I Can Has Yrn?

Whenever I get out my knitting needles, Zoe instantly goes into homicidal psycho jungle cat mode.

Fury

A table shorted me! Gaah! Told me to split the check three ways, then paid for it all together by leaving a hundred bucks on the table and walking out. Never mind that the bills combined equaled $108.

Could have been worse, yes, but what the hell? I must express my rage...where are a watermelon and a croquet mallet when you need them?

Steve Jobs Hates Me

Dear Apple,

iPhoto sucks.

Love, Allison

...

Dear Photobucket,

You also suck.

Love, Allison

...

I write this after moving and renaming all the jpegs of my trip. The new names and location make uploading them much easier. However, iPhoto cannot find them now, so this makes actually using them difficult, unless you want a bunch of giant sideways pictures. (Disclaimer: the terrible storage for iPhoto may be due to my digital camera, but my fury is no less.) At any rate, this entire process has felt very Windows-y.

Photobucket also won't load its bulk uploader properly, so I'm mad at it, too. And all the editing functions take forever.

But wait! I had the patience for two pictures:

This is where I went:



And this is me enjoying it:



But you don't get to see exactly what I enjoyed until at least Monday. Gotta love the restaurant business--a guarantee that you'll surrender all your nights, weekends, and holidays FOREVER!

Grammar Nazi!

I have recently become obsessed with the linguistic evolution of the phrase "trying to." It's become "trine."

"I'm trine find my phone." "Are you trine get in touch with her?" "He's trine save up some money so he can go back to school."

Is this a northern Midwest thing, or have you noticed it too?

Did You Ever Lose an Elephant?

While in Missouri, my mom decided she wanted to go to the St. Louis Zoo. To me, that meant one thing: elephants. We hadn't been in years, since the first and last time we had gone previously had been on a 140˚ day with a humidity of approximately 6000%. I remember being completely confused as to why the hyenas and rhinoceroses--

WAIT. I need to establish that I had to check the dictionary on that one. I was desperately hoping the plural was rhinoceri, even though my English major self knew it would never make sense. But did you know that rhinoceros can be singular or plural? I added the "-es" for clarity. Okay, I'm done.

Anyway, I remember wondering why my father seemed to think the heat a perfectly acceptable explanation as to why the animals seemed so lethargic. As I tried to explain to the giraffes, "You're from AFRICA. This heat can't be that bad. Do stuff."

I've always found zoos a little depressing, and I suspect that within a century they will cease to exist, replaced by wildlife sanctuaries with--okay, I've got this whole convoluted plan for zoo replacement, but I won't go into it here. At any rate, I hate seeing the animals that pace and leave trails in the grass of their pens, clearly depressed and bored. The panthers always seem miserable, and for some odd reason, giant anteaters seem to have a tough time of it, too. I think zoos should replace all their big cats with cows and goats and animals that don't mind tedium, but those would be the most boring zoos of ever to anyone, and I'm getting off track. Come to think of it, giraffes seem to do all right--they certainly have no problem breeding in captivity. Maybe hoofed animals are the key. Oh, lord, I'll stop.

Let's try this again. I was happy to see the new improvements to the zoo, including much larger enclosures for some of the animals. (Though I must wag a finger at the St. Louis Zoo for packing four hippos into a strangely small place. I'm no zoologist, but they're hippos. It seems impossible that they would be comfortable with that.) The maps, though, were almost no help at all, and every path curved and twisted the wrong way at every possible moment. As such, I grew increasingly frustrated in my search for elephants, especially as closing time neared.

Really, the point of all this is that my father and brother will not stop quoting me and announcing out of the blue, "I WANT TO SEE SOME GODDAMNED ELEPHANTS."

Hail, South Dakota

I'm home.

I have pictures, but no camera cord. Isn't it funny how these things work?

Now, I do have one major point that I have been aching to write about since I got back.

When I was in high school, I seriously considered going to Washington University at St. Louis. I read all the literature, checked out the website, researched scholarships, and even toured the campus. I eventually decided against it, feeling that the cost was high, the application fee wasn't worth it, and I wouldn't be comfortable in a big city that far from home.

But that's not what I tell people now. I tell people I didn't go to WUSL because I couldn't take the disappointment of finding out their mascot wasn't the Heffalumps.

Way Better Than Samantha's

I WANT.



I am too lazy to Google extensively right now, so I have no idea what it is or where it came from. StumbleUpon and I have had a mad love affair for the past few months, and it gives me spectacular pictures with no data sometimes. I saved this one awhile ago. I recently came across it again when it randomly popped up as my background picture. If anyone figures out where it came from, I'll gladly post a credit.

If anyone's wondering about the sudden spate of posts, I actually left for the family vacation in the Missouri backwoods six days ago. It's actually June 11 right now, and I have felt very chatty the past couple of days, so I have spaced out the posts manually to make myself look more responsible and less time-wasting.

Are Otters Ever Not Cute?

Eee! The video mania continues. I die!

glumbert - Otters hold hands

Pfft

One of the great annoyances of my life is that Blogger always makes me log in twice. It's like it doesn't believe me on the first try or something.

Note to self: according to the first sentence, I have a pretty good life.

Need a Good Cry? Let Me Help

I have a love-hate relationship with this video. My boyfriend has a strictly hate relationship with it, since he came home a couple of months ago to three college girls sitting on his couch sobbing hysterically and babbling about dogs.

I'll share it with you now that I'm thinking of it, but be warned that it pretty much makes me want to cut myself.

Mac Users: Do This.

Control Option Command 8.

Hee!

Bad Feminist

For a long time, the only thing keeping me from a subscription to Bust has been my steadfast refusal to consider myself a feminist.

I don't know quite how to explain it. I worked on a pro-choice campaign (yeah, yeah, stereotype, but that's my point--read on). I believe strongly in equal pay for equal work. I bristle at the thought of only 16 (16!) female Senators in this country. My boyfriend knows well enough not to get me started on the linguistic implications of "homewrecker" and "whore" (neither of which has an appropriate male equivalent). I once wrote an essay about the inequalities perpetuated by English's lack of a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. Hearing the word "cunt" sends me into a Hulk-like rage, complete with sputtering and clothes-ripping. Okay, maybe just the sputtering, and I know the Hulk didn't sputter, but you get the point.

BUT. I think a lot of sexual harassment claims are overblown. The campus women's group vaguely irritates me (which is what keeps me from joining). I shave my legs every day, whether anyone's going to see them or not. I hate being called a woman--I'm still just a girl. I worry (too much!) about my figure, though it embarrasses me to admit it. I also secretly enjoy having had traditionally feminine jobs, secretary and waitress, and feminized my other previous job as a cashier by referring to myself as a shopgirl. I love when men open doors for me. When I wait tables, I have never considered the customers' mild flirting degrading; I always find it innocuous and occasionally flattering. That said, reaching behind my back and untying my apron strings does not count as flirting, Dirty Old Man of Christmas Eve 2005. That was just creepy.

I guess I dislike the feminist label because I don't want it to be necessary. I'd rather just ignore the whole thing, put it behind us, and live my life secure in the idea that Career-Driven and Devoted Mother are not somehow incompatible ideals. I can't decide if this attitude is progressive and empowering or simply hiding from the truth of it all.

After all, I remember with great distaste the Drum-Off during my freshman year of high school. At the time, I was the only female percussionist in the school band with any real chops, which is to say, the only one who refused to play Girl Percussion (you know--bells, marimba, the godforsaken tambourine). I had inherited the trap set, taking the spot from a senior who had graduated. As I learned to navigate the drum kit, I was understandably nervous, and somehow the rest of the band decided that I had somehow wrangled the seat unfairly. The director had appointed me as the trap player since I was first chair, but the whispering that the second-chair was better than I was grew louder. I finally asked a friend why everyone assumed the second-chair would be better, and she confessed to me, "I guess what people are saying is...well, you're a girl." Finally, the director got fed up and scheduled a public Drum-Off between the two of us. I soundly kicked his ass. For further emphasis, our director opened the spot to any other band member, and a few of the trombone boys embarrassed themselves mightily. I grew comfortable, even showing up guys from other schools during tournaments, and I'm totally getting off-track here.

For digression's sake, I'd also like to add that when we got a new band director two years later, he quickly relegated me to Girl Percussion, despite the fact that I held that first chair spot easily. (I still resent that, Pasty Band Guy.) He maintained that I was the only one who could play the timpanis, but they're not difficult, so I still don't understand the logic. I'm not going to blame sexism, though. He still let me play marching snare and lead the drumline, so I don't know what his obsession with me and Girl Percussion was. And yes, I know the concept of Girl Percussion is sexist. But look at the college drumlines sometime--you'll find maybe one female snare. A couple of bass drums, perhaps, but the girls tend to be on cymbals and xylos. So Girl Percussion will remain my private name for it, and I'll just have to deal with my own latent sexism.

Anyway, back to my point. I don't know what the hell to make of feminism. I've long privately referred to myself as an "equalist" rather than taking on all the stereotypical connotations. I'm not anti-feminist; that's not it. If anything, I guess I'm just a feminist in denial.

All that said, no, I didn't support Hillary. I voted Obama. I believe with all my heart that America's ready for a female president, but I didn't think it was this female. I'd list all the carefully thought-out, heartfelt reasons if the mere thought of talking about the nomination didn't make my pupils contract and my blood pressure spike dangerously. But I know for damn sure that the following makes me bristle, and not just because I hate Chris Matthews with every quark of my being:


And then again, I found the link in this mostly wonderful article, and all I could think was, "So liking Sex and the City automatically makes me a vapid, consumerist faux-feminist drinking from the Cosmopolitan-flavored font of 'bubbling idiocy'?"

Apologies to Meryl

Ok, I woke up early yesterday and switched on Encore to watch Death Becomes Her. And I had a thought. A scary thought. But an entertaining one.

Meryl Streep:


Paris Hilton:


Yes? No? Am I crazy?

(Images from Virtual History: Film and Hella Bella).

Detail-Oriented

On Main Street, there's a printing company called "Intsy Prints." No big deal. Rhyming is catchy, and it calls to mind "itsy," which I guess emphasizes the clarity of their printing (and hopefully not just an insistence on only printing on postage-stamp-sized paper).

Today I drove past it, and I found myself momentarily confused by the realization that it's not Intsy Prints, it's Insty Prints. I know I'm petty, but that's an entirely different SOUND. "Inst" doesn't rhyme with "prints." It rhymes with "princed." Or "minced." Or "rinsed" or "winced" or "convinced."

So from now on I call it In-Sty Prints.

Perils of Pizza

So...I was catching up on my blog links, and I came across the following post at Lyrical Munchies (formerly Munchies for the Addiction, which I must now change on my sidebar):

"The ability to order pizza online has got to be one of the greatest things that has come out of the invention of the Internet. You choose your pizza, add toppings, throw in some bread sticks and drinks, and pay for everything, all with a few clicks of a button. You can even tip the driver, long before the pizza arrives at your door. Hey, it's not that I can't stand the element of human interaction when ordering a pizza; I'm just too lazy to pick up the phone."

I was going to post a comment, but the post is two weeks old, and my exaggerated cartoon character reaction ("geeeeeeaaaaaaahwwwwuuuuuuuuuhhhh?!") merited a longer commentary.

So this, I have to say to you, Munchies: NO. NO. Ordering pizza online is a TERRIBLE invention. Among the worst, right after plus-size spandex and the Star Wars missile defense system. Having worked at Corporate Pizza Joint, which may or may not be the leader in online pizza-ordering (I guess I can't get dooced anymore, but the vagueness is habit), for 3+ years, I can assure you that nothing could elicit more groans from the staff than an online order popping up on the cook screen.

Now, sometimes all goes well and absolutely nothing happens. Sometimes, unfortunately, equals out to "1 in 18 billion" in my experience.

What's wrong with online ordering?
1. Well, there's the slight oversight that it's not personalized according to store. Want banana peppers on your pizza? Well, TOO FUCKING BAD, because this location doesn't carry them. Also no Dr Pepper. But will the online doohickey catch that? Oh, no. No, of course not. That's too easy.
2. So we're generally charged with trying to call the guy that wants banana peppers and Dr Pepper, and nine times out of ten, he has ordered online because he's too baked to find his cell phone and has no freaking clue what we're trying to explain to him (if he has actually now managed to find his phone so that he even answers).
3. That, of course, is if we can tell him, since people who order online generally have a complete inability to correctly type their phone number.
4. Then, if we have managed to sort things out, the pricing is wrong because of the banana peppers, so the orderer will argue with us for ten minutes, insisting that the new price we're quoting him is wrong, and he's pissed anyway because we don't have banana peppers, and how was he suppposed to know that? (This is a perfectly valid complaint.) So he gets a discount.
5. Please note the above scenario is best case. Most online orders are much more like the time some lady ordered a supreme/combo/garbage/whatever you want to call it and then diligently clicked the "NO" button for every topping she didn't want...which left her with, I kid you not, a 17-dollar cheese pizza. Then she bitched about the price, insisting, "All I got was cheese!" I think the delivery driver is still in prison after embedding a quarter in her left eye.

My brain is about to explode from all the horrifying memories of these scenarios.

Summertime Blues...Red, Yellow, Green, Green, Fuck, Orange?

There's this disease I call lastnotitis. It's highly contagious, and generally begins with one person loudly muttering (can you loudly mutter?) "Fuck!" As the disease spreads, everyone else in the room simultaneously groans and doubles over while biting their lip.

If you didn't get the title, lastnotitis proliferates when somebody's playing Guitar Hero and they miss the very last note of the song. Variant forms include longnotitis, when they miss a ridiculously long note and stare blankly at the screen for the next fifteen seconds, swearing under their breath, and starpoweritis, when you hit every goddamn note of a star power sequence and miss the very last one.

On a related note, the star power sequences in "Paint It Black" are obscenely long.

I just started playing Guitar Hero again today, finally wresting MY PlayStation2 from my boyfriend's greedy GTA-obsessed hands. Two weeks ago, I played GH at a party for the first time in months, and so I have begun diligently tapping away in my attempt to beat GH3 at Medium. Small hands are a definite disadvantage, making Hard next to impossible--I can barely get at the blue key, let alone orange. And Lefty Flip my ass--it's a major issue. Guitar Hero does not work for lefties, as much as they'd like us to believe it does. Playing lefty, like I do, is a cool party trick, but it's impossible to play standing up with the standard strap and it makes using the whammy bar much more difficult.

Okay, I'm done. Arr rarr rarr.