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Random Thoughts
Posted to %afda by pieceoftheuniverse on 4th December 2000
Trine wrote:
>
> Oooooh, I'm bored.
Is it because you're bored that you've come to see me?
> I've read all the posts here now (and no comments about me not having a
> life, please),
You don't have a life, please. Or not.
> or at least everything from the last week or so, which is all
> my pc will allow me, for some reason.
>
> SOMEONE PLEASE ENTERTAIN ME!!!!!!
I could send you every post I received from the week before going back at least 'till September (which, oddly, is where everything comes to a grinding halt. Hmmm. Perhaps I didn't exist before then, and I only thought I was), but that might be a bit too much for your mail server to bear. That, and I don't feel like it.
> Tell me more about yourself/selves, or something.
That's a very dangerous request, you know, especially to be made of me. I would ask you not to say that again.
> Anything.
Really. I'm not kidding. There's no stopping the insanity once it is unleashed, or at least not until it's done untying the leash from the doorknob and exhausted itself by running around the froup for a while. Don't ask again unless you seriously want to leave your brain on auto-pilot for an hour.
> Please.....
Well, alright. Just this once. But no complaints! If the insanity is too much you'll just have to deal.
I've always wondered about pianos. Pianos seem to me to be the type of device that only a madman would possibly come up with, save for the odd sort who thinks of these kind of things and then goes out and gets a patent before he's completely understood the notion himself. I've looked inside of pianos, and they seem very strange indeed. A bunch of tiny little hammers knocking on little bits of twine twirled around something roughly undefinable, assumingly connected to something that helps the noise get out properly. Perhaps my main problem with pianos is that I can't play a single tune. Oh, I used to be able to pound out "Mary Had A Little Lamb" on occasion, but that was brought to a swift halt when I was found singing words completely inappropriate to the true nature of the song -- we won't go into details, but it involved some of the more interesting sexual innuendo having to do with sheep. And let's just say that Mary was experimenting, and maybe I've said too much already. Actually, I've never understood the fascination with sheep. Sheep are kind of nice to look at; at least, cartoon sheep are. Cartoon sheep seem to be the epitome of what a sheep should be like if you've never seen it in the real world: soft, fuzzy, white, with an expression-full face that could give you any range of emotion that you could wish. So you might imagine my disappointment when I first arrived at the petting zoo and saw this pitifully disgusting animal with wool pointing every which way, a perfectly bland face, and a smell that could have made the Bug-Bladder Beast of Traal decide it would be best to take a walk, preferably to the next galaxy or two over. The Bug-Bladder Beast of Traal seems like another interesting life-form, but with my experience (limited though it may be) of sheep, I can just picture that my "perfect" image of such a beast will not be met by the real thing, if there is such thing as a real live Bug-Bladder Beast of Traal. But by that notion, the picture in my mind falls a couple notches, and then I remember the sheep, and so it falls again, and eventually we have a horridly disgusting creature wallowing in its own filth that so completely disappoints that it is actually an improvement on anything reality could give. Reality also bothers me, not so much the fact that it exists but that I have trouble relating to it. I relate much better to fictional landscapes painted with an artist's or an author's brush, and I would much rather live in any of the hundred thousand universes that I have read than to take one step further in reality. It's not so much that I dislike my life as much as the fictional world would be so much better. Sure, there are all these problems plaguing the characters, but I wouldn't have to be one of them. I could be one of the third-party characters, one of the walk-on stars that are mentioned once and then forgotten for the rest of the novel. I could live my life in shadow, only occasionally seen by the reader as I exist to my own, therefore untouched by the intense and no doubt climactic happenings circling the main character(s). Of course, this could be terribly bad if, say, it was one of those Armageddon stories in which the hero/heroine has to save the Earth from a terrible catastrophe, misses the first time (therefore dooming pretty much everyone who had cared to exist before), and then somehow gets a second chance, be it reversal of time or some other neat trick the author has thought of. Granted, I might not remember the horrible death I had suffered in the previous timeline, but it would still be bad to go though that kind of thing. I've always wondered about death, too, which is another thing about reality that I just don't understand. What is it about dying? Why do we have to do it? Sure, there's the overpopulation thing, but I am relatively sure that the human race is so gung-ho over it's own survival that we could come up with -something- if it really came down to it. Not only that, but there would be less of a rush to get things done if we had eternity to do things in. Of course, the procrastinators amongst us would wait until the end of forever to actually sit down and do something, but I'm sure that kind of thing would all get straightened out in the end, whether by some sort of law or something. Laws strike me as being rather silly. Not the having of them per se -- well, no, actually, it's the having of them that strikes me as odd. If something is against the law, then it is understood that you're not supposed to do it. But for the laws that are supposed to be for "our own good," well, isn't that just another term for common sense? Like speed limits: I understand that. Go this speed, and chances of you dying in a car wreck are less likely. But helmet laws? Put on a helmet, and your brain won't end up all over the pavement. Why not just stop the activity all together? Why bother with a law to help protect the people doing the idiocy in the first place? Idiots annoy me. I think the fact that we're surrounded by idiots every day is point in fact an argument completely against the theory of evolution. The fans of Darwin should just throw in their hats right now, because it should be plain as the nose on their face that they are completely and totally wrong. Noses are funny things. They form out of cartilage, so they say, but what -really- determines their shape? Is it DNA, or is it something to do with the environment a person is born into? I could just imagine separating two twins for that kind of experiment, pushing, poking, and otherwise fooling with their noses just to see what happens. Of course, no one would ever do that to a child...
Children also annoy me. I realize that once I was a kid, and I must have been annoying as hell, but still. I can picture myself screaming and yelling just like the kids I see in the mall, but that period in my life was very short-lived. It basically came down to my parents telling me that if I did that sort of thing ever again -I- was going to be very short-lived, and I could tell they meant it. Those were the days of spankings. Spoil the rod and the kid's a brat, I always say... I know that saying comes from the bible, but could you imagine actually beating a child with a rod? What comes instantly to my mind is one of those steel things they use to hold a fence in placed, and whapping the poor offspring with that over the head repeatedly. I suppose that's what my father used to term as the "clue stick;" as in, get hit by this and maybe you'll get a clue. Still, it seems rather cruel. The most my father ever did was a belt, but that was bad enough. I can't imagine how it would feel to be clobbered by a steel I-beam. I've heard stories about how they came up with the idea of using a steel I-beam to reinforce structures: apparently, this guy was building a house of cards when he suddenly came upon the idea that he could make his house twice as strong if he put in some toothpicks to steady. Bull. I've tried that, and I've got to say this for the guy: he must have been damn dedicated to get those things to work. Maybe it's because cards are a different shape or something now, but when I tried that my toothpicks were too short to be any good. When I got bigger toothpicks I had to file them down, and eventually glue them to the cards to make any sort of headway at all. Then I glued all the cards together and -that- made a far sturdier house than anything a bunch of toothpicks could do. Of course, I couldn't take it apart later, and I probably still have that "sculpture" around somewhere. Toothpicks seem to be silly things as well. I don't think I've ever used a toothpick in my life. Maybe it's the same kind of phobia I have when sticking something like a contact in my eye, but I just don't see the benefit of poking myself in the gums with a sharp stick. Toothbrushes are okay, because those are somewhat softer, and they're supposed to go there. Plus they've got the toothpaste, and you've got to apply that some way. But toothpicks only occasionally have some sort of flavour associated with them, and really the only reason they have even that is to make it slightly more palatable as you mash this piece of wood between your teeth. Gum does a much better job, I would think; floss would definitely be the better option. Flossing seems a weird thing, and I would like to know who came up with it. "I know," someone must have thought, "I'll take this piece of string and put it between my teeth." Huh? Just why would you want to? Did a dentist dream this up and eventually become a millionaire? Could you face the other millionaires when they asked how you made your fortune? "I deal in stocks." "I sell oil." "I invented floss." Just not on the same sort of scale. Scales are another problem for me. I don't like weighing myself, but my girlfriend apparently -has- to have some kind of ongoing measurement of herself so that she can berate herself for the entire month. I refuse to have a scale in the apartment, but of course if she goes and visits her friends or her family over the weekend and they happen to have a scale, on she goes. And then for the next month it's "Oh, I gained a pound," or "Oh, I lost a pound," and both are, of course, disastrous. I'd rather play the piano.
--
pieceoftheuniverse - I've mentioned pianos to you, right?
