Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
the King to the White Rabbit, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

Hello My Dearie, Hello My Baby, Hello My Dusty Blog

May 25, 2008

Monday · 3:20 PM

Spring is here, and renovation is in the air—and not just digitally, either. As I type, I’m gagging on glue fumes and getting a toothache from drill vibrations as my new bathroom window is installed. (Why am I getting a new bathroom window? Beats me. The landlord has apparently developed a glass cube fetish and wants them in all the bathroom windows in the complex. Also: Glass Cube Fetish is a good name for a band.)

So according to my records, the last time I blogged was in… December. Wow. So what have I been doing since then, you ask? Read on, and all shall be explained…

The Redesign

So the first thing you regulars probably thought when you clicked onto the site was "Hey, it’s been redesigned!" And the second thing you probably thought was "Nazis…?", because everything is black and white and red and we’ve all subconsciously learned to associate that with swastikas and armbands. I wasn’t consciously going for that association—why would I, I’m Jewish—but I like the colors and don’t want to give them up just because some goose-stepping freaks from way back when got all up in everyone’s face and kicked off a war. Screw you, Nazi bastards! I defy you with my palette!

BUT anyway. Everybody loves the little lists I make (right? RIGHT?!?), so here ya go:

Things You Should Know About This Redesign

I Am Vegan, Hear Me Roar

Yes, I finally did it—after years of mulling over the moral and health ramifications, I finally made the switch from vegetarianism to veganism. I did it for ethical and environmental reasons—at least, that’s my official line. I really did it so that I can sit on my high horse and judge all you peons for your milk-swilling, egg-killing ways. YOU MAKE CHICKENS CRY.

Just kidding. Now hand the hen a tissue and let’s move on.

It’s been about two months since I made the switch, and I’m… not noticing much of a difference, in the sense that I thought it would be a lot harder than it actually has been. I was expecting to go through some kind of dairy withdrawal. I imagined myself getting clammy and sweaty and twitchy and scratching at my face a lot and maybe having convulsions and hallucinations and babbling about omelettes like a delirious Sherlock Holmes babbling about oysters… but no. I am rather disappointed. I was kind of looking forward to telling everybody how HARD it was to go vegan, it was such a sacrifice but I did it for the animals and the Earth and the future generations. Sadly, the worst I can come up with is that now I can only get the non-dairy Amy’s frozen burritos rather than the cheesy kind. And the non-dairy kind still tastes freakin’ great. Stupid tasty vegan food, giving me nutrients but taking away my kvetch.

Mousie

This is a weird part of the last few months that still has me rather hurt and befuddled. See, some time around the beginning of March I stupidly paid a visit to my local PetCo—stupidly, I say, because I should know by now that every time I walk into a pet store I always leave with a new pet. And this time was no exception. My husband and I came out with a mouse—a fat, cute little adult male that was free to a good home. We brought him home, we set him up in the Pimped-Out Rodent Cage, we tried to think of a name for him—I wanted to call him Hitler (he looked just like the guy! I swear!), but we settled on Roderick Spode, although I just called him Mousie most of the time. He was rather shy of humans, but was too curious and too gentle to bite us when we reached in to pet him. Also, he was loud. He talked every single second that he was awake, a running monologue of grunts and squeaks and chirrups that could actually drown out the TV when we were trying to watch something. After a few weeks, he had settled happily into his new cage, was enjoying his toys and his food, and had gotten used to my hand well enough that he would let me stroke his head and back.

And then, barely a month after we got him, he died. Just like that. I checked his cage one morning and found him huddled behind his plastic house, all stiff and cold, with his little eyes wide open and glazed over. That kind of scared me, since my rodents usually look a lot more peaceful when they go. (On the other hand, I have a hunch this wasn’t a painful death; he looked like his heart just stopped and he died in a second.) I’m not sure what did Mousie in, but I have a hunch it was all the exercise he’d been getting for the last three weeks—he'd gone from being a fat little guy in a teeny-tiny tank to running around a four-story cage. That, or maybe he was just old—he was between 9-12 months according to PetCo, but he could certainly have been older than that.

So I made him a little coffin out of a cardboard box and wrote an epitaph on it:

I looked like Hitler, but I was much nicer;
How gentler than ye human brutes we mice are!

And then we buried him with full pomp and circumstance in the dumpster and went back to being a mouseless household. At this point, though, I’m not even going to bother taking down the mouse cage; why go to all that trouble when we’re bound to end up with another rodent soon? We never go for long without another mouse to feed…

I Does Has Fandom

As embarrassing as it is to publically admit that I still have fandoms—I mean, come on; I’m a married adult in my mid-twenties—I totally do. Except I don’t have very many these days, because everything sucks lately: Lost, House, Law & Order, 24, the Amelia Peabody series… half of my regular fandoms seem to have taken the Road Too Often Travelled by Fandoms Once They Get Popular and/or Go On For Too Long. Fortunately, I still have a few left…

Dark City

Since I haven’t been blogging that much lately, I don’t think I’ve come across as the fanatically-devoted, unhealthily-obsessed, soundtrack-humming fangirl that I am when it comes to this film. How much of a fan am I? I’ll let you guess: what do you think I did when I heard that the director’s cut of Dark City was coming out on DVD, BluRay, and possibly in theaters?

  1. smiled and said, "Nice!"
  2. jumped up and down while squealing and clapping hands
  3. spit cranberry juice all over the computer monitor and keyboard, shrieked like a banshee, fell out of my chair, and ran around the apartment screaming "SUCK IT, MATRIX, SUCK IT!"

I’ll give you a hint: my monitor’s a bit sticky and my neighbors probably wonder what all the noise was about, but I don’t care. I am going to pre-order it or go out and buy it the day it comes out (OR BOTH) and then not leave the house for a month while I obsessively analyze every single frame of the director’s cut and memorize the extras.

Death Note

Are your feet cold? They might be, because Hell has officially frozen over: I have read a manga. An entire manga series, in fact. And I liked it.

I’m just as shocked as you are. Really.

Blame my friend Diana for getting me interested in a genre I’ve been consciously avoiding for my entire life. She picked the best manga to catch my interest, too: Death Note is a supernatural/crime thriller that’s better than any supernatural/crime thriller I’ve come across in recent years. I read the whole series just in time to catch the limited-release showings of the first Death Note movie, which Diana and I went to last Tuesday. It was entertaining and bad at the same time—fortunately more of the former than the latter. The best part: people in costume. I saw two Lights and myriad Ls, one of which apparently intended to crouch on her chair L-fashion for the entire duration of the movie. That might be taking fandom a bit too far, I think.

(Also: as we were going up to the back of the theater to sit, a girl in one of the seats eyed us both and inquired loudly which one was Matt and which was Mello. I did not actually hear it at the time it happened, but I can clear up the confusion right now: I am Matt. Although, now that I think of it, I am probably more like Near—give me some finger-puppets and a quiet room, and I’m a happy camper.)

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