... About Floating Fetuses

Reader, I'm going to hell. There's no avoiding it. I've pretty much picked out my own hand basket, lined it with fluffy pillows, stocked it up with Dr Pepper and Cheetos, and am just patiently waiting to be carried off.

Now, anyone who knows me well knows that I make this proclamation quite regularly. Like every time I play a joke on someone, or use the phrase "That's what she said" in an inappropriate fashion, or throw things at homeless people. But this time I mean it. And I have evidence. May I present:

Exhibit A:





Reader, please don't take offense, but that floating fetus in a bubble that you post on your blog or website to show me how far along your pregnancy is totally creeps me out. And by that I mean it gives me the heebie-jeebies. I just don't feel like I need to be privy to that particular aspect of your blessed event. If I were a tweenager I'd probably say something along the lines of "TMI!"

I mean, congratulations on your pregnancy. Please don't show me your fetus.

It's not just your fetus, or even just fetuses in general. I pretty much want to look at your face and your clothes and not have to know about anything that's happening underneath that. You know that Body Worlds exhibit? Bailey tried to talk me into going, but I refuse. Why would anybody want to look at human bodies with their skin taken off? That's sick. That's Hannibal Lector sick.

Oh, yeah, sure, it's educational. So is a trip to the toxic waste facility, but you don't see people lining up to do that and then posting a widget about it on their blogs. There's a reason why God made our bodies opaque (and I'm sure He'll have an opinion on this soon). We are not supposed to see what's going on in there.

I'm sorry if that makes me a jerk, but.... well.... sorry, it's just so hard to sincerely apologize when your fetus is showing. D'ya think you could just put that sucker away for a minute?

So the bad news is, as you can clearly see, Reader, I'm most definitely on the fast track to hell. I obviously have no respect for God or His miracles. I don't think the Big Guy's going to be too thrilled with me about that. The good news is, as a proprietor of my blog, you're most likely coming with me. Don't worry - I'll save you some Cheetos. Have you ever noticed how a Cheeto kind of looks like a little orange fetus?

... About My Commitment Issues

Reader, remember a while ago when I told you about how I like to jot down ideas or things that I find amusing so I can use them in stories later? Well, I have an email in my drafts folder that is designated specifically for that purpose.

I've found that it's wise to save it in my email, because I can access it anywhere and I can't lose it. I used to jot stuff down on Post-Its or scraps of paper and put them in my pocket - more often than not my grand ideas would end up in the wash cycle a few days later and dissolve into nothingness. Occasionally I'd put them in one of a dozen half-filled notebooks I have lying around my room, but then they'd inevitably be forgotten until I happened to stumble upon them weeks or months later.

But the email method has been working fairly well. It's easy to keep track of, easy to alter, easy to find again. So now I have literally pages upon pages of little gems, one-liners, outlines, and quotes saved up in my drafts folder, most of them for this story that's been bouncing around in my head for a while. But for some reason, I can't bring myself to put them down into any kind of coherent form.

I don't think it's 'writer's block', per se. I know pretty much exactly what I want to say. I run scenes and situations through my mind over and over, tweaking here and there until I'm fairly happy with how they're turning out. But when it comes time to actually sit down and put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), I just lose all enthusiasm for the project. I just don't wanna anymore.

This is hardly a new development, Reader. I think my inability to commit explains a lot about me - why I can never choose a restaurant, for example, or why I've never held the same job for more than 18 months. Or why I seem to be constantly turning down marriage proposals. I know, I know, those types of commitments are hardly consequential. But an inability to turn my story ideas into something solid and permanent could have dire effects on my future!

You know, there was a time when I was forced to swallow my commitmentphobia - my screenwriting class. If you didn't bring pages in to read, Paul wouldn't give you a big R! And ooooh, how my fellow students and I coveted those big R's... if we failed to collect enough of them by semester's end we wouldn't pass the class. So every second or third Tuesday for the entire school year I had to hunker down and punch out fifteen or so pages to keep Paul satisfied and keep the big R's a-flowin'. And for the first time EVER, I ended up with a complete story! It had a beginning, an ending, even one of those dastardly 'middle' things!

Unfortunately, the more I looked at it the less I liked it. I decided it needed some major tweakage, and that after a brief break to I'd go back and polish it up with fresh eyes. I have yet to begin that process.

I think my problem, Reader, is that I don't suffer any IMMEDIATE consequences from not buckling down and making progress on these things. Plus, I used to finish my pages for my screenwriting class at work, but I don't have a job with that luxury of time anymore. Even this short little blog has been written one or two sentences at a time, when I felt like I could spare a minute.

It's pretty clear that I need some stronger form of threat motivation, Reader. Maybe you can help! What could you hold at arms-length until I follow through and get those ideas out of my email and onto a page? What kind of prize can you offer me that is comparable to a big R? What do I want that you could potentially give me?

Maybe this would actually be a good idea, Reader. But then again, maybe not. I don't know. There are good and bad things about it. What do you think? Oh, I just can't decide.

... About Siggy's Extraordinary Mind-Reading Capabilities

There are so many amazing things and places in the world, and I want to see as many of them as I can. So it's no surprise that I have a bit of a weakness for home décor with a 'travel' theme. My favorite acquisition thus far is a set of antique world map prints, and I'm always on the lookout for a good deal on an old-fashioned globe in a stand. In our apartment I've put out things that represent some of the different places I've been. Out in the living room are big framed prints of rainy days in New York, London, and Paris, as well as knickknacks I bought there - an Eiffel Tower statuette, a jewelry box from Westminster Abbey, a blue vase from Bath, etc.

My bathroom is Mexico-themed. I have an Edward Martinez print on one wall, and on the shelf sits a Mexican doll that Taylor bought me in Cancun for my birthday, a terracotta Mayan calendar, and a bunch of shells. My favorite of these shells is a nearly-perfect sand dollar; it's missing just a small bit of one side, which actually helps it to sit up better.

Do you know how I got that sand dollar? A giant starfish, about three feet across, extruded its stomach, wrapped it around a flat urchin on the bottom of the sea, liquefied its soft parts, sucked them off, and left behind the skeleton. Then the skeleton washed up on a beach in Mexico where I found it, packed it in my luggage, and now proudly display it over my toilet.

It EXTRUDED ITS STOMACH and LIQUEFIED the SOFT PARTS! How freaking amazing is that?!

And that's just one of the myriad of amazing things Bailey and I learned from watching 'Planet Earth' last night! Did you know that a baby humpback whale drinks 130 GALLONS of milk EVERY DAY?! Or that Deer Cave in Borneo is home to a 300 FOOT HIGH MOUND OF BAT GUANO?!?! Did you realize that baby musk oxen are actually REALLY REALLY CUTE?!?!

Siggy did. In fact, just as I was opening my mouth to express how surprisingly adorable I thought the musk ox really was, Siggy chimed in with her narration of the show, saying, "The calves are cute." Bailey and I laughed, but we were quite impressed. And it just kept getting more and more impressive! A few minutes later, as we watched some polar bears sliding down a snow-covered hill, I said, "That looks like fun."

"It looks like fun," echoed Siggy.

"I just said that, Siggy!" I said. But she ignored me and just continued explaining about how the bears would survive in the harsh conditions of the Arctic. A while later, Bailey wondered aloud why there is such a variety of species in the reefs of Indonesia. Without missing a beat, Siggy chimed in with an explanation: "There are so many different types of animals in these reefs because they are right at the convergence of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean."

Bailey and I just stared at the screen, slack-jawed. How did Siggy KNOW?! How could she possibly time her narration to match up with exactly what we're thinking exactly as we're thinking it?! Of all the wonderful and surprising things about our world that we learned last night, perhaps the most mind-boggling of all is that Sigourney Weaver is a genuine psychic!

Remember on 'Ghost Busters' when she was possessed by Zuul the Gatekeeper? I think that might have something to do with it.

I must admit, Reader, I've always been skeptical about the validity of psychics. But I have about 7 hours of 'Planet Earth' on my DVR that make me think it could be possible. I mean, if there can be a cave entrance deep enough to engulf the Empire State Building, and dolphins can hydroplane up to the beach to catch fish, and half-inch seahorses can have territorial disputes involving head-butting, and people will voluntarily eat a chunk of hardened bird saliva and call it a delicacy, isn't it reasonable to believe that Siggy could be a psychic?

One thing's for sure - telepathic or not, Siggy has existentially multiplied my desire to go around the world and see all the amazing things it has to offer! I want to be able to decorate my living room with a piece of gypsum from Lechuguilla Cave, a photo I'll take of a flying great white shark off the coast of South Africa, a vial of melted ice from Antarctica.

I wonder how hard it would be to transport that 300 foot mound of bat guano to my apartment?

... About 45,905,911,510 Grains of Rice

Reader, one of my earliest entries on this blog was about my addiction to the website FreeRice (read the post here). Well, today is FreeRice's one-year anniversary! Woo-hoo! According to their website, FreeRice patrons have donated 45,905,911,510 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program over the past year.

Let's do a little FreeRice math, shall we?

45,905,911,510 grains of rice = 956,373,156 grams of rice*
956,373,156 grams of rice = 2,108,441 pounds of rice
2,108,411 pounds of rice = 2,390,933 daily rations of rice

That's nearly a quarter billion people fed through the efforts of the FreeRice website. That's pretty impressive. But guess what, Reader? The UN estimates that there are over 850 million people in the world that do not get enough food every day to sustain a healthy life. FreeRice hit its donation peak in December of 2007, just a couple of months after its launch. Don't get me wrong - I LOVE the fact that my late-November blog entry inspired thousands of people to visit the website and therefore donate nearly 7 billion grains of rice in a month. But shortly after that the numbers dropped, and the average monthly donation is about half that.

Here's what I have to say about that, Reader: What gives?! I've made it pretty easy for you. The FreeRice link has just been sittin' pretty on my sidebar for almost a year now. And we both know you visit my blog six or seven times a day. But you can put your dependency problem to good use! Just think, Reader, if one of those times you said to yourself, "I'm going to make a small sacrifice... instead of re-reading '... About Running My Own Country' for the thirty-seventh time, I'll just click over to FreeRice and feed some starving people."

I know what you're thinking, Reader, and you're wrong. It wouldn't offend me in the least if you decided to forgo memorizing my past posts in favor of visiting FreeRice. Well, maybe it'd hurt a little bit. But trust me, the offense is minimal, and somewhere deep down I have a soul, possibly, and that soul knows it's probably worth it. Besides, the improved vocabulary you'll develop from playing FreeRice will probably help in your highly admirable efforts to be more like me.

Now, Reader, I do realize that not all of you get your jollies from taking a never-ending vocabulary quiz like I do (although for the life of me I do not understand WHY that wouldn't bring you endless joy! *sigh*). So good news for you - FreeRice is not just a vocabulary quiz anymore! There are now a whole bunch of new subjects to try, like multiplication, Spanish, the Periodic table, and famous paintings. I'm on a geography kick right now.

My name is Kristen, and I'm still a FreeRice addict.



*According to Dr Google, there are approximately 48 grains of rice per gram. Go ahead, check my math. I dare you. Except it's probably wrong. In which case, I don't want to know.