Parallax

My outgoing voicemail thinger explains that I am not around and encourages people to leave their messages as poetry. This means the messages I get are usually entertaining, though they're not necessarily poetic. That is, until last week, when I got the following message: "My name is Al! And everything's gonna be all right because Al is your pal! That's my poem!" Al then went into the business part of the leaving-a-message (I'd called for information on a thing, etc etc), but that? That was brilliant. I am saving that message FOREVER.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: out-poet Al. I accept limericks, sonnets, and haiku. I'm in favor of epic poetry, but I think the voicemail thing has a time limit. You're welcome to find out for yourself.

Those of you on the twitter and the facebook already know this, but I'll retell the story here: I got a hamster. His name is One Eyed Jack, because he has one eye. He was a rescue/rehome from Craigslist, and my telling this story prompted one of my internet friends to look at Craigslist herself, where she wound up getting a bicycle. He's the rodent that keeps on giving. Jack fits nicely into my Rest Home for the Broken & Deranged, being slightly both himself; he tends to veer to his blind side when on the wheel, and has a habit of falling asleep anywhere, like a dog: legs splayed, flat on his belly, head propped on anything convenient. Being a male rodent, he has balls as big as his skull. I find them a bit alarming really, but it's better than a surprise pregnancy. He's a brown/black hamster, short haired, with white on his chin that streaks down his throat and leads to a little trail of interrupted dots on his belly. Other than the missing eye, he's in fine shape, and has spent his time running, burrowing, chewing, grooming, nomming, and not biting me despite me being huge and unfamiliar.

Dave took me to a Rays game last week, which was fun. I'd been before, but more in the sense of "socialize and drink beer while a game happens in the background," and since my understanding of baseball is just the Elementary School Rules version, I felt I was missing out on quite a bit. Dave's even more into baseball than hockey; while he may not have written the book on the sport, he wrote a book, for his graduate thesis. He also loves to explain things. This makes him the perfect person to teach me about cycling pitchers when you're two runs down in the eighth, and the moveability of stadiums, and adjusting the outfielders to allow for scatter patterns (I think that's the name of it? the places where batters tend to hit?), and why some of the more elaborately dressed fans had brooms with them, and what bases are made of. I don't feel a burning need to get back to another game as soon as possible, like I do with hockey, but it was a fun way to spend an evening and I'd be happy to go again.

I advise you all to avoid the philly cheesesteaks, though. Eieeew. Dave was done halfway through. I was done after stealing one piece of meat. It was crunchy like bacon. That can't be right.

Yesterday Bleu and Jen and I hit the flea market, which is a lot more fun when it is cold than when it is hot. Bleu got a big metal pole that looks like it should be used to herd sheep, to hang things in the yard. Jen got a watermelon and a fishing pole, which I got to carry around. (The pole, not the watermelon. I called not-it on the watermelon.) I again struck out on an Estonian flag; screw it, I'm buying one online instead.

I also offer a challenge: any global-warming deniers are invited to sit on my deck. The rules are thus: from 11AM to 6PM, no shade, water only for drinking, bring your own towel or chair. I'll time you and see how long you last before you need to come inside. Which is to say: it is a hundred and stupid outside and has been all week. This isn't supposed to happen until August, damnit.

It's thundrous and hopefully going to rain, which will help - and which reminds me. All locals should see last week's Mythbusters - they tested whether or not you can get fatally electrocuted in the shower, or while on the phone, if your house is hit by lightning. You can. I AM VINDICATED. Having the house properly grounded helps, but you know that sometimes that gets screwed up. (And then you get electrocuted in the shower, and you are no longer visible to motion detectors and touch screen do-thingers. If you're me, anyway.)

Time to go lie around like... my hamster. It is too hot to do anything else.

Me: "I think I like this one better. The other one has too much blue in it, don't you think?"
Bleu: "Uh. No. What?"
Me: *facepalm* "Gah. Art school, sorry. It's more purple, and purple is made out of blue."
Bleu: "Yeah, go with that one."

Bleu says that This Sort Of Thing really Only Happens To Me. She says it in a way that invites capitalized letters, because -- well, y'all read me, you know my crazy life.

All I wanted was red nail polish for my toes. But being me, I had to look at all seventy different kinds of red, and have internal debates about whether there was too much blue or yellow in them, etc etc, and somehow in the process I got... stolen. For help. By a lady who seemed ever so slightly off. She was walking around holding two giant bottles of foundation, and sort of shaking her head in annoyance, and she had opened up the foundation bottles and had blobs of it on her hands.

I don't know how it started exactly, I just know that I wound up standing there in complete bafflement watching this woman rub quarter-sized blots of foundation onto different sides of her face, and then telling her which one I liked better. There were several problems with this. I shall explain.

1. The last time I regularly wore makeup was in high school. I gave up on that nonsense once I graduated and got a car, which meant I had to be coherent enough in the morning to not kill myself in said car. Makeup time quickly turned into COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE time.

2. Even when I wore makeup, I never did foundation because the palest shades they had were still too dark for my fishbelly-white self, so:

3. Figuring out what foundation works best for a black woman is really out of my area of expertise. Especially when I'm supposed to pick something from a rack.

She kept grabbing bottles and trying stuff on, and after a while (ladies, you know what I mean when I say a quarter-sized glob is a lot of that shit) it all sort of ran together and I couldn't see the difference anymore. To further complicate things, she'd open the bottle, swab some out, close the bottle, and put it back so after I said I preferred A over B, or C over D, or.. I think it went to M over N or something... I was then asked, do you remember which one it was?

Bleu, meanwhile, was hiding at the other end of the aisle all LA LA LA I DON'T KNOW ANY OF THE PEOPLE IN THE STORE. I decided I would Not Be Having with this lack of backup, and went and got her. "You wear foundation," I started, to Bleu.

Foundation Lady says: "You don't?"
Indi: "No. I, um--" [realizing that "because it doesn't come in Mime, and anyway the dog thinks it tastes like candy" is not going to work here] "-- uh, my skin doesn't like it. Breaks out something awful."
Foundation Lady: "But your skin looks so good! You're not wearing anything?"
Indi: "Nah. I break out, it's awful, I go red. I look like a lobster then."
Foundation Lady, smearing another wad of foundation on: "What about this one?"
Indi: "I'unno. Blend it more."
[She does.]
Bleu: "THAT ONE. GO WITH THAT ONE."
Indi: "It's, um." [off Bleu's glare] "Yeah! I like that. It works better than the others."
Foundation Lady: "But I was thinking of this one, on this side - which side, d'you think?"
Bleu, ready to run: "THAT SIDE."
Indi: "Yeah, that one."
Foundation Lady: "Hmm, yeah, it does cover better. Cos my skin does this thing, you see it?"
Indi: [off another glare from Bleu] "Not under the makeup I don't!"
Foundation Lady: [happily] "Look, it's two for ten bucks! You girls are so nice, thank you!"

Ten minutes later...

Bleu: "How come stuff like that always happens to you?"
Indi: "How come stuff like that never happens to you?!"
Bleu: "I don't look at people."
Indi: "That helps?"
Bleu: [Indi, you are an idiot] "Uh, yeah. Hey, look - chocolate."

So then we got chocolate, because it only doesn't have fat in it when I buy it for other people.