Which Turtle were you?

I freaking love Ninja Turtles.  More so now than I did back when they were age-appropriate, certainly.  I miss my youth and am retroactively constructing a fictional fantastical view of how important TMNT really was to me.  This is aided by a relative dearth of readily available photo and video evidence to the contrary.  It’s further aided by continuing reminders in our (technically) adult household:

Recently discovered in a chocolate egg.  

Current home: Displayed prominently on the piano in the living room.

Modern turtle enemies.  What the hell are these guys?  

What happened to Bebop and Rocksteady?

Potentially the husband's proudest possession.  

Also on display on the piano.  Right next to the wedding pictures.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were pretty much the coolest thing my generation’s TV had to offer (kids these days think TMNT was made for them but they are SO wrong).  Any one word in the title would have been amazing enough for a little kid:  Teenage.  Mutant.  Ninja.  Turtle.  But you put them all together and suddenly you’ve got an unstoppable tsunami of Awesome.  With a capital A.

Who doesn’t still remember the theme song?  Who didn’t love pizza almost exclusively because of the turtles’ singular culinary obsession?  Who didn’t want to own all the action figures? 

That was the best Christmas present I remember getting as a child – a big-ass box of Ninja Turtles action figures.  And I got a life-size plastic version of Leo’s sword too (it was a sword to me back then, not a katana, because I didn’t know better).  And I promptly hit my sister over the head with it and got it taken away.  But those few fleeting moments of well-armed glory, they were magical.

The best part about the Ninja Turtles was that they were each unique enough to allow for favorites.  I think my interest in each of them has vacillated regularly throughout the years, but the truth is my heart is sworn to Raph and always will be.  Never mind that Leo dominates our household – that’s mostly the husband’s doing – or that most people think Raph is a whiny angsty baby (cf. that scene in the first movie where he spends the entirety of his farmhouse hideout time moping in a bathtub).  Raph isn’t exactly my favorite, but he’s my turtle.

Let me break it down for you, those of you who don’t know the turtles like familiar friends.  Kids tended to base their favorite turtle choices on one of three major attributes:

Yes, some kids chose their favorite turtle based on which Renaissance artist he was named after.  So what?  You got a problem with that?  You want to start something?  And clearly the makers of TMNT knew nothing about the Renaissance, anyway – the turtles’ names were totally misattributed in my opinion.  Leo should have been the tinkerer.  Mikey should have been the tortured brooding one, and Raph ought to have been the partier.  I had a really hard time in Art History class thanks to the Ninja Turtles.  Bastards.

Misattribution aside, I always wanted to be Leo.  I wanted to be a leader and have an awesome weapon and kick ass.  Or I wanted to be Donny, I wanted to be all scientific and technical.  But I got Raph.  Standoffish angsty hot-headed annoying Raph and his stupid useless sai.

This is because I had a dream when I was little.  Real little.  It was one of the very first dreams I remember, and it was long and perilous – I was a ninja turtle and I was stuck searching for hours through a neverending labyrinthine sewer system in a fruitless attempt to rescue April O’Neil from certain peril.  I was Raphael.  I can’t just ignore that kind of sign.  My subconscious chose for me.  It’s always going to be Raph.

Maybe this is why I always fall for angsty fictional characters, eh? 

It’s all Raph’s fault.

P.S. I just took an online quiz and I got Donny.  Figures.  You can also take the quiz here.

Google is your friend

It occurs to me that I may be too naïve and trusting a person.  I will probably be that little old lady who gives all her money to the nice Nigerian prince who just needs a money transfer because he lost a kidney while traveling abroad in Monaco, or whatever.  I have effectively already been that little old lady, actually, a few times in my life.  When I was working at Dairy Queen (it also occurs to me that I should apparently just have named this blog ‘Notes from a Dairy Queen’, given how much blog fodder those few short teenage months have thus far given me) this quite cute disheveled long-haired ratty-shirted guy once charmed me into buying him a whole ice cream cake “for a dinner for homeless people out in the desert” just by playing me a song on his harmonica.  I got duped into giving a psycho creepy stalker kid a kiss in a foreign airport.  On a rainy day, a family friend had me totally convinced the video of catastrophic flooding in Australia being covered on CNN was actually our backyard river.  In a series of factual blunders, I even managed to accidentally fool myself into thinking pandas weren’t bears and held that belief for years, and was so confident in my mistake I had other people in on it, too.  ‘Gullible’ might as well be my middle name.

Also, I tend to see no problem living in places one should probably avoid.  Prime example: when the husband went out of town for six months I moved into a smaller place more suitable for a single person living alone.  It was the size of a port-o-potty and was all sorts of broken-down – when the gas guy came by to approve the place and told me he couldn’t do it because the gas heater wasn’t up to code, the landlord just told me, “It’s fine, they always say that.  Don’t worry about it.”  So I just moved in and didn’t turn the heater on the whole winter.  The place was pretty much made of cardboard.  In fact, someone told me later about a friend of a friend whose house in Tucson was broken into after the burglar just kicked in the wall and walked in – and given the size of the hole I managed to put into the closet wall just by leaning a hand on it, I think my place fell into that same Laughably Easy burglarizing category.

But none of this really hammered home for me until I came home one day and realized I’d locked myself out.  I was sitting there staring at the door, wondering what the hell I could do – when out of the corner of my eye I saw an angel, an actual angel rooting through the big dumpster in our alley.  This homeless guy had with him a whole shopping cart of goodies he was diligently trying to augment – surely he’d have a screwdriver in there somewhere?  I walked over and explained my plight.  And sure enough he did have a screwdriver, and in under two minutes he and I had pried my window open and got me inside.  And you know what he said, while we were breaking into my house?  He told me, “This place isn’t safe.  I have a sixteen-year-old daughter and I would never let her live in a place like this.”

That’s how I got schooled that my house was potentially not my finest choice of living situation.

I’m looking for apartments in Chicago right now and I’m trying to keep these and other reminders in mind as I look at all these adorable places and fail again and again to remind myself that they are cheap because I am probably going to get shot walking out the door.  I’m not a good judge of these things.  But my friend helped me develop a great litmus test for checking out neighborhoods I know nothing about: 1) Google the address, 2) Find the closest park, and 3) Google the park name.  If you see news of a shooting, beheading, or bomb-planting in that park in the first five search hits, you are probably not about to settle into a nice neighborhood.  Seriously, this works.

If anyone could help me out with this whole Chicago thing I’d be deeply obliged.

Nerds are the best kind of people

I’ve just returned from the Arizona Browncoats’ sixth annual Can’t Stop the Serenity event, and if that didn’t make any sense then you’ve probably never seen the cult classics Firefly (the TV show) or Serenity (the movie).  Obviously I recommend both.  And I bet you wouldn’t argue with me that Can’t Stop the Serenity is a nerdy event.

This event represents exactly why nerds are the best kind of people.  On every scale, it exemplifies the very best that people can be, and what they can do when they come together for a good cause.

To summarize in one sentence, Firefly was a space cowboy sci-fi show that waxed profound in its portrayal of a group of mercenaries struggling to survive a universe that failed to appreciate their particular brand of morality.  Firefly has a wealth of fantastic messages enmeshed in it, about ethics, righteousness, equality, the list goes on.  I mean to say that this nerdy space cowboy show in and of itself was a production promoting the best kind of people. 

But it was canned in the first season by Fox. 

Enter the browncoats, the cult followers of Firefly.  Like the characters they idolized, they banded together for a common cause: to give a final voice to their favorite show.  They actually scraped together the cash themselves to fund a full-length film chronicling their favorite crew, and out of that sprung Serenity.  How awesome is that?

And it gets better.  Now around the country, browncoats put on annual Can’t Stop the Serenity screenings of the movie, and all the proceeds go to benefit Equality Now and other organizations seeking the empowerment and equality of women worldwide.  It’s a charity the show’s creator, Joss Whedon (of Buffy and Dollhouse fame), feels very passionate about.  Six years in, these screenings have raised over half a million dollars for Equality Now.

So yeah, all of that is great and all – strong moral messages and philanthropy and whatnot, it’s real nice.  But would you also believe that nerds are the most courteous moviegoers I’ve ever had the pleasure to sit with?

I know!  This is at a dedicated cult-movie screening where you’d expect people to be all rowdy and annoying.  And still no one yelled over the dialogue, no one clapped out of turn, and when the important bits came around no one ruined the surprises for anyone who hadn’t seen the movie yet (yes, there were two of them in the crowd).  One cell phone did go off, but the girl instantly turned it off and looked absolutely mortified.

The husband and I have all but sworn off movie theaters after our last twenty our so experiences where we’ve been subjected to people having entire conversations throughout the movies we paid ten dollars a ticket to watch.  But these browncoats were fantastic and their conduct throughout the whole evening – in the theatre, during the speeches and fashion show and front-running show screenings, milling around the lobby, even in the bathroom – was exemplary.  It was amazing.

I’m totally going back next year.

When the husband’s away…

Everyone has idiosyncrasies they choose not to display around other people.  Some of us do this because we’re prudish and self-conscious, and others of us do this because we don’t want to annoy the ever-loving piss out of our loved ones.  When my husband is out of town, my life changes in oh-so-many infinitesimal ways…

1. Loneliness is cleanliness.  Can you believe I’ve actually done the laundry every single week this month?  And the dishes?  And I’ve made my own meals for dinner?  You should see my house right now, it’s gorgeous.  It is absolutely miraculous what you can get done when you have no excuses like, “He totally put that there and he can damn well pick it up himself.”

2. Loneliness is craftiness.  I never would have scrounged up the sewing machine if the husband was around.  I’m making holiday costumes and learning to face-paint and cleaning things I’ve never cleaned before and mending things that really don’t need mending.  In husband-departures past, I’ve hauled out the acrylic paints or the earring-making supplies or the molding clay and gone to town.  Oh, and the husband was out of town for a couple weeks when I made the Stargate, too!  See?  I’m only ever creative when he’s gone.

3. The house turns bulimic.  With all the cleaning and all the crafting, the house pretty much waffles daily between being pristine and qualifying as a natural disaster area.

4. There’s this thing called ‘fruit’…  I’ve said we don’t eat in.  But as part of point one, I’ve been going to the actual grocery store and picking up actual fruits and vegetables and actually consuming them on a regular basis.  And the white nectarines in season right now are delicious.

5. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.  Normally I’m not much of a drinker.  No, honest.  But when the husband is away and I don’t have my regular social drinking partner and wine-bottle-sharer, I go crazy.  On days when it normally wouldn’t cross my mind once, I’ve found myself staring down the beer in the fridge and wondering how long I’m going to hold out before I start drinking alone.  I could shank a baby right now for just one good glass of white wine.  I’ve finagled my way into two glasses of wine this week and I’m still dying.  I think this defines alcoholism.

6. Cereal = all-day staple.  Cereal is no longer just for dinner.  Breakfast, lunch, second lunch, dessert, midday snack, midnight pick-me-up… it’s so versatile!  Especially when I don’t want to leave the house.  Which leads me to…

7. Self-imposed exile.  I’m a natural-born hermit.  The husband makes me leave the house to walk around the university, or get food for dinner, or buy things, or socialize.  But now, I don’t have to do any of that!  I can sit in a single spot on my couch all night and no one will bother me!  (Friends of mine, don’t get any smart ideas about taking me out of this in a fit of pious pity.  I like it.)

8. Forget personal hygiene.  I still brush my teeth twice daily.  But it can be hard to get up the motivation to shower when no one with whom you interact is going to get within a few feet of you in a given day.  And makeup and hair maintenance and cute clothes are all straight out the window when the bed is calling for you to sleep in just a few minutes more…

9. Cadaver nails.  That’s husband’s name for my fingernails when they start growing out of control, he says they look like when people die and their nails keep growing (I’ve heard this before, but I’m not sure it’s true).  But I hate cutting my nails.  HATE.  It takes forever and then you have to file them and I never had this problem back when I used to bite them off.  So when husband’s gone, the claws come out.

And finally…

10. Absolutely NOTHING in moderation.  At least, with regard to media.  The husband can only watch things once or twice before he gets bored with them.  He hates listening to music on repeat.  Me?  If I don’t consume everything a song or a band or a show has to offer, if I haven’t yet worn it like a second skin, if I can’t repeat it back verbatim, then I feel I haven’t really experienced it yet.  And when husband is gone, there’s no one to limit my addictions.  So far I’ve watched both seasons of Modern Family straight through four times.  Four.  That’s forty-eight episodes, back-to-back, four times over.  And each night I find a new song to fall in love with and play it on repeat for hours – last night it was Silver Sun Pickups, tonight it’s Mark Martel’s “Somebody To Love” audition tape for Queen Extravaganza (and my God, does that man ever sound like Freddie Mercury!  Be still, my beating heart!), and so on.  It never ends.

Anyway, I’d keep going on this list but my cereal’s getting soggy and I have to reorganize the pictures on the piano and I just reached the episode where the whole family takes a trip to Maui, and I really like that one.  Peace out!

Just like riding a bike!

I’ve taken up sewing again.  Well, effectively for the first time.  The other day I dragged my brand-new untouched sewing machine (gifted to me a few Christmases ago by my mother) from the highest recesses of our hall closet, because I finally found a use for it: making Día de los Muertos costumes for our stuffed animals.

Best not to ask, really.

Let me give you some background on me and sewing.  When I was young, my mom’s sewing machine was always set up in the family room and my sister and I dabbled in making crude stuffed animals and whatnot on it.  I own no evidence of this, but I’m confident I was once capable of threading the machine and sewing in a straight line, and even a curved line on some daring days.  But that was a long time ago.

So when I opened this box, I have to admit I was feeling a little trepidation.  It was a daunting beast of a machine, with a really big manual that had lots of diagrams.  (I’m exaggerating.  It was a big book because there were a lot of diagrams, three languages, and painfully exhaustive large-font instructions, such as “Disconnect the machine from the power supply by removing the plug from the main socket!” and “Never drop or insert any object into any opening.”)  Hesitantly I threaded the needle, pinned down my first test scrap, and pressed with ginger care on the foot pedal.

And it turns out, relearning to sew is just like relearning to ride a bike!

See, after I stopped riding my bike in high school I was nervous about getting back on it in college.  But by the end of my first week, I was still wobbly but I was getting the hang of it.  I was even confident enough to take one hand off the handlebar to wave a thank-you to a row of cars that had stopped so I could cross the street—

And my hand twisted and I flew headfirst over the handlebars and my backpack knocked straight into my head and I scraped both knees bloody and totally ruined my good new jeans.  Right in front of dozens of stopped cars full of laughing drivers.  Yep.  Grace personified, that’s me.

So when I say it’s just like riding a bike, I mean that I am comically inept at relearning to sew.  So far I’ve wasted half a spool of thread and a good dozen scraps of fabric and filled my house with more shouted cursing than even the foulest-mouthed sailor would admit to, and all I have to show for it are two disembodied doll-size jacket arms.  I’m just glad Dead Day isn’t for another month and a half.

No green thumbs on these hands

I’m an awful plant owner. 

We have three plants living in our house: an orchid, a ficus, and I think an amaryllis.  I’m pretty sure if my poor plants could talk they would scream in fear every time my husband leaves and they get left in my care. 

The probable-amaryllis has the most to fear from me at the moment.  (I have a feeling my comment field’s going to ping with the correct answer to my flower ambiguity about five seconds after I post this.)  It was a gift from my mother a few years back, and after a half hour of internet searching I’ve seen lots of amaryllises (amaryllii?) with our same pot and I think I remember seeing that flower on the box when we got it. 

Who knows?  That’s not the point.  The point is it has not once flowered in our house and I finally decided to heed my sister’s advice and look up how to properly care for a bulb plant.

And of course the first thing I read was not to put it in a sealed pot, which is exactly the kind of pot it came in.  So one screwdriver and a good deal of effort later I’m left with a cracked pot bottom and a shower of soil all over my kitchen sink.  Good start.

Also, I think this thing gets watered by the husband about every three days.  That might be too much?  Is once a week better?  And how often would all these East Coasters and Midwesterners water a plant if they lived in a desert?  I keep reading all this “cool, dry place” business and let me tell you – cool is not happening.  Dry I can manage, no problem.  Ten percent humidity is an Arizona standard.  But cool? 

Like I might have mentioned once or twice on this blog and even in this post, I live in Arizona.  We don’t do basements or cellars.  We can’t even get cold tap water nine months out of the year.  If you want cold water out of the tap, you rig a strainer filled with ice up to the faucet.  (Desert rats take note – I got that tip from a Facebook friend and I’m paying it forward because it works-ish.)  Outside of my refrigerator the coolest any part of my house gets is about 78 degrees, this time of year.  That’s not even close to the 60-something I’m seeing on the web. 

(Do people still call it the web?  I feel like that’s some holdover from the 90’s all of a sudden, like “cyberspace” or “the Net” – although Sandra Bullock is holding up incredibly damn well, come to think of it.  Good on her.  Okay I’m rambling.)

Plus, some sites say to take the bulb out of the soil to make it go dormant and some say not to and some say to do it in summer and some in fall and some when the leaves start to turn yellow and some say to cut the leaves down to the bulb and others say leave two inches…  All I want is the industry standard, people!  Gosh!

It’s enough to drive a girl crazy.  The internet is not remotely helpful for advice.  It’s as bad as reading scientific literature, with everyone all defending their mole hills, except on the internet it’s a lot harder to sift out bullshit.

Can someone help me?  How does one get a flower out of an amaryllis (probably) bulb?

My poor plants.

Got to love the First Day

I love the first day back at school!  All of a sudden campus is crawling with students again.  The freshmen are all stumbling around trying to figure out how to get to their brand-new college classes, the seniors are already showing up all jaded in pajamas like they couldn’t be asked, the grad students are trying to figure out whether to bother even printing the syllabus.  It’s a day full of adorable blunders and maddening accidental breaches of etiquette, and I can’t decide whether to stay indoors and weather the storm or go out on every class break just to enjoy the show.

I’ve seen nine First Days now at this university and they never change.  It’s so nostalgic.  Kids come by and try opening our lab’s key-locked door, and I’m reminded to go write the sign explaining that classroom ###-B is that-a-way around the corner.  11:35 rolls around and I panic and run out to grab a lunch before the classroom floodgates open for a nightmarishly crowded lunch break at the student union (it’s the only food the freshmen apparently know about).  The gym is off-limits this whole first week until the undergrads settle into their schedules and realize 3:00 is not an appropriate exercise time for them.  There’s no point at all to trying to bike around in the ten minutes before every hour, not when skateboarders and pedestrians have no idea yet where their right-of-way ends and the bike lane begins (come to think of it, I don’t see as many rollerblades around of late – has an era finally come to an end?). 

All around me I see kids sitting in hallways waiting for classes to start and I remember my first year here, little eighteen-year-old Kaitlin sitting anxiously in the hallway of the social sciences building trying awkwardly to figure out what to do with herself during the break between 9:00 and 9:50.  I hear them asking each other questions – where is this or that building, when is your lunch break, where do you go for good coffee – and I can practically hear myself trying to start up those same meet-and-greet conversations that for me never ended up going anywhere.  I miss my fellow first-year grad student, who showed up so cheery-faced in my first class of graduate school and with whom I shared all of my first grad school memories.  I happily fail to envy the other students in my lab, who’ve not yet moved beyond class-taking and have to run off with lunch in hand to sit through a four-hour lecture.

This ninth year is the last year for me, and I’m going to miss all of this First Day at College ridiculousness.  It’s been fun.  But THANK GOD I’m getting the hell out of here before I make it to ten.


UPDATE: I made it to ten.  Thank you, data collection setbacks.  Ten was the same as the rest, except that the incomers looked like children.