Spoilers, String Theory, and Overthinking It

Hey everybody. Before I get too involved in the blog post (which, I mean, I already have. I'm about two paragraphs down right now, but I wanted to come up to give you an important message from the future, which is somewhat appropriate for reasons that may become apparent if you continue reading, which you should not do if you do not meet the criteria that I will be setting out shortly), I want to say that there may be some spoilers below. Specifically, there will be spoilers for Interstellar, which is a pretty good movie. You should see it if you get a chance, if only for the visuals. However, if you have not seen it yet and are planning to do so and would prefer to not have things spoiled for you, please stop reading after the Indiana Jones gif below. I know it doesn't really look like Indiana Jones, but that just shows that you haven't seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and really have no business saying what does and does not look like Indiana Jones.

It has been a whirlwind. So, to start- the fair was wonderful. Despite the hour and change of traffic (which I'm sure could lead to a joke about how South Carolina doesn't have anything better to do than go to the Coastal Carolina Fair ha ha you're so hip and edgy, because South Carolina (or the South in general) is such a novel target of comedy and wow did you write for Seinfeld? Maybe Friends? You should. Hey, you could write an episode called "The One Where Charleston Is The Number Two Travel City In The World According to Condé Nast." Or you could just fuck off, because fairs are wonderful and, as has been pointed out previously, a veritable smorgasbord), there were crafts (including a painting of Dick Grayson and Jason Todd that won first place, indicating that comic books are becoming part of the artistic pantheon, as well they should (aside from Chuck Austen's run on X-Men which, despite having Havok, who is woefully underused, was awful), as well as a 5-year old's "more interesting" newspaper, which apparently consists of coloring an ad page with blue and orange crayons), there were animals (such as New Zealand white rabbits, which we use in the lab, so that was interesting), and there was food. God, was there food. Yes, there was a steak sandwich, which was okay, but mostly, there was the Sampler Combo from the fried goods... stand? Trailer? Van? I don't know. Whichever noun you prefer to use, it was amazing. There were two: fried cheesecakes (cheesecake batter, but deep fried), fried cookie doughs (chocolate chip cookie dough, but deep fried), fried brownie bites (brownie batter, but deep fried), and fried Oreos (Oreos, but deep fried). I'm... I still don't know which was the best. My pancreas still hates me and is currently in unofficial diplomatic talks with my arteries to foment rebellion throughout my body. It was still totally worth it.

They might try to enlist my oh who are we kidding, I just wanted to put this gif in here.

Today, I went with The Lady to a local plantation, where there was free admission for county residents, which I guess is somewhat off? I mean, plantations are a big part of history in the South, which is not great, but they are also very pretty and do a decent job of maintaining some of the history (even if they don't acknowledge some of the worst parts, because then how would you get weddings to rent the places out for exorbitant prices?). Anyhoo, it was nice, and we got to see some animals, because there's a quasi-petting zoo. You know, free roaming chickens and ducks and peacocks and deer, which I guess are really pretty out of the ordinary for petting zoos? I haven't been to one in about 10 to 15 years (what with serving a dime for straight up shanking someone who wouldn't let me share my fruit cup), so my standards for petting zoos are a bit warped.

Anyhoo, after that, we saw Interstellar with a group of friends. It was very good, as all Christopher Nolan movies are, and the visuals are astounding. Go see it in IMAX, and bring earplugs, because our theater was shaking. Seriously. Hans Zimmer found an organ. If you're still reading, just go ahead and find tracks from the soundtrack on Youtube, because it's phenomenal. Of course, if you're heeding any of these warnings, you have ignored my previous warning about spoilers, and you should really stop reading about now. No, this won't spoil everything, but it will spoil some rather important plot points (even if they're pretty easy to figure out, honestly).

You're still reading. Stop that.

Okay, now that they're all gone, let's talk about time travel. Yep. Interstellar has time travels. Hope that was worth spoiling the movie for yourself. Good work. At the beginning of the movie, Murphy (the daughter who is later played by Jessica Chastain and Ellen Burstyn) is talking about a ghost who is knocking things off of bookshelves. The ghost leads to the plot of the whole movie, and we find out that something has been using gravity to send messages to people at the time of the movie to lead them to the wormhole that takes them to the distant planets. At the end, holy shit, it was Matthew McConaughey the whole time, because future fifth dimensional people (maybe) set this whole thing up as a stable time loop. I know this sounds like a brag (because it somewhat is), but I figured that out when they mentioned that the ghost sent them to the NASA headquarters, because that just made sense, you know? Stable time loop, it's a pretty well established trope, having seen play in Lost, Superman: Red Son, Futurama, The Terminator (well, sorta), Doctor Who, Bill and Ted, and Harry frickin' Potter. Yeah, the movie leaves questions at the end, but the time loop, I felt, was pretty cut and dry.

Then I went to trivia with the folks with whom I watched the movie. I guess I think about time travel WAY more than average people (making me wonder if I'm making efficient use of my time), because two people (who are, of course, wonderful and awesome) were contesting that it made no sense. Their point was that it made no sense that future people would be able to generate the conditions necessary to set forth the plot of the movie without the events of the movie already having happened, to which I say, yes. Yes. That is what happened. The events of the movie happened, being caused by the interference of fifth dimensional beings, at a point in time before our perception of the generation of such fifth dimensional beings which was in turn caused by the prior interference of said fifth dimensional beings.

Despite my potentially overly verbose wording, this makes sense. The events that led to leaving Earth and the survival of the human race are of pretty substantial note, even in the lifetimes of the effectors of such events. As a result, it is not unreasonable to assume that these events would be well recorded by historians and biographers, leaving a substantial paper trail of what exactly happened. This paper trail, then, provides a blueprint for the future, fifth dimensional beings to do what they need to do to generate the past necessary.

You get right the hell out of here. We don't serve your kind.

BUT! That doesn't even have to be the explanation. That's a long, overly complicated plan with way too many moving parts (maybe) to be feasible. That's because the plan is being explained and perceived by third dimensional beings (namely, us). We perceive time as being linear and, more importantly, as a one way street. You can't go back, you can't stop and look for a while at what exactly happened at the moment something occurs, because that moment has past. Everything is the past. The video I'm linking here is a pretty decent explanation (as far as I'm aware, having abandoned physics basically as soon as matrices started rearing their ugly, square, inverse generating heads) of how dimensions beyond the third one would work.
From what I've gleaned from the video above (again, not being a physicist, so feel free to correct me), once you're fifth dimensional, you're free to travel throughout a given timeline and affect outcomes at earlier points. You can't just hop between them, though, because that would be sixth dimensional space.

So, from our perspective, it's just a stable time loop. At Year X, fifth dimensional beings set up a wormhole, which is discovered at Year Y. At Year Z, humanity moves on from Earth (due to earlier exploration efforts using the aforementioned wormhole), leading to its continued survival and (possible) evolution to fifth-dimensional beings at Year A. For fifth dimensional beings, though, it's basically, "Okay, I need to go to Wormhole Mart and pick up Matthew McConaughey by the black hole and let him do his thing. Why don't I do the latter and the former?" Yeah, it's hard to write that without temporal descriptors, because we don't think that way. They would be able to.

What's more, even if I'm wrong about the historical relevance hypothesis (the thing from three paragraphs above), then all it takes is for two fifth-dimensional beings to meet at Year X (wormhole day). Both started in our universe and observed previous moments in time, but one went ahead to see what would happen if the wormhole wasn't set up (or if any number of other events hadn't occurred). Things go bad (because, well, we'll assume that things go bad without those events) and lead to a lack of fifth-dimensional beings. That doesn't matter, because there's at least the one who saw it who can go back to Year X and tell others/ensure the wormhole (and/or other necessary events) happen to make certain that things go as planned.


I may think too much about time travel, but because this is Chris Nolan, I'd say I'm thinking just enough about time travel.

"I'm going to take your mind home tonight and then never call."

I'll go ahead and start off this post by apologizing for last night. As you may or may not have noticed, there was not a post last night. I was out with The Lady for a friend's birthday, and we got home pretty late. As you know, birthdays come but once a year, and we were making quite merry.

Now, don't you have something to say? Maybe an apology for not noticing that I didn't post last night? Maybe you're going to double my salary for a start, and Tim is going to grow strong, and we'll discuss the particulars over a Christmas bowl? Maybe you're going to tell me to put some more coal on the fire before I dot another "i"?

Global warming is your reclamation's fault! Scrooge, you magnificent bastard, I READ YOUR BOOK!

Anyhoo, as a result of missing last night, I'm going to try to scramble and get out two entries today. (Note: It is now 5:30 PM. I had to run into lab for a while, and I have gotten all of 2 paragraphs further since I got home. The second entry is not looking good for today. As recompense, have a God knows what the second one is going to be about. Probably a detailed description of a nosebleed when I was six in a rental minivan. Maybe I'll even throw in a play by play of the drive between Charleston and Memphis.

Riveting stuff, folks. Well, it was probably darker in real life. Literally. We were driving at night for a lot of it.

But despite the potential for a white knuckle adventure of two people in a car listening to GPS (or a graphic description of throwing a clot), I'll leave that for another blog post. Yeah, I'm a big friggin' tease. Oh. Oh, great. Firefox is now recognizing everything I type as being French, and therefore everything is misspelled. I AM NOT MAKING UP WORDS, FIREFOX.

There we go. Something just clicked and made it realize that I'm speaking English (albeit not the Queen's English, because I am neither a fabulous transvestite nor a New Yorker).
Now, with that out of the way, time for a spot of tea, a steak and kidney pie, and then on to business.

TO BUSINESS!

As some of you may know, Blogspot (or Blogger or Google+ or whatever it's calling itself these days. I really don't know, but it will always be better than Livejournal, which is still a thing, apparently.) has some means of monetizing your blog. I've been occasionally tempted to take them up on it, because, hey, extra scratch means extra Civil War generals and biopics starring Johnny Depp, and who doesn't need a little extra Johnny Depp in their lives, right? None of us. That's who. Thankfully, it looks like he's toning down his love affair with Tim Burton for a little bit (even though he's replacing it with one with Kevin Smith maybe? I don't know. I'm tired. Leave me alone. I also have to go to the fair shortly, as it is allegedly a veritable smorgasbord, and I intend to discover such frivolity firsthand.), but damn was he overexposed for a while.

Speaking of which, I feel like that would be one of the fun things to do with a time machine- go ten years in the past, find an average Joe (not a plumber, though, because they are exceptional folk), and say, "Hey, man. Check this shit out. You know Johnny Depp?"

"The guy from 21 Jump Street? Yeah. What ever happened to him?"

"You haven't seen the Pirates of the Caribbean movie?"

"The what? Oh, oh. No. That's a movie. Five years ago, I had a religious experience that told me that lights projected onto screens are the work of the devil."

"Wha- well, surely you've heard of them, right?"

"No, I don't read the newspapers, or as I like to call them, the devil's napkins."

 "The devil's napkins."

"Yes, the devil's napkins. You don't think the devil eats the souls of charlatans and heathens without a napkin, do you? That would just be sinful."

"That makes no sense."

"Well, you just don't get it. I mean, I'm from Philadelphia. We believe in God."

"What does that even mea- wait. Wait wait wait. Are you Diane Keaton?"

"Yes."

"Have I somehow Quantum Leaped [Author's note: Quantum Leapt?] into Woody Allen doing Manhattan?"

This train is heading straight for a town! We're off the rails!

"No, you've Quantum Leaped into my chocolate pudding. I was wondering why it was talking, but I figured that it was just some sort of devil's foodstuff."

"Oh, of course, since devil's food cake is chocolate, you figured that the chocolate pudding might be somehow Satanic."

"Naturally."

"Hmm. Well, is there some burning issue that you need me to help you with, Diane?"

"Yeah, I was wondering if I should just play the same character in all my future films. That seems to be working for me pretty well right now, and I don't think people will get tired of it."

"Oh boy."

"What?"

"Nothing, nothing. Sure, that sounds like a winning acting strategy. Um. If you don't mind me asking, what year is it?"

"It's 1989."

"Oh. Okay. That would explain why you understood the Manhattan reference and the Quantum Leap reference and earlier made mention of 21 Jump Street."

"Pretty much. That would be an appropriate conclusion to make, as Manhattan came out in 1979, Quantum Leap began in 1989, and 21 Jump Street debuted in 1987."

"Right. Hm. Well, this has certainly been enlightening. I'll be going now. Eat your veggies and drink your Ovaltine."

"Okay, Devil Pudding. Bye now."

"Bye."

Well, with that embarrassing moment out of the way, maybe you try again and find an actual average Joe in 2004.

"Hey, man, can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Sure thing."

"You know Jo- wait. First off, what year is it?"

"2004."

"Okay. And I'm not some sort of chocolate pudding, am I?"

"No. No. Why would you be?"

"Long story involving Diane Keaton and some pretty heavy-handed references to 80's pop culture."

"Oh, you mean like Quantum Leap and 21 Jump Street?"

"Actually, yeah. That even makes a nice segue into my next question- you know Johnny Depp?"

"The Pirates of the Caribbean guy? Yeah, he's pretty good."

"Yeah, well, see, I'm from 2014, and by 2014, he's going to be just awful."

"You're pulling my leg."

"No, see, Tim Burton is going to cast him in every movie possible-"

"But they worked together in Edward Scissorhands, and that was pretty good, right?"

"Yeah, but it's going to be, like, 5 years of just awful, awful Tim Burton movies. You know how he does that quirky but sorta dark style? It's going to get old really fast."

"Yeah, but that's made them money so far."

"In ten years, though, it's going to be stuff like 'Johnny Depp IS Tonto.'"

"That makes no sense. He'd be a terrible Native American. Okay, fine. That makes sense."

"And guess what else? You know who's going to be huge in 2014?"

"Who?"

"Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, and Woody Harrelson."

"Okay, Woody, I can understand, but Gigli McDaredevil and Shirtless von Chick Flick?"

"Why did you make McConaughey into a German count?"

"I'm terrible at nicknames. My questions stands."

"Yeah, okay. Yeah, both of them actually end up becoming pretty well respected actors. Affleck takes a break for a few years, starts directing (you know, starts with smaller, indie stuff and works his way up), and he does a few films that get pretty substantial buzz. McConaughey does a few movies that do well and ends up doing a TV series with Woody Harrelson that is supposed to be pretty incredible."

"Wait, 'supposed to be?'"

"Yeah, I haven't really watched it."

"Wow, and you're the one telling me about pop culture ten years from now?"

"It sounded like a much better idea at the time. This clearly was not very well thought out. But, dude, isn't your mind just utterly blown by the actors who are big ten years from now?"

"Well, I mean, I guess, but isn't there something better you could tell me about the next ten years?"

"Hmm... Don't see the third X-Men, do see the ones with the younger actors as Professor X and Magneto, see the next few Batman movies. The Superman movies aren't awful, but they keep getting rebooted, so they're a bit of a waste of time. I know the folks who do Lost say they're not all in purgatory, but by the end they will be and nothing really gets answered."

"Anything NOT related to pop culture?"

"Well, I'd say something about how you're destined to fight Skynet, but that would be a terrible lie."

"And it falls under the purview of pop culture, which I specifically asked you to avoid."

"Yeah, well, sorry, buddy. I really thought this was a better idea than this."

"You were clearly quite mistaken."

"Oh, watch anything Pixar does, unless it's about vehicles, in which case avoid it like the plague. They're not ENTIRELY horrendous, but they're clearly more for getting kids in the seats and making some money for their bigger projects. Also, anything Christopher Nolan does."

"Well, naturally. Pixar and Chris Nolan are both wonderful."

"Exactly. Well, I'll let you go about your business."

"Enjoy 2014."

"I will. Enjoy the recession."

So, yes. That's why I don't monetize my blog. It leads to bad time travel experiences that are just way too hastily written. That and the fact that I really dislike internet ads, which are the basis for monetization on Blogger/Blogspot/Google Blag. Potato, potato, right?

A ballsy post

As some of you may know, I have a roommate. Well, I say I have a roommate. Those of you who know that I have a roommate may or may not believe me, as he tends to live in the library. He's another medical student who wants to go into a competitive specialty, so he studies a lot. Good for him- it seems to be having good results thus far.

Artist's rendering.

This has led to somewhat minimal interactions between the two of us (and even with members of his own class, but that's neither here nor there). We've grabbed a drink once or twice, he came to trivia once, and we see each other when schedules permit. He's a pretty good guy, albeit with a very different personality from me. We get along well enough, all things considered, and we can complain about common topics. I mention these facts because said roommate (we'll call him Lenny, because even though it doesn't fit perfectly, it fits well enough) has decided that he wants to stomp on my testicles.

I'm really not sure why he wants to do this or what could have brought this on. Some (further) context: I'm volunteering at a Ronald McDonald House on Friday, which I guess means I'm helping make spaghetti. Easy. I make spaghetti all the time. I'm in charge of buying the noodles. Easy. How many- oh. Okay. I'm feeding forty people? Wow. That's. Well. That's a lot of spaghetti. Thank goodness for my SAM'S CLUB MEMBERSHIP.

I'm a member of a club. Take that, Alvy Singer, Groucho Marx, and Freud.

That's right, ladies. You need a palette of Cheerios? Twenty pounds of ground beef? Three pounds of potentially questionable bananas? A baker's dozen of dental floss? I'm your man, along with probably many other mans who could be your man in a situation requiring that a man be your man. Heck, for these purposes, a woman could potentially be your man, but she'd need some special equipment. Namely, a Sam's Club membership. I mean, it's a club. It has to be somewhat exclusive (although obviously not THAT exclusive, since they take folks like me).

Anyhoo, throughout living together, I've noticed that Lenny likes to buy things in bulk. He goes to the store pretty rarely (in stark opposition to my grocery habits, which are lots of small trips, likely due to having to carry all my shit for like a mile (okay, fine, 700 meters for the cheap grocery store, but if I wanted the nicer things? It was probably a mile or so. I can't remember the name of the store or find it on the map to give you a more accurate idea.) while in France).

And when he does go to the store? It's usually an insane amount of ground turkey and boxes of Kashi. You're not picturing an insane enough amount. Oh, he also sometimes gets the 0 Calorie (or calorie, in this case, because, hey, 0 calories is 0 Calories) condiments. You know, that Walden Farm stuff. Gives me the willies.

This is the face of terror.

Anyway, I'm going to Sam's, because I need 6 pounds of spaghetti. As a (sometimes) courteous roommate, I asked if he needed anything.

Here's a transcript of our text message conversation. You'll have to excuse misspellings- I'm trying to represent this as accurately as possible.

Rob: Making a Sam's run tonight. Getting milk while there. Need anything else?
Lenny: Thanx man. Im good. 3+ milks woukd be good :)

So far so good, right? I mean, I worry about the fridge fitting more than 3 milks, but we do tend to polish off that much.

And then things go off the rails (which, from me, is saying something amazing/terrible/amazible/amazeballs).

Lenny: Maybe some steel toe boots...
Lenny: Lol to stomp on Robs testicals. Ha

... What. I mean. What. Clearly he's joking (as denoted by the "Lol" and the "Ha"), but still. What. Being a reasonable and inquisitive sort of fellow, I try to find out what's going on.

Rob: We don't have room for 3+ milks. Maybe 3 though. Depends on expiration dates. Also, why are we stomping on my nuts?

Yes, a masterful play by Rob. A smooth transition from milk into why we're scrambling my huevos. I mean, this is just a joke, right? He'll just explain what's up and it'll be fine. It's going to be fine. Everything is going to be okay.

Lenny: No worries. Tell u ltr

What? No. No. You have mentioned stomping on my Netherlands, and you have not given a reason. There are times where you don't worry about things. You've turned in an assignment, your boss was being bitchy at work,  you're Australian, but the prospect of clacking my maracas with steel toed boots is not one of these cases.

Oh, wait, wait, wait. I think I know what this is. Yep. We had a conversation about a month ago relating to this. Yeah, see, our bathroom looked pretty awful. Mildew grows like wildfire in Charleston, and we hadn't given our shower a good cleaning in a while, so it was pretty dank. Jeff was out of town for a few months, but we agreed that if I handled the kitchen and living room (which also needed a good once over- look, we're bachelors, and even though it's a terrible and harmful stereotype, in this case it's absolutely true), he'd handle the bathroom. To his credit, he was a man of his word, and it was freaking immaculate. Good show, old sport. Of course, after he cleaned it, he sent some pictures. Awesome. Nice before and after thing (for given value of nice- the after was much cleaner). Then, the following text occurred. (Note: this is roughly two months ago, whereas the other texts are from yesterday.)

Lenny: He who destroys will have testicals stomped on! Repeatedly.

Okay. So, we've learned some things. One, Lenny cannot spell testicle in a text message. Thankfully, medical school exams don't really take off for spelling, since they're pretty much all multiple choice. Two, if the bathroom gets messy again, there's a chance that E.T. is going to find some all new Reese's Pieces around the apartment (note: the slang is coming from Stanford, so... apologies?). And, what do you know, the bathroom is starting to pick up some grime again. Nothing too major, but it is noticeable. And, hey, it can be awkward to tell your roommate, "Hey, clean this shit up." Maybe that's what's going on here.

Rob: I didn't think the bathroom was THAT bad. Did it get that bad?
Lenny: No bathroom all good.

Well, shit. I'm pretty much out of ideas at this point. I asked him when I got home that evening, but since The Lady was there, he maintained that I had company and wouldn't tell me why he's trying to go all Yuletide Tchaikovsky my walnuts.

So, without further ado (and with deference to these fads of lists and click-baiting):

Ten Reasons for Rob Getting His Testicals Stomped On:

10. Bathroom cleanliness. I still think this is a viable possibility. There's history of him threatening such behavior with regards to this subject, so maybe he just didn't want to say anything over text? It's possible. But then again, there's also...

9. Kitchen cleanliness/fridge/freezer space. With my recent trips to Sam's, I've been taking up a bit more fridge and freezer space. I made a whole lot of miso soup (made a little for The Lady's birthday, but then there was a bunch of leftover chard, miso, and tofu, so I figured, when in Osaka, right?) and it's taking up a bunch of space in the freezer. Also for The Lady's birthday, I made a chocolate crepe cake with mousse filling between the layers. I had done this for Christmas last year, and it's a good standby dessert. Unfortunately, the mousse required frothing some egg whites and whipping some cream, and I don't have particularly large bowls. This led to a bit of potentially suspicious splatter on the counter. Due to the hurry I was in at the time, it has lingered there a bit longer than I'd like. (Also, fun fact, I apparently cannot get egg whites or whipped cream to form peaks in any reasonable space of time. Whoops.) So, yeah, the kitchen is a bit of a disaster right now.

8. Joke about male UG exam. In the second year of medical school, students learn about the examination of the genitals for both sexes. This past week, they have been doing the male UG exam, which involves: handling of the penis (wherein they usually tell you that you're being too gentle with it and need to be firmer if you're going to express any potentially pathological fluids, which is just an awful sentence to write), the handling of the testicles (wherein you learn that the vas deferens and testicular artery feel like guitar strings of differing thickness), and a prostate exam (wherein you remember that while terms for female UG exams were basically written by an Ob/Gyn waiting for his lunch break, for men you get to imagine what a "boggy" prostate feels like). So, yeah. It's a bit of an awkward moment, and it's topical, but I would think that such an experience would make you LESS amenable to thinking about shelling your roommate's peanuts.

7. Not inviting Lenny to trivia. I haven't been great about inviting Lenny to trivia. Part of it is that he never wants to go, part of it is that I rarely see him to ask, and part of it is that I don't know how well he'd gel with some of the folks at trivia. Bit of a dick move on my part (no pun intended, but I will take full credit for it), and maybe it's getting to him.

6. General stress. Medical school is stressful to begin with. The second years have just started what I call Rash block, because it deals with dermatologic, pediatric, and reproductive diseases. It is the worst. You get to learn about fungi, antibiotics, antifungals, antiretrovirals, HIV, STDs (they travel in packs!), vaccine schedules, and freckles.

WHEN WILL WE FIND A CURE?

So, yeah. I can get the ol' sense of humor taking a bit of a hit when faced with such a load of material.

5. Not getting a wine tasting ticket. Every year, there's a big, university-wide wine tasting at the local aquarium. It's a pretty swanky affair with lots of wine and some pretty solid food offerings. Tickets also sell out within a day or two of going on sale (and that's with having to go buy tickets in person with cash or check). There was a line out the door of the gym when they went on sale. It's kind of a big deal. I got one for me and one for The Lady. Lenny didn't get a ticket. I don't know if he really wanted one or not. I probably should have checked and seen if he wanted to join me in line for tickets.

4. Allergy to chocolate. Yep. You read that right. This almost falls under the purview of number 6, but it works here, too. If I couldn't have chocolate without a terrible and potentially debilitating reaction, I'd want to stomp some grapes, too.

3. Demonic possession. Hey, just keeping an open mind about these sorts of things, you know?

Unlike SOME people.

2. Time travel. Okay, hear me out on this one. In the Terminator movies, they keep sending Terminators (huh, so THAT'S how it got that name) to kill Sarah Connor or John Connor or something. Now, to Skynet, John is a pretty serious menace, right? He's sorta their Pol Pot or Hitler (sorry, Godwin) or Slobodan Milosevic. And everyone talks about how, if they had a time machine, they'd use it to kill Hitler (well, I would use it to maybe give myself some stock tips and do REALLY well in trivia)? Maybe that's what's going on here, with a touch more humaneness. I mean, wouldn't it have been easier to just punch Kyle Reese really hard in the ol' pill bugs? Then there wouldn't be a shootout in a police station, Arnold Schwarzenegger wouldn't be governor, and my seed wouldn't spawn the next Jimmy Carter (you know, history's greatest monster).

1. Walden Farms. I'm onto them and they're going to have Lenny send a message.

"Be a shame to see your peanut spread be extra crunched."

This Whole Court Is Out of Order

Yes, there was no post last night, but that all depends on your definition of "last night," "post," and "Yes." As the post from last night that may or may not have happened would state, I was working on the post at The Lady's apartment last night, and the internet went down. As you might imagine, that puts a bit of a damper on any blog posting. However, the post is written, and it's saved on my laptop and will be posted once I bother to boot up my laptop and get everything handled.

Oh, and for those of you who were wondering- The Lady's internet is fixed.

That'll do, unplugging and resetting the modem. That'll do.

For those of you who don't know (because I guess I don't excite you quite enough to get you to go all the way back to the blog's inception), this blog started while I was in France teaching English for a year. Well, teaching English is a strong word for it- I'm sure that my students learned how to say "a cat red" really well, because, boy, did they say that every day that I was teaching. You think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. Every. Freaking. Day. That's what happens when you only have to work 12 hours a week (which I've been known to exceed in a single day in lab, hashtag grad school hashtag amurrica hashtag I really don't understand how to do hashtags, and I think that they tend to be overused despite their obvious utility as keywords in a social media setting to identify what is trending or is related to any given sort of event hashtag that last hashtag was greater than 140 characters so it really defeats the original purpose of a hashtag as defined by Twitter, doesn't it? hashtag the previous hashtag was only 139 characters hashtag winning). I had time to travel, I had time to see Paris (and go to museums where I'd crash and burn while talking to cute art students about Rothko, which I guess is a pretty sweet way to crash and burn when you think about it), and I had time to blog. More pertinently, I had time to cook. And, trust me, on less than 800 euros a month, I had to learn to cook (which my mom had already taught me to a pretty substantial extent with the Family Life merit badge and Webelos pin, to say nothing of the summer of research and trying to woo ladies without the help of Rothko).

Worst wingman ever.

This led to what was frankly a pretty great New Year's resolution and probably the only one that I managed to keep for any significant time. Whilst in... probably Barcelona? Might have been Munich and/or Passau (to the sister, if you're reading this, thanks again for hooking me up with the Aussie contingent- it was a pretty solid New Year's celebration, despite the vegemite and my nonexistent German)? Anyway. At some point, I decided that I was going to bake something different once every two weeks. I wanted to bake because I had a decent grasp of pasta and some soups (and I needed to do those sorts of things anyway to keep from starving and going broke), and I figured that learning some new and snazzy desserts would be impressive with the ladies.

You may be noticing a theme on Rob and his reasons for cooking. Yep. It's entirely self-serving (HA HA unintentional pun).

Bo Burnham is funny people, especially when he brings an erection to Dunsinane. That's right. They're coming fast and loose tonight.

I figured that I'd do something new (because I needed one heck of a repertoire for some reason) every two weeks, because that's about how long it would take me to finish everything and it's enough space to keep me from burning out on it (unlike how some of the desserts turned out HIYO) and going broke (again, something of a theme of Rob's time in France).

And, hey, it worked out pretty well. If memory serves, I managed to make:

-The Apple Bav Torte (An Apple Bavarian Torte topped with sliced almond streusel and a layer of what was functionally cheesecake beneath the apples. Yes, I know that I screwed up my modifiers there. I'm on a bit of a time crunch to get as much done as possible before trivia. Bear with me here, guys.)

-The Nanners Incident (A sort of banana cake to which I added way too much cocoa powder, resulting in a surprisingly complex flavor profile that evolved quite nicely on the tongue, all topped with cream cheese frosting. Here I should probably note that the French don't really have what we consider to be cream cheese, but there are similar enough substitutes. For those of you who are in the know, I was usually using Petit Suisse.)

-Toll House cookies. No, they weren't new. No, the landlady did not like them (insisting that they had a strange flavor that she attributed to the baking soda. She also called them cakes rather than cookies. Oh, Bev.). Yes, they were still delicious. This was also notable, as it was the one time that I did not substantially change the recipe. If memory serves, this is the one that I brought with me to the school, and the principal took me aside and told me that if I keep making things like this, I'm going to be "rolling in honeys" (Warning: not an actual quote, but it was the gist of it. Also, sorry for using the term "honeys." The part of Rob's brain that though that was a good idea has been sacked.)

-The C'thulhu Cheesecake, which haunts my dreams and reminds me that one day the Old Ones will return from the abyss beyond time and space and lay waste to our pitiful existence.

-Some sort of strawberry coffee cake, which was pretty good, actually. I'm sure I had an amazing name for it, but it has been lost to the ages. I can't give you gold every time.

Herr Frobe finds this unacceptable.

-Chocolate Banana Raffle, which was a chocolate pie crust with banana slices covered in a layer of chocolate. There's a picture of it somewhere, and maybe I'll find it and put it up at some point.

Like right now, for instance. Ain't I a stinker?

-Bus Ride Chocolate Cookies, which held up surprisingly well for days on end without going stale. Then, when they were gone, I resorted to a chocolate bar that I thought was the equivalent of a Crunch bar. It was filled with Pop Rocks. Combine that with a moldy carrot, and you have a terrible van ride to Croatia.

-Scratchy Brownies, which were made from scratch and therefore were grainy and hard as all get out, but they tasted good enough.

-An Apple Tarte for Bev that she was supposed to eat for her birthday but then she kept waiting until I'd join her for a piece, which led to an awkward lunch, as is oft the case with Bev and lunch. Oh, Bev.

Anyway, the point of all that listing and rather blatant padding was that I was a pretty prolific (if not proficient) baker with a bright future ahead of you (because you wanted to switch back to the whole second person thing from the other night, as it was such a rousing success then). Aaaaand then I moved back to the States.

I will say that I had every intent of keeping up with the resolution. I was going to change lives with my baking and prowess the shit out of all things culinary. It'd be like, "Cancer, you say? Well then, have yourself one of my delectable pains au chocolat." Boom. Cured. Don't need no fancy-ass chemotherapy or radiation. Just delicious buttery crust and chocolatey filling. Get the scientists on making that into a pill or injection or suppository (because sometimes you need to take desperate and delicious measures).

Of course, once I got here, I was reminded that, no, you have to work every day for at least eight hours. Oh, and trivia? What? That's a thing? And I'm making some small amount of disposable income,  so I can actually go and do such things? Awww shiiiiiiiiittttt.

Plus, hey, I can afford to eat, and how! Restaurants in Charleston? A Mellow Mushroom within walking distance? Affordable beer? All of these things and more are going inside me.

And, hey, what's this little fella coming out to play? This little hairy fella I see when I look down OH GOD LORD IT'S A BEER BELLY. NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE.

NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE I HAD ABS ONCE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE THIS ISN'T PADDING AT ALL NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE

So, yeah. I stopped baking because it was making me fat. I've gone hog wild baking for parties and such (and have often had things go terribly, terribly wrong, because people don't want cheesecake at parties), don't get me wrong, but there's not the same zazz as before. And so the baking slows. I've made some pretty kickass desserts for Christmases and other special occasions (see: triple layer chocolate mousse cake, chocolate crêpe cake, chocolate gingerbread cheesecake).

Sometimes they look like little bearded men in headdresses, because milk chocolate mousse won't fucking set.

Still, it's pretty rare that I get home from lab and think, "Hey, you know what I want to do after 10 hours of measuring liquids and dispensing them among containers? Dispense liquids AND SOLIDS among containers for another several hours!" Usually it's more along the lines of, "Ugggh, I'm going to watch Netflix and then pass out," unless it's trivia night, in which case it's more of a, "Uggggh, I'm going to go to trivia and then come home and pass out." But despite baking being replaced by Netflix- and trivia-shaped idols, I still have somehow managed to pick up some pretty serious cred as a baker, particularly among those of the more feminine persuasion. Mission accomplished.

Honeys love honey buns.

Fanfiction, Gaston, Livestock, Metonymy, and Math

Today, in a fit of boredom and procrastination (the best kind of fit, really. Okay, fine, the best would probably be something involving a suit, but it's still way better than pique or mania or epilepsy, all of which are probably pretty awful), I read some fanfiction. I think Firefox wants me to split that into two words (i.e., fan fiction), but I'll be damned if I let spell check dictate my behavior like that. No, I won't inflate my word count by splitting up fanction into two words (i.e., fan fiction), because I can try to inflate my word count plenty just by rambling along like this.

Mitochondria. Adrenoceptor. Arrestin. Immunoprecipitate. Ultracentrifuge. Putative.

Anyway, yes. I read fanfiction today, and it was a terrible decision.

What? You wanted more to the story than that? Okay, fine. On my travels around the internet, I came across an A Song of Ice and Fire (ASoIaF, for the acronymically inclined who can make sense of those vowels better than I can at the moment) piece about what would happen if Sean Bean didn't die in something. I was intrigued, because, hey, that's an idea, right? Sean Bean lives through something and goes on to do, I dunno, something good with his life? Gardening? A life of billiards? Starts a small café and starts a budding romance with a young daughter of the local eccentric inventor? Maybe starts hunting and becoming a pretty stand up guy around town? Maybe the young daughter of the local eccentric inventor is a little bit bookish? Maybe she's a bit ridiculed by the other townspeople and Sean Bean tries to include her? Maybe she goes missing for a few months and her father has this weird story about a Beastman sort of thing (which is ridiculous, even if you're in some sort of 80s movie/TV series, except I guess that that was Beastmaster. Wait, unless there were a Beastman in the He-Man movie from the 80s. To the Internets! Well, I'm already on the Internets, I suppose, so I guess I'd better take me a little looksie. What do you know, he was! He was played by Tony Carroll, who, I guess, was some sort of body builder, as his other film credits include Hercules in New York (wherein he was credited as Tony "Mr. World" Carroll). He was a Leo and is now dead, as you may have guessed by my persistent use of the past tense. Let's pour one out for Mr. Carroll.), and then she comes back and starts picking up the same weird Beastman story, which is absurd, because Tony Carroll is dead and never lived in that cozy little French village? Maybe he does the logical thing and try to get them both to seek some sort of professional help? Maybe he has some big sing-along in the local tavern about how great he is (because Sean Bean is actually pretty great)? Maybe then there's actual evidence of this Beastman, and he had kidnapped the cute bookish lady? Maybe because Sean Bean is Sean Bean, it's time to rally up a posse (because the police won't do shit about this, I mean, Beastmen aren't really in their jurisdiction, and there's also talk of moving funriture, and the guy has a freaking castle. This isn't the time for siege warfare, it's the time for action.) and storm the castle that got mentioned in that parenthetical just now (Sean Bean can now sense parentheticals)? Maybe in the process- wait. Wait. Wait. This is going to end with a dead Sean Bean. Dammit. Gaston Sean Bean still dies. Dammit, dammit, dammit. Why can't we just leave Sean Bean alone?

"No one dies like Sean Bean; no one flies like Sean Bean; no one spoiler their movies like casting Sean Bean."

But anyway. Yes. I started to read this fanfiction (not a fan fiction, because we will not be oppressed by the violence inherent to the Firefox spell check system), and, surprise, surprise, it was not very well written. Okay, that's a bit ungenerous. It looks like it has a decent story going for it, and it certainly manages to keep to the general style of the original series and such, but the characters are using vocabulary that isn't really keeping with their canon voices, there are lots of stretches of dialogue without any internal monologue for characters who really should be having some internal monologue (which is one of the things that is nice about the books, I mean who doesn't enjoy a good internal monologue? I'm sure I'm enjoying one right now, probably involving pies or bacon or bourbon), and Sean Bean is alive.

Who am I kidding- I'll probably keep reading it, because I'm a bit obsessive about finishing things (The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and A Confederacy of Dunces notwithstanding- that was a weird summer), hence my accumulating collection of webcomics that I have to read, because, dude, I have to keep up with my comics. WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS TO CHANGE THINGS- I NEED TO KNOW?

Anyway, I've gotten about halfway through a post without drastically changing directions (look, the Sean Bean thing was totally on topic, because we were basically talking about Sean Bean more than the fan fiction oh balls I meant fanfiction), and while I'm sure I had something revelatory about fanfiction and its role in society or some such nonsense (here's a hint: it involves pairing characters, probably in sexual situations, and wish fulfillment, but no seriously, there's some good stuff out there, and I'm being miserly about these sorts of things tonight), that's just not in the cards for tonight. OH HEY, THAT'S NEW- ROB HITTING WRITER'S BLOCK HALFWAY THROUGH. MAYBE HE'LL GO ON SOME SORT OF ENTITLED RANT THAT'S SUPPOSED TO BE SELF-DEPRECATING BUT REALLY JUST MAKES HIM LOOK BAD.

OOOH. MAYBE HE'LL MISUSE TERMS LIKE "IRONY" OR "META."

"Maybe he'll misuse words like... like SWELL. Or- or so's your old man!" Et tu, Professor Hill? Oh, sorry, Ajax, kai su, Professor Hill?

Guys. Guys. I need you to stay with me. We're not going to misuse terms like meta and irony. Not tonight. I mean, I might misuse terms like zeugma, metonymy, and synecdoche, if only because I've forgotten some of the nuances to their uses (and, I mean, who uses zeugma these days anyway? Not that it shouldn't be used more- it's a perfectly wonderful rhetorical device that I've heard of being used in delightfully adorable marriage proposals, but for my money, nothing beats a good milking cow and a herd of goats for a marriage proposal. Livestock are pricey these days. Shows diversification and forward thinking, assuming you know anything about animal husbandry. If you don't (like me), it shows that you're willing to take a risk and make what is in all likelihood a terrible, terrible decision.), but not because I've lost their spirits deep within my manly soul.

"YOURS ARE THE HANDS THAT WILL TYPE A POST AND A GENOME!"

Well, except for synecdoche, because that was part of the title of what is possibly the most disturbing movie I've ever seen, and for reasons that I cannot fully articulate. Seriously. Go see Synecdoche, NY, and tell me that it is not just deeply unsettling on a visceral level. But zeugma and metonymy? They're pretty cool dudes. Or ladies. I mean, I haven't actually talked to them in person, so I can't be sure about their genders. No reason to think they're men, after all. Of course, I usually use "dude" in a pretty gender neutral sense, because I mean, we're all just trying to abide, you know? Do you know?

No, it's cool. You don't have to know. We're all learning in this thing together. For example, tonight we're learning that the Random Article function on Wikipedia is not providing much substantial fodder for blog topics, and yet the absence of fodder is in itself fodder for topics, thereby proving the concept of zero as a whole (but not natural) number. Because zero is not natural, it is an abomination and oh good heavens did this just start to go off the rails again.

Zero, I would like to apologize. I've got nothing against you. You're a pretty groovy number. We need you for some maths. I mean, it was really annoying when we had to show our work for regrouping in subtraction and it was something like one hundred minus seventeen, so you had to cross out the one to a zero, the first zero to a ten, the first ten to a nine, and then the second zero to a ten, after which you could finally continue on with your normal subtraction. I mean, my blood was up for just taking that seventeen straight out of the one hundred's flank, possibly using my teeth (which have rather prominent canines, so I will straight up Dracula that flank), and I have to pause to write out all these zeroes and tens and nines? This is unacceptable. This will not do. It was like having to do long division with a seven without using remainders (although not exactly the same, mind you, as subtraction and division are entirely different operators. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story (if it may be called such) that I am going to relate.). I was glad to get to use fractions again, because, jeez, did that make everything easier. Instead of going on and on and on trying to find the pattern over which you could put that bar indicating that it was a repeating number, you could just make a fraction, dust off your hands, and walk away, presumably while the chalkboard exploded behind you in a demonstrative fireball, because, you're doing math, dude (it's gender neutral, don't have a cow, but if you do, are you asking me what I think you are?).

Second post, second person

After that whirlwind last night, we'll see if I can keep up some semblance of that momentum. It would be nice, let me tell you.

 

Alas, the odds are rather against it (or agin' it, if you're into the old-timey abbreviation game. Well, I suppose it's more of a contraction than an abbreviation. It's certainly not an acronym, because there is a difference.), as I'm currently at trivia and may have to try to appease The Lady like some sort of vengeful pagan god. There are also lots of other people around a wooden table drinking beer, so I guess we might have some sort of Norse thing going for us. What can I say- she's pretty Frigga-ng cute.

D'awww.

Unfortunately (wow, I'm being a real downer on my topic sentences, and I'm not meeting any of the third grade requirements for good paragraphs), the buzz is wearing off, and I'm still on my phone, and the din is throwing of my game. I'd make some comment about my game being potentially nonexistent, bit I think we're above that.

Note: from here on out,  you're going full on second person for this post. You cannot be held responsible for your actions or any changes in your opinions that may result from the ravings of your blog post. Of course, now you've switched to your computer, as you're back home from trivia, and you're really, really disappointed in how little got written. It looked like much more on your phone screen.

Anyway, as you were saying- well, that's just inaccurate. You weren't really into anything, which is just a wonderful start, and now's when you start going on and on about how you're not finding any sort of flow, and you really just end up writing yourself into a freaking corner because of it. Not tonight. Tonight, well, hopefully you haven't covered this topic already, because that would be some serious egg on your face (which is actually vaguely funny and topical for reasons that you might discover once you actually get to the point, but why rush things, you know? You'll take it slow, because you actually made a typo a few lines ago and needed to go back and fix it so that Firefox wouldn't throw up the red squiggles. Along those lines, no made up words yet only one made up word tonight. For those of you playing the home game, you OH GOOD LORD THEY SPAWNED. Okay, now there are four made up words, which are apparently "agin'," "old-timey," "Frigga-ng," and "D'awww." Out of those four, you'll grant it one, and that was a pun, so it really doesn't count against you (or shall you say... agin' you. Okay, how many parentheses deep are you right now? Looks like just two.).).

You're going to talk about pie. Not in any sort of concrete sense, mind you. No, you're going to just speak in generalities in an attempt to get your creative juices moving and such. Sorta like last night you were talking about the general concepts behind Novemblog before you ended up talking about Highlander and grudges against middle school history teachers who, by all other accounts, were actually supposed to be pretty solid teachers. Well, as far as the adjective "solid" can be applied to middle school, as middle school is a cesspool of hormones and just awful years.

You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and acne. (Also, once again, you've found an image link with an incredible article attached. This one is a liveblog of a middle school dance, and what you skimmed was actually pretty impressive. Maybe you should take another look.

But, yes, pie. Unlike middle school, pie is actually pretty cool. You and The Lady went to a wedding a couple of weeks ago (fine, a week ago. Are you happy now? No. You are not. Life is a series of events without meaning, and happiness is an illusion... unless there's pie.) Weddings are always wonderful, and this one was particularly great. You had a youth pastor for part of middle school (hey, full circle, for a very small value of circle) and most of high school, and she had a pretty awesome ceremony. No, there wasn't pie at the ceremony. You don't have pie at wedding ceremonies. That would be exceptionally messy and inconvenient (and probably a bit sacrilegious, what with the moaning that would likely go into you eating pie, and that's just not church appropriate. You're not sure that's restaurant appropriate. There really should not be moaning in restaurants. You get that you're enjoying the food. You don't need to turn this into food porn. That's what Instapintertwitterbook is for.).

No. You have pie at wedding receptions.

For. Serious.

You get that that there's this tradition about wedding cake and all that jazz. And, hey, sometimes you run into a good wedding cake. There are good cakes out there. However, none of those cakes is pie. And you may quote you on that.

You actually had a piece of pecan pie, which was delightful (even though pecan pie is, what, crust with corn syrup and some pecans on top, which you guess is pretty delightful, really, because otherwise why would there be all this worry about corn syrup? I mean, it has to be pretty delicious for folks to put it in everything. It's like MSG and whichever orange they use on the nacho Doritos, which are delicious but manage to be utterly bereft and devoid (because you really wanted to use both of those words) of any cheese.), but there were other pies and they all looked great. And they all looked homemade, which, as you already know, improves any pastry or dessert by at least 30 percent. I mean, you could serve you some cookies made of prunes, beets, and flour, and if they were homemade, you'd probably thing they were at least somewhat palatable.

With all apologies to your father and common decency. Maybe you should add a stipulation about blindfolds for that thirty percent rule.

Pie can be tricky, though, if only because it has so many moving parts. You've got the crust, the filling, and then you've got a goddamned pedantic not-quite-a-blogger who is trying to tell you how to do a pie. Who do you think you are- is- um. Well. Second person seems to be collapsing in on itself a bit. Give it a second and it'll get back to normal.

Okay, let's try this again. You've got the crust, the filling, and then you've got a goddamned pedantic other you who may or may not be a blogger who is trying to tell the you you how to do a pie with that voodoo that you you (as opposed to other you who may or may not be a blogger) do so well. I mean, who does this other you think this other you is? Some sort of blogger? Because, as has been established several times throughout this paragraph BY THIS SELFSAME OTHER YOU, this other you is really not quite a blogger, and therefore your points are invalid. Other your points. Not your your point. Your your point is still entirely valid, because BITCH DON'T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO.

Not second person, but you get your point. Which your, though? Which you is you? Are you on Mars? Are YOU Sammy Jankis and/or John G.?

Listen, you, pie is a freaking mystery. Nobody knows where pie started. You mean, pie is a circular dish, so it can have no beginning and no end, but it is also triangular and therefore has a point. Pie, therefore, is the secret to an eternal and purposeful existence. You know, an existence of eating pie. That's a pretty neat purpose, right? Finding the best pie? You mean, you could even subdivide into dinner pies as opposed to dessert pies, or even crust varieties. Are you including tortes and tartes? What of tartelettes? How far does the rabbit hole go? Will there be sufficient rations of pie to reach the bottom?

Sometimes, just sometimes, you get a post that goes exactly where you want it to go. You plot it out, and you cover all your bases, and you've got plenty of words to tell the story (and reach the Novemblog quotas, of course. Gotta have your quotas.). Sometimes, you get a post that starts up and then goes off the rails into left field and probably runs over some cows and a cornfield or two before stopping.

And then you get posts like tonight that start off okay, you guess, and then decide to go off the rails right into a brick wall, probably of a middle school (but it doesn't hurt any kids, because kids are our future. You guess it runs into the cafeteria at like midnight? Lunchladies are pretty awesome, and they have a hard enough time having to deal with middle schoolers, who have a hard enough time dealing with middle school and puberty and the rap music and their craaaazy dancing) whereupon it implodes in a rather anticlimactic fashion. You think that's what you've got here tonight. The terrible looking beet cookies? A rant against yourself by yourself to yourself (you begin to wonder if this second person idea might not be a bit too played out, but if the horse looks dead, then another kick won't be too bad, right? Wow, are you going to hear about THAT phrasing in the next couple of days. Horses are wonderful creatures, and The Lady has family with some horses that are utterly fucking majestic and adorable. You would say that they're totes mcgotes adorbs, but everybody knows that totes only apply to bags given to goats raised by the McDonald's corporation for the purpose of, you dunno, voicing drive through speakers? Does that work for you? Maybe you should stop asking questions, because this parenthetical is going to have to end with a question mark to begin with. You should get back on track now. As you were saying, "A rant against yourself")? Rabbit holes? Pies as the secret to all existence?

You know that life's a cheeseburger.

DAD JOKE MIC DROP.

Novemblog Part 3: The Reluctanting

Welcome back, blogees. That's right- not even a paragraph in and I'm already making up words. We're off to a great start for yet another year of Novemblog (because I had to be accurate and make up multiple words in this paragraph). For those of you who don't know about Novemblog, well, you're about to. For those of you who do (i.e., the majority of folks reading this), go take five. Smoke a cigarette if that's your thing. Maybe grab some coffee. Skim a Wikipedia article. Cure cancer.

Novemblog is, simply put, a terrible idea. I mean, it's currently 12:05 AM on November 2nd, which means I'm missing deadlines already. I'm exhausted from a day of getting fluids pumped out of me (not like that), getting fluids pumped back into me (also not like that), warming fluids (still not like that), squirting fluids onto smoothish surfaces (NOW it's like- wait, no. Nope. Still not like that. Huh.), and then having an ill-advised beer.

On the one hand, this beer was given a 9.25 by the source webpage (The Brewstraveler, to whom I'm sorry I don't give more appropriate citation- I am history's greatest monster). On the other hand, it's a sour, which is almost always ill-advised.

More to the point, Novemblog is my solution to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for the hip folks out there). Rather than put in the focus and effort required to write a cohesive piece of literature (yeah, I'm really stretching the definition right now), I go ahead and shoot for the word requirement (50,000 words over the course of the month) into a series of blog posts (most of which have way too many parentheticals, which is another made up word according to Firefox). Let's face it- there's a lot of word padding, because one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven is a rather large number, and it gets longer when you have to write words for the entirety of said number.

There are plenty of previous Novemblog posts out there (at least 60, which is as many as six tens and is therefore terrible and a half if stolen by Lex Luthor), and they are of vastly varying quality. Vastly varying value, if you will, which you sort of have to if you're reading this. Like I said, I'm history's greatest monster. According to the internet and Matt Groening, that makes me Jimmy Carter. For more of my exploits, I encourage you to visit here. There have been attempts at travelogues, attempts at Dada and the surreal, but mostly, there's just a lot of padding. I mean, just look at this entry. I've taken over four hundred words to tell you about Novemblog. The folks who I told to read the Wikipedia article on coffee-flavored cigarettes have already moved on to investigating its mechanism of carcinogenicity. That's right. The Wikipedia article on coffee-flavored cigarettes causes cancer. It's all good, though- it's just a little cancer like a glomus tumor. I mean, that's really like the Screech Powers of cancers. "Oh, look at me, I'm called a tumor, so I must be dangerous, even though I'm really just a bunch of vascular tissue that's probably benign. But if I cause distant metastases, watch out! I really might do it!" Because, see, Screech was always viewed as a nerd because Dustin Diamond is a pretty terrible person and looks like he'd be socially awkward, so they had him say lines about robots and things, because all nerds have robots, right? Why, just the other day at nerd club, I was talking about how it's really a shame that we can't share all of our robots with the rest of the world because they would go mad with power. This was right before we made our robots feed us grapes and then fight to the death, which was funny because robots can't die, what with them not being living things. It was all incredibly droll. In fact, it was almost as droll as when I was at nerd camp in the summer of 2005 (a good year for nerd camp) and we made a robot feel emotions just to tell it that it couldn't have emotions because it doesn't have a soul. Wacky fun.

Now that we've gotten some the vaguely satirical but mostly sociopathic bit out of the way (just like ol' Johnny Swift!), well, for now at least, because you never know when it's going to pop up again, what with the growing bitterness in the world and the endlessly encroaching ennuie (because alliteration isn't just for pep rallies anymore, as pep rallies really deserve no claim to anything EVER- I mean, hey, you get out of class for an hour to watch some people yell about your school's team and how they're the best team ever despite their losing record, and that's why each class has to show why they're the best class. After all, there can only be one.)

"Get in the car, loser, we're going shopping."

Anyway, if you followed back to the sentence that started before I went off on another tangent dealing with pep rallies and how I never much cared for them or liked them, I mean, come on, let me finish my freaking homework so I can do extracurricular activities I care about (or pretend to for the sake of college applications), yeah that old sentence, maybe we'll realize that Rob probably had an idea about what was going to happen there and then forgot all about it. Truly, he is a wordsmith of the highest order (hey, that was one of those extracurricular activities I took on and didn't even manage to pretend to care about).

And now, dear readers, pay close attention, because Rob is feeling chilly (as his room is somewhat in the shade, and that means that when the days get brisk, Rob is freezing his friggin' nubs off, as he has lost fingers to the chilblains of years past), which means it's time for him to grab a bourbon. Sometimes this has already happened. Usually that means that Rob is pretty desperate. Tonight, it just means that he's friggin' freezing.

Nah, he's totally desperate. Somebody cast him in a nineties Robert Rodriguez flick, because he's a regular Desperato.

Earlier tonight, Rob said, "I don't like to think of it as twenty-nine. I like to think of it as twenty-ja." I didn't want to Rob you of that pun.

He also turned on some Turisas. This was probably not a wise decision. That's some freaking delicious bourbon. He also came across the O. Henry Pun-Off Twitter feed, which is pretty amazing. I strongly recommend it. Rob probably does, too.  Yeah, the Turisas is wonderful but is an absolutely terrible decision, as most musics with vocals tend to be for his focus. That's why we're switching to some Holst. Imagine, if you will, supervillainy galore with strings playing at a rapid staccato. Better yet, just listen to the friggin' music. Mars, The Bringer of War. It's okay. I'll wait.

The bourbon, as is often the case, is a double-edged sword (which, I mean, aren't most swords? I guess machetes aren't, and maybe some katanas? I don't know. I don't know, guys.). It's loosening things up a bit, but at the cost of focus, which is why we've gone from Turisas to Holst to bourbon to discussions of the effects of bourbons to swords (which was actually earlier, but, hey, best learn now that time is an illusion on the Novemblog. Lunchtime is not an illusion because Novemblog rarely happens during the diurnal hours.).

Aw shit we just got to the big four minute mark. You know the one. You don't know that you know the one, but you know the one.

Not that One, though.

Not that Juan either.

Also, Pluto is not a planet according to Holst. DID HE KNOW BEFOREHAND? IF YOU IGNORE FBI EVIDENCE, THEN IT'S CLEAR THAT ABRAHAM ZAPRUDER CHANGED THE IAU DEFINITION OF A PLANET WITH A CAMERA GUN- A GUN DISGUISED AS A CAMERA. CAMERAS STEAL SOULS. SOULS ARE EYES. EYES ARE NEEDLES. THERE ARE FIVE NEEDLES. FIVE. QUID PRO QUO. (With all apologies to David Willis and no apologies whatsoever to elishka, the Yahoo Answers account obsessed with the JFK assassination and the KFC secret recipe.)

And as we draw our first Novemblog to a close (well over an hour after it should have been posted), I would like to share a story that's somewhat apropos, as daylight savings time approaches its end. In the 8th grade, I was in a class taught by one who we'll call Ms. B. It was a US History class, and I was only in her class for a week before they reorganized the students and I got switched to a different team. Yes, in all things, middle school was a shitshow. Anyhoo, I remember that in one of the early days, she asked if anyone knew the story behind daylight savings time. I, armed with the knowledge of watching way too many episodes of the Powerpuff Girls (because I had such an active social life in 8th grade), recalled that Benjamin Franklin had proposed it as a means of economizing on candles. Now, according to Wikipedia, such a thing happened but was purely satirical, due to the lack of rigorous scheduling at the time. Ms. B, though, said that I was just patently wrong, and it was actually farmers needing to be up earlier for harvest that set up daylight savings time. I initially took her at her word, but it's one of those things that I remember far better than I should because I hold a grudge like a champ (or a Japanese horror movie). Tonight, I took a look at the ol' Wikipedia (as you may have gathered by my earlier statement starting with "Now, according to Wikipedia" aw whoops spoilers), and, okay, fine, she was mostly correct, EXCEPT it was an entomologist who really proposed it, so I mean, who was really right? After all, entomologists collect bugs, which are used extensively in Chinese foods, such as the night market in Wangfujing, where there were multiple palaces of the Qing dynasty. Dynasty shares a root with the Serbian film series Zikina Dinastija, which was aired on the bus I took to Serbia and was terrible. Ergo, daylight savings time is a conspiracy by 8th grade social studies teachers to force me into watching unwatchable Serbian movies and slowly drive me insane.

I don't think it's working.