i like eggs

I LOVE EGGS! i would scream this from the rooftop (of a chicken coop, on a chicken farm, wearing a chicken suit), and then after i did that i would go inside and eat some eggs..... actually, forget about the syntax and flow of that sentence. let's just talk about eggs, okay?

eggs are a touchy topic. everywhere you look, someone is railing against eggs and spouting all their bad qualities, but i say enough is enough. eggs are here to stay, and you'd better get on the egg train before it leaves the station. mister.

people don't like eggs because they're high in cholesterol and are willing to banish them from the refrigerator for this fact before actually doing their research. eggs are high in cholesterol, yes, but it's saturated fats that make your blood goopy, not dietary cholesterol itself. it's complicated, i know. if you don't believe me, read a book.

people also don't like eggs because they're actually tiny chickens. i can see the logic in that. it's kind of weird, if you think about it really hard, but personally i'm not a fan of thinking really hard. i just like eggs. that's all. (disclaimer: we buy free-range hen eggs, so i'm really a good person, i promise)

reasons you should eat eggs:
1) they're vitanutritious. that means they're full of vitamins and are therefore nutritious. these vitamins include ones like choline (integral to the development of unborn kids' memories. ironically, eating fetuses is good for fetuses.), vitamin d, and vitamin k. eggs also contain all essential amino acids, but anyone with a brain could tell you that's because you're basically eating dna.
2) eggs contain carotenoids, which help lower the risk of developing cataracts. unborn cheepers are good for your peepers! haaaahahahah i should be on stage.
3) eggs are good for your hair and nails. they just are.

my favorite way of eating eggs is over medium. i like having the egg whites slightly goldened, with the yolk solid around the edge but yolky in the middle. or, if the yolk breaks (which it does, always), then i don't fry it for as long.

um, anyway.

these are beautiful eggs.

this is a beautiful breakfast (minus the potatoes)

this is a beautiful fantasy

lynx
egg fax
beautiful eggs
breakfast of champions

behind the scenes: i said "egg" twenty-one times.

I like boats

I'm riding on a dolphin, doing flips and shit
The dolphin's splashing, getting everybody all wet
But this ain't Seaworld, this is real as it gets
I'm on a boat, motherfucker, don't you ever forget.

--A. Samberg, 2009

Generally speaking, people shouldn't go in the water. Our stupid skinny limbs make for poor propulsive instruments in anything thicker than air. Plus our air-sucking mouth holes don't work very well below sea level. I know what you're thinking.

Water is a refreshing way to cool off in these hot summer months. That neighborhood pond is looking awful attractive right now. Wouldn't it be nice to take a short dip?

Don't go in there. You're just gonna flop around like an injured seal. You'll get all pond scummy and I'm gonna have to drag you out. Don't put everyone through that.

Turns out that you're not the only one who's jonesin' for the ocean. Humans have been trying to quench the collective urge to submerge for millenia. Frustrated with the aforementioned physical limitations of the human body, one Sumerian man decided to tell God to S his D (literally!). After yelling a string of obscenities at the sky, James P. Boat swore an oath to invent the boat. The rest is history.

Mr. Boat, Circa 10,000 BCE

Boats are the brilliant solution to the cosmic tragedy of humans and water. We want what we can't have. An analogy is in order. You can force your way into Salma Hayek's home (ocean) but you'll be severely beaten by a crack team of Mexican assassins (drown). In this example a boat would be like a chef's outfit. It will let you get way closer than you normally would and maybe even smell her hair.

Ms. Hayek christening a boat. I know, relevant.

More than a symbolic gesture of spite toward a vengeful creator, boats are more fun than a barrel of very fun things. I don't own a boat, but my uncle married into a family that does.

Side note: ladies, start your engines. Boat engines, that is.

The feeling of exhilaration you get on the front of a boat is hard to describe. The calm water whips by beneath you and cool wind shears overhead. You can't get the same effect on land. Not to mention boats come with a whole variety of fun activities. From skiing to waterboarding, they've got you covered.

Kayaks and canoes count too. Paddling to the middle of a calm lake is a serene experience unlike any other.

Only caveat: Don't be this guy.

Click to play.

i like underwater

pictures.

i also like being underwater, probably more than i like being abovewater, or outsidewater, or halfinwater, or nowherenearwater.










i WILL be a mermaid when i grow up.

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.