting a new roll of toilet paper in a bathroom stall
3. finding Mr. Right

I'll give you a hint: the category is "things that are difficult."

The god of complaining is appeased!

Valentine's Day

Well, I guess I might as well write about it.  After all, I ignored it entirely last year, opting to write about my superior opinions on obesity.  My plans for this day are as follows: a romantic dinner with my suitemates.  Oh, and the dean of the college is coming to give a special guest lecture in my psychology class, which is apparently amazing.

I've never minded Valentine's Day terribly much.  It's about as significant to me as Arbor Day, except that I receive flowers and Disney-themed cards from surprising people.  Oh, and the chocolate I consume is heart-shaped.  Come now.  Would you cry over not being able to plant a tree on Arbor Day? So why cry because you don't have a significant other in an arbitrarily chosen day of the year? If you answered yes to the Arbor Day question, there are bigger issues than I can address.  And I'm no more aware of couples than I am at other times of the year.  Valentine's Day is just a one-day license for the gross, joined-at-the-mouth couples to kick it into overdrive, and I filter them out, anyway. 

But there's one aspect of it that I do find unbearable: PINK.  It's everywhere on Valentine's Day.  Back in the day, when my dream was to grow up to be Tom Hanks, I developed an aversion to the color.  Part of growing up to be a man meant detesting girly things, like personal hygiene and the color pink.  While I've embraced the former, I'm still ambivalent about the latter.  I'll admit, I've purchased a couple of hot pink pieces of clothing, but that's because hot pink is obnoxious, and therefore exempt.

Top Five Songs For Valentine's Day (fun music about love, another thing the day is good for):

1. Lovers of Loving Love - The Aquabats
2. 500 Miles - The Proclaimers
3. Happy Valentine's Day - Outkast
4. Crazy Little Thing Called Love - Queen
5. You Sexy Thing - Hot Chocolate

technorati tags:holidays, love, music

I am judging you...

...when you use a fork to eat ice cream. I may joke and poke fun, but I actually am judging you. It just doesn't make any sense. There as an instrument created that works perfectly for eating ice cream, and it's called a spoon. Note that spoon does not equal fork. I don't know why, but this one of those things which I don't even just find charmingly quirky. It's kind of like when people stab pieces of meat with chopsticks. Just admit defeat and use the appropriate utensil.

It is called a spoon.
Why are you using a fork,
you utter dumbass?

technorati tags:food, utensils, haikus

Monkey Adventures

I only started working with the monkeys (I'm working in a psychology lab) on Friday, and I already have an arch nemesis.  The first time I met him, I was delighted because I was feeding him.  After all, I was making a monkey happy.  I will call him Wanf (we are not friends).  Towards the end of the feeding time, however, he reached through a cage square (bigger so that they can pull larger objects in, as needed in experiments), and took a swipe at me.  He knocked down my protective mask, and I stepped back, shocked.  Wanf had much better extension than I had anticipated.

On Sunday, I still hadn't learned my lesson.  The monkeys know how to trade, and he wanted to trade me the disgusting pellet of food he had for...an identical pellet of food.  Hope springs eternal.  Wanf had taken the first pellet, bashed it against the floor, and given me a pained look of, "Not this shit again!"  When I refused to trade, he threw the pellet to the floor.  As I stooped down to pick it up, he took another swipe at me.  He came back with a small clump of hair.

Wanf yanked at the strands of hair, licked them, and held his hands out to examine it.  It was different yes, but not at all tastier.  His look of befuddlement at this equally terrible food he'd protracted from my head was hilarious.  Wanf was quite distraught.  Even though there was a frizzy patch on the front of my head where he'd yanked a few strands out, I considered that round to have gone to me.

This afternoon, I was determined to do better at protecting myself.  I kept myself relatively far way from the cage squares when I saw Wanf.  Having kept my head away from the cage for the entirety of the session, and having had no encounters of the head swipe kind, I felt relatively okay.  Wanf is a small male, and so I felt that it was probably okay to let him hold my hand, like the females do.  I held out my hand, and he grasped my finger.  I thought our relationship was heading in a new direction when disaster struck.

Wanf grabbed the tip of my glove and yanked.  I'd been warned that monkeys might try to take chunks out of my glove, but I'd never seen it in action before.  He pulled on the glove, trying to rip off one of the latex fingers, and I pulled back, shrieking, "Help!"  My lab partners stood, watching silently.  I turned to one of them to beseech her with my eyes, and she shrugged.  Why was I overreacting so severely, and what was she supposed to do?

I finally wrestled my punctured glove away, disillusioned.  But I felt better when, five minutes later, Wanf got a chunk out of another lab person's glove, and she was forced to trade the monkey a peanut for the chunk of glove.  That's right, the monkeys do it on purpose.  They know that you'll trade them tasty peanuts for the chunk of glove that could potentially harm them.  And they smile gleefully as lab personnel are forced to acquiesce.

Wanf: 2, Meredith: 1

technorati tags:monkeys, college, adventures, research

Ummmm....

Dear lovers:

Sorry, we're just going to have to write this week off.  It's been what I'd call a hell week.  Ice Cube put it best when he said, "Life ain't a track meet, it's a marathon."  And if I've said that before, you are not to mention it: it's still true.

Love and apologies,
Meredith

Snow, or lack there of

I'm being punished for something.  It's February, and we have yet to have any accumulation here.  The first part of the winter was fine, because it was in the fifties and sixties and we were all toasting to global warming.  But now it's just cold, and there's no snow to make me feel better.  I have concluded that I, and the rest of the students on campus, are being punished for something.

My dad came up to visit, and one you get five miles outside of the city, there is a foot of snow on the ground.  A FOOT.  We've had nothing.  The cars had snow on their rooves, there was a dirty wall of snow on the side of the road.  Just outside of the perimeter of where I can get to.

To add insult to injury, it's rained here.  It will be bitterly cold, we're talking 5 degrees F without wind chill, for a few days.  Then it will warm up into the high 30s, low 40s...and rain.  It will pour rain; we're talking amounts that would mean, if it were seven degrees colder, an epic blizzard.  Winter wonderland, a use for that sled I bought, snow men! But then it stops raining, and the temperature promptly drops again.  This weather has been going on since January: not having snow and it being cold is one thing, but being teased with intermittent warm spells just so it can rain is another thing entirely.

My dad also called me when he got home, 275 miles south, to tell me that there is an inch of snow on the ground there.  Washington D.C., where it snows rarely enough that anything non-liquid falling from the sky incites mass hysteria.  There's something suspicious about all this...

technorati tags:weather, snow, winter

Coffee

I was a conscientious objector in the Coffee War.  I ripped up my draft card and fled to Teanada.  I've lost many good friends to coffee drinking and their angry debates about the merits of various coffees.  I remained uninvolved until Tuesday, when I drank coffee for the second time in my life.  I'd drunk my parents' instant dirt water, and it was enough to convince me that drinking coffee was a life experience I could have skipped.  Besides, I didn't think it would make much difference in my alertness.

This was false.  In the dining hall, about to mix hot cocoa before my tragically scheduled 9 a.m. class, I stopped in front of the pot labeled "Organic Fair Trade Coffee."  I debated for a long time; it was for the betterment of the global economy, and I was dragging.  Making a quick decision, I substituted the coffee for the water in the hot chocolate mix.  My friends tell me this is called a mocha, but I call it my miraculous make-the-taste-of-coffee-go-away hot drink.  A mouthful, yes, but a title that gives me credit.

My body, unused to the amount of caffeine, reacted.  I came into class feeling buzzed, and I would notice every once in a while that my eyes were open wider than normal.  Here's the thing: I was very, very awake, but no more able to function in class than when in a drowsy haze.  I was too distracted by how exciting and bright everything was to contribute to the conversation.  I'm a fast talker normally, but the coffee tranformed my sentences to continuous one-word psychobabble.  I think mixing coffee with an already hyper person is like mixing crystal meth and alcohol.  A poor decision on all accounts.  (And no, I don't do drugs, I just took 5 years of health classes.)

I drank coffee again today, hoping that this time the results would be better.  They were not.  I'm just going to have to break myself of the compulsive need to do all the homework assigned to me and get more sleep.

technorati tags:coffee, caffeine, class, drugs