Monsters

Some days, I feel more like a monster than other days. Some days at work, I have to euthanize animals, usually for space, which is probably the stupidest reason to kill something. Sometimes, it doesn't actually bother me. Those are the times I feel guilty that I don't feel guilty. Today, I finally had to euthanize a cat that's been at work a while that I particularly liked (that I, as the hand of Death, have skipped over for almost three months now,) as well as four kittens that I've watched grow up for the past two months. Today is not one of the days it doesn't bother me. I'm so frustrated with this job,and that I'm shoving animals in cages together to try to keep from euthanizing anything, and that when we go to mobile adoptions, everyone comes to pet the cute puppies, ignore the older dogs, and make excuses for why they can't take anything home (and, on occasion, why I'm a horrible and vicious person for having to euthanize anything at all.) They tell me how they breed their animals so that their children can witness the "miracle of life," then bring the unwanted offspring here so I can handle the inevibility of death, even if I as much as tell them that I'll euthanize the animals. Not to mention the people who surrender their 10 year old dogs and cats to us because they just don't feel like taking care of them anymore, and who don't bat an eye when I tell them that, due to space issues, or health, or temperament, I'll have to murder their faithful companion. Or those that bring strays from outside our jurisdiction even when we're so, so full, and then have the gall to tell me that it's my job to help the animals and, again, I'm a horrible person for not killing other animals to take theirs. Some of these say, "I'll just dump them on the street in Pearland so that you have to take them in!" and storm out in righteous fury. How churlish of me.

It's because of days like today that I dread coming to work for my two days a week (and we haven't even officially opened yet.) Those two days have the potential to be truly loathsome.

Blah Blah Blah

Today, while I was caught in my routine of starting out on a totally legitimate website like pcmagazine.com and somehow, through the magic of associated links, ending up on strange and not entirely truthful websites with questionable English composition skills.
I had actually read the first paragraph or two without noticing blatant grammar errors and flowery prose (obviously not an American tendency) and was only briefly confused by the correlation between average esophagus size and sexual facts (this is so going to hit on Google's porn keyword list, isn't it?) until I hit a statement that was so bizarre considering the article content and average English grammar that I actually stopped to consider it.
"It is not the adults but infants dream more time."

What are we saying here?  That infants dream more than adults...(and hopefully not about sex?!)Does this include Stage 3 and 4 sleep (nightmares,) which is also when you're more likely to sleepwalk/sleeptalk, or just REM sleep?  (You are more likely to hallucinate if deprived of REM sleep, which I find fascinating as well as hilarious.

At this point I scrolled back up to the top of the page to discover what the hell I was reading that, up to that sentence, had been at least reasonably comprehensible and mostly on topic.  I then wondered if the article was as questionable in the other four languages or if the English version just had a third-rate translator.  Do they bash the sperm-counts of men of other nationalities in the other translations?

But honestly, where did they get this information?  It's like trying the pickup tips in Maxim and expecting it to be, you know, helpful, when the magazine is written and edited by a bunch of guys with as low a pickup-line success rate as you.  (Who reads Maxim, anyway?  I always see it at the store but never see anyone buying any...Actually, I never see guys buying magazines at all.)

It seems that yellow journalism is on the rise again with blatant errors in fact-checking (or total lack thereof...) and sensationalist stories, and the exaggerating of random coincidences to sell papers (or get site hits, or feed subscribers, or what have you.)

Pimpin' Rides and Questionable Luggage-Towing. Also, Asshat Parking.

Three entries this week?  Man I must be really bored on a roll!

On my drive to College Station this week, I saw (and managed to take pictures of while driving with my iffy cell phone camera while no cops were looking!) the two most amazing vehicles I've ever had the pleasure to actually see on the road!
                                                             
 Pre-Pimp

Mid-to-Post Pimp












It was bizarre...like watching Pimp My Ride in real life, only they were only partially done because, sir, that is not nearly enough pimping yet.


I expect to see these cars again in a further state of pimp.   Also, the pre-pimp car was only three cars behind the post-pimp car, which was excitingly unexpected.  I was just driving along, rocking out to Queen and minding my own business, and I see pre-pimp car and think, "Well, that's kinda a sweet ride, there, love the color" and lo and behold, when I pass him, there's ANOTHER one, SAME COLOR, only with added pimpiness!  What are the chances, huh?  I wonder if they know each other.


On the subject of cars and driving, I took a picture of this minivan with rather terrifyingly-loaded plastic tubs while sitting in way-backed-up I10 traffic (it's not like I had anything better to do, like move six inches closer to my destination\...)  I mean, does that really look like a good way to transport things?  I'm not even sure they had a top rack (can't see one when you zoom in), but they didn't tie it on through the windows, so I guess that's something.

I cry for their gas mileage, though, since it was just viciously, brutally murdered.

The other day, my roommate and I went to the movies.  There's always someone parked atrociously, but usually, you can at least tell that they made an attempt (if a pathetic attempt) at parking within the lines.  Not this guy.  Oh no, not only did he park in the most assed way possible for no apparent reason, he doesn't even have a front plate, which I'm pretty sure is illegal in Texas.  (It's not a new car either since they have an inspection and registration sticker.)  I think what bothers me most is that he was so close to parking directly over the middle line but didn't quite hash it.  Also he parked crooked.  AND HE TOOK TWO TREE-SPOTS (the most important ones in summer-Texas.)  What a total asshat.



Blogger, why do you insist on cramming my awesomely laid-out posts into tiny little bodies like a fat woman in a size three dress?  I don't understand when you give me a reasonably sized Composition Box that is apparently 1.5 times the size of the actual body...why?

Old thoughts

I am both entertained and saddened by a diary entry in a long-lost journal of mine that I just found tonight.  I will reproduce it here in its' entirety and possibly also post a picture (maybe later.)

July 30/1997 age 9
Dear Diary,
I hope that when I am 27 there will still be Rinos, pigions,. TIGERS, and other animals that are endangerd and threatened today.  I hope PEOPLE will quit polutIng and cutting down Trees. I hope that the murder of Lauren K. Smither will be caught and punished but won't be killed.  I hope murders will be little. won't be often and maybe quit.  But most of all I hope people won't be cruel Dumb! or cruel.


Now, I am entirely unsure why I thought pigeons were endangered and/or threatened when I was nine, but apparently I've never liked people.  Lauren Smither was a girl in my sister's Girl Scout troop who was abducted and found dead some months later.
A later entry:

"7/20/98
This night was a scary one.  Mom might have gotten killed.  (She was in a car wreck.)"

Frankly, I'm surprised I didn't write more.  Maybe that's because nobody bothered to tell the kids what had happened until both parents came home four or five hours late.

"June 10, 2000
Commendable won in 2:00 10/3 sec in the Belmont Stakes, 10 lengths
Aptitude 2nd
Unshaded 3rd."

I guess I found the horse races on TV one day?
I'm thinking maybe my childhood was a little strange.  Then again, I also wrote "Wow! 94" in the bottom of my desk drawer, so who can tell?

ID vs Teleportation?

So I'm sitting in bed and watching Hot Fuzz (which is totally like the best movie ever) but really I'm busy typing instead of watching it, which is somewhat sad.  I'm also wondering why I'm so incredibly unreasonably ridiculously tired which, coincidentally, is why I'm currently in bed watching Hot Fuzz.
Did you know proponents of Intelligent Design often cite the human eye as an organ that could not come about randomly?  In fact, it would take only four simple steps (all forms currently present in the animal kingdom) to get from a few photosensitive nerve cells to the complex structure of the human eye.  Furthermore, this as evidence of Intelligent Design is total bunk, because any designer who would install photoreceptors backwards for no good reason could hardly be considered intelligent.  At least the blind spot makes some sense (it's where the optic nerve exits, so naturally doesn't have photoreceptors in that area.) It might be possible for the optic nerve to exit somewhere that, you know, doesn't receive sensory input, but maybe that would have caused some other problems.
Anyway, I should be studying for my physiology lab exam but I really think I'm just going to pass out when the movie is over.  I guess I don't have much to say today, but felt like blogging???
Teleportation is the best superpower.  I'd only have to get up like twenty minutes before class instead of like an hour.  I wouldn't have to drive back and forth to school every weekend.  I could go visit my sister whenever I wanted to instead of planning out a week I can take off and sit through the airport.  I could go visit Kelly whenever I wanted to.  I could make day trips to Italy and still sleep in my own bed.  Even if I could only move myself and whatever I was carrying at the time, it'd be extraordinarily useful.  I could go see musicals in New York.  Now I just need to figure out how to not land in a wall or a person or underground...

Silver Tongues on the Silver Screen?

This should never happen.  What the heck, people, did you really all grow lives outside the internet?  I am saddened by your failure to entertain me.

I'm kinda sorry that I haven't blogged in a while.  I was planning to, but there were finals, and two days later my dog died, and after that the post would have just been miserable whining about that.
Unfortunately, I'm seriously out of the habit now and don't know what to blog about.


Everybody abandoned me to my own devices today.  I made it back to that point in Geist where I suck and hate the level.  I'd gotten past it once, but I either don't know where that memory card is or it got horribly corrupted.

I am so so so so sorry that Vincent Price died.  He was on my list of People with the Awesomest Voices on the Planet.  He is survived by Sean Connery, James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, and Keith David (but not Suzanne Pleshette as I've just discovered.)  My list needs more women.  Ladies, step it up already!

Pranks, Banks, and Floa...Tanks?

I'm always sad when my pranks backfire on me.  Like when I neglect to replace the toilet paper roll and think, "Hah!  The next person who wants to go to the bathroom will be seriously disgruntled and perhaps mildly inconvenienced when they discover that there is no toilet paper on the roll!" and then I end up being the next one to use the toilet and recall that I have, in fact, only inconvenienced and disgruntled myself by my childish prank-laziness, and that makes it possibly the most failure of a prank there is (except maybe that time I wrote a letter from my middle school on my typewriter telling my parents I was failing my middle-school classes and my dad actually believed it and confronted me about it even though it was April Fool's Day and I misspelled "Independent School District" and had weird typewriter alignment errors and didn't even bother to put it in an envelope--it crushed me to think that he actually thought I'd fail middle school, of all things).

 Where was I?

Oh yeah.  I'd sat on the couch and gotten online and started playing Assassin's Creed II because I need to get those last few trophies, when the power went off like God was telling me that I needed to get off my lazy bum and take that deposit slip to the bank and get coin-rolly-paper-things so I could actually deposit my meager collection of change and pretend I have money even though it's only a measly $30 and that doesn't really pay for as much as I'd thought it would when I was seven and could only dream of amassing such a large amount of money and what I could buy with it, like a horse and a dinosaur and a trip to Pompeii to see the weird plaster-people because that sounded really cool, and probably I could squeeze out enough money to buy a spaceship with the leftovers, or if I didn't buy any ice cream from the ice cream truck that still came around then, even though he was starting to drop us off his rounds cause the only kids in my neighborhood were myself, my sister, and my next-door neighbor with whom I was best buds but now I'm not even sure I would recognize him in the grocery store.  (I know I have a tendency to write ridiculously long, possibly run-on sentences, but that was a 211 word sentence and I'm a little proud of that even though I probably shouldn't be.)
At any rate, I took God's advice and drove to the bank, check and deposit slip in hand, and deposited the check to my sister's account (who, it seems, needs to inform them of her address change before they start charging her for returned mail.)  Unfortunately, the bank has decided to eschew the manual wrapping of coins and no longer has little coin-rolly-paper-things and I have to use a machine now, which I guess means that one of my secret enjoyments has been taken away from me and I feel that I didn't get enough coin-rolling in this life, and I'll be telling my grandkids that in my day we didn't have these fancy coin-rolling machines and that we had to roll them by hand, and by God did we roll those coins like there was no tomorrow and we probably sometimes didn't count right and a roll that was supposed to have 40 quarters only had 39, but that's okay because unintentional unexpected windfalls are God's way of saying you are loved (or that you'd better return that person's wallet and this is really a test to see if you're worthy of Heaven because God is sneaky that way and that's why people are always on edge when they find wallets (unless they're bad people and just keep it, that is; I don't think they're on edge about anything.))  I was kinda annoyed that I have to take my coins to the bank now (didn't I have to do that anyway?) and it's a little frustrating.

Anyway, I was sitting on the couch and trying not to move after rabidly defending the awesomeness of jeans on an old blog post of Allie's (of which most of the reasons include bugs and I never noticed that apparently is approximately a third of the reason I wear jeans and not just because I like to wear jeans.) because it's kinda really hot since my parents refuse to turn on the air conditioning until I can literally prove that my blood is boiling and not before.

Nobody was talking to me online, and after a few hours of mostly talking to myself, I resigned myself to spending today alone in the hot house contemplating the exact amount of heat that would be produced by propelling myself to the kitchen to get something to eat and whether the energy gained by eating would really be worth the trouble and unnecessary production of heat by my muscles.  Then I remembered that we have ice cream in the freezer and that producing a little extra heat was totally worth it for a Coke float.  So, I dug out a glass and as the first scoop of ice cream was falling in, beyond the point of my stopping it, I realized that I'd forgotten to check that the glass did not have any current or previous unsavory occupants; i.e., roach appendages or dead (or living) silverfish.  I dropped two more scoops in the glass and tried my best to ignore my oversight and pray to whoever might be listening that I was not, in fact, about to unwillingly ingest insects of any sort.  I grabbed a glass-bottle Coke and spent a few moments debating whether that one 8oz Coke would be enough to cover three scoops of ice cream and started to worry that I'd made a grievous mistake.  Then I contemplated how much trouble I'd be in for drinking mom's glass-bottle Cokes in the first place, especially since I'd already had one today and was hoping she wouldn't notice, but I really doubted she wouldn't notice two conspicuously empty glass Coke bottles in the recycle bin.  Then I considered whether I really wanted a Coke float in the first place, since I'm far more enamored of root beer floats, but there was no root beer in the fridge, and would it really be that weird if I just ate ice cream out of a glass instead of a bowl like normal people?  At that point, I was struck by an epiphany--the garage fridge might present me with A&;W (if dad hadn't drunk it all, even though he always says (as he's drinking one) that root beer is too sweet and he doesn't like it (which happens with alarming regularity.))  To my joyous surprise, the garage fridge did, in fact, have not one, but several cans of A&W and I could commence making the best root beer float ever.

It occurs to me (and also to Chris, who claims that a root beer float is NOT dinner and I should eat real food,) that just because I'm alone and when I was younger I always said that when I was an adult I could eat whatever I wanted for dinner, that even though I'm now an adult and can technically eat whatever I want for dinner, root beer floats are satisfying and delicious but hardly classified as nutritious by any means, and I really should not be forgoing meals for tasty ice cream and soda treats.  But then I ignore my responsible side and Chris is trying to get me to eat something that might be classified as "real food" if your description is rather lenient and includes greasy fried foods with a high fat content, and instead enjoy my delicious root beer float (which, thankfully, does not have a bug in it, or if it did I already accidentally ate it without noticing, which is probably just as well.)

Just because my dog is funny, you get a funny picture of him.

-Insert reference to tanks here because of this post's title-



Or maybe I'll just spam the end with AT-AT pictures.