Friday, December 17, 2010

Odds and Ends

Photo: KhayaL, Flickr Creative Commons

My teeth hurt like a mofo today because during my visit to the orthodontist they appear to have replaced the wire in my braces with steel rebar. Actually, it's not all of my teeth. It's mainly the top left incisor and the three teeth to its left. One of them feel like it's being slowly yanked out of my gums. Fun.

* * * *

I keep checking the NOAA forecast for where I plan to spend some time on the trail next week and it's going to be cold, but it doesn't look like we have to fear any rain. The good news is that if anyone is going to die of hypothermia, it's going to be Mickey. Despite the fair skin and Northern European heritage, the dude was not built for the cold. Too much lean muscle, too few lipids. The bad news is that he's far too tiny for me to gut and climb inside for the warmth after he dies. Neither is the other guy I'm probably hiking with. I guess I'll just have to settle for eating them when they pass so I can convert their blessed calories into more fat to insulate my vital organs. There may be blood.

* * * *

My dog threw up all over the freaking place last night. I missed the whole thing. I was checking e-mail on the computer, Little Gandhi was watching Word World and building plastic towers of Babel and the dog was just sitting on the couch. I came out of the office to the kid's question of "What is Lucy eating?" to find a large brown pile the consistency of thick oatmeal that had to be at least half of the dog's mass. Putting the kid to bed about 45 minutes later I found out that she apparently had enough left over to make a few smaller piles on the rug in his room. How in the hell does a dog that size vomit that much? My wife got to miss the entire thing being at a work Christmas party in some place famous for onions.

Have I not mentioned here that I have a new dog? Well, I do.

* * * *

Sometimes I wonder about Pandora.com. Usually, I'm amazed at how well it chooses songs for me, but yesterday it started playing Lil Wayne for me. I've got a bit of hiphop mixed into my Pandora mix, but it's the geeky stuff, not the stuff you hear on the radio. For the record Lil Wayne sucks. You know what also sucks? REI's customer-created playlist. Pandora played an ad for it and I thought I would try it out. I regret that decision. Apparently people who shop at REI aren't as cool as I thought they were.

* * * *

As soon as I post this, I'm going home and won't go back to work for two weeks. Thank god for the public education system. You may be making more money than me and even feel more fulfilled by your career, but I get two months off in the summer plus a bunch of other breaks, so you can just go suck it, and suck it with proper verb tenses and pronoun-antecedent agreement, dammit. Also, I have my masters now so next year I get to pay even more taxes.

Speaking of taxes, I mentioned my masters to another teacher today and she said, "Yeah, you get more money, but you have to pay more taxes." My thought is that if you make enough money to complain about taxes, then you probably make enough money. I'm okay with that.

* * * *

Finally, if you live in a rural area of the South (or anywhere else this linguistic phenomenon occurs), can you please promise me to stop using seen as the past tense of see? Seriously, I don't know how much longer I can hide my irritation at someone saying "I seen you at Walmarts yesterday." Oddly, where I live, seen and saw are nearly universally used backwards. It's "I seen" and "I have saw." The consistency would normally lend me to be cool with the dialect's uniqueness, but this one example irks me to no end. Remember, kids, seen can only exist with its helper friends have, had, has, and the forms of to be. Saw is a loner and likes to work by itself. You make saw angry when you do this and the baby Jesus reconsiders his past decisions regarding your soul.

Merry Christmas people!

5 comments:

Courtney said...

Ah yes, I remember the feeling just after a braces tightening. It's so fun to actually feel your teeth moving.

Yes, you've mentioned the dog. I want to meet her, preferably when she's not horking.

Agreed, Lil Wayne sucks.

Who cares if you have to pay more taxes? You still net more money. People are stupid.

OK, the past tense thing is SO WEIRD. I have never once heard my grandmother use the correct past tense of something. "Grandma, did you eat yet?" "Yes, I eat already." "Grandma, did the mailman already come today?" "Yes, the mail was took already." DRIVES ME CRAZY.

Chris said...

I'm afraid I'm getting more annoyed by Southern dialect as I age, too. I thought I had stayed in touch enough with my up-bringing to not mind it. But then we went Christmas shopping last week and mingled in tight quarters with the masses at Toys R Us... suffice it to say, I realized I have become an elitist snob. I'm not proud of it.

Julie said...

When I tried to become a teacher, I was initially stuck with "sticker shock" over the pay but I made peace with it since the per-hour breakdown differs significantly when you factor in all that vacation, holiday, sick pay, etc. Not that it matters since I obviously didn't get the job.

Sid said...

Must just say that I loved your little rant about past tense. And from now onwards, whenever someone fucks up the English language, I totally plan on saying, "You're making baby Jesus cry."

Mickey said...

Your quote about taxes is a keeper.

I don't know if this is what the REI playlist is like, but outdoorsman that I am, I've never related to outdoor types when it comes to music. Besides the usual penchant for Phish and Bob Marley, climbers in particular have a thing for techno. It's inexplicable.