Res ipsa loquitur

So my lovable puppylike ninth-grade boyfriend just got in touch on Facebook. He's living on a farm some miles outside our hometown, and his only neighbor is ... my pharmaceutically enhanced yet endearingly goofy twelfth-grade boyfriend.

If they could get Wonder If He Knows He's Gay Yet and Epic Love, Epic Daddy Issues out there, it would be a whole little colony of my teenage mistakes.

The spouse once said to me, "I don't know why your parents are always so nice to me," and I said, "That's because you haven't met the boys that I could have ended up with."

(It's a favorite of my father, who shares the trait.)

A guy takes a job at a bank. The first day, his superivisor hands him a bundle of bills. "There ought to be a hundred in this stack. I need you to count and make sure."

The guy starts counting. "One ... two ... three ... four ... five ... six ... seven ..." Then he hands the stack back to his supervisor. "If it's right so far, I'm sure it's right all the way through."

Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions.

( Read more... )

I was tempted to do that meme where I ask you all about your impressions of me as a writer, except that I figure there's nobody out there who's half as fascinated by my writing as I am. So, taking my cue from godofwine, I'll give you my list of the telltale signs that you're reading a Res story:

( Telltale Signs )

Also, last night I dreamed I was playing bingo with pirates, so clearly my life is lacking in excitement.

Root canal was today. The plan of listening to books on the iPod fell through -- the process is just noisy enough to drown out key bits of plot -- but I was happy to have my music with me.

They put a waterproof thing in my mouth to isolate the area they were working on, presumably so that I wouldn't get little fragments of tooth all over my tongue. I haven't had a mouthful of latex since I was single. The flavor has not improved any.*

It was a little unnerving to see smoke curling up out of my mouth, but it wasn't actually painful. Yet. Ask me when the numbness wears off. For the moment I'm more troubled by drool than anything else.

* I said this to the spouse when I got home and he stopped dead in his tracks with shock. Then he said, "I started to ask you, 'What kind of debauchery were you getting up to, anyway?' and then I remembered that you were getting up to it with me."

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Also, randomly: Our local newspaper's headline about Harriet Miers' appointment said: "Female appointed to Supreme Court."

This is either an appallingly bad headline, or a very good one, in that they've pinpointed her one and only qualification.

Hey, why not. Here's a meme last seen chez darthfox:

Ask me for "top five" lists of pretty much anything, and I will list you my top five of that thing or things.

Note that if you ask for something that requires any knowledge of pop culture that can't be gleaned from reading slash, I'm likely to disappoint, as I'm sadly out of touch with my own culture.

I think I first saw this chez stresskitten.

Ten things I've done that you probably haven't.

1. Interviewed the state beekeeper of West Virginia

2. Been bitten by a snake

3. Ridden with Santa Claus in the Christmas parade

4. Spent the night sleeping on a staircase landing. With four other people.

5. Had a job cleaning bathrooms at a kindergarten.

6. Been a personal organizer for bored rich women.

7. Been polygraphed.

8. Seen a bear cub in the wild.

9. Eaten pickled pigs' feet.

10. Held a cat as she died.

The original sci-fi erotica I'm writing for dementordelta (which I'm now thinking of as "the pouch porn") is getting a lovely polka of a beta, and I'm psyched to do a second draft tomorrow. I'm all excited about it.

In other news, I'm somewhat freaked out because without planning to at all, I went and told my best friend I'm bisexual. This is not a confession I routinely make, in the nonvirtual world -- the spouse knows, but I don't share it freely -- but it came up in conversation, and there was this moment where really my choice was to lie out loud with words ("Oh, yeah, I don't get that either") or to tell the truth.

It was terrifying.

She ... says I'm wrong. "You're not, really," she says.

This is reassuringly normal for her, actually, so my eye-rolling is much softened by relief. However, I still spent the rest of the afternoon feeling strangely freaked out. Guilty, actually, as if I'd done something wrong.

I think I don't tell the truth enough. I need more practice.

Very interesting questions offered by ellen_fremedon.

I think the way this thing works is, if you want me to interview you, comment me and I'll answer you with questions.

1.) What's one book that you always wanted to like more than you did? Why do you think you couldn't get into it?

Three for one: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. All these people whose taste I admire keep recommending it to me. I made it about halfway through Book Two and then just gave up.

I've complained about this elsewhere. The ideas are incredibly original, but the writing is often so sketchy that it's more like an outline. There's very little support for why characters do or say what they do.

2.) Describe an item of clothing that you no longer own, but that you loved to wear.

Ooh! In college I had this gorgeous sweater-vest. It was wool, but it felt like cashmere, in this grayed-down shade of purple that went with a surprising number of my clothes. Very comforting. I used to wear it over a white T-shirt. (Hey, it was the eighties.)

Alas, it was a casualty of my slobbiness -- first it got bleached out with a big toothpaste spot right over one boob, and then I caught it on a nail and ripped it.

3.) What's the best compliment anyone has ever given you?

thinks I'm sure people have given me good compliments, but my favorite thing to hear is, "Yes! That's it exactly!"

4.) When was the last time you sang in public?

If you mean performed, last Sunday, with the choir. (Did you know that if you sing the word "holy" forty-six times, it begins to lose all meaning?) If you mean "sang where other people could hear you," I was singing Paul McCartney's "Just Another Day" in the gym shower this morning.

5.) If you had to live the rest of your life without committing one deadly sin, which one would you find it the easiest to avoid?

Whoa. Not sloth, that's for sure ... Not gluttony ... On the surface it may look like I'm trying to live a life without anger, but in fact that probably means I'm more prone to it than most people ...

Actually, odd as it may seem, I might find it easiest to give up lust.