Smug

I feel snarky today. Snarky in a way that makes me feel happy and smug, not snarky-frustrated.

One of those times when I get tired of people complaining about how bad everything is and figure, what the hell, all I can do is what's best for me. At this point that means doing my Math homework and not eating any more graham crackers. These are easy things to do, because the homework is some easy-peasy limits and we ran out of graham crackers because I ate them all.

See?

Damn, I really feel good today.

I joined a new gym with about ten different instructors. The Wednesday guy is very good, one of the Thursday guys is good, the Monday girl is okay and everyone else oscillates between passable and really bad (Friday girl). Also, pushups are kinda dangerous because the gym floor gets incredibly slippery when it gets sweaty. My knees slide around in an entertaining way, but I don't want to do full push-ups because one of my hands might slide off to the side and I'd end up like Michael Jackson.

Of course, I could bring a yoga mat, but I'm too lazy to bring one with me on the bus at 6 AM.

Isn't it funny, though, that I'm early for the 7 AM classes at the gym, but was late for every single 7:30 AM History of Biology class? Well, maybe not funny. Telling, I guess.

I've been doing my nails a lot lately. Right now I'm wearing sparkles, only half of each nail chipped off and I have yet to re-do them.

I stubbed my two tiniest toes a few hours ago. The pinky still hurts, but luckily my nails are intact. I knew a girl whose foot slipped when her knee gave out (there's something wrong with her knees and apparently they do that every so often; she said she's had many surgeries, but will inevitably end up in a wheelchair by the time she's… I forgot how old. Maybe 35?) and her big toe's entire nail came right off. Augh! So I treasure my pinky toe's nail, although actually there isn't much of it. If I clip it, it's about 3mm long. But it's there, make no mistake.

Okay, Math.

Right.

Non sequitur

I didn't mean for this to come out feeling bland, but I guess that's how I feel at the moment.

I was doing some homework this week about neurotransmitters. It was funny. As I read about serotonin and depression, I was like, "Holy crap, this was me yesterday!". Horrible morning, slept all afternoon, woke up at night feeling better.

I love my Behavioral Ecology class, but the annoying thing about trying to talk about it is that within a minute many people veer the conversation over to humans and human behavior. Yes, humans are fascinating. But don't try to make comparisons between humans and other animals if you don't understand the animals you're talking about in the first place. Like in a book I read recently, where the characters had a long conversation about lions and lionesses and female power and it was mostly founded on a bunch of false assumptions they made about lions. If you want to talk about humans, then talk about humans. Don't drag lions into it and start making up fantastical analogies just because you think they sound cool.

I really am a stick in the mud sometimes. I was just thinking about that today. I was on the bus and I saw a kid reach into his book bag, pull out a microfiber cloth, pick some lint off of it and then wipe his glasses on it very carefully. "Kid," I thought at him, "there's a fuzzy hoodie on your lap. No need to be carrying around your microfiber thingy. Don't be a stick in the mud."

I think about this a lot, sometimes. It's very comforting:

I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of people with goiters. So did Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer who is the hero of this book. Those unhappy Earthlings had such swollen thyroid glands that they seemed to have zucchini squash growing from their throats.

All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to consume less than one-millionth of an ounce of iodine every day.

My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were supposed to make her sleep.

When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again.

And so on.

So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

It's from Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut. I added the emphasis so you'd know which parts to pay attention to, just in case you were temped to focus especially on the bit about goiters.

Every time I go to the study room next to the library I fall asleep. All the warm air rises up into that room, but it doesn't get too hot as the day goes on because there's a dome that the hottest air goes to. Today I was nodding off when a classmate from a few semesters ago sat at my table and talked to me so I wouldn't fall asleep. He told me he ate 16 tacos for lunch, which explains how he can run so much and be so skinny. Seriously, what little there is of his body is in great physical condition and he's known for running on and on, fast, and never getting tired.

Clutter

My family accumulates things. The fridge accumulates tiny containers of dipping sauce which nobody will eat. We save the ketchup and chili sauce packets that come with pizza, even though none of us eat them. We have tons of keychains. We have tons of books. We have fifteen-year-old elementary-school textbooks. We have tangles of toys crammed into a plastic storage box under the stairs. We must have around a hundred mugs. And there are uncountable decorative bowls, vases, plates, figurines and other souvenirs.

Be it by nature or nurture, I have a tendency to obtain and accumulate things (Star Wars toys, amusing pillows and odd bits of nature extracted from their homes during field trips** all come to mind) and am averse to throwing them away. Luckily for me, I seem to be less averse than my parents, who once yelled at me for not eating the corners of a slice of cake.

Two weeks ago, I felt suddenly overwhelmed by how much stuff I had and threw out two trash bags' worth of stuff from my room, which was promptly picked over by the housekeeper. This means that a stuffed toy, a plastic CD case and other such items are now on display in the laundry room (which is of her domain, as she uses it a lot more than anyone else does).

All my old Star Wars toys (and there were many of them), anime figurines, a music box, a poster I never got framed are in storage; a lot of my ex-clothes is being put to use by other people (I only have one metal band T-shirt left!), I threw out a bunch of useless knickknacks, relocated a table elsewhere in the house, dusted everything…

…and I am still swimming in stuff, but at least it is now mostly things that I want and use.

Still, I've been bitten by the decluttering bug. Today I attacked some common areas and threw out what felt like 12kg of old magazines, threw out a bunch of garbage that has been lurking for who-knows-how-many years un the bottoms of decorative vases that lay, concealed and forgotten, behing potted plants, and amassed two dozen or so decorative bowls.

Why do we have so many bowls? They just sit stacked on a shelf and gather dust and lost earrings. And that's just the ones that were in two rooms downstairs– in the display cabinets upstairs there are bowls all the way back o every shelf, and more bowls stacked in the cupboards underneath. When I asked my Dad if there was any one that he felt comfortable getting rid of, he pointed at one shaped like a green pig (it's not as kitschy as it sounds, it's actually quite nice) and then suggested I wrap up all the others and put them in storage because they're pieces of art.

In storage? Where? What for??

AUUUGH! I am ridding myself of the habit of accumulating things, even small, insignificant things like pen holders.

Oh, I didn't mention the pen holders, did I? We have a lot of those, too. But my Dad's tools of the trade are pen and paper (well, that and a few Apple products) so the pen holders are actually put to use. They're all over the house, on nearly every end table and desk. There's enough of them to be on every one, but some desks are selfish and can have three or four pen holders so there aren't enough to go around.

You know, there's something extra odd about having so many decorative things tucked away and piled on top of each other– none of them are actually hung up on a wall or anything. At most they sit, bunched together like merchandise in a shop, on top of a surface such as the piano. Maybe if we set some of them up properly, people would finally feel the house is "decorated" and stop bringing more things into the house.

Weekend project.

** By which I mean things like a walnut shell, or a giant mushroom which my teacher had harvested and was going to throw out. You know, not stuff like a ghost crab for a pet or anything.

School

Today was my second day of school. I started fifth semester, which means I'm almost halfway through my bachelor's degree. Actually I'm supposed to be two-thirds done, because the degree is eight semesters long, but you need to take a workshop** during your last four semesters and I didn't join one this semester.

I don't know what I want to specialize in, you see, and the workshop you join will define what you'll write your thesis about and who will be your supervisor. I was completely enamored with Parasitology, which turned out to be a dud when I took the class last semester, so I'm treading carefully in the world of Biology these days.

I'm getting interested in animal behaviour these days. There's a workshop on that but I didn't join it because what if I end up disillusioned with animal behaviour, the way it happened with Parasitology?

I'm taking Ecology of Animal Conduct this semester and so far it's looking great. The teacher is really good, plus he's English so it sounds cool whenever he says a name or book title. The rest of the time he speaks Spanish with an accent reminiscent of my Mom's, so I feel right at home.

Anyway, the animal conduct workshop will open again next year. If I want it, I'll wait for it and add an extra year to my bachelor's degree. If not, I'll join something else next semester.

I also signed up Biological Anthropology because it sounded fascinating, but after going to the first class and getting a list of the recommended bibliography I can see that it's not what I was hoping for (it's mostly genetics), so I'm dropping it like a hot potato so I can concentrate on my other five courses, especially animal behaviour.

** Workshop as in "meeting at which a group of people engage in intensive discussion and activity on a particular subject or project", as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary widget I have on my dashboard. We don't spend two years carving table legs or something.

Birdie

Yesterday a bird fell out of a tree in the backyard while I was whittling a penguin out of wood**. I only figured it out when the Small Dog, who is a cocker spaniel and therefore is engineered to fetch birds, risked life and limb fighting the bamboo thicket and later a thorn bush while trying to get at it.

The bird was freaking out so it ran around the yard and I managed to tackle Dog just when she had the bird's tail in her mouth but hadn't chomped down yet. The bird ran away into the thorn bush and I tied up Dog so that the bird could regain its composure and fly away. It didn't, though, and stayed on the ground beneath the bush until not even the combined efforts of my dad, my sister, her fiancé and me were any help getting it out of the bush and away from Dog. Eventually we gave up when my dad pointed out that it was hopping around to get away from us and it was getting poked by all the thorns.

Small Dog stayed tied up for the rest of the day, except for a brief stint where she tugged at the chain so much that her collar snapped in two (killer instinct, that dog has), and this morning the bird had migrated into a small bamboo on the other side of the yard. The bird's mom was flapping around the bamboo and screaming at her kid, and also screaming at Maxie when she wandered into the yard for some sniffing, a pee and possibly breakfast. It followed her around, hopping on the wall and on the trees, screaming at the top of its birdie lungs. Maxie totally didn't notice.

I don't know what the bird's status is now. I haven't seen it since morning, although I heard it conversing with its mom in the afternoon. For my own peace of mind, and to make up for making the bird poke itself with thorns yesterday, I made a little bird bath and tied it to the braches of the tree. Next to it I put a slice of bread with almond butter and sunflower seeds. I read that in a kids' activity book when I was little, except in the book they used peanut butter. I figured that our peanut butter has some added oils and whatnot and probably the almond butter is better for the bird. Or for the bugs, who are probably going to be the ones to eat it.

** I do not mention this to show of my whittling skills, but because "whittling" is a funny word. Like "soup".

Yoga

I woke up today with a horrible headache, stiffness and pain all over my body, including my eyes (!). So I languished in bed for a while, then moved downstairs to languish on the sofa so that my parents could take pity on me more easily (I'm all about helping others).

After some aspirin, a nap and some mother-brewed Chamomile tea, I did some yoga with a DVD. The DVD was bizarre, featuring a woman called Wai Lana who demonstrated the poses while wearing an assortment of colorful jumpsuits and a flower wreath decorating each of her extremities, in various picturesque sceneries (mountains, beaches, rivers…) on a big, orange living room carpet.

Anyway, regardless of its weirdness, the yoga helped me loosen up my sore muscles and made the last bit of my headache dissipate. During the relaxation, when you're supposed to lie down with your eyes closed and enjoy the music, I peeked at the screen and was surprised to see footage of Wai Lana dancing in the snow, sledding with her friends and having snow fights.

I'm feeling much better now, enough to want some Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

Vacation

Last week, from Monday to Friday, I went with several of my friends from high school to Morelos. One of them has an uncle who built a weekend house there, though the place isn't used much. It has three bedrooms, two bathrooms and an outdoor kitchen all in a row at the back of the property, and then a lawn with a few trees and a pool.

We got there by bus (it's not a long ride– about 1.5 hours on a bus, then two half-hour rides on vans and then a short walk up a hill) and spent several hours cleaning the place and reclaiming it from the insects and arachnids who had staked out their territory in the absence of people. It had accumulated dust and dirt and did I mention the wasps?

There were a few wasp nests here and there. Some of them we knocked down, but we left the bigger ones alone. The biggest was inside a bathroom, so it happened several times that someone would go in, shut the door, and then come barreling back out in a panic shrieking that there was a wasp inside.

One night, most of us stayed up late talking, and then moved into a small tent that we had set up on the porch (on the porch because it was raining so hard). Seven of us somehow squeezed into the two-person tent to keep talking, and then six of us fell asleep inside (one guy was smart enough to go to bed at 3AM). We woke up in the morning feeling all stiff and crampy.

Another night we set up a bigger tent and slept in the yard. Sometime in the early morning someone woke up and noticed that their blanket was wet, and realized that it was raining and the tent was leaking. So we groggily went to our rooms, and stupidly left behind a bunch of sheets and comforters behind to get soaked in the tent.

Oh, and on one day, my friend's uncle– the owner of the house– swung by with some other men to paint the walls. They brought a little boy, about four years old, who we took turns playing with ALL DAY. That kid did not know the meaning of the word "tired". For about an hour we played a game that consisted of him standing at the edge of the pool and "hiding" a plastic ball inside one of four inflatable swimming tires. He would then instruct me to swim underwater from one end of the pool to the other and surface through the hole in the tires, looking for the ball. Of course the ball was always in the last tire where he made me look. On the plus side, it was an excellent workout; that kid should be a personal trainer.