i like medical dictionaries

i used to think i was a pretty normal kid, but now looking back at my childhood, i'm realizing there were a couple of warning signs that should have told me that i probably thought a little differently than the other children. for instance, the first cd i ever owned was "now in a minute" by donna lewis. seriously? i think just me (age six) and just two strung-out preteen girls drained from crying over "sixteen candles" were the only people who bought that cd. but then again, my brother's first cd was ricky martin, so i mean you tell me who was the weird one. i was also in gt (gifted and talented), which is like the elementary school equivalent of mensa, except with none of the perks and all of the societal scorn. we got to play fun games like "piece the fake pterodactyl skeleton back together" and "do a stupid project over rosie the riveter," but we were allowed to skip science class for gt, so that was pretty cool, if a little bit illogical.

hooowweeever, since there were other kids in it too, i never really felt like an outsider, but i'm pretty sure i can say i was the only one in my class who religiously read medical dictionaries. okay, maybe not religiously, because that's just dumb, but i loooved them. still do. there was something so exciting and thrilling hidden behind the lines of minute text describing the procedure for curing a bone cyst (you have to scrape the cyst and fill the cavity with bone chips!) and the old black and white pictures of goiters and impetigo (fluid-filled blisters that burst and form pale-brown crusts). delightful!

(goiter)

(impetigo)

i loved pulling down my dad's old copy of the american medical association: encyclopedia of medicine and just thumbing through the pages, savoring words like "lymphogranuloma venereum" and "hydatidiform mole" and the way they felt in my mouth (the words, not the moles). so, when i got some money (thanks grandma), i bought my first medical dictionary at age like eleven or something. i read it all the time, and used the knowledge i gained from it to make a hilarious birthday card for my friend (outside: "happy birthday!", inside: "aren't you glad you don't have vitiligo?!"). comedy gold.

(vitiligo. not even joking. it's science. p.s. rip)

but really, it might just be that i have a sick obsession with like, weird stuff. i'm not sure. all i know is that my love for medical dictionaries has translated over to a particular fondness for medical dramas (but not grey's anatomy. the only thing medically wrong with anybody on that show is an unfortunate inability to portray actual human beings), and a desire to like, clean everyone's wounds. and i don't mean that in the normal, compassionate metaphor way. totally mean it in the weird way.

but i guess on the plus side of all this, if anyone i know ever contracts erysipelas, i'll know what to do.

i like south africa and so can you!

Sponsorship for this post has not yet been provided for by the South African tourism board. It comes free of charge, pro bono, gratis... besides it's no great secret that I'm a fan of my homeland.

This list should convince you to like it too, if you didn't already, and tell you what you can do about it!

So here goes.

1. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

As he celebrates his 90th birthday next month, we mark our fifteenth year since the end of the disgusting apartheid era, nobody liked it, especially Nelson. He spent 28 years cooped up on an island prison brooding over it and yet he maintained a nonviolent stance toward effecting change in his country. (Incidentally, Gandhi developed his nonviolent protest while living in south africa)

Side Note: I was friends with his God Son at school and he visited a hospital my dad was working at to rename it. Morgan Freeman is playing him in a movie coming out later this year.

Your Turn: Buy a poster, read "Long Walk to Freedom," or celebrate his birthday with some friends on the 18th of July.

2. The uKhlathlamba Drakensberg Mountains

The drakensberg is one of the most beautiful places on earth with lush valleys and gorges leading up to majestic basalt escarpments that surround the tiny country of Lesotho. It's name translates from Zulu and Afrikaans to mean "Barrier of Spears" and "Dragon mountain," so it's not surprising that it inspired the setting of Lord of the Rings. It is considered the biggest art gallery in the world comprised of 35,000 individual bushman paintings dating at least 40,000 years ago. The Tugela Falls, located in the top right corner of the above picture, is the second highest in the world.

Side Note: After becoming the first man to climb mount everest, Sir Edmund Hilary regularly frequented the area on holiday with the Mrs, because, he is reported to have said, "it offers great hiking and a chance to regain feeling in your toes after a nasty case of Himalayan frostbite." Also home to baboons (more later).

Your Turn: Come for the vistas, stay for the... well also the vistas.

Get creative! Start a "hike of the month club." It's just like a book club, only you get together and discuss the hike that none of you really had enough time to do.

3. Baboons

This may seem a strange selection, considering the wealth of great African animals (lions, tigers, elephants, zebras, etc), but baboons provide a remarkably apt social analog. One can refer to them as a metaphor for almost any situation. Here's a purely hypothetical example, with completely fictional characters to illustrate this point:

Ian meets Calculus Girl. Ian likes Calculus girl. Ian thinks Calculus girl's attractive, but she shows alarming potential to be annoying, using phrases like "fudge monkey's" and "uh oh spaghetti o's." The warning bells go off in Ian's head, but he decides to find out the true nature of Calculus girls personality. Alas, poor Ian forgot to heed the wise allegory of the baboon and fell into the great trap of the cute but incredibly annoying girl.

So if you feed a wild baboon, it loses its fear of people and starts rifling through rubbish bins and becomes a pest. And then you have to shoot it!

Moral of the story: young Ian shouldn't have fed the baboon.

Side note: This sort of aesop's fable type logic can be adapted to fit anything!

Your Turn: Try to incorporate more stories of baboons into daily conversation.

4. Shopping in Traffic

Traffic jams, congestion, no problem! Here in south africa you can now satisfy all your shopping needs from the convenience of your own car. Need a sack of potatoes, or fruit or flags for supper, well you needn't look far as there is probably a friendly vendor haggling outside your window. The rest of the world could learn a thing or two from this. Why go to the drive through, when the drive through can come to you! A typical sales pitch might sound something like this: "Cheap, Cheap! Cheaper than Cheap!"

Side note: At the 2003 national street vendors workshop some topics of discussion were: "Apples and Oranges: the congressional distribution of," and "Boxers or Briefs: an ethical dilemma."

Your Turn: A double major in business and african relations is tailor made for street hawking, though a little over qualified.

So you like?

i like contrast

martin luther king jr. once said "i have a dream something something something hills of georgia a bunch of kids playing together something something all colors blah blah racism is bad", and his words have always stayed dear to my heart. i'm not racist, but because i'm white a lot of people assume that i am, and also that i can't dance, and that i like country. all of things are wrong. wrong wrong wrong. i am a GREAT dancer, HATE country, and am NOT racist. but what's ironic is that i identify with about 98.9% of all the things on the stuffwhitepeoplelike.com website. it's weird. i swear i'm not a cliche.

anyway, the point is, i'm not racist, and in fact love diversity! diversity is great! contrast is great too. you can't figure out who you are until you figure out who you're not. or something. that's deep, right?

contrast also looks great in photographs.

see? classic contrast. also adorable. not at all racist.

kiiinnnnda freaky as hell, but it gets the point across.

oh man. look at this. this shit is cultural.

these kids are going to grow up to be individuals.

but see, a LACK of contrast can also look cool too! the world is just full of contradictions! (note: a lack of diversity doesn't work the same way)


and that is why i'm not racist. the end.

lynx:
cat in a box
hoodlums
shoez
albinobaby

i like wine (and my mom)

so i'm sitting here and it's my mom's birthday and my aunt is showing my mom how to use her itouch and my dad and my uncle are watching the baseball game and all i can think is oh my god i love wine and my family.

i feel like this is a drunk posting, but i'm just a little tipsy so it's classy, right? it's just like free love. i've got the love and i'm gonna spread it around like butter on bread. whole wheat, slightly dysfunctional, greatly fun bread.

somehow wine ties into that. i had a lot of wine tonight. more fun facts about my family later. lord knows the pages i could write about them.

happy birthday moms. i lub you.

+

(that's my dad and me and my mom) (we've all aged a bit)
=

happy.

i like lolcats

you know, in these difficult times, one of the only things that can comfort me when i see the hopes of millions sink with our titanic of an economy is the fact that we as a country can still laugh at a fat cat who likes cheeseburgers and isn't too great at spelling. no, not garfield. no one has laughed at garfield since 1992.

LOLCATS.

lolcats are great, because now i know that secretly everyone has imagined personalities for their cats and laughed at their adventures... not just me.



once you start thinking about it, it's actually kind of cool how lolcats have evolved. cats have always been a big part of pop culture, whether or not the public has been consciously aware of it. right off the top of my head i can think of three cartoon cats that i grew up with (sylvester the cat, tom of tom and jerry, and felix, and snagglepuss), and what's interesting is to note how different each of their personalities have been. felines are mysterious and i'm bored thinking about this paragraph now so let's just see a cat playing the keyboard:

LOL

i like city lights

they always make me nostalgic for a place i've never been.

i like shaped food

i have some problems with food:

1) it likes to lurk in womens' problem areas
2) it doesn't make itself
and
3) it's boring

number three particularly bugs me. how many times have you sat down to eat something, and then realized what you want is actually something completely different and/or more interesting-looking? no matter how hard you try, your tuna fish sandwich is never going to turn into a rabbit or an umbrella, and when you realize this, it's bad news bears. the finite state of food matter is a BIG problem, because i like to be intellectually, physically, and imaginatively stimulated at all times. luckily, there's a solution to the imagination part: shaped foods.

foods shaped like other things are great! just ask your mom.

this is your pretty basic food shape. everyone starts out with the heart because it's easy and because you automatically look like a sensitive soul, despite the fact that you made it with greasy hash browns in a waffle house on valentine's day. how sweet.

dinosaurs?! who DOESN'T like dinosaurs?! no one. no one dislikes dinosaurs, and that is why they are the next level up on food shape difficulty. everyone loves them, and if you have a sandwich, a knife, and know what a dinosaur looks like, you automatically have either five new friends or children that are willing to forgive you for being a bad mother. my mother never made me these.

see, this is the big leagues. if food was a video game, the person who made these would have scored nine extra lives, saved the princess, and shot the duck. also, these are great for vegetarians who can't eat pork, but have the craving to slaughter something with cloven hooves. (side note, does anyone know what a mung bean is?)

this is for you ethnic/cultured folks out there. y'all got a spot in this niche. don't y'all worry about a thang, chubblies.

but see, some people just don't know when to stop on the whole food-shaping business. things gets weird, people get awkward and uncomfortable, and eventually the police show up and you now have three kegs and a casserole to yourself.

take for example this picture:
this is a weird-ass picture. but i love it.

or this guy: yeah, that's bread. yeah, what the hell. talk about an overachiever. on the bright side, no one would ever say they didn't suspect it if he turns out to be a serial killer.

in conclusion, i still need intellectual stimulation. and i'm hungry.

lynx:
heart of hash (browns)
dino-wich (looking at it, this has to absolutely be my new favorite website. i could write an entire post about them.)
pigglies
bento babe
weird-ass picture

cereal killer

i like sunburns

call me weird*, but one thing i really enjoy is a good sunburn. i'm not exactly sure why, but if we were to play psychologist, i'd say it all stems from my insecurities. i am a really pale person, and i guess this is seen as weird in texas, land of a thousand suns. some girl in my high school once came up to me and asked if i was from norway because i was so pale. i told her no and then i punched her in the face and dragged her down the hallways. "hallway-dragging carly," they called me. not really. but anyway, whenever summer rolls around, i'm always lagging behind the other bikini babes who automatically turn golden brown like, the second they encounter UV rays. it's not fair. so i'm usually the one sporting a perky shade of pink/lightish red, and in my efforts to catch up, i think my brain has somehow convinced itself that that horrible tingling/burning sensation feels good. and it does! it's the feeling of summer. painful, painful summer.

this is me

*don't. i'm sensitive.

edit: i got a sunburn on my ass, and i now take back everything i ever said about sunburns being fun.

i like fluffy dogs

actually, to be specific, i like all dogs (ten points to anyone who finds the irony in that statement [which isn't even true; i do dislike some dogs (but not a lot)]), but i have a particular place in my heart for the huge ones that resemble polar bears. those are the kinds of dogs that when i was little i was convinced i could train to give me rides all over the place*, and eventually we'd leave home and travel across the world, needing only a peanut butter sandwich and a bone in a hobo-style knapsack to sustain us.

needless to say, i'm become used to my dreams not working out exactly the way i want them. for example: i never met that dog. still, i'm positive he's out there, and he's waiting for me to climb onto him and never look back. also, i think his name is bo.


*nerd moment: anyone who has seen miyazaki's princess mononoke will know exactly what i'm talking about. anyone who hasn't probably does too.