Category: Random

I don’t know where to file these posts.

Fourth Percentile for Capillary Circumference

I’ve never been accused of being a waif.  In fact, the Scotts are an ample clan.  Not huge, by any means, but solid.  Round.  Rubenesque, if you will.

(All except my brother, who’s always been built like a professional rock climber.  Asshole.)

I had boobs when I was, like, eleven, and my big, black ex-boyfriend used to effuse about my “sista booty”.  My thighs are thick, my fingers like lovely little sausages…Vienna sausages.  Everything about me is a bit bigger than it needs to be.

So imagine my surprise to find that I have tiny

tiny

tiny

veins.

I went to have blood drawn, and the nurse tried my right arm, my left arm, and my left hand.  Then she called for back-up.  The second nurse had me take off my shoes so she could try to tap a vein in my foot.  No dice.

I have to go back on Monday.  The second nurse told me to drink a lot of water, and she would try to procure a pediatric needle for the next whack at it.

Is This Thing On?

OK, seriously? I’m tapped. I got nothing. I give my students a writing prompt every day; I think you, my throngs of readers, could suggest one tiny idea for me. Ask me a question. Quote me an inspiring quote. Tell me what bugs the hell out of you about my blog. Send me some news about your lives. Give me the link to a video you think will horrify or amaze me. Please?

Our God

I reconnected via Facebook with a really good friend from high school.  I adored this dude.  We both played trumpet in the band and knew all the words to “The Humpty Dance”.  And we just got each other, you know?  My memory of us is in a state of constant giggles.

(I don’t like the syntax of  that last sentence, but I’m too tired from seeing Wicked at DPAC tonight [amazing!] and dehydrated from mowing the lawn in the 90 degree heat/1000% humidity this afternoon to figure out a better way to say it.)

These days my friend lives in Texas with his wife, having survived cancer (“butthole cancer”, he told me), and he has become a foster dad to two little boys, brothers.

Today, his Facebook status update was:

My non-English speaking sons came home today singing “our God is greater, our God is stronger”. Thanks [his church] worship!

It made me profoundly uncomfortable.  I had many thoughts.  The one that I wrote to him was, “Greater and stronger than other people’s God?”

Remind me to tell you sometime about my experience growing up with an atheist father and Unitarian Universalist mother and being told by my classmates, who all went to Brushy Fork Baptist Church, that I was going to hell.  Maybe it will illuminate a few things.

I’m All Frakked Up

OK, Battlestar Gallactica. You win. It took three seasons, but you got me.

I still bristle at the use of the curse ‘frak’, especially when used like:

“This is just a clusterfrak.”

Or

“I want you to frak me like there’s no tomorrow.”

And I groan at the eyebrow- and jaw-acting of Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck), Jamie Bamber (Lee Adama), and Tahmoh Penikett (Helo).

But Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos are frakkin’ sublime, the plot lines are truly entertaining, and the themes (torture, xenophobia, use of natural resources, family dynamics, religious extremism) are timely and/or timeless.

Congratulations, BSG, you’re in the fan file.

Pwned

I found out that a farm just up the road from me had a summer produce CSA.

Yay, local produce!

Yay, reducing my grocery-related carbon footprint!

Yay, supporting local business!

Yay, yummy things for me all summer!

As soon as my tax refund came through, I wrote a check for $500 and sauntered up attaway.

In the driveway sat a car with the following bumper stickers:
Bush/Cheney ’04
McCain-Palin
and my favorite…
I Think Therefore I Vote Republican

Goddammit.

?

So, you know I’ve been having some fun with Google Analytics, but I also spent some time recently looking at other analytic software reports, such as Awstats.

It was all a little beyond me with the hits and visits and pages and whatnot, but I could kinda make out what they were talking about.  Until I got to the “Search Keyphrases” section:

Search Keyphrases (Top 10)
Full list
5 different keyphrases Search Percent
free download .22 caliber gatling gun 1 20 %
layla jade torrent 1 20 %
big women wearing girdles 1 20 %
men wearing ladies girdles 1 20 %
layla extreme torrent 1 20 %

Ha ha! Remember that post I did about that man, Layla, who wore ladies’ girdles and wielded a .22? And also about extreme torrents?

Me neither.

Turn That Frown Upside Down

For about five minutes last Thursday evening, I did laughter yoga. You might have heard it referred to as laughter meditation. Supposedly, the body can’t differentiate between real laughter and fake, so you get all the physiological benefits from just going through the motions.

When I first heard about it, I imagined us lying around in different poses, going, “Ha…ha ha…ha ha ha.”

Ugh.

And we did start out by walking in a circle saying, “Ho, ho, ha-ha-ha.” But after that, it got genuinely hilarious.

We made laughter milkshakes, pouring this imaginary cup into that imaginary cup, and back, and then drinking it down: “Hahahahahahaha!” After that, we mixed up another laughter milkshake, but didn’t like it so we threw it in someone else’s face: “Hahahahahahaha!”

We argued with laughter, moving through the room ha-ing angrily at each other and made up with sweet hahas.  We stood in two lines facing each other and watched the laughter race cars go by: “ha ha ha hahahaHAHAHAHAhahaha ha ha ha…”

And my favorite part—after each exercise, we went:

“Very good! (clap)

Very good! (clap)

(arms overhead in a V) YAY!”

I had been feeling anxious and nihilistic before we started, but I was nearly peeing myself by the end of it.

Laughter yoga: AVID BRUXIST STAMP OF APPROVAL (bonk)