Veronica Brush's Blog, page 8

Bugs in the System

Once upon a time in a swamp somewhere, a spider and mosquito locked eyes and in that one look, knew they were made for each other. I was love at first sight, or, in the case of the spider, love at all 8 of the sights. They knew their families would never approve. But, through some adventures, they proved that the power of love is more powerful than any obstacles.

And they lived happily ever after.

In my bedroom.

Slowly eating me alive.

The end.

I cannot think of any other explanation for the current situation I have found myself in. Every morning, I wake up with either a new mosquito bite or a new spider bite. Never both. They are seriously taking turns. And I vacuum everything and move the furniture around and change the sheets and none of it helps.

I know how they’re doing it. The spider shows the mosquito how to crawl around under the sheets so that it can bite me even when I’m tucked tightly under the blankets. Then the mosquito flies the spider around so that it doesn’t get tangled in the sheets when I’m removing them and neither of them can get sucked into the vacuum.

Also, the mosquito has gotten a silencer from somewhere because I never, ever hear it.

How do you combat that? My only chance is to find their families and hope that their families getting involved cause a Romeo and Juliet situation.

Anybody know any spiders who have been complaining about the type of insects their progeny are hanging around lately?

But that’s not the end of my problems.

I’ve been without internet for two days.

Everyone gets 15 minutes of a near-death experience and this is mine.

It’s like the internet has become Amish and was shunning me. It’s like the rapture had happened and everyone on the internet was taken. That would certainly be unexpected if you’ve ever read what’s on the internet.

I never realized how much time I spend on the internet. I suddenly have a whole lot of time to fill. I had to watch my OWN cat do funny things.

I don’t even have a cat.

I had to dress my dog up like a cat and wait for her to do funny things. Mostly she laid on the floor in her cat costume looking at me with sheer annoyance. She’s a method actor. I never knew that about her before.

I also asked friends to randomly stop by and either call me a nazi or throw an advertisement at my face. It isn’t the same.

Life is hard off-line. I was going to call my internet provider’s customer service line, but I couldn’t look up the phone number because I didn’t have internet. Luckily I have a phone book for just such an emergency. I keep it somewhere safe so I’ll always be able to find it. I cannot now find where that place is. I bet people on the internet would have good ideas of places to look.

I called a friend of mine who’s an engineer. That phone conversation went like this:

Me: Can you fix my internet. I need to blog.

Friend: Who is this?

Me: Oh, sorry. This is Veronica. Fix it!

Friend: I can’t.

Me: What kind of engineer are you?

Friend: A chemical engineer.

Me: So can’t you just come up with some sort of chemical potion to make my internet work?

Friend: Someday you’re going to have to learn what I do.

Me: I don’t think so.

Friend: Did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in?

Me: Every hour for the past 36 hours.

Friend: I don’t know. Maybe you’ve got a bug in the system.

And that’s when I realized: this was no accident. The mosquito and the spider are trying to cut me off from outside contact. I think they’re going to try to kidnap me or hold me for ransom or possibly force me to perform some sort of insect wedding ceremony.

As soon as my internet is back up, I’m going to start a crowd funding campaign to raise money for my potential ransom/a wedding reception.  Either way, I’d like to be prepared.

Near Royalty

The Queen of England is looking to hire someone to run her Facebook and Twitter accounts (See?  I linked it so you couldn’t disbelieve me!)

Obviously I’m the perfect candidate:

-I have experience on social media and, while I cannot figure out how to set my blog to my own time zone so I have to do some serious math every time I want to set an article to post at a specific time, I consider myself good at computers

-I randomly break out in British accents

-I have my own car

-I have a crush on David Tennant, who is from the general vicinity of Europe

-My puppy is part King Charles Spaniel, so I’m practically royalty myself

As a mere formality I thought I would type up my resume (Or “CV” as they call it in the UK. For those ignorant Americans who don’t know what that stands for, it stands for “United Kingdom”)(At the time of posting this, I am unsure about CV).

Veronica’s Resume
Job History:

2006-2015: Gainfully employed

2015-Present: Ingainfully employed as Author/Blogger

References:

King Charles spaniel mix

Waiter at Local Mexican Restaurant w/ Most Gluten Free Options

Person on Google+ Who Complimented My Blog But Has Not Yet Started Stalking Me

Education:

Attended University.

Passed all my non-stupid classes.

Graduated in under 10 years.

Core Competencies:

Umm…yes?

Other Skills:

Using “Paint” program to put hats/facial expressions on animals

Quoting Shakespeare, a man of infinite jest. I have borne him in my backpack a thousand times.

Dropping juggling clubs on my right foot

(although I am practicing being able to drop them on my left foot as well)

Conversational Chinese

(assuming the conversation largely revolves around where the bathroom is)

Greatest Strength:

Weirdness.

Greatest Weakness:

Weirdness.

Also I care too much.

But let’s not talk about me. How are YOU doing today?

Greatest Strength:

Redundancy

Greatest Weakness:

Sweatiest bicycle rider ever

British Words Known:

Elevator = Lift

Flashlight = Torch

BBC = Dr. Who

Everything else, you just add a letter “u” to

Labor = Labour

Color = Colour

Gray = Gruy

British = Bruitish

Qualifications for Social Media Job:

My blog has over 100 followers.

(Rounding up)

(Rounding up a lot)

(From roughly 7)

(Rounding up)

Self-Published Books About Murders During Mars Colonization:

Yes.

Things You’d Like to Ask the Queen:

Since rules for personal audiences with the queen say “Do not touch the queen under any circumstances”, does the queen ever mess with people by waiving her hands close to their face and saying “You’re not touching me!”? Because that’s what I would do.

Other Notes:

Please don’t read my blog until after I have been hired

Now we just sit back and wait. If my math is correct, my blog clock is telling me it’s already next Sunday, so it shouldn’t be long now!

Book Judgery

(This post is subtitled “You Don’t Know How Close I Came to Drawing a Bikini on a Book to Complete the Beauty Pageant Theme”.  Just FYI.)

Books should be judged by their cover.

For example, this book, newly available in paperback, is clearly one of the best books ever:

You can tell just by looking at it. Even a periphery glance at it tells you this book was well written, with unexpected twists, by an author with delightfully small feet.

That’s what I get out of it anyway.

I was recently at a book store.

Okay, that’s not really newsworthy. It happens a lot.

The surprising part is that I left with two bags of books! That’s less than normal.

I love books. I love things that have the mere shape of books. Yet another reason why I’ve never married: I have yet to find a man shaped similar enough to a book.

I have to judge books to keep from buying them all. Since I don’t have time to read all the books, I have to judge them on something other than their insides. And it has been my experience that, even though you may be in a used book store where the books already have some wear-and-tear, the clerks still do not like it when you judge books by how far you can throw them. Flammability is also out of the question, although I cannot go into detail until the court case is settled.

And so we’re left with the covers.

There’s two parts of a cover to consider.

1.) The front. This is usually located on the front of the book. If you’re looking at the front of the book and don’t see the front, check the back.

I judge the front with simple mathematics:

Count the number of swooning women on the cover. Multiply that number by 1. If the total is greater or equal to 1, then I don’t buy the book.

Also the number of bellybuttons visible on a book cover is inversely proportional to how much I would enjoy that book.

2.) The back. The location of the back of a book varies by region. The back of the book usually has a blurb on it about the plot of the book or lack thereof.

To judge the back, I compare the blurb to a consolidated book blurb I wrote myself. The more similar the two blurbs sound, the less likely I am to buy that book.

Here is my comparison blurb:

Steve is a disgruntled-but-beautiful, sexy-but-attractive, and all around appealing single woman with a man’s name, because apparently that’s really “in” right now. She lives in the small town of Rural in the state of Midwest, dirt capital of the world. Despite her gritty and sexy determination, her world has fallen apart around her. Her husband, who so lacked redeeming qualities that you wonder how Steve ever agreed to a second date with him, let alone marriage, ran off with her best friend, running over the family dog as they left. Steve’s boss is a sexist jerk, but everyone lets him get away with it because the author said so.

But Steve’s problems don’t end there: she dropped her phone in the toilet, her house burned down, she wrote a really funny post on facebook but nobody “liked” it, she won a lifetime supply of ice cream but her freezer broke so it all melted, it’s the worst hay-fever season in recorded history, and somebody on the internet spoilered an episode of “The Walking Dead” before she could watch it.

When she finds out her brother in New York City was murdered under mysterious circumstances, she knows she’s the only one who can solve the murder. Because those big city police all lack her gritty, small-town, sexy street-smarts.

Steve quickly realizes there’s more to her brother’s sexy murder than meets the eye.

Something supernatural is going on here, but can Steve figure it out in time despite the sexy fact that she is actually incredibly incompetent? Of course she can, because she’s got attitude, and that’s really all you need to fix any and all situations!

When she meets a mysterious, sexy detective, they’re thrown together, despite their obvious hatred of each other. They seriously can’t stand one another. Everything they say to each other is a sharp, witticism. Surely as soon as they solve the crime, they’ll get away from each other as fast as they can since there’s no way these two could ever be friends, let alone have a chance of falling in love! Ha! Just the thought of these two as a couple makes me laugh incredulously. These are two people who will just definitely never fall in love. Ever. Like that would be the most unexpected thing in the history of forever. So don’t expect that. Cuz that’s definitely NOT what’s going to possibly not happen.

Discovering a dark world of evil vampire wizards who are responsible for her brother’s death, Steve realizes she should have said “Spoiler alert” or maybe not announced that on the back of the book when that basically makes the first 200 pages of the book moot, as the author spends those first 200 pages building to that as a big reveal on page 210.  Just act surprised when you read it.

Entering this forbidden world of magic and passion will push Steve to her very limits and cause anyone who reads that sentence to die a little inside.

Follow Steve on her coming-of-age-even-though-she’s-like-40 tale of passion, adventure, lust, forbidden fruit, intrigue, sex, sex, intrigue, and MURDER. With the help of the sexy detective, Steve will learn not only about the strength of the secret, but sexy, world of vampire wizards, but also the strength of her heart. (This last sentence can also be used to induce vomiting, in case this book is accidentally ingested.)

*  * *

If the blurb on the back of the book I’m looking at doesn’t sound similar, then I know I’ve finally found a book to take home to meet my parents.

I hope this helps in your future book buying.

Nearly-All-Crustacean Shakespeare

April 23rd is a day to celebrate Shakespeare because they think it is the day Shakespeare was born.  They also think he died on the same day, which makes it even more impressive that he wrote all those plays, being alive for less than a day.

This year we celebrate Shakespeare being dead for 400 years.  Now that I say it out loud, it doesn’t actually sound very nice.

In honor of April 23rd, I couldn’t pass up finally writing the much-anticipated (mostly by me) Crustacean Shakespeare I have been promising to write.

(Full disclosure: I did not actually write most of it.  Shakespeare is responsible for 90% of the lines I used.)

And now, curtain!

A beach on an island.

Enter a lone crab/wizard, Crabpurnia.

Enter Laeobstertes

Lobster, Merchant and friend of Crabpurnia.

 

 

Enter Seal.

Seal Exits.

Exit Laeobstertes and Crabpurnia.

Enter Sir John Flamingostaff the Angry

 

The End

Happy Shakespeare Day Everybody!  To thine own self be true!

Gratitudiveness

I had a bad day the other day. I didn’t order it or anything. It just showed up on my doorstep. I tried marking it “return to sender”, but the mailman wouldn’t take it back.

They say when you have a bad day, you should take a moment to be grateful for the good things. They say that because they’ve clearly never had a bad day. I don’t know about “they”, but when I’m having a bad day, there are no good things. Everything looks like this:

That’s why, when I’m in a good mood, I try to take pictures of the positives so I can remember them when I’m in a bad mood.

For example: I’m grateful that I’m not the person who invented these:

Those are real glow-in-the-dark dog poo bags, available at big chain pet supply stores.

I can’t think of a single practical application for these. Luckily I thought of several impractical ones:

-Encouraging responsible pet ownership. Picking up after your dog is important for their health and the health of other dogs. With these glow-in-the-dark poo bags, karma thanks you by making you more visible and thus less likely to get hit by a car when you’re carrying a nice full, glowing bag of poo. That other guy, the one who never picks up after their dog, gets hit by a car instead. When the ambulance comes, he gets run over by that, too, all because he lacks glow-in-the-dark visibility.

-How much cooler would your night juggling of poo bags look with glow-in-the-dark bags? You could take that show on the road, or at least to YouTube.

-On your walk, you stumble onto a crime scene. Literally. You trip over the body, all because the police ran out of crime scene tape. You save the day with your roll of glowing poo bags. In gratitude, the city forgives all your parking tickets, saving you millions of dollars (You’re really bad at parking).

-It’s late at night when suddenly you and your dog are abducted by aliens with an unearthly glow. They plan on learning about humans by lobotomizing you. Your only chance to escape is to disguise yourself as an alien by taping together your glow-in-the-dark poo bags into a glowing alien costume. You make it back to Earth, warn humanity, and we go all Independence Day fighting them off. Humanity is saved, all thanks to your wise choice in poo bags.

I guarantee you those applications are way better than anything the guy came up with when he pitched his glowing poo bag idea to corporate.

I’ll tell you something else about that guy. When he has a bad day, he’s grateful he’s not the person who invented these:

These are also real scratch & sniff poo bags and were on the display next to the glow-in-the-dark ones.

How many terrible ideas did that dude have before, that the company said “OK” to this one?

Dude: No one wants to smell their dogs poo, but what if we could change that? Just scratch the bag, then put your nose to it and be instantly enveloped by the scent of fruit. And not just any fruits. Exotic ones, like pomegranate mango, for the discerning sniffer.

CEO: You know what? Compared to your ideas for edible ones, joke exploding ones, and the ones that play “It’s a Small World” on a continuous loop when filled, this one is brilliant. Here’s a million dollars.

The only reason I could ever see for these is if you love pomegranates or mangoes, but then find out you’re deathly allergic to them. Associating the very smell of them with your dog’s poo should help you go cold turkey. So, when you think about it, this dude may have saved lives.

I bet even the people who’s lives he saved make fun of him and his invention, though.

But even that dude has something to be grateful for when he has a poopy day.

He’s got the scent of pomegranate mango.

My Blog Turns 50

Today my blog turns 50 posts old.

In honor of this, my 50th post, I thought I’d combine all my posts into one Super Post! So I took the 1st sentence from my first post, the 2nd sentence from my second post, and then I mostly lost count.

Some of the later ones I had to circle back to the beginning of them because there weren’t that many sentences.

I don’t know why I’m telling YOU this. It’s not YOUR 50th post. I can do whatever I want! So back off! And enjoy!

For my first blog post, I would like to explain who this blog is not for. Who ever thought I’d get this far? I don’t dress like an Amish person or anything. And now, the thrilling conclusion to why I seem to attract guys on drugs. Actually my puppy had to have surgery on New Year’s Eve (I think I accidentally rear-ended 2015 and that’s why it hated me so much).

Now, obviously one of these two artists got distracted from the tree. Don’t let the casual way in which I post it — possibly including the phrase “Can anyone explain to me why…”– fool you. My theory: they have to keep hyping it up because if they stop, they’ll realize what a miserable thing running is. “So’s your face!” They do not need more than a few seconds to express their concepts.

Yes, te word “our” as a silent ‘ ‘. It’s actually based on what will possibly be true story. I can’t even find her in my house half the time, she shreds my furniture and my curtains, and gives me looks to let me know how much she wishes she could feed herself so I wouldn’t be needed in her life. They don’t just not eat it. But not in the way that all dogs are mixed breeds (even pure-breds are mixed breeds as it turns out)(but don’t tell the AKC or they’ll implode).

So, as a youngest child, if I find a shirt that I like, it doesn’t matter who it “belongs” to because it just as equally “belongs” to me, so I can wear it to paint in. Like “Grants: I Have Less to Say About Them Than Turtles”. Because who else makes snow-crop-circles? The rules are that I’m going to make you think so deeply about something that you’ll forget no one else in the room could hear your internal conversation and then you’ll say something that makes sense in the context of your thoughts, but to no one else in the room. Once the quarterback has the ball, his job is to throw it.

We are experiencing Brainical Difficulties. If you have, I imagine you don’t have very many friends. This may mean missing Thanksgiving all together (as well as the 4th of July) to stand in line, but you know as well as I that Christmas is only 30 days away and you are going to need the other 29 days to start getting ready for Easter. He sure is great, huh? Not necessarily good ideas, but ideas.

When my love can’t get to you, it comes back and attacks me. So is Earth not a planet? This is why I don’t date anymore. Sean Connery stars as Cate Blanchett playing Eddie Redmayne in this one. Throwing things comes later.

It was just because I thought differently than apparently most people do. But I’m not good at social situations, especially when there’s blood involved. Does he have to adopt a dog to take care of? No. Funerals are expensive, particularly since you got that clause in your living-will stating that you want all the members of One Direction standing vigilant by your hospital bed and painting your fingernails with real gold as you lay dying.

Or at the very least, if someone says, “This is definitely a scam product!” you can quote: “This is definitely a…product!” If typing an important document and you don’t know which word to use (and your Caps Lock key is broken), use ‘Affect’. Junk mail contributes to the obesity epidemic in America. Hello? I feel like this one is self-explanatory.

And so I armed myself with the best bear-avoidance equipment I had on hand. A good rule of thumb for showing off your underwear is this: If you would not present your underwear TO a person, then it probably isn’t a good idea to present it to them while on your person. “Who would rather not be here?” (They ride off on horses, riding all night and into the day). He had the sort of face that suggested he held grudges.

There was a pair of ducks just sitting calmly, confident in the safety of their sanctuary. I demand a raise! Like the powdered seasoning? First of all, because my parents never bought me a Power Wheels as a child. And that’s what would happen if a mongoose and a libertarian went into business together.

Okay, I made up that last one up, but I felt like I needed a good closer.

I think, if nothing else, I can say that I have definitely held true to my themeless roots.  I don’t even know what’s coming next.  Except that all-crustacean Shakespeare.  That needs to happen.

Thanks for hopping on my crazy train and I hope you’ll stay on for another 50 posts! I promise they won’t make much more sense than this!

Taxing

There are only 2 certainties in life: Death and taxes.

EXCEPT NOT THIS YEAR!

This year one of those things is no longer the certainty it was! And it’s not the one you would have preferred be less certain!

I was going to write a blog post about how to do your taxes the day AFTER April 15th. You see how that would be entertaining? It’s funny because it’s impractical.

But the government had the last laugh. Apparently taxes aren’t due on Tax Day this year. This year, they’re not due until the 18th, possibly not even of April!

Comedy is all about timing, Government! You’re ruining my punchline.

*Sigh*

But the show must go on.

And so I will offer my tax advice well before your taxes are due, when you could still conceivably take my tax advice and thus end up in jail. And I would feel just nearly awful about that. But not bad enough to not give you horrible tax advice.

I consulted with a tax adviser on my tax deductions this year.

He replied, and I quote, “You’d have to be crazy to take these deductions.”

Done and done.

Here are a few of my favorite deductions I took advantage of this year (all based on factual, little-known tax deductions):

As a blogger, I do a lot of maintenance to my whaling ship. That’s why most of my tax deductions are from the really-really-true 2004 ruling that decided whalers could claim deductions for ships, tools, maintenance, and supplies for their crew, up to $10,000. Me and my crew hit that number easily. My first mate needs a lot of puppy toys to keep her at the top of her game.

The best part is that this $10,000 is deductible not as a business expense, but as charitable contribution.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why is whaling considered a charity?”

Wait…that was really what you were thinking? I was not expecting that. That has thrown me off my game a little.

See? First tax day is late and then my blog posts start making sense and then apocalypse. And not the cool kind where we all dress up in leather and ride motorcycles through the desert. More like apocalypse where there’s nothing but polyester and everybody has to ride segways, which do not do well on sand, so we all have to stay on the sidewalks.

But I will tell you why whaling is considered a charity. Because without whalers, Star Trek 4 makes no sense. And everyone loves Star Trek 4.

However, whaling is also mostly illegal in the United States. That is why I only use my whaling ship as a grow site for marijuana.

Speaking of smoking, stopping smoking is also tax deductible. Of course, smoking is also a very expensive habit. So I recommend when you take up smoking (Do you want the tax deduction or not?) that you smoke only one cigarette and then work on quitting smoking for the next two hundred years of your life. (Now that you don’t smoke, I’m assuming you’re gonna live longer.)(And as long as you’re getting a tax deduction, you might as well live a lot longer!)

Vehicles that plug-in are also tax deductible. This deduction used to make me feel left out. First of all, because my parents never bought me a Power Wheels as a child. Secondly, because I have an energy efficient car, just not one that plugs-in.

I have a prius.

No, not the cool, modern car you are thinking of.

I have an original model prius. With a tape deck.

I could have taken a better picture, but I didn’t really feel like I needed a high-resolution picture of my tape deck.

I upgraded to a tape deck because the phonograph impeded my vision while driving.

My prius is so old and has so many miles on it, I took a sharpie and wrote “B.C.” by the odometer. Now as I watch the numbers roll ever higher, I can imagine I’m traveling over 252,000 years back in time. It makes me feel better about my car.

But I still get amazing mileage to the gallon and save myself hundreds of dollars a year on gas, and that deserves a tax break, dang it!

Then I realized that, the way I read the tax code (skimming summaries of it on the internet during commercial breaks), it doesn’t specify WHAT my car has to plug-in to.

So every morning when I get up, I plug the special adapter into my car’s lighter. Then I plug the adapter into an extension cord, and I plug the extension cord into my waffle iron and I make waffles at a rate of over 40 waffles to the gallon. (That’s on the highway. In city limits, it’s more like 32 waffles/gallon. But when I’m not trying to drive at the same time, it’s even better.)

And then the first mate on my whaling ship eats all the waffles. She always has the munchies for some reason.

Excuse me, but I smell a business expense!

Happy Tax Season to all and to all a Good Rebate!

No Place Like Homeopathy

Homeopathic medicine is becoming more mainstream these days. The number of people practicing homeopathic medicine is growing, largely because we’ve stopped burning them at the stake lately.

Now we just mock them on the internet.

What is “Homeopathy”? It is a mix of two words:

-Home, because you treat yourself with things commonly found in your own home and

-Psychopathy, because people think that’s what you have when you announce you have gone the homeopathic route, picturing you in a pointy hat, stirring dandelions and Omega 3 into a bubbling cauldron.

But that’s not what it’s really like. I know, being myself a Level 34 Homeopathic Wizard.

Why don’t I go to a doctor like a sane person, you ask?

I’ve tried that. All my doctor appointments went very much like this:

Doctor: You’re pregnant.

Me: I haven’t even told you my symptoms yet.

Doctor: Oh, sorry. What are your symptoms?

Me: Well, I was shot yesterday and…

Doctor: You’re pregnant.

Me: I’m not pregnant. If you look, you can see my organs oozing out of my…

Doctor: (Checking my chart) But it says here you’re a woman.

Me: (Checking to make sure my bosoms are still there) Yes.

Doctor: So, you are pregnant then.

Me: (Handing doctor my liver) Maybe you could just run some tests on my liver while it’s conveniently on the outside of me.

Doctor: (Googling “What is a liver?”)

In short, I feel you will get better results from WebMD than from your average doctor:

WebMD: What are your symptoms?

Me: Well, I was shot two days ago and I’ve been bleeding out.  Plus, I never got my liver back from that doctor…

WEbMD: You have the black plague and/or pregnancy.

So I stopped going to doctors. Luckily I had some alternative options.

Then my veterinarian friend told me it would be illegal for her to be my doctor, even if I dress like a dalmatian. (Sidenote: Most insurance plans will not cover dalmatian costumes.)

And I wrote my cousin and asked her how dead someone has to be before she can give them a physical or “autopsy” or whatever it’s called when she as a mortician does it. She never got back to me.

Then I finally found an intelligent doctor I liked. That is until Netflix stopped carrying Doctor Who. (Insurance also refused to reimburse me for my Netflix subscription. What do I even have insurance for?)

And that’s when I switched to homeopathic medicine.

Now I use things like turmeric to help me feel better. Turmeric, you ask? Like the powdered seasoning?

Yes! But instead of buying the $2.99 powdered seasoning, I buy it in pill form for $40. But what makes my pills of turmeric so much better than your powdered turmeric is…that…um…mine is prescription-strength turmeric, I guess.

My mom is actually the one who got me started in homeopathy. She suggested I try an Epsom salt bath. She told me to fill a bath with hot water, poor in the salts, baking soda, and if I wanted, a few drops of vanilla or cinnamon sticks for scent. In retrospect, she may have been trying to bake me.

But it seems to be helping. I have not had to return to a doctor and be told I’m pregnant in a while. Consequently, my levels of pent-up aggression have gone down as well. (Believe me, this post could have been WAY more bitter!) And my insurance company stopped sending me “Cease and Desist” letters that claimed all my pregnancies were going to bankrupt the company.

So everyone’s happy.

If you’ll excuse me, it’s the witching hour, which is when I take my Vitamin C.

Falafel and Other Letdowns

I’d like to talk about things in life that I find disappointing.

Because that oughta be a barrel of laughs.

1.) Falafels. If you were to combine the words “fun” and “waffle”, you would get the word falafel. (Also if you sneezed and fell down the stairs while you said the word “waffle”, you might end up saying “falafel”, although I’m not advocating testing that theory.)

So I always believed falafel to be some sort of amazingly special waffle. I pictured a nice fluffy Belgian waffle wrapped into a burrito-like thing (because I also love Mexican food). Inside would be all the best foods, like bacon and ice cream and candy and cantaloupe and steak and tacos and queso and cheesecake and pancakes and even more waffles!

Spoiler alert: That is not what a falafel is. According to Wikipedia, “Falafel is a deep-fried ball or patty made from ground chickpeas, fava beans, or both.”

That was a slap in the face when I found that out. Who came up with that? If I was at someone’s house and they offered me a falafel, I think the conversation would go like this:

Host: Here’s dinner! It’s a falafel. I made it with chickpeas or fava beans or both.

Me: You forgot I was coming, didn’t you? And you didn’t buy any groceries, so when you saw me pull up, you grabbed whatever you found growing in that overgrown part of your backyard, balled it up, threw it in some oil and are now trying to pass it off as exotic food, aren’t you?

Host: Yes. I’m sorry. I’ll order a pizza.

On the other hand, if you offered someone my idea of a falafel, the conversation would go more like this:

Host: Here’s dinner! It’s a falafel. Try it. No beans or peas in this! It’s all the best things in life stuffed inside a waffle! And I added pepperoni and whip cream on top of mine!

Me: Thanks, but I can’t. I’m dead.

Host: I hadn’t noticed. What happened?

Me: I ate a falafel. Apparently it’s not good to eat 20,000 calories in one sitting.

Host: What a shame.

See how everyone is much happier, albeit less technically still alive, in conversation #2?

If we can change the definition of the word “literally” to mean “not literally”, then we can change the world “falafel” to mean “waffle stuffed with goodness”. I believe in us!

Which leads me to another disappointment:

2.) Have you heard that “Literally” now means “not literally”? That is a real not-made-up-by-me fact.

You know when you used to look up a word in the dictionary and it would tell you the definition of that word was basically the word? Like you’d look up the word “snickersnee” and the definition would be “The act of snickersneeing” and you thought “That’s no help!” and invented the internet so you could Google definitions instead and at the very least end up watching some funny videos of cats snickersneeing?

Well, thanks to “Literally” meaning the opposite of itself, we now need those useless definitions. Because now you have to look up a word before you use it to make sure it still means itself. Because it might not.

Imagine one day walking into your boss’ office:

You: I demand a raise!

Boss: A great idea! I’ll get on it at once.

You: Really?

Boss: Yes. I’ve been wanting to pay you less for a long time now.

You: But I wanted a raise.

Boss: Yes, and “raise” now means to give someone less money. You should have bought a dictionary back when you were making more money before I took away that raise from your paycheck. Now please enter my office and open the door on your way in!

This also causes the whole time paradox problem, but in verbal form.

For example, if the definition of the word “snickersnee” became “The act of not snickersneeing”, then the word snickersnee no longer really exists. If its only definition is to that it doesn’t mean itself, then it doesn’t mean anything, so it’s no longer a word. But if there is no word, it doesn’t exist to negate itself out of existence.

I think we should fight against this by frequently using words like we believe them to mean their opposite until the dictionary manufacturers have had to change the definition of every word to the opposite of itself.

This would be especially fun in comments section on the internet. Jump into the middle of an argument and proclaim that everyone there is intelligent, classy, and productive.

It could be a miserable time for nobody!

3.) Something else that I find disappointing are blog posts that end abruptly without

Only Natural

(If you’re wondering why I have a picture of a crab quoting Henry V, the answer is simple: I like Shakespeare.  And the crab looked like he could pull the roll off.)

(This post is about nature and a crab is something that can be found in nature.)

(You see how it’s all coming together now?)

One time I saw an ad on TV that said something about “Inside you is an outdoors you, who thinks the comforts of home aren’t as comfortable as the great outdoors.”

That is not true.

Inside me is a me that asks “Should we build a fort inside the house so that we can be even more indoors than we already are?”

Nature is pretty, but also a terrible host.

Picture this: a friend invites you to stay at their mansion (oooh!) and they tell you, “By the way, there may be snakes in the bed you’ll be sleeping on. And my entire house is infested with bugs. And I don’t have a toilet, but you can use the bushes.”

You probably wouldn’t stay at that friend’s mansion, no matter how extravagant it was.

Well that friend is Mother Nature. She is not a good housekeeper.

And it doesn’t help my relationship with the great outdoors that I am pale. Really pale. No, even more pale than you are picturing.

Here’s a recent picture of me where someone used the flash:

I saved this pic because, despite the obvious flaws, I like the way my hair looks in this one.

Needlesstosay, there is not enough sunscreen in the world to protect me from the sun. I get sunburned in the shade. I get sunburned during eclipses. When the weatherman puts the happy little sun graphic on TV, I have to change the channel as fast as I can before the graphic of the sun burns me.

Recently I witnessed something very disturbing in Nature. It was lying dead in the sidewalk’s gutter, like pedestrian roadkill. I t made me want to shout, “Get a room, Nature! And put all your dead things into it instead of leaving them all lying around willy-nilly.”

Besides being disturbed by this dead thing in my path, I was also disturbed that I didn’t know what it was. It was like some mad scientist had shrunk a beaver down and given it a rat tail.

Apparently this is called a “muskrat”. I did not love muskrats like the song “Muskrat Love” suggests I would. I found them to be disturbing and, frankly, unnatural. And Nature should not be allowed to make things that are unnatural.

All this has led me to take some drastic measures.

I felt I had no choice but to speak out.

Thus, My Yelp Review of Nature:

I went out into nature hoping to have a nice afternoon. Unfortunately I was very disappointed by my experience, to the point that I think I should warn people before they waste their time in Nature.

It started pleasant enough. Nature has a nice look to it. The atmosphere is very under-stated, but pleasant. It has a sort of modern-fusion mix of nitrogen and oxygen that’s popular right now, with just the right touch of other gases.

On one particular visit I decided to walk through one of Nature’s meadows. There was a pond there. It was very still and the sunset was reflecting over the glass-like water, in between the reeds that were growing through it. There was a pair of ducks just sitting calmly, confident in the safety of their sanctuary.

I was thinking, “I wonder if I could find a place of such peace inside myself?”

In that moment, do you know what hit me? A face-full of gnats, that’s what. Some went into my nose and I’m not sure they all came out. What the heck, Nature? This is why we don’t commune more often.

Their cleanliness is severely lacking. Everywhere you look, there’s something growing: weeds, mold, fungus. Nature apparently abhors to vacuum. You may also get pooped on. I’m surprised the health department hasn’t shut them down considering the dirt they keep their food in, not to mention all the animals that wander through.

Nature’s customer service is terrible. It’s rare that I leave Nature without some sort of bite, scratch, bruise, burn, or at the very least, itchy eyes. Patrons may get the feeling that Nature does not care for them at all.

Nature does run a variety of interesting shows. They have everything from lighter-fare, such as clouds, to more somber displays, like volcanic eruptions. Most of their stuff is family-friendly, though their springtime shows do tend to include sexual-content. It’s worth noting their popular night productions do include many stars.

I would only recommend Nature for people who have or want a strong constitution.

My work here is done.

If you need me, I’ll be in my fort, applying sunscreen and planning my all-shellfish version of Hamlet.