Chris Martin’s Birthday
It’s Chris Martin’s birthday today!
So have a beautiful live performance of Human Heart, because that song is absolutely heartbreaking and magical. Like pretty much every other Coldplay song.
Solar
This is a wonderfully produced little documentary on our Solar System.
Uranus is such a weird planet, yo. It’s my favorite.
That is all.
Hypothermic Half
I did my run for the Hypothermic Half Marathon today!
Of course it was obscenely cold outside on the day I decided to do this, so I ended up doing it inside on the treadmill, haha.
Still counts, though!
Happy Anosmia Awareness Day!
As per tradition, here’s an anosmia-related video. She discusses the very important difference between smell and taste and how anosmics can taste things (the five basic tastes) but miss out on flavor (the mingling of taste and smell).
END!
Salt of the Earth
So like any standard white person, my favorite “spice” is salt. Likely because of my anosmia, salt is really the one thing that can alter the taste of something for me.
One thing that I like to add some salt to is scrambled eggs. I often put cheese in them, but I can’t really taste the cheese itself. The only thing I can actually taste is added salt (because eggs, to me, don’t taste like anything).
Anyway, this morning I was really wanting some nice, salty scrambled eggs, and I was remembering back to one Christmas when my mom got me a Himalayan salt block. Himalayan salt blocks are chunks of smoothed pink Himalayan salt and are designed to be cooked with or used as a serving plate. The food that is cooked/served absorbs some of the salt and gets that nice salty flavor.
I never cooked with the one my mom got me, but I did put cooked scrambled eggs on it after cooking them separately and they were always so good. I know I carried that salt block with me for quite some time, but I think it eventually broke on one of my (many) moves around the continent and I’m pretty sure I don’t have it anymore.
But I’m tempted to get a new one!
Open wide! A SURVEY SURPRISE!!!
(It’s not a surprise, it’s just me being obnoxious)
What type of music do you like?
Does it produce frisson? Then I’ll listen to it.
Have you ever been skinnydipping?
Ew, no.
How many pillows do you sleep with?
I sleep on a couch most nights, so technically I use a couch pillow. Does that count?
What position do you often sleep in?
On my back or on my left side.
What do you wear to bed?
An old Bloomsday shirt. Undies.
Could you ever go out with someone just ’cause they’re rich?
Only if the date was to get to know him better. Like, I get set up with a guy and all I know about him is that he’s rich, I’d go out with him because I’d like to know more about him. But no, I wouldn’t go out with someone just because they’re rich.
Have you ever contemplated suing someone?
Nope.
Do you believe in karma?
I believe the universe balances itself out.
Do you believe in revenge?
To an extent, yes.
Who is the most intelligent person you know?
Lead. Easily. That dude was (is?) ridiculous.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for someone?
HA WE’RE NOT GOING THERE TONIGHT, SORRY
Do you throw bread for the ducks?
When I was a kid my dad used to take me down to Lewiston to feed the ducks, but I don’t think I’ve ever done it on my own.
Where do you like to go to on a first date?
Anywhere but a movie or show. I want to be able to talk to you, not sit next to you in silence while we consume media.
This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while
Thank you, Tumblr.
This is how I imagine I look when I’m running versus when I’m done and feel all accomplished, hahaha.
House (not MD)
Super interesting stuff.
I’ve always liked small spaces. Hell, I went through a phase in junior high during which I felt like even my own room was too big and thus I moved all my important things into my closet and hung out there instead.
Our place is pretty much perfect for me and Nate, but if I lived on my own, I’d love to live in a tiny little studio.
Yes, it’s a Matt Walsh video, sorry
So let’s ignore the whole Dylan Mulvaney part of this video (which is like all of it, I know). The thing I wanted to talk about in this video is something that I’ve noticed both conservatives and liberals doing: setting up this “us versus them” idea.
Here, it’s extreme. How quickly Walsh shoves his critics into the “them” group, and how quickly he turns against them, despite the fact that the people calling him “mean” are pretty traditional conservatives that would likely agree with a lot of the other stuff Walsh says. The harshly spoken “they” and “them” emphasizes a divide between an “us” and a “those other people” in such an exaggerated, vile way that it just stokes that fire of “we are two separate species of people, and we should be natural enemies of one another and should never compromise on our views. If you have ANY of the same viewpoints as the “other,” you are a traitor and are just as bad as them.”
I think there’s always been an “us versus them” mentality in politics, but I think everything’s just become so much more divisive than it ever has been, which makes it hard to actually operate as a unified country.
It’s pretty sad, really.
Book Review: The Good Soldier (Ford)
Have I read this before: No? This is one of those books that feels super familiar, but I’m not sure if I’ve actually read it, haha. If I have, though, it would have been back at the very start of using my list given how vague my memory is of it (so like 7th grade).
Review: I love the opening line of this book: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” Instant hook. There’s so much going on with each of these characters under the surface and so much deception amongst them that it’s almost hard to keep track of it all. I like how even the Wiki article describes the narrator as follows: “he is either a gullible and passionless man who cannot read the emotions of the people around him or a master manipulator who plays the victim.”
Favorite Part: This beautiful line:
“And it was a most remarkable, most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.”
That’s just…that’s so simple and beautiful.
Rating: 5/10
Where…where did this come from?
I swear to god I don’t remember making this, but I can’t find where I would have downloaded it and this is EXACTLY the kind of stupid thing that I WOULD make in a fit of LOLOLOLOL, so who the hell knows.
(Yes, I uploaded it to YouTube in August 2023 because it wasn’t there originally…just on my compy.)
Sleep? Nah! WHY BUY A MATTRESS
If You Like It Then You Should Have Put a Pin On It
Remember a few days ago when I showed you all the stickers I have that I haven’t stuck to anything because I’m dumb like that?
I’m the same way with pins.
(Yes, I have some weird pins.)
(Yes, I only have Master Shake and Frylock. Meatwad is MIA.)
OH GOD I’M COMMITTED NOW
The very first marathon I’ve ever signed up for!
Now I HAVE to do it, which is a little intimidating.
I ran 21 miles today, though, so that’s a start.
(I also signed up for the Vancouver Half Marathon, but that’s easy.)
Breaking Spring
So Calgary’s XTREME WINTER TEMPERATURES are really good at lining up for when I am on any kind of break – winter break, spring break, whatever.
Don’t believe me?
Take a look at this graph. Can you tell which week is our spring break?
Yup, you got it!
This happens EVERY YEAR. What in the HELL.
You know what the best thing is about my Sennheisers?
E V E R Y T H I N G
3.5 Inch
Bro, we have a set of floppy disks in the mail room at work:
My dear Millennial friends, do you remember having “2 floppy disks” as an item on your back-to-school list for junior high? We had that. I remember those colorful transparent ones were sold in like packs of five or ten. I also remember how we played fast and loose with our data by pinging that metal covering back and forth and trying to touch the disc inside.
Y’know, ‘cause we could store an ENTIRE WORD DOCUMENT on there.
Fun times. It’s wild that we have little tiny flash drives that can now hold terabytes of data.
Want Fun Shape Stuff?
ME TOO!
Here’s my best circle drawn with a mouse. I’m sure I could do much better on my touch screen laptop, hahaha.
(And here’s me cheating with a really small radius.)
Popular Opinion:
Toy Story is a trilogy. The story was wrapped up perfectly in three movies. I refuse to watch the fourth one out of principle and I’m so GODDAMN PISSED that Disney is destroying Toy Story further by making a fifth one.
Leave it be. It was perfection.
UGHHHHHHHH.
WOOOOOOOOO
I AM SAD!
Cake
This song was the audio for some random TikTok I stumbled upon today and it immediately released a weird wave of nostalgia from my mid-childhood, back when I’d spend the weekend at my dad’s condo and I’d watch all the weird shit Cartoon Network had on after 9 PM (including Adult Swim, when that became a thing).
Edit:
This show was over my head at the time, but MAN I remember that intro.
STICKER, NO STICKING!
Does anyone else love stickers…
…But doesn’t stick them to anything?
Here’s my pile.
Nothing is worthy enough for these stickers.
IT HAS BEEN DECIDED
Once I go back down to Moscow this summer, I’m going to take all my old home video tapes to Archer Photography and have them converted to digital format there. My mom went there a little while ago to ask if they were able to do that, and it sounds like they’re able to just convert everything to MP3 format.
So that’s cool.
I’m excited!
And suddenly it’s 2009
I have a lot of music. Because of this (and because Apple’s shuffle is not truly random), there are a lot of songs that I haven’t actually heard in a long time.
One of which is this song, which came up for the first time in YEARS when I shuffled my music:
And I was immediately transported back to 2009 when I’d downloaded this song. I was at UBC, still in the office in the psych building (instead of that god-awful botany annex) and spent a lot of time listening to this song loudly over my headphones.
It just…ugh, it just sent me back there so easily. And the whole song just aches of despair because that’s the emotion I most strongly associate with the time I’d downloaded it.
I often wonder if my memories that are tied to music are actually stronger than most peoples’ music-based memories since I am missing the most “memory-connected” sense and thus I have to compensate.
Now I have to go cry in a corner and convince my brain that UBC didn’t really happen, because OH MY GOD I had the worst time there.
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