lantana

From kottke.org:

David Attenborough, the voice of several thousand hours of nature films, gets hate mail from viewers who believe he should be crediting God for nature's beauty.

Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

everybody always says how awesome new skin is for cuts and blisters.  but it's not.  i once put the waterproof, painful stuff on a big scrape, but it didn't keep the water out, and then everything got horribly infected beneath a dried, apparently unremovable new skin barrier.  i've tried it on heel blisters, too, but it just seems to rub off and then everything bleeds everywhere, right in the middle of the meeting.  (nothing makes me feel more professional than a colleague pointing out my bleeding foot).  tonight, i scraped the outside part of my thumb, real good.  after a few band-aids didn't last at all (awkward position, sweaty hands), i realized that maybe THIS is what new skin was BORN for!  it's always bowlers and rowers who praise it, anyway, so maybe HANDS are its destiny!

so i washed it again and dried it again and made sure it wasn't weeping, and put on two nice coats of acetone-and-polymer.  but somehow i now have a plasticky new skin bubble filled with nice red blood on my thumb.  i want to throw the stuff away, but i will probably keep giving it one more chance.  seems like such a good idea.

my laptop believes that it lives in the midwest, as does my gcalendar.  but *I* am frequently located on the east coast.  so when my computer tells me that it is 1am and way past time to go to bed, it is actually 2am and way-way past time to go to bed.  i suppose i can't entirely blame the computer for my bad habits, but it certainly isn't helping.

seriously? 12k?  and what exactly is my cut?

my new roomie always has the tv on.  he doesn't even always turn it off when he goes to sleep, because he likes to fall asleep in front of it.  but tonight when i came home.....the tv was off!  and good music was playing!  and the lights were lower!  AND there was a pair of pumps in the kitchen! 

so i quickly and quietly made my way upstairs. 

i could hear some talking downstairs, so i thought it was safe to go to the kitchen. but, while i was washing my bowl, i heard him professing his love indirectly, like this: "it's so cool, like, where i am in my life right now, and where you are, like there's no pressure, and we can just be friends, like no pressure.  and you're my best friend.  i mean, we can just hang out, and smoke a bowl in the garage, and it's cool."

so i went back upstairs, quickly and quietly.

oh man.  the temperature is not expected to exceed 70 F for the next TEN DAYS.  might as well say EIGHT MONTHS.  

i first saw the word "chimping" on kottke, a perfect description of the annoying habit some of my friends have of demanding to pass around the digital camera after every photo so they can see the picture that was just taken.  (they call it chimping because everyone goes "ooh ooh ooh"). 

i started this wiaree with my boo as one extra way of staying in touch over our perpetual long distances.  while there's a plan for us to have NO distances between us in the near future (wooie!), right now he's real busy, and i'm gonna forget all the things I have to tell him if i don't talk to him soon.  it's kind of like he validates my existence, and if i can't jabber about my day to him, i feel a little lost.  anyway, instead of writing pages and pages here, i'm gonna make a list of the things i want to jabber to him about.  if you're not my boo (or if you are), have fun filling in the stories yourself!

cookout#2
cribbage
roman's truck dream
jerry sleeping on the floor
phone calls from lola
un-idle computer
paper outline
baby boxes

we are having hail here!  pretty big, too - like spherical dimes, maybe nickels.

since i've been living in illinois, i've been kind of a post-college-single-male-by-association.  it's been pretty chill - plenty of sportsbars and card games.  but i hadn't had the full immersion experience until this weekend - my first weekend in town as a roomie.  it's entirely different now that there's no 'safe' place to call my own - when the whole crew can show up sunday afternoon and start drinking and yelling at the TV in my house without an invitation from me.  but it's all good!  i learned that i can play videogames for a while, then leave to run errands at a strategic moment that excuses me from dinner and the evening sportsbar session.  perrrfect!