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Papaya generally likes to nibble/bite Asma's calves and ankles, going back many weeks ago (if you remember the story about her ‘marking’ me, even before that). Recently, though, she's been at it more and on top of that, she's started to bite me as well.
We searched online for this behavior and a lot of sites pointed to her being in heat and being frustrated. So, we decided to get her spayed (it's good for her anyway, as bunnies are prone to ovarian cancer otherwise).
On Monday, we took her to Brookesville Veterinarian Clinic for an examination, and if everything looked good, they'd keep her overnight and spay her the next day.
The veterinarian was excellent, and she said that the main reason she kept biting our legs was because she liked us a lot; it was her way of showing us that we're hers. Aww. (She'll often plop herself into the ground when we pet her.)
I picked her up today after work and apartment-hunting (we've nearly got something nice). Papaya is recovering well, though she still seems out of it. She needs a drop of medicine for the next few nights, and her general lack of strength now (along with wrapping her with a shirt) makes her easier to hold.
Last night, Shirin found a Livestrong that Asma in turn found on campus many weeks ago.
I think Shirin should give it to Papaya.
Yesterday morning, boarding the plane from St. Louis to Washington, I saw a man that looked exactly like Biz Markie. I missed a chance to confirm this, but I still partly believe that it was really him. What I need to know for sure is whether he has a somewhat long scar along the left side of his face (near the chin and neck), and if his teeth are small.
Things going against him being the real deal is that he was flying coach (eh, not so much a factor; though if I had to travel early in the morning and was a legend and not broke, I would travel first class), and…he just seemed too much like a normal guy. But maybe he is just a normal guy.
I feel so sleep-deprived right now, especially my eyes.
I also cried on the plane as I left Springfield. The flight attendant was nice. I miss my family.
Song of the day: “Since U Been Gone/Maps” by Ted Leo
**Disclaimer: Before you guys dive into this post with the eagerness of a starving jackal, let me just warn you that I’m going to be writing about some gross stuff. Consider yourself warned**
I’m usually not one for sweeping statements, but I feel I can safely say that I work with some of the most disgusting people ever. It’s important to note that by “disgusting”, I’m not referring to physical appearance, (although there is a serious lack of attractive people at my job), instead I’m using the term “disgusting” in reference to serious lack of fucking hygiene.
For a while now, I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend in some of the bathrooms at work. At least once a week, I’ll walk into a stall only to be greeted by a toilet seat covered in urine. Let me be perfectly clear: this is fucking disgusting, and completely unacceptable. Without being specific, let me just say that I work in a “professional” office environment for a company in the top 150 of the Fortune 500 companies, and yet the bathrooms in my office building remind me of a port-o-potty at the state fair.
I’ve come across many disgusting sights/smells during my employ, most of which I'll spare you the details of. However, I find peeing on the toilet seat to be particularly repulsive to such a point that I can no longer remain silent. Now is the time to make a passive-aggressive stand!
Normally, toilet-seat-peeing is a sickening, yet faceless crime. One simply walks into a stall, looks down, and there it is. Last week, all of that changed. I walked into the bathroom, and all of the stalls were full. Just as I was about to leave, I heard the distinctive flush of an industrial strength toilet, followed by a stall door unlatching. A man who looked to be about 30 years old quickly hurried by and out the door. I’m not even sure if he washed his hands, but after what I was about to see, I would not be surprised to find that he did not. I looked down at the seat, and of course, there was piss everywhere. Not only that, there was piss on the ground around the toilet, and finally, there was piss ON THE TOILET PAPER!!
Now, I’m 99.9% sure that this was done by the guy that just walked out. I mean, who would walk into a stall in such condition and then proceed to actually use it? Obviously not me, because I walked right out of the bathroom, down a flight of stairs and all the way down a long corridor to the hidden bathroom that no one ever goes to. As for the toilet-seat pisser, he was able to escape by vanishing into the maze of cubicles. I’m still not sure if he’s working alone, or if he’s part of some sort of international urination ring. Either way, I know what you look like, you fucking bastard.
Walking around Best Buy, I hear a man call out to me; it is Andrew's dad. Not only that, but he said he was talking to Andrew on the phone.
So I take the phone and talk to Andrew, and he asks me if I want to go out and see the Illini game tonight. And I'm like, What? You're home?? The green Accord in the driveway is still yours and not Peter's???
When I get home, I make my way to Andrew's house and, sure enough, he's really there. And so we see each other for the first time in nearly seven months.
To think, if either his dad or I were not at Best Buy at the same time, we would've totally missed each other and yet only have been half a block away.
That is Andrew's cute dog, Audi [sp?]. There's an umlaut somewhere, I think. For however old she is, she still has a lot of energy, and wants a lot of attention.
I was watching National Geographic while jogging in the basement yesterday (I'm in Springfield, by the way: came Wednesday morning, leaving early tomorrow morning), and yesterday must've been some tribute to the sea, because many shows seemed to focus on the life aquatic. And I forget what was being said, but one creature was being described as ‘malignent’.
Now, normally I equate that to cancer and tumors, so I was wondering why that and benign were being used. I know that ‘mal’ usualy denotes something bad, and malignent and benign seem to share a similar structure (in the root and first suffix). It was at that point that I answered my own question, and came up with a similar relationship – malevolent :: benificent.
What a breakthrough.
Sea creatures are so strange. I wonder if we evolved from the sea animals, or if multiple strains of life took place once the model of sperm and egg was established? Maybe the first land animals went way, way back but they were only the size if thumb tacks for hundreds of millions of years before mutations kick in and they grew huge? I dunno.
Home is okay. A bit stressful. I wish Illinois was next to DC, then maybe I could be more at ease.
Things to get done now.
Oh, and I badly need a new job.
Song of the day: “Black and White Town� by the Doves
Thanks to working in the mortgage industry, I’ve developed a greater respect for the unbelievable power that comes along with having good credit than the average 23 year old might have. Without getting into the particulars, let’s just say that having good credit is truly the key to happiness or at least a significant amount of material possessions…and in America, is there really a difference between the two?
My first bad experience with credit was my junior year of college, courtesy of the nice folks at Cingular wireless. Well, it was mostly my fault for agreeing to a shitty cell plan that didn’t have long distance or free nationwide roaming. Safe to say, one $500 phone bill later, I had learned a valuable lesson. Actually, I didn’t learn my lesson until a few months later, when the collection agency tracked me down.
All of this brings me to last Monday, when I found myself applying for a Circuit City credit card. Imagine my surprise and amazement when I was approved for a $6,000 line of credit. I actually started laughing at the counter. And so, like any responsible person would do, I proceeded to buy a 50 inch television. Also, I don’t have a bed. Clearly, my priorities are straight.
One of last night's dreams was a bit quirky. I was going to a summer camp set in city block (with tall buildings along the road), yet beyond both sides of the streets, there were trees.
This camp was apparently run by an all-gay staff (I forget the name they gave themselves, but it was funny). This camp was not, however, just for gay people. Entirely families went there.
Well, I was there with Andrew, Arun, Derek, Nick, and Toby. At one point, Nick was getting a tarot card reading, except with some sort of cloth necklace. The tarot lady read off the signs, and they were all alliterations, which I thought was a big deal. Nick seemed upset about it, and even cried, because it was similar to a reading he had done a few years ago. Derek said something to me that made me laugh out loud, though I tried my hardest not to while Nick cried; Derek later apologized before that and thought he was being an ass at the time.
Another time, we (though I forgot who exactly was with me now) were supposed to go to another part of the camp, which we thought was across the street. The building was closed for the summer, though, and we wandered around empty hallways. We found an inhabited room, with junk food wrappings and soda bottles and cans littered about. There was a girl there who for whatever reason thought it was a good idea to live there while no one else did. Except that she hurt her leg and was in a wheelchair.
To each his or her or its own.
7011 pieces of spam since February 8, spanning 30 megs (not including attachments).
I think it's funny, even if it is no surprise, to see two men, from opposite directions with a Starbucks cup in their hands, walking past yet another Starbucks. Does it confuse their sense of direction?
Last night I had a dream which, at the time, I thought was based on a book I'd read several years ago. The basic story is that several kids from many different backgrounds come to one town for a special summer camp. One day, the electricity goes out, so the kids are told to wait in a warehouse for their safety until the power comes back.
Except that it doesn't. Time wears on and they start to get hostile towards each other. At some point they start to punish each other with death, and even get into cannibalism once the food starts to run low.
This isn't quite what happens in my dream; this is what I was telling myself while the dream was happening. All the actual actions weren't creepy or violent; just normal activities in an odd setting, or vice versa.
When I woke up from it, I thought to myself that it was similar to Lord of the Flies, which Asma also pointed out when I told her. But I was convinced that it was something else.
There was a part where this boy was waiting on a candy shipment from his parents, and he had to covertly get to the post office, because going out in the town was dangerous (all the kids later pigged out on the near-disastrous pick-up). I suppose that this segment of the dream is more reminescent of a zombie movie.
There were elements of a video game theme as well, but the details of that are a bit murky. Something about toilet paper sitting on a high fence post, which no one good jump to get unless they scrolled back earlier in the ‘stage’.
I was disappointed when I tried Googling for a book similar to the dream, and felt dumb when explaining it to Asma. Poop.
A few days ago, by accident, I stumbled onto Soldiers for Hire on The History Channel. I was pretty fascinated by it, considering I have some sort of soft spot for the idea of a mercenary (moreso that you could choose your fights).
What really got my attention, though, was a segment on Africa. It wasn't only the details they described and showed (fuck Iraq, if Africa is going to waste; but they don't have any power to pose a threat outside of the continent, so one cares to do anything). At the center of this segment was Executive Orders (EO), a private military company (PMC), headquartered in South Africa and comprised mostly of former South African Defense Force special ops.
Though they'd been around since the 80s, they started to get attention first when they were hired by the Angolan government to reclaim an oil refinery taken over by 1500 rebels. Whereas the entire Angolan army had failed, a unit of 60 EO ‘employees’ overtook the rebels and reclaimed the refinery for the government.
Impressive, right? Well, soon after that success, the government of Sierra Leone hired them to fight the Rebel United Front (RUF). The RUF started by taking over Freetown, and their tactics were brutal. EO came in with a force of about 300, and within a month they managed to push back the RUF and within three months have the country more or less secure.
This didn't go over well with the UN, because they apparently felt threatened that such a tiny force was doing their job more effectively. Of course, they said they were worried that private militaries with the power to overthrow a government was bad news. So, they forced Angola and Sierra Leone to cancel their contracts with EO. EO warned of bad things to come.
What happened? Nearly 18000 UN troops took over peacekeeping duties in Sierra Leone. Within 100 days, the RUF began its attacks again, taking 500 peacekeepers hostage.
Sigh.
And when things started escalating again in Rwanda, a fleeting idea of the UN's to hire EO was squashed.
I understand the worry of a private group being highly effective and taking control of a country, but at the expense of letting millions of civilians over the years getting tortured and raped and murdered while no other country steps in? And if that was EO's intention to take over, why haven't they done so? They clearly had the power and tactics to take over the governments that hired them.
(The publicity EO received turned out to be bad, because, among other things, they were portrayed as being murderous westerners despite their Sierra Leone force consisting of around 80% black Africans; not much attention was paid by the public in their actual accomplishments. There are also rumors that they're linked to DeBeers.)
Oh well. War is complex and my analysis is simple.
Anyway, I just thought the whole UN thing was ridiculous, and now I'm starting to think Bush had some pretty dumb wisdom in going against them, if they're capable of stopping the spread of peace in Africa.
I finished watching the show on tape this morning. PMCs are playing a big part in Iraq right now, so when you here of contractors dying, there's a good chance that they were armed and on the frontline with American troops. Three cheers for Kellogg Brown & Root.
Gotta get to work.
Song of the day: “Filet O’ Fish Fridays� by ???
I’m too lazy to verify this, but this might be the first time that the song of the day is the main topic of my entire post. For the past few weeks, usually on the morning drive to work, I’ve been hearing this song on the radio, and for some reason, I love it. The song, of course, is an advertisement for McDonald’s Filet O’ Fish, and I don’t think any amount of singing could ever get me to eat one, but I’m not factoring this in to my love for the song. [Note: I just Googled the term “filet o’ fish Friday song�, while I did get several hits for the filet o’ fish itself, nothing for the actual song. Perhaps this post will be the first. Although who else would really search for that phrase on Google?]
Since I’m not sure if this advertisement is on the radio anywhere besides the LA market, I’ll go ahead and describe the roughly 45 seconds of pure musical pleasure that is the “Filet O’ Fish� song. The song has a definite disco/dance quality to it, and in fact it sounds vaguely like “YMCA� by the Village People, except the chorus is “Filet O’ Fish Friday!� I promise that this has to be one of the catchiest commercial songs ever. It’s certainly the best song ever made about McDonald’s Filet O’ Fish.
I’m sure most of you probably heard a while back the Hey Mercedes is breaking up, and just today I heard that the Get Up Kids are calling it quits after one last farewell tour. I was a fan of both of these bands, and I am definitely bummed to hear that they are no more. I owe my knowledge of GUK to Lance Robbins, who introduced me to their critically acclaimed 1999 album “Something to Write Home About� during senior year of high school. GUK put out 2 more albums of new material after that album, but both failed to propel them to the commercial success that seemed certain after STWHA. While I don’t know the details of the break-up, I’m sure that 10 years of not-quite-making-the-big-time has to take its toll on a group.
Sorry for the long delay since the last post.
Ps. thank you again for the great time. You know who you are...I think.
I spilled tea onto my desk twice this afternoon.
Once, I set the cup (the cap of a Thermos thermos) down stupidly, wherefore the cup lost its balance.
Twice, I was putting the cap back on, not realizing that there was some tea left.
I have pooped three times today, and feel like a fourth one coming. It might be a new form of diarrhea (not so much in its consistency, but in its frequency over the span of an entire day). Not all of us were safe from Subway, after all.
Moby Dick tonight, exercise tomorrow.
This morning on NPR they played an excerpt of Clutch's ‘Swamp Boat Upside Down’, which shocked and happied me.
My dad is fond of clichéd expressions.
We are going to have chinchilla babies someday. They will be the most adorable creatures in existence.
Yeah, we've got tickets to see him in Philadelphia on May 18.
Also, Papaya loves to shred newspaper. A couple of nights ago she burrowed herself into a pile of Asma's clothes. So precious.
I want to build her a new cage so that she has more room to run around, and, ideally, a place/thing for her to burrow into.
Also, the film version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a great injustice to the book. I was irked enough by The Two Towers, though that's grown on me much more since I first saw it. I understand the need to adapt something for Hollywood, but the success of the first two movies clearly showed them that they didn't need to go so far from the book.
The special effects are vastly improved (and I want a Hippogriff much more now), but there were far too many changes that didn't need to be (for instance, when Harry was originally in Hogsmeade, he made an effort to not bump into people with his invisibility cloak, whereas the movie has him acting like a total asshole, pushing over a group of singing children) and there was scarce development of the plot as far as key details about why things are happening (but of course, there's the book to fill in the gaping holes in the movie).
In short, I dislike Alfonso Cuarón. I have serious doubts about Goblet of Fire now.
My cellphone literally died on me just a few seconds ago while I was playing Snake. I've had the battery meter down to one bar many times before (sometimes for over 12 hours).
And I've just now realized that my battery's capacity has lowered significantly in the past few weeks: it was at two bars when I got to work, not six hours have passed, and I haven't talked to anyone on it, when poop, it flashes ‘Recharge Battery’ and shuts off.
Sigh.
I hope to do this as simply as possible, having borrowed some methodology from someplace which I cannot remember (possibly West Wing):
0. You shall not worship any other god but YHWH.
1. You shall not make a graven image.
2. You shall not take the name of YHWH in vain.
3. You shall not break the Sabbath.
4. You shall not dishonor your parents.
5. You shall not murder.
6. You shall not commit adultery.
7. You shall not steal.
8. You shall not commit perjury.
9. You shall not covet. The Torah, God, as revealed to Moses
Now, which of the 0-indexed commandments are enforceable by law? 5, 7, and 8 have any clear recourse; 6, if either side pushes for a divorce (no love given to unmarried couples, save through Judge Wapner and his descendants).
What, then, is the reason for even displaying the ten commandments if more than half are not governable laws?
And for the ones that are governable, what is so fundamentally ‘Christian’ (really, Judeaic) about saying you can't murder, steal, or lie? Are they really promoting the idea that no other culture or religion in this world has similar basic morals?
And when judgements are passed, to what verses in any scripture are they citing as reason?
Really, it's stupid to put these up in any court, and stupider to defend it. By displaying this in a public court, they are advocating a specific set of religious doctrines.
Why not display the Code of Hammurabi instead? At least it deals strictly with the day-to-day actions of people. Or if you insist on the ten commandments, at least display excerpts of law-related passages from other religious texts. It's only fair.
(It also sends the message that, no, we're not really dipshits and are aware that every culture has a set of morals and we wish to show that we draw upon wisdom from all in making judgements (even if some laws are terribly flawed and need major changes to reflect common sense) because not everyone believes in Moses.)
¶ The birds have started chirping since yesterday. Bye bye, cold. Please bring, with spring, the ability to control one's body and mind; or else, Kaiser will feel poo.
Asma and I went to New York City last Thursday. It was a long-planned trip, as Tori Amos was doing a performance and a talk about her new album and book. Asma just happened to be at the computer several months ago when what turned out to be an administrative error on the ticketing site opened the tickets for sale for around 15 minutes. (Tori fans have this sickth sense, along with a large and highly effective news/rumor network.)
We took a Chinatown bus, since it was by far the cheapest way to travel. My only main concern with that form of travel now: the trip there had a no-flush toilet, no toilet paper, and no sink; the trip back had a ground toilet with a disgusting looking bathroom floor. Make sure you can hold your poop and pee until the pitstop.
Now, I haven't been to New York in six years, and Asma hasn't been there in twelve. Our memories before were favorable, but we were disappointed when we came into the city. Old, worn out, dirty. Parking at $12 per half hour. DC is so much better. At least this put a smile on our faces:
The grim reality of crime fighting even made us laugh. Silly police vehicle bumper stickers:
Christine was kind enough to let us stay for the night, so we dropped our stuff off in her room and all three of us went out for Vietnamese. And while they loved their dishes, I regretted reading the menu of my noodle bowl of beef ‘tendons’ as ‘tenderloins’.
Ah welll. Christine departed and we took the subway to see Tori.
The subway is dirty. It's also a bit claustrophobic.
This is, of course,in comparison to DC's Metro. And while the environment is not entirely welcoming in scenery and attitude (a guy was yelling at me – What the fuck you looking at?! – while I was exiting a car once, and I didn't even know he was on the car until he started yelling. Asshole. There were also loud, drunk 14-year-olds drinking openly), the subway runs 24 hours. And it goes everywhere. That kind of makes up for things?
The subway cars are also littered with advertisements, which Metro should take into consideration if it needs revenue boosts. I found this particular advertisement interesting, because it might be the only city in America to partially advertise in Bengali (top left):
Transliteration: ingreji shikun. So this ‘Learn English’ center must have idiots if they couldn't spell ingleshi. Learn Engrij, that's what they're saying.
But back to Tori, the weirdo. She didn't play because of some acoustic problems which they announced several weeks ago, unbeknownst to us. Her talk was interesting, even if I was falling asleep (had a slight cold and not enough sleep). She was thus extremely meandering and hard to follow. But even at my most awake points, she sometimes started referring to things that were never introduced earlier in her response to a question or comment. So it's not just me being overwhelmed with her whimsyness. A condensed, non-verbatim example of how she creates a song:
I paint on sound canvases, you know, and try to draw in the essence of the colors, and, and, it's this sense of profoundness in seeing the pitter-patter of air around butterfly wingsamp;amp;hellip; My daughter came up to me and said she wanted mommy, not Tori Amos, and I told her Tori buys the dolls, but, you know, once I was on a ship, listening to the rocking and the waves, picking up patterns: dub-dub, dub-dub, dub-dub splooge, dub-dub splooge clap, dub-dub splooge splooge clap giggle splooge dub-dub, and it evolved into amp;amp;lsquo;Gracie's Mayflower Cocktail Partyamp;amp;rsquo;. But there's this whoosh! and you feel like all your sexuality just bursts out andamp;amp;hellip;I paint on sound canvases with a sonic palette.
That was all Thursday, minus the belligerent black man on the subway.
Friday was geared towards some wandering. Asma and I go breakfast at Dizzy Izzy's. They serve the worst mochas on the planet – a $3 cup of vending machine-dispensed cappucino with some extra steamed milk and chocolate syrup. Blech.
Asma pointed out the skyline a few times, alluding to the absense of the World Trade Center (I, of course, played dumb). I don't really remember the magnitude of the towers, even if I did walk around the outside six years ago, but it was strange to realize that there really weren't any giants standing out in the city.
Our walk through SoHo and Greenwich Village ended after a few hours when we went back to meet Christine at her dorm, having discovered the following:
It wasn't a retarded name for a parking garage, unfortunately, but it was a very nice gourmet grocery. I had my first blood orange. Horribly, horribly named. Someone was amused, though. Cutie.
That's just awesome.
They still exist.
I also had a tasty mocha at French Roast to make up for the $3 I'll never get back. The waiter was displeased to find out that we just wanted a mocha to go. He directed us to the bar.
The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent either around 5th Avenue. Yes, we saw the Ga[y]tes in Central Park, and went into Prada with the most stylish bathroom I'd ever seen, though it wasn't well kept, probably because the salespeople are too good to do that work. There was also a store with luscious orange windowing, whose name I didn't catch.
And, I was a peeping tom at the sculpture park in the contempo art museum.
We hopped on the subway to West Village, where we bought famous Magnolia Bakery cupcakes, as fame-ified on Sex and the City. About a block or two up the street from the bakery, Asma was like, ‘Kaiser, did you see who that was???’, to which I replied, ‘No’.
It was Sarah Jessica Parker who, having seen Asma's star-struck face, quickly turned away and kept walking. For a tiny human being, she walks damn fast. You could tell from the back, though, that it was her. Her big purple coat and pulled up hair were of SATC caliber.
We ended the outing at a fantastic Italian restaurant called Bianca. Having suffered a stuffy nose most of the night and day, I missed the smells, good or bad. But my taste was almost intact. I don't enjoy holding my breath while eating, though. Gives the act of dinner a sense of urgency in chewing.
As a grand finale, I knocked over a wine glass partially filled with red wine. Partly because I was tired, partly because the bus would be leaving soon (we ran for our life in the end, thinking we'd be stranded in New York because we got to the bus stop late.)
Overall, my dreams for living in that city have been shattered. It's unclean, considering that my nails got dirty twice just from having them exposed to the air. A little too busy and uninviting as well.
But they have hundreds more restaurants than DC, and ways to get around at any time of the day, and much more that we've yet to see. So it'll remain a spot to visit in the warmer days. The slushy and brown snow does nothing for its image.
Thus ends my tale, which I'm not happy in the retelling of. But that's what you get for being impatient in the posting of things.
Oh, and we survived the snowstorm of the century yesterday: a crippling 1" in Takoma Park!
