Crispy Beef Jerky Chips
(Picture from, and link to Oberto)
Cake Batter in a Bag
(Picture from, and link to Packaging Digest. Scroll all the way down — it’s not on the Sara Lee site, because it is still apparently in test-market mode)
When does a habit become pathological? And when should I start worrying?
Plagioclase’s mother, when offered something to eat or drink, will, with few exceptions, ask for “half that, please.” I could pour her two ounces of ginger ale and she would leave some of it in the glass.
I understand that she’s older and her appetite isn’t what it used to be, let alone the effects of her meds, but geez.
The exceptions? Ice cream and chocolate. Those she always has an appetite for.
Although it’s been a while since I was mistaken for male, it was quite a common occurrence before I hit puberty. “Are you a boy or a girl?” was the first question out of the mouths of many young boys, as I ran around in my non-girly clothes, playing with cars and not dolls.
It wasn’t just the lack of socially-dictated clothing and the propensity to tom-boyishness — I am plain-looking, I don’t wear makeup, and except for the couple of times I let it grow out (just to see what it was like), my hair has always been short — above my collar, usually.
When Plagioclase and I started dating, I had very short hair, he had long hair, and we were both kinda skinny (I outweighed him by about 15 pounds; he’s taller by about 7 inches). I always wore jeans and t-shirts and tennis shoes, and usually had some sort of button-up shirt draped over me. He always wore jeans and t-shirts… you get the picture. From the back, especially if we were seated, you couldn’t tell who was the girl, or even if there was one. From the front, at least one is obvious — Plagioclase has had a beard since he could grow a decent one.
Anyway, I liked the ambiguity that made people uncomfortable. I was reminded of it today at the doctor’s office. I was next in line to check in, when the clerk looked up at me and asked, “May I help you, sir?”
I blinked, and then stepped up to the window and said, “Yes, I’m checking in Plagioclase’s mother, she has an appointment with Dr. Dutch.”
He reddened slightly, and said “Sorry, ma’am.”
What could I say? “Dude! I have boobs!”? No, I said, “That’s ok.”
It really was ok — and I was secretly pleased.
In this post on gun control by Belle Waring, there’s this phrase (scroll down):
No one is a 2nd amendment absolutist, because everyone agrees that there are some types of arms which private citizens may never have, such as tactical nuclear weapons. The debate is clearly over what restrictions we will have over the armaments of private citizens, not whether there should be any.
When I read this, all of a sudden that old joke popped into my head:
A man asks a woman, “Would you sleep with me for a million bucks?”
The woman looks him over and says, “Yes.”
The man asks her, “Would you sleep with me for ten bucks?”
The woman draws herself up and retorts, “No! What kind of woman do you think I am?”
The man responds, “We’ve established what kind of woman you are — now we’re just negotiating the price.”
I didn’t say it was a good joke.
The post also reminded me that I miss shooting. I took riflery in college (back the days when phys. ed. classes were required — riflery was one I could do without having to change clothes), and shot rifles and handguns in class. I also have used shotguns (clay pigeons) in an old quarry in Ohio. Once I had the opportunity to shoot a black-powder long rifle — which was a blast because I actually hit the clay pigeon I was aiming for.
It is fun to fire guns. I don’t care for handguns because to do a good job at it requires a steadier hand than I have. But it’s fun in the way that explosions on TV are fun (the fake ones, that is), or watching a building being imploded, or racing around on a go-kart track, or putting metal in the microwave. It’s using a mechanical object as an expression of power, and feeling just for a little bit that you might have some control over it (whether you really do or not).
This has nothing to do with hunting, by the way. I don’t hunt, and like most people of my generation, would find it difficult to prepare any meat that didn’t come shrink-wrapped to styrofoam (eating it if someone else has prepared it is totally different).
