Goldfrank's Toxicologic Emergencies

Today's title is the name of the book my monitor is resting on. I bought it from the medical library for a dollar, along with what the entire Collective agrees is the funniest book they've ever seen. I'm too lazy to actually get up and go find out what the real title is, but we're calling it The Book of Unhappy Children. It's about the physical signs of seasonal allergies in children.

So it's a lot of pictures of children with stuffy noses and sinus headaches glaring at the camera.

We look at it when we need a schadenfreudic boost.

I'm on my way to bed, because I discovered that I was too tired to play SWTOR, and that means that I'm practically dead, but I wanted to share this with you. It's absolutely, 100% the most helpful book review in the history of book reviews. It really influenced my decision on whether or not to throw down the $2.99 on the Kindle edition of the book. I've copied and pasted it in its entirety here. Uncut, totally unedited.

Are you ready for this? It's super insightful. It's extremely honest. It will truly help you decide whether or not this book is worth reading.

"It's good, but I've read better."

I learned how to peel a clove of garlic in 10 seconds. 10 second to peel the clove. Not 10 seconds to learn.

Following yesterday's realization of HOLY CRAP ONLY 45 DAYS UNTIL RACE DAY! I am now thinking, "Wait... 45 days is a lot of time. A lot of runs. A lot of stuff that's going to happen between now and then and panicking? Not helpful."

The closer I get to this thing, the calmer and more in control of it I feel. The marathon is happening. I'm training, I feel pretty good, and I'm gonna be fine.

Funny stories for today....

I went out for a run with The One Who Makes Me Seem Inadequate By Comparison (But Who Is Really Nice So Just Deal With It) after class, and since it's all about-to-be-winter, it was dark way before we were done. I actually really like night running as long as I don't feel like I might be chased by bears.

But the point here is, that when I got back from my run, I walked into the Collective House and was hit by the most goddawful smell of my entire life. I rounded the corner to the kitchen, opened my mouth, and before I could say anything, Catface Meowmers said, "The microwave caught fire. Save you asking."

The Collective House was built in the fifties, and had a microwave-over-stove thing happening which we didn't question, and apparently it caught fire, with smoke and actual flames. So like rational adults, members of the Collective tried to cut the power to it. Only to find - this is my favorite part - there was no breaker for it. The Bearcat-Catbear turned off every breaker on the panel, and they stood in complete darkness... save for the comforting glow of the microwave.

So then the next option was "Take the microwave down and just unplug it." So with some grunting, and some cursing, and some powertools, the UberTransFan got it down to the stove, we clapped and cheered, happy in the knowledge that we would not die in our sleep, except...

It was wired directly into the wall. No plug. Just some as-previously-established LIVE wires, coming out of the wall and into the back of the microwave.

Luckily we know a JOAT with electrical skills, and he happens to be a nice enough guy to come and help us. We gave him money and dinner and the general Collective consensus is that he's our hero.

And then this morning I got my haircut, and I have to live with everyone's faces for a couple of days until they realize that the words "You have to give it a few days to figure itself out" aren't just things I'm saying, it's true. I think it has something to do with the combination of blowdrying and those rolly-brushes that Chris always uses. I mean, I'm not one to question her expertise - I mean, I call them rolly-brushes and I'm sure they have a name - but my hair doesn't look good when you do that.

I can't wait till it gets a bit cooler. I'm so ready for my fall/winter wardrobe. Leather jackets. Scarves. Knit hats. My apple hat has been calling to me for months. Soon I will be able to answer its call.

But for now, time to go talk about Marxist criticism some more. No, not criticize things Marxistly. Actually talk about Marxist criticism. This semester is drastically changing the way I read, between Critical Analysis in the Study of Literature and Writing Fiction Workshops.

Is it called forgetting if you remembered earlier and decided to forget again?

I was up at 6:22AM to write a paper discussing why Tennyson's Maud was a monodrama and not a dramatic monologue. I did this by referring back to Ulysses, for contrast and also because I really love me some Ulysses. I really love Tennyson in general but, yeah, Ulysses is fun for me.

Not that it makes that much of a fun difference to your morning, but this is my favorite part of the essay:

"The distinction between monodrama and dramatic monologue is important here because Tennyson is also famously the author of what could arguably be the first true dramatic monologue: Ulysses. The difference lies in the narrators and the span of time they are addressing the audience. Ulysses is notably shorter and covers a limited span of time, a single moment of the narrator addressing his audience, even though he speaks of both the past and the future. In contrast, Maud is so expansive that it spans multiple days and, indeed, multiple styles. The tone swoops high into the operatic free verse of Ulysses and then fits itself neurotically into tight, rigid rhyme schemes and still seems barely able to adapt to the twisting mental landscape of the speaker."

Not that it's spectacular writing - or even particularly good writing - it's just that it's early in the morning and I totally-not-on-purpose-forgot that it was due so I could go to Target with the Collective and by the Little Monster some fake food for her new fake kitchen.

I found the best Halloween costume ever while I was there. The early morning wake-up is entirely justified by this picture:

I would have purchased it except that it was $30 and also meant for a toddler. Okay, so the only deciding factor was that it was $30. I'm still convinced that I'll find it online for cheaper than that. That's the problem with being an internet maven. You're always going to be convinced that, whatever it is, you can find it cheaper online.

I did buy a new hat, though. It's been a while since I had a fedora.

This morning's essay partially brought to you by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!, which I totally stole from the Beebe house last time I was petsitting for them. Video prominently featuring a powerful case of Nick Cave's porn star mustache.

"Like trying to reheat tater tots in the microwave. It doesn't work."

Something odd happened today. I hit the wall with Chaucer.

I love The Canterbury Tales. A lot. But today's reading was the Monk's Tale, and I pulled a total "tl:dr." That stands for "too long: didn't read," and is used in chat forums during debates and heated discussions. A person will post what's known as a "wall of text," maybe a very well-reasoned response, and someone will respond with, "tl:dr." It's a really snippy way of saying, "Bored now. Shut up. I don't care if you're right (and I pulled this move because you probably are)."

The Monk's Tale hits you will this Wall of Text about how the mighty fall. It's well-written and I understand the point, I think, which is that God - it's always God in Medieval Literature - has set up the Rules of The Game so that everything is fair, and that means that bad things happen to good people sometimes.

But seventeen examples was a bit too much for my brain. When I skipped to the end and saw that the Knight - the noblest and therefore most proper person in the party - interrupts him with a, "For the love of all things, please just stop it," I felt vindicated.

This is Goldfrapp, off of their third album and the third single from that album. It's my favorite Goldfrapp song. I thought of it because sometimes I think Goldfrapp goes on a bit too long, even though they're very good.

The Roommate Question

In the span of time The Roommate slept this morning, I have:

1. Woken up

2. Fed cats, made coffee, cleaned the litter box, packed up my weekend bag and gotten ready to leave the house.

3. Gotten back to the dorm, restarted my computer, fed my fish, located and posted the song of the day.

4. Gone to breakfast, listened to half a Car Talk while eating breakfast, returned to the dorm.

5. Studied for my English Literature In Transition exam.

6. Run 10 miles at an easy pace.

7. Taken a shower.

8. Eaten lunch (previously procured so as to have more study time).

9. Left for my ELT exam at 1:30pm (I'm posting this half an hour in advance but I very much doubt she'll move before then)

I feel it should be noted that I'm not a particularly industrious person. In fact, there are a lot of things that need doing that I have not done as of yet. Like, clean my room. Make things to sell on Etsy.

When I say, "My Roommate is always sleeping," I really mean, "My Roommate is ALWAYS SLEEPING." I try to make as little noise as possible before noon, but after a while I have to make a choice between living and allowing her to keep sleeping. I had to borrow a pair of old school headphones from The Librarian because I was wearing earbuds so often my ears started hurting.

So The Roommate Question, like The Woman Question of post-Victorian England, is actually a complex, multi-faceted series of questions, perhaps without answers, encompassing things such as, "When does she go to class? When does she eat? What does she eat? When does she go to the bathroom?" I've never seen her shower, but the room doesn't smell, so she must be showering. She apparently hasn't failed out of classes, but when does she have time to study, with all the sleeping that she has to get done? She goes to sleep around the same time as me - 10 or 11. Sometimes when I get in bed, she goes to sleep so immediately afterwards that I know she's been waiting for me to turn off the light.

In many regards, she's an ideal Roommate. We're not friends; we've had a total of 4 conversations and I can relate all of them to you, word for word. (One of them goes like this: "It's raining." "Oh. Well, I'll need an umbrella, then." "Yup." "Thanks." "Yup.") She doesn't care where I go, what I'm doing, or whether or not I'm home for dinner. She doesn't know my parents and she doesn't know my girlfriend and she doesn't care to find out. I similarly do not care about her business, save for the one Question, and at this point it's more of a scientific curiosity than anything.

I simply do not understand how a person can sleep so much.

-

In other news, in about an hour I'm going to be writing a master of an essay about the relationship between Everard Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn in George Gissing's The Odd Women. I'm calling it "In Defense of Everard Barfoot" at the challenge of the professor, and I'm going to try and prove that Everard actually does fall in love with Rhoda.

The Odd Women is a nice little novel about the New Woman. I'd recommend it but not to the extent of suggesting you abandon your current reading material to pick it up. It starts out plodding and didactic and it really takes you a while to get invested in the characters; when you're reading for pleasure you shouldn't have to struggle for more than ten or fifteen pages.

One day I'll read for pleasure, and it will be glorious.

You're like a puppy. It's so sad.

My usual lone ranger running route takes me right past a house my brother used to live in. He doesn't live there anymore, obviously, but I'll still always think, when passing it, "I wonder if my brother is home."

When he lost his place in that house, he decided that he wasn't going to give his landlord the satisfaction (read: have the decency) of leaving it entirely clean and devoid of his presence. So he left quite a lot of stuff that, in his opinion, he did not need.

Much of it was the kitchen stuff my parents had been kind enough to buy for him. I'd roll my eyes and say nevermind that, but it's the point of the story, which is that a week or so after he moved, I ran past his old house and the trashcan was overflowing with his old stuff. So much so that there were bits and pieces of it all over the yard.

And sitting on the grass getting trampled was a potholder that I remembered being in my mom's kitchen since I was really little, a patchwork job with Mother Goose on it.

I ran past - you can't really carry things, and it was in the dirt, and I didn't want to stop, and what if someone saw me picking it up, and and and....

But today, while I was busting my ass trying to get home in time to meet a friend, something made me stop. Turn around. And pick up my mom's potholder.

It's Mother Goose.

In a roundabout, I-was-already-thinking-about-it-kind-of-way, it made me think about heroes. Childhood heroes and adult heroes (which we call 'role models') and the things that keep them with us.

My professor today was talking about how Frederick Douglass had a voice like James Earl Jones, and that got us on the subject of Darth Vader, which meant we got to hear this story:
"So, we all went to the mall because they had the Batmobile there, and we wanted to see the Batmobile. And there were all these kids there... so the Batmobile pulls up and the doors opened and... Batman had gained a lot of weight and Robin looked like a thug. And then all the kids were chanting, 'Batman, Batman!' but it turned into 'Fatman, Fatman!' and Robin started a brawl."

I never really admired superheroes as a kid. I mean, I loved them but I never really idolized them. In fact, my first hero was Theodore Roosevelt.

No kidding. Teddy Roosevelt was the man. Look him up some time. The guy was a for real cowboy, and basically an all-around adventure man who just happened to be in politics. When William McKinley was assasinated, they couldn't find TR for two days to tell him he was president because dude was camping in the wilderness.

And look at this mustache.


Tell me that's not the face of a man you only wish you were.

Good ideas I have had: 'Put the Thin Mints in the freezer.'

I got one of my exams back, and I was reading over my essay, and I came to this section:

"To please the character of Lord Henry, I'll insert an aphorism here:"

And that was when I realized that my essay was a pretentious bastard. Luckily it was on Oscar Wilde, so it probably just came across as thematic.

I'm developing a theory that Girl Scout Cookies are actually part of some secret plot by the Girl Scouts to take over the world and make us all their macramé-braiding slaves. I think I could probably eat a whole box of Thin Mints in one day if I didn't restrict myself to one serving size at a time, and since you can only get them once a year, for the other 364 days I'm a slobbering idiot jonesing for my crispy, minty, chocolaty fix. It's evil, I tell you. Deliciously, deliciously evil.

And I'm not even talking to the box of 'Lemonades' I was bullied into buying. I wanted my lemon creme sandwich cookies, but was informed that those no longer existed, and I had to have these instead. I'm suspicious of them and they thus far remain unopened. I mean, they have lemon slices stamped on them. It doesn't seem right.

They stopped making these square cookies with animals on them that were dipped in fudge on one side, and this is truly tragic. I wanted them. I wanted to nibble all around the edges and then try to cut out the giraffes with my teeth and lord them over regular animal crackers. (Which everyone knows are really cookies so why perpetuate the lies? I'm suddenly nostalgic for those little animals covered in white frosting and sprinkles. Do they call those 'crackers' too?)

According to my NYTimes feed, it's possible that pretty soon I'll be one step further away from being a second class citizen. That's exciting, and would merit a lot more discussion from me, but I have Thin Mints, which thanks to my brilliant notion of sticking them in the freezer, are no longer melting in the bipolar climate control of my dormitory.

See, it's not like I want to get married. It's that I don't like being told that I can't get married, like I can't serve openly in the military. It's someone else telling me that I'm not good enough.

You know what would be great? Thin Mint ice cream sandwiches.

I have "Can't Live (If Living Is Without You)" stuck in my head.

But no worries - that's not going to be the song of the day. It's just to give you an idea of the kind of pressure I'm under while I write this. It's hard to think thoughts while Mariah Carey is belting in your ears.

My legs are sore from yesterday - The Librarian warned me the course we were running had lots of hills, but of course I was sitting at my desk at the time, and sitting at your desk makes all things seem just as easy. "Ten miles of hills - psh. I'm sitting still right now. How much harder can it be to run ten miles of hills below an 8:30 pace?" Because I'm a running asshole, even to myself. Tonight's run from the store is six miles, then tomorrow I'm not running at all (I'll probably go bike at the gym for a while), so I'm not terribly concerned about my quads. I'm more concerned as to whether or not my tights will be dry by the time I have to put them on again.

Today I wrote an essay contrasting the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale with the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, and their various messages about what makes a good marriage, and What Is A Good Wife, and What Do Women Want. My thesis was that Chaucer wrote these two entirely opposite viewpoints - give the women all the power versus give the women none of the power - to basically say, you know, "I don't know; do whatever the fuck works for you. Books can't tell you how to live, not even mine."

None of that means anything to any of you, but I was pretty proud of it, considering that I had to write it in 30 minutes in pen. Obviously I cleaned up my language for the professor. She has a doctorate, after all. Though she likes the Twilight movies, so it's hard to make that mean something. Today in American Lit, the girl next to me had a Twilight bookmark in her copy of Norton's Anthology, and Tedward's stupid eyes were watching me, I swear.

Anyone who uses a Twilight bookmark in Norton's Anthology is probably not going to be reading that anthology with much comprehension, in my opinion. It's like saying that Miley Cyrus is better than Cyndi Lauper. You can't have heard much Cyndi Lauper to make a statement like that.

Brom Bones wouldn't even need a pumpkin to drive Tedward's glittering buttocks out of Sleepy Hollow, 's all I'm saying.

Something I should analyze more closely...

...is the fact that I like myself better running than I do when I'm sitting still.

I mean, it's not that I *dislike* myself at any given moment. I just like the way I feel, as a whole community of atoms and DNA and body parts and grey matter, when all of us are concentrated on running. Running is a total body experience and there aren't many things that are like for me. It may come as a shock to you, but I tend to be a little ADD. Multi-tasking, they call it these days.

Like, I'm writing this, and listening to songs to figure out what to post to here today, and watching the clock because I have to leave here at about 4:30 to run 4 miles and be at The Librarian's house in time to catch a ride to track.

I'm not gonna be doing a track workout today, but I want to hang out with my running friends, who are doing track, so I'm running 4 miles before and I'll just tool around the track for at least 3 miles and then go to dinner with everybody. I'm holding myself back from speed work until I'm more used to skating. I don't think my legs can get used to both at once, as my knee injury can attest.

I don't understand what Glee's producers think Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" is about, but I'm pretty sure this is like in my Chaucer class, when I'm sitting there holding my breath trying not to blurt out, "SEX! Chaucer is talking about SEX!" and the Professor is like, "God, someone please say 'sex' so I don't have to," and everyone else in the class is like, "Um... the birds are chirping?"

Oh, good. Time to run!