Focus on character

After class, I am waiting for Jesse to pick me up, and Bennet is there shuffling around on the sidewalk. He's in my writing class, and his stories are way better than mine. They're lyrical, kaleidoscopic, and unflinching. The class we are in focuses on character in short stories. I'm not entirely convinced that Bennet wasn't planted to show how fascinating and absurd characters can be.

I do not know how old he is. Old enough that his shoulders have stooped and his belly precedes him as he shuffles into the classroom; he takes his time getting seated. Old enough that he doesn't care to know better, though it's easy to believe that he never did. Bennet makes frequent comments about all the "darlings" in the class; we're mostly female and he mutters his appreciation for this fact every chance he gets.

On the sidewalk, he approaches me.

"Have you seen the teacher?" he asks.

"I haven't."

He fishes in his pocket and pulls out an airline sized bottle of Smirnoff vodka, mostly empty. "I haven't once been to class sober." He swigs the last of it, choking as it burns his throat.

There is a potted tree next to where we are standing and he fishes around in the flowers at the base of the tree, attempting to conceal the evidence, as it were. He grows frustrated after a few seconds of this and tosses the bottle over a fence. Feigning all sorts of things, he innocently asks, "Did you see something fly by here?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I tell him, laughing, thinking of someone blaming "those damn kids" for throwing bottles over fences. Who would ever imagine this truth?

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100 things, part shi

10. Yesterday, I left my Invisalign braces soaking in Listerine too long, so I had a bluish tint to my teeth for awhile. I ended up taking a two hour nap, however, and the blue was gone by the time I woke up. I was a bit disappointed about that; blue teeth are funny.
11. Procrastination is one of my favorite verbs to put into action. At the moment, for instance, I am putting off household chores, homework for my writing class, and adulthood.
12. I signed up for a Facebook account so I could play word games, and have become completely addicted to them. This isn't the first time I've been addicted to word games; I've spent many a night competing with strangers to unscramble letters over the past ten or so years. The problem with Facebook is that it adds social networking to what would otherwise be a pure geek fest. This complicates matters quite a bit: what if your friends don't actually want to play word games with you? If you win a lot, is it bad form to keep asking your friends to play? If you don't win, is it bad form to tell your friends that you never want to see them again? And what about this friend finder nonsense? Should I befriend people I haven't seen since high school? Do they even know who I am? Is it impolite of me to not send them friend requests? How the hell do you unscramble the letters ZQOUUO to make a word? And why did Crystal just throw a chicken at me? If zombies keep attacking me, does that mean I don't need sleep anymore and can stay up all night playing word games?
13. I don't remember watching Family Ties when Alex P. Keaton tried to pass off zuoquo as a valid word in Scrabble, but I do remember my friend Josh Black bringing the episode up when we were in high school or college. All those years later, it still cracked him up; I love it when that happens.

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My cat has never been this happy to see me

My friend Carin sent me a link to a similar video about Christian the lion today. Of course, I had to look it up to see if this was a true story; it appears that it is and it's a fairly amazing one. Wikipedia has a little more information, as does this Mail Online article. I love the idea of a lion in a Bentley. It's so ridiculous! There are also a ton of similar videos on You Tube that are worth a look; one of them even shows footage of them playing with Christian back in London before he was shipped to Nairobi. Beware, though, that one is dubbed with Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You."

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I just got one of the coolest emails ever

The subject, "from one nerdy girl to another," caught my attention. Elisabeth from Sweden wrote to tell me that she has used my blog to learn how native speakers use English. It has evidently worked quite well for her; the email was written in perfect English. It's crazy to think that something as simple as posting random thoughts to a blog could help anybody at all, not to mention someone 5,000 miles away. Though I think the credit all goes to Elisabeth for having the dedication to wade through seven years of blog posts, translating them into Swedish.

What makes the email completely awesome, though, is that Elisabeth included a link to Game Over, her Nintendo metal band. Let me put that in bold: Nintendo metal band! Holy cow! That's so cool!

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100 things, part tres

7. I love fruit. Few things make me as happy as sweet mango, a bag of cherries, or a perfectly formed nectarine. Pineapple weakens my knees; a delicious pear will make me do a happy dance. One of my favorite childhood memories is of sitting in the cherry tree in our back yard, plucking off cherries and popping them into my mouth. My sister and the other neighborhood kids didn't like to climb the cherry tree because of the sap and the ants, but I was reasonably careful to avoid them and got the tree and its fruit all to myself. I've surely romanticized the memory a bit (for instance, in my memory, I am not wearing terrycloth shorts and my belly isn't hanging out of a dirty, sap-stained shirt). But when I think back to that tree, I always remember perfect blue skies, wispy white clouds, a sweet summer breeze rustling the leaves, and the sweet taste of cherry on my tongue.
8. I dislike going to the grocery store. I came up with a scheme to bribe myself to go to the store last summer: I get one apricot each time I do the shopping. When the items on my list are all crossed off, I head for produce where I hover over the apricots on display. I pick up several of them, squeeze them gently, sniff them, compare them, and finally choose what I deem to be the best of the bunch. I gobble down the apricot as soon as I get home, before the rest of the groceries make it out of the bag. It's a perfect moment. Yesterday, Ransom brought me home an apricot, yet another of his minor heroic feats. Of course, if he makes a habit of this, he'll be doing even more of the shopping.
9. I like Superman, but have noticed that superheroes don't actually exist. Awhile ago, I came up with the idea of minor heroes, people who do something that means more to you than it does to them. There's the aforementioned case of Ransom and the apricot, for example (and about a thousand other things). There's also a guy in Portland who returned my bus pass to me about six years ago. I dropped it as I was getting off the bus. It was tucked in with the scan card I used to get in the door at work, which actually would have been a bigger loss. Anyhow, this guy lived in my neighborhood and probably recognized me from previous bus rides. I was astonished when he approached me from the opposite direction, about a block away from my house and handed me the plastic sleeve with my scan card and bus pass -- I hadn't even noticed they were missing yet. I see him around town every now and again; he almost certainly doesn't recognize me, but I like knowing that the Bus Pass Hero is still around. It makes the world seem a little safer, somehow.

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Medieval Lives

If you've any interest in history or knowledge or fun things, I highly recommend renting Medieval Lives. It's a series by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) about the types of people who lived in Medieval times. There are eight episodes detailing the lives of peasants, monks, damsels, knights, etc. I enjoyed the way he started episodes outlining what we think we know, or the stereotypes we've come to believe, and then showing how those perceptions aren't really supported by evidence. The stories of Robin Hood, damsels in distress, and kings named Richard are all scrutinized in this series in a humorous and informative manner. Plus, there's a bonus episode about the gladiators. Hooray for learnin'!

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You heard it here first

Sarah, mom of the triplings, just forwarded me a link to a CNN article entitled "Gay marriages worth $684 million." I'm very pleased to know that my theory is proving to be correct. Go California!

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