Cuttin' Up

My husband vehemently disagrees with me on this, but I think my old apartment was pretty awesome. I mean, it had a dishwasher, which, in my mind, erases all of the cons.

Fact: Washing dishes by hand is the leading cause of dishpan hands - an unbearably horrific condition.
Fact: Washing dishes by hand requires the foul act of touching dirty dishes.

Before I had a dishwasher, I addressed these concerns by wearing rubber gloves to wash dishes and/or leaving them to pile in the sink as long as I could stand, but I still found dishwashing a hateful and tedious chore that should be outsourced to machines at any opportunity.

Granted, my tiny apartment had a few problems:

• Plush, powder blue carpet covered the bedroom and hallway floors.
• The counter around the bathroom sink was made of a problematic fiberboard material that warped when it encountered water (good choice for a bathroom). 
• I lived next door to a shut-in who periodically came out of his apartment to yell at me for various imagined infractions - usually "slamming the door". To be fair, his hair appeared to have been constructed out of an animal pelt, which would make me angry at the world too.
• It was the only city apartment I've ever been in that had unfinished wood floors. I thought it gave the living room a cozy cabin-in-the woods / barn-like ambiance, though others referred to it as "gross" and "difficult to clean".  
• The floorplan was strange and inconvenient (see below).

Entering the apartment, you found yourself in a dark, narrow, windowless hall with those same unfinished wood floors, directly facing a closet. The closet door opened outward, while the apartment door opened inward, meaning that the two doors, if opened at the same time, would stick together. Overall, this made it a pretty inconvenient set-up for moving large items into the apartment. Fortunately, when I arrived in town from grad school, I had almost no furniture so didn't notice the problem until about a month later when I bought a small couch and the delivery men were unable to fit it through the front door/entryway. After about an hour of trying to wedge it through the door, they angrily gave up and made me pay approximately the value of the couch for a "breakdown service." A man from West Virginia came in, disassembled the couch and then put it back together inside my apartment.

All that worked out great for the next few years that I lived there. The couch got nice and comfortably worn-in to the point where I was nearly afraid to sit on it.

When I finally decided to move out, I knew the couch couldn't come with me. After all, it looked like it had been through several world wars that had been fought by cats.  I wasn't sure how the h*ll I was going to get it out of the apartment, but I knew I wasn't paying to have it disassembled again. I tried to sell it on craigslist, which didn't fail to find me several buyers willing to drive 50 miles for a $2 ottoman and scream at me on the phone when I sold it to the first person to arrive at my apartment, but there were exactly 0 takers for the couch. So I did what I always do and procrastinated until the weekend I had to move out to figure out what to do.

By the time the weekend rolled around, a decision - however undesirable - was magically made for me (procrastination has yet to fail me on that count). My only remaining option was to disassemble the couch myself, which I knew I could handle, because I had a toolkit and a fiance. In addition to a tape measure and a few nails, the toolkit contained two tools that I thought were totally up to the job.

With that, I formulated a plan that was equal parts desperation, overconfidence, and complete lack of experience with woodworking. That weekend, my fiance and I would take apart the couch ourselves, reducing it to pieces small enough to get out of the apartment and leave on the curb for bulk trash pickup. For reasons that still remain unclear to me, my fiance actually agreed to this plan. And that's probably why he's now my husband.

Anyway, we first tried picking up the couch, which weighed approximately 3 tons, and made one last-ditch effort to force it out the door. Fail.

So we started on the destruction, feeling a little like Dexter. Initially, I found the process very thrilling.

My first instinct was to saw off the legs, a simple step that I thought might enable us to get the rest of it out the door. So I gleefully began to saw. And sawed. And sawed. And sawed. After about five minutes, I laid on the floor, completely exhausted. I had managed only to put a small scratch in the leg, which seemed to be made of some kind of advanced hardwood-diamond composite material.

Moving to plan B, we decided to try and knock/rip the thing apart using our bare hands (and possibly the hammer), Pumphrey Brothers-style. That sounded awesome. Then we tried it. Unfortunately, not only were we not martial arts experts, but all the pieces of the frame were held together by industrial-strength staples and nails spaced about an inch apart and coated with a thick layer of wood glue. Also, when struck against the couch frame more than once or twice, the head of the hammer would fly off.

At this point, I started to weep and beat my fists helplessly on the couch, visualizing my security deposit slipping away as the couch sat there mocking me, wobbling on its damaged legs. My fiance, always more level-headed than I am, wisely ignored my meltdown and continued to hit the couch legs over and over with the hammer until they came off. I, meanwhile, ripped uselessly at the fabric covering the frame, mainly exposing hundreds of sharp industrial staples.

A day later, we had the legs off and decided to make another run at the door. Since I had stripped most of the material off the frame, I had rendered it nearly impossible to carry comfortably. However, our final round of destruction did the trick, and we were able to force the carcass of the devil-couch out of the apartment (deeply denting the closet door in the process), get it into the elevator, and carry it down to the street. I may have had severe lacerations across my hands and arms, but I hadn't felt this good and free in a while.

When we came back up, I took one final look around the apartment and made sure to slam the door on the way out.

Attention Surplus Lethargy Disorder

Okay, so I totally missed the joy of Alternative Universe Month, as I've been living in the alternative universe of Too Much Work.

If there's an opposite of ADHD I definitely have it. Especially when I get busy, I can fixate my attention on only a very limited set of things (even when they're not interesting or fun or rewarding) and I block out everything else. I guess that would either be called "OCD" or "normal" or "narcissistic jerk", depending on your perspective. So when I get busy with a project at work, life falls by the wayside, which becomes unfortunate for things like blog updates and laundry.

Alas.

Anyway, lest this blog be confiscated by the authorities for reasons of severe neglect, I'd better start posting again. Which, coincidentally, works out because I just took a few days off, and I'm TOTALLY WORKING ON A POST RIGHT NOW!

AlternaWorld: THE RULES

Inspired by a viewing of Fringe and some dude throwing the idea out there, I've decided that February is Parallel Universe Month. And what better way to celebrate Parallel Universe Month than to dust off that most beloved of all novella formats: the choose-your-own adventure!

SO. Here's how it will work (sorry - this isn't choose-your-own rules):

1. I'll describe the situation, adding a bunch of pictures to illustrate events, the mood, and protagonists more clearly (see below for an example):

2. At the end of the set-up, I'll provide several options for actions that could occur next. For example:

3. Leave a comment at the end of the post telling me which path you would prefer to continue down

4. I will provide the next installment at a time and place of my choosing - possibly months later, if history is any indication

Note: In the long and storied history of this blog, girl2 and I have received a grand total of SIX COMMENTS, so as you might imagine, this whole scenario is going to present a gigantic and possibly unresolvable number of vote-tallying conflicts and challenges.

Stuff on My Cat('s Mind)

I know I've wondered, as I've watched my cat walk from his food bowl to the front window and stare mournfully down at the rainy street - what exactly is on his mind?

I'll tell you what: CAT STRATEGY.

I know. A lot of people assume that cats don't think about much other than eating and sleeping. X-ray pictures like the one below might lead you to agree with that. But I'm hoping to forever alter the way that you think about feline cognition!

The central problem with crude tools like the X-ray is that they can't detect the ruthless efficiency of the feline brain. An X-ray can't show you that cats are capable of complex thought processes whose richness and variety surpass even those of the most highly trained and herring-motivated dolphin.

How? Simple: Cats use 99% of their brain 100% of the time. Contrast that with humans, who use - what, like maybe 10% when we're at our best? Sure, our brains are big, but are you really using all that gray matter to post status updates on Facebook?

Pictures like the one below dramatically demonstrate what I'm talking about.

No, I didn't just make those numbers up. What's above represents a mere snapshot of findings from a new PET Scan study our research team performed on a human and a feline volunteer. During the experiment in question, subjects were invited to think as deeply as possible about the most pressing issues facing them today while we measured their brain activity.

We found that the human subject not only resisted the experiment, but jabbered on and on in what could best be described as stream-of-consciousness thought:

Meanwhile, with the aid of a professional pet psychic, the research team was able to ascertain that the cat in question was internally engaging in fields of inquiry that ranged from the geopolitical to the sartorial.

Anyway, I think I've given away enough for now. Look for near-term publication of results in a respected scientific journal - I'm thinking Science or Nature, though I'm definitely anticipating some kind of bidding war.

Turkey Tales

I would conservatively estimate that my husband and I have a collective 6 hours of cooking experience that mainly involves frozen pigs in a blanket. Despite that, we've thrown caution to the wind and invited my parents to our house for Thanksgiving this year. I'm pretty sure this was a serious mistake from a culinary perspective. 

Because the very idea of cooking a turkey seems incredibly, horribly daunting, we decided that the best approach would be to do a small test turkey a week in advance. Not a full-on giant gobbler - but a goblet, if you will. Just something to give us the confidence we need when Thursday rolls around.

When in doubt, I turn to my pantheon of hero-gods for help. I only have three of them (in no particular order):

• David Allen
• Alton Brown
• Stephen Colbert

Don't let the small size of this pantheon fool you. I've found that - without fail - one of them has insight into the tremendous challenges I face each day. And once again, one of them was perfectly suited to the task.  

For those of you who, like me, are complete and total turkey novices, let me warn you about a LOT of motherf-ing details that you have no reason to know about and that few recipes or evil parents choose to inform you about. Also, if you're like me, sometimes you don't really read recipes in advance and sometimes you call evil parents partway through the cooking process, when faced with an emergency and it's already too late.

• Bird Size. Off we went to purchase said turkey. I didn't realize they made them in different weights, so that was our first discovery. The smallest one we could find was 12 pounds, which seemed big to me, but I have no point of reference other than my parents' obese cat, who weighs about 13 pounds. Not that I would cook him or anything, but he seems large enough to feed a family of 3 for a week.
• Thawing time. I guess it makes logical sense that somehing twice the size of my head that's frozen in a solid block would take two days to thaw, and even then still be 0 degrees Kelvin inside, but its rare that my plans incorporate an element of logic. We gleefully brought home our bird home, thinking we'd cook it that night ... and then read the label on the side: "thaw in refrigerator for 1-2 days". Um.
• Brining location. So we read the recipe carefully after we brought the bird home. I knew we'd have to brine it, but it hadn't occurred to me that I didn't have a vessel large enough to hold it + 2 gallons of brine. Alton helpfully suggests a 5-gallon bucket. I have one of those, but I've used it for mopping the bathroom floor, so that didn't really seem sanitary. After discovering that none of our cooking pots were big enough to hold it either, in a flash of inspiration we settled on a cooler.
• Difficutly of removing the gross stuff inside. I kind of knew there might be something called "giblets" involved, and although I still don't know what those are, I was really afraid that I was going to have to perform horrid surgery to get them out. However, Butterball is pretty nice. Well, kind of nice. There are no directions or descriptions on the packaging, but they helpfully clean the bird in advance and put all these organs in a little bag that you can easily pull out at one end of the bird. HOWEVER, then I noticed that there's this weird metal wire holding the drumsticks down. I couldn't really see inside the turkey and kind of wondered how someone might stuff it, given that there's no apparent inner cavity. I also kind of didn't want to deal with it, and thought "Well, maybe I'm supposed to remove the wire," and I pulled and pulled, but it appeared so deeply embedded that it may have been part of the bird in life. So I stopped and called my husband to tell him I think I removed the giblets. After asking a few questions, he said he didn't think I had and to wait until he got home because he didn't think I was really trying to remove the wire. I got annoyed and hung up and started to ignore him and put the bird in the brine, but then thought better of it. Thank god I did, because when he came home, he managed to get the wire out (though I was smugly satisfied by how difficult he found it). And then he extracts this HORRIBLE LONG RED FROZEN TWISTED THING - possibly a "giblet" - that's stuck inside the bird. I think you're supposed to make gravy with it, but I refused to touch it.  

So we got through all of that and brined the turkey for a day. Then it came time to cook it. You start by roasting it at 500 degrees for 30 min, then sticking a thermometer in, turning the oven down to 350, and roasting for another 2 hours. My husband handled things at the 30-minute mark. An hour later, we were watching Three Sheets when suddenly the smoke alarm started going off.

He ran over the the oven, opened it up, and said, "F**K. F**K. I ruined it. It's ruined." I may or may not have been napping and ran over and tried to force him to tell me what happened. Also, I looked at the bird, which appeared to have been cooked with a blowtorch. The ends of the drumsticks were black, the skin was brown and crispy, and the wingtips were charred. After some back and forth and strong resistance to my factfinding mission, we clarified that, yes, he had forgotten to turn the oven down at 30 minutes and had just stuck the thermometer in. The turkey had now been roasting in a 500-degree oven for about an hour and a half.

Fortunately, around this time the thermometer alarm went off, signalling that the inner temperature of the turkey breast had reached a safe 161 degrees F. So we cooked it a little longer for good measure and then took it out.

Frankly, it was pretty good, even if a little dryish and blackened in parts. See? My hero-gods never let me down!

The Death Spiral

I haven’t been posting a lot recently, which I know is pretty sad for all three and a half of my readers. I am counting myself in that total, by the way, but I wasn't sure I could really count my cat as a reader just because he has his own profile on Facebook. I know he'd read me if he weren't so busy with Farmville though, so he's the half. MRRRROOOWWWW!

Whatever. I’ve been pretty busy lately, and I don’t deal well with things like “stuff I have to do” and “work”.

I liken this type of unwanted responsibility to a lightning bolt hitting an airplane. In these situations, I have a kind of a mental autopilot that takes over and directs my behavior. Unfortunately, I don’t think my autopilot realizes that it’s supposed to be helpful rather than destructive. So my life becomes an out-of-body experience in which I watch myself do increasingly stupid things that I’m powerless to stop.

Sometimes - like today - I do get caught in the death spiral. Which ends up being a good thing - at least blog-posting-wise, but a bad thing in terms of, say, career progression. Most days, though I manage to wrest back control somewhere during the viewing of bad TV (though strangely never early enough to prevent the spending of money) and do whatever dreaded thing it is that I've been avoiding. Sad, really!

Eyewitness Account

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Screen on the Green is DC’s foremost opportunity to illegally drink alcohol on the Mall. And there’s a movie, which is nice too.

I want to like it, but usually I spend the entire time alternating between freaking out about insects that hop onto our blanket and sneezing uncontrollably because I’m sitting in the grass.

Unfortunately, my husband loves it, so he gets cranky every time I manage to wheedle my way out of it. This past Monday, as part of some misguided attempt to be a good wife, I agreed to go. Also, they were playing Twelve Angry Men, which I hadn’t seen since high school social studies class. The same teacher also had us watch Anatomy of a Murder because he had been an extra in a ballroom dancing scene. When he screened that one for us, he leapt up during the crucial second when the top of his head appeared on the screen and shouted, “Look! I had hair then!”

But I digress. On Monday, about 60% of the way through the movie, I just happened to look up at the sky.
 
“Um, what the f**k is that?” I asked my husband.
 
He looked up and said, “I don’t know! Wait. WHAT THE F**K IS THAT?!”
 
The people in front of us looked up too and said pretty much the same thing.

Then we all went back to watching the movie, because it was at kind of a good part. We had to wait until it was over to compare notes, so it’s possible a little something got lost, but here's ...  

 

It’s hard to imagine how we could have had such different experiences, but we were both pretty insistent. I’m usually good at googling, but searches of “UFO+DC+screen on the green” and “UFO+DC+alien abduction” didn’t turn up the right sort of stuff.
 
So after all that research, the best explanation I can come up with is that my husband and everyone else were probably abducted by the aliens and had their memories replaced with obviously ridiculous substitute images.
 
I guess the aliens somehow forgot me, but I’m kind of small, so it’s understandable. Also, I think that they may have already decided that when they land and establish alien hegemony, they want to install me as their puppet dictator, and are thus hoping to keep my mind kind of fresh.

Emails I Send to Myself with the Subject "Harumph"

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

- Mark Twain

Invention of the Day

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. Especially when you’re expected to listen to other women talk about giving birth. I’m pretty sure men are never subjected to these stories, and it’s really unfair.

If there’s one thing that mothers and pregnant women love, it’s sharing horrifying stories in which they try to one-up each other in describing the various bodily functions and issues involved in pregnancy.

I remember going to a wedding once where the bride was pregnant, and almost all of her female friends were either recent mothers or about to give birth. I learned a lot at the pre-wedding ladies’ brunch. In fact, I learned so much that lost my appetite.

After that experience, I decided that the only way that I would be willing to have children of my own would be if science intervened. It was the beginning of an idea - one that just requires some minor R&D to make it happen.

But before I get to that, let me just address one common criticism. I know there are some people who think that it’s all magic and rainbows to carry a child. A few people I’ve run this past may have made comments like “cold” and “inhuman”. Well, I bet they said those things about the telephone and email. And I ask – how many of you have even met all 865 of your Facebook “friends”?

It's high time we redefine everything. Let's start with the womb. We’ve had years to endure v 1.0. Let’s make the next version with the users in mind.

I see a lot of benefits.

First and foremost, it’s never been fair that women have had to give up their favorite things for 9 months. Life may be nasty, brutish, and short, but being able to eat soft cheese whenever you want makes it a little more bearable.

The pain of labor may be fleeting, but the weight gain can last.

With the External Womb, you’ll never put on a pound and can even lose weight right up until your “delivery” date!

Based on my very rudimentary understanding, there are a lot of tests and doctor’s appointments involved in pregnancy. With The External Womb, you don’t have to deal with any of that.
 
Who needs an ultrasound when you can see the baby with your own two eyes?!

I understand that older siblings sometimes have a difficult time adjusting when a new baby arrives. With The External Womb, you can ease that transition by making your baby part of the family before he or she is even born.

Finally, a lot of parents to-be do silly things, like reading the classics to their babies in the womb. I mean - is there something that The Odyssey is going to teach your baby about life in the modern world?


With The External Womb, you can do a lot better than that.

Next Blog Roulette

I rarely decide to play because the "Next Blog" function so often disappoints.

But then sometimes you strike solid gold ...

How To Be Interesting

There’s a lot of advice out there on how to be more interesting. The problem I’ve found with most of it is that it’s too difficult to implement. You’ll see stuff like “talk about topics that are interesting to people.” Yeah, but that sounds like effort, and everybody knows effort is lame.

Or you’ll get “helpful” tips like “make eye contact.” Well, gorillas rarely make eye contact – unless they want to rip you limb from limb – and they’re one of the most-visited animals at the zoo. And you know why? Because gorillas purposely cultivate a sense of mystery. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I decided to put my bachelor’s degree in psychology to the test, did the hard work and distilled a sea of Internet wisdom down to five principles. I’ve also provided some tips and examples of how you can put these principles in action TODAY.

So. Do you want others want to be around you? Do you want others want to be you? Here goes …

Threat Level Orange!

I am definitely a social phobic.

My fiancé refuses to believe this – meaning he either is blinded by love for me or I hide it well through a complicated set of compensation and protective measures. Probably the former.

I’ve never been too nervous about public speaking or giving presentations. However, situations that involve unscripted interaction with actual humans (i.e., 89% of daily life) fill me with a anything from mild fear to abject terror.

It’s often difficult to explain exactly HOW scary social situations can be to those of you who gleefully walk up to strangers and begin chatting like old friends.

However, I’ve found that most people can empathize with being afraid of things that present actual, physical threats.

Therefore, to bridge the communication gap, I have created some helpful side-by-side scenarios that compare social situations with physical threats that would objectively inspire the same level of fear in any reasonable person.

To make it both EVEN CLEARER and EVEN MORE COMPLEX, I’ve also tacked on a threat-based, color-coded system, adapted from the Department of Homeland Security scheme that we ignore every day. This will help you understand the protective measures a social phobic like myself will often apply.

Time for the scenarios:

Fine. Not so bad. Now we begin to get wary ...

Feel the heightened sense of fear ...

Raw terror ...

Based on recent experience, I would place this nearly at the top of the scale:

Sometimes, it's wisest just to give up: