Blog #10: I Hope There's Pasta Salad in Hell

2009

 They'd changed the religious billboard by the 24 road overpass again. Before, it had toted an overtly Baptist view on abortion, but now it read “Heaven or Hell: You decide.” with the familiar 1-800 number underneath. Bart and I drove by this billboard every time I took him home after debate practice, and this time he felt particularly goaded. With my cell phone, he dialed the number and waited, me giggling in the driver's seat as I turned onto the overpass.

“Hi.” He starts confidently when the other end picks up. His hair is the same as when we'd first met - medium-length and swept to the side like a prototypical skater kid- and he casually tosses it out of his bright blue eyes. “I'd like to make a decision.” The man on the other end is confused. “Yeah,” Bart continues, smirking as only a 16 year old boy knows how. “Your billboard on 24 road says I need to decide heaven or hell, and I think I want to choose hell.” The man is taken even more off guard. I hypothesize that he doesn't get calls very often, especially of this variety. From Bart's response, I assume the man asks him why he chose hell.

“Well,” Bart reasons, sitting back. “I like really hot weather...” The man at the call center informs him that he is not just hot, but forced to carry our punishments. “Yeah, but aren't most of the trials and stuff exercise related? Like pushing boulders up mountains again and again? I like exercising too, and hot weather, so I don't really see the problem...”

I have no idea how that conversation ended, but I'm sure it was hilarious.

Taylor “Bart” Bartholomew is my best friend, and I hate him sometimes. His favorite food is pasta salad, he has two younger sisters, one that he hates and one that he tolerates, his parents are divorced, and he sometimes talks in third person. He's also a member of the United States Marine Corps, stationed in Afghanistan until June, having first arrived in early January 2012.

His first impression of the middle east was “dusty and cold,” something I knew he was disappointed by, loving the heat and all. Lucky enough for him, things warmed up, and by March it was reaching above 90 degrees every day. The heat isn't so bad, he says, it's the searing hot dust that blows around that really makes his temporary home hard to deal with sometimes.

Blog #9: Eavesdrop-drop-dropping

Dressed in an unassuming deep purple coat, the woman waits at the Maggie's Buns entree display for a good two minutes before speaking up, waving down the hipster twenty-something behind the counter. "What is that entree at the end?" She gestures, in case the verbal description wasn't enough.

He leans over to check, furrowing his brow slightly under the mop of dark hair. "That is..." he leans further before answering "...our veggie pesto wrap."

The woman nods and frowns, considering this. Clearly, it was not the answer she was hoping for, after staring down the food so carefully before. "Is there any protein in that?" I bite my lip, watching the exchange, my stomach quietly moaning.

Now he frowns, his small white ear gauges coming into view as he turns to the display of food again. "I don't- it's mostly just vegetables and pesto." A sheepish shrug, and he turns to face the woman again.

Another wrong answer, it seems. The woman crosses her arms. "Could you fry me up an egg with it?" It sounds condescending, and I feel bad for the hipster. I want to order something simple and on the menu to make up for her.

The hipster is thrown, both by the question and the tone, and he nervously straightens his light blue, "White Castle Employee of the Month 1971" tee-shirt as he formulates an acceptable response. "I'm not sure..." Feet still planted in front of the register, he twists his tall body to peek into the kitchen area behind him. "It depends on how far they are on cleaning..." Stepping away from the counter now, he takes a few paces towards the back, passing briefly through the teal door frame to check on the cleanup progress, desperately trying to help his costumer.

His coworker, a pretty young woman with a thick black ponytail who knows both my name and my order from my many visits, appears. "What's up?" By now, I realize that it's going to be a while before I get to order my usual, so I pull my phone from my jacket pocket and check Twitter while the hipster male employee explains situation to the girl.

I look back up just as she gives the woman an apologetic shrug. "Oh, yeah, we usually stop doing hot sandwiches about two, sorry." The problem is that once the hot sandwiches stop being made, the grill is unnecessary and gets cleaned and prepared for the next day. Thus, no fried egg to accompany the protein-less wrap.

The woman purses her lips, then quickly smiles to show she isn't too upset. "That's alright. What's the one next to it, then?" Again, she gestures.

The hipster walks around the counter to see. "That is our vegan Thai peanut stir fry." Knowing that the peanut sauce is the only protein element in the dish, he doesn't look confident.

The woman nods, hands going into her deep purple coat pockets. "You know, I think I'll take that one."

He looks relieved. "Great! For here or to go?"

She pulls a large, black clutch-style wallet from within her purse with a smile, seemingly just as relieved that the confusion was over. "For here is good." She hands him a credit card.

"Hi, Bri!" The female employee, a smile on her face, peeks from around her male counterpart, who is gratefully ringing up the woman's final order. I smile, say hello back, and order the usual. Quick, simple, and on the menu.

Blog #8: Meet Bryan

The ten minutes before my poetry class starts is the best part of my Monday. The entire class is united against the professor that must not be named, and so we spend the couple minutes before he arrives complaining, making grandiose claims about standing up to him, but mostly just reveling in our united cause. Funny thing is that I don't know any of these people outside of this class one bit, and some I even have trouble remembering names for. It's strange to me that sometimes the people that are really strangers to me are the ones I see every day.

The only boy in the class sits next to me, on the left side of the small classroom. His name is Bryan and all that I know about him, past the unruly ginger mop on his head, is that he comes after me on the attendance sheet.

"Hey, uh, Bryan?" I inquire, fumbling with my iPhone in my pocket. "Do you mind if I interview you for my creative nonfiction class? It's just... I have to interview a stranger and I don't know you so you're basically a stranger..." Great, I'm rambling, I think, but he's already nodding, open to the intrusion. Relieved, I pull the phone all the way out, switching to the camera act.

"I have to take a picture... so... yeah. I'm gonna take an awkward picture of you now." He laughs a little at my awkwardness and I pull out a pen. "So... what's your name?" I raise an eyebrow at myself and he smirks back in understanding. The girl on the other side of me is calculating the possible date for the late midterm- we're almost three weeks behind on the syllabus.

"Bryan with a y, Davis. Bryan Davis." It was good that he pointed out the y. I'd been mentally spelling his name "Brian" because I liked the idea that Brian and Brianna were sitting next to each other. Ah, c'est la vie.

"And what's your major?" I realized at this moment how completely unprepared I was for this interview.

"English lit." He rests his hands on his decomposition book (the environmental equivalent of the composition book, I assume) patiently.

"Cool, cool..." I mutter, writing it down. The girls next to me look over at us, curious. "What do you want to do with that?"

He smiles, almost sheepishly. "I want to teach high school."

I stop writing and raise my eyebrow at him and chuckle, remembering my own reasons for not ever wanting to be a teacher, especially in high school. "Brave. So do you have to go to, like, teacher's school after this?" I pause to mull over my phrasing. "Teacher's school? Did that just come out?"

He laughs again, and nods. "Yeah, a couple years of teacher's school."

I make a forgettable comment to the girl next to me about their midterm reschedule conjecture and then another thought occurs to me. "Why high school?" I ask Bryan, still patiently giving me his full attention.

He shrugs with a thoughtful look. "Just from my own personal experience, I had a lot of great teachers back then and I want to do that too." We make eye contact for a moment, not because we're seeing something in each other, but because we're sharing a trip down memory lane, thinking about all the great high school lit teachers we've had. It only lasts a couple seconds, but I'm glad I interviewed Bryan. He's comfortable with the same kind of quiet reflection that I am, content with silence. I decide that I like Bryan, and hope we have a class together in the future, if only to commiserate about professors that will probably never inspire a love of teaching.

Blog #7: My fear of octopuses is completely and totally rational

Did you know that the male pillow octopus grows to only a few centimeters, while its female counterpart can stretch further than six feet? You go, girl!

But octopuses have more to offer than just an extreme body size. One intelligence trait of the octopus that has been circulating YouTube for a while is their ability to camouflage into almost any background. Their entire bodies are covered with tiny pigmented cells called chromatophores, each of which contain three sacks of colors and are surrounded by muscles that can control how the pigments are displayed by either relaxing or contracting. Think of it like a balloon; when it's loose, the color is small and concentrated, but when you stretch it out the color spreads and expands. A terrifying balloon of death.

Every one of these cells is controlled independently by the nervous system, allowing for an incredible amount of control and complexity for the range of colors. This also means that the octopus can change its appearance in less than a second. As if I wasn't already freaked out enough; not only can an octopus completely envelop me in its arms of death to slowly strangle me as I drown, but it can also sneak up on me, like a lioness waiting patiently for its prey to become complacent.

But enough about my completely rational fear of a slow, horrible death-by-camouflaged-tentacles. Remember the male pillow octopus we talked about earlier, the tiny one? Well, what he lacks in size he makes up for in creativity. These little buggers will rip off the poisonous tentacles of Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish -which they are immune to- and wield them as swords to keep predators at bay. As disturbing as that is -imagine ripping off the arm of one of your enemies and using it to fight off your other enemies- is it wrong that I find this defense mechanism kind of adorable? The things are only a couple centimeters long!

Blog #6: On Hating Twilight

I remember reading Twilight in 8th grade just before its massive popularity hit and loving it. Stephanie Meyer had created a world I was completely able to fall into and roll around in. Then, about a year later, it started getting pretty heavy mainstream attention, and so the haters started to crawl out from under their angry rocks, ready to sink their teeth into something freshly beloved. No vampire pun intended.

Twilight hating became, almost overnight, the sport of choice for "intellectuals", all of whom cited its anti-feminist protagonist, its borderline abusive love interest, and its less-than-stellar writing style. While I can offer plenty of arguments debunking those concerns, that's not what's so interesting about the fad of hating Twilight.

What's interesting to me is that it happened to Twilight, and not to one of the hundreds of adult romance novels whose entire genre is essentially subjugating at least one gender for sexual purposes- and I am including men. Yes, Twilight was more popular than many other romance novels, but its haters have almost created an entire social movement around the dislike of one silly book series.

There are many books in this world, and arguably many far worse than Twilight. In fairness, Kristen Stewart hasn't done much to help the negative view of the series, but even before the wildly popular movies premiered, the hatred was almost louder than the love.

I suppose my biggest question about the fad is this, though. With all the things in the world to spend energy hating, why Twilight?

On Sexist Jokes

A man is driving and runs over a woman. Who is at fault?
...
The man, because what was he doing driving in a kitchen??

Hi, my name is Bri (hi Bri!) and I'm a female who laughs at sexist jokes. I can't help it- they're so absurdly offensive that they actually throttle past the "offensive" line and end up at funny. Obviously I don't find these jokes funny when the "comedian" actually believes the sentiment, but when it's me and a couple friends and someone cracks a kitchen joke, I'm going to laugh. And I'm going to laugh hard.

I don't find sexist jokes funny because I'm an anti-feminist, or because I believe my gender's rightful place is in front of a stove, let's be clear. No, I love sexist jokes because it forces people to, frankly, chill the fuck out.

Let me explain. I believe that if you can't laugh at something, then you don't completely understand it. I believe that cracking jokes about something is just as valuable a coping mechanism as "roaming the halls weeping" (thanks, Spock!). Laughter reminds us that through every horrible event there comes a reason to continue living. Joking about touchy or controversial topics is just a way of dealing with them, because yes, sexism is funny. It is honestly hysterical to me when one person believes they're inherently better because of the set of genitals they lucked into prenatally. And how do I express that opinion? By satirically telling jokes to point out how imbecilic their points-of-view are. I would much rather laugh than yell, would rather smile than sob, and would rather spread entertainment than hate.

I laugh at sexist jokes because if I yelled and protested over every sexist, bigoted, or hateful thing someone makes light of, I would never get to sleep. I laugh at sexist jokes because they're funny, and because laughter is the best medicine for a fractured world. I laugh because, well, why not?

What They Don't Tell You About College

What they don't tell you about college is that it smells awful in the dorms. None of the pamphlets prepared me for the stench of genitals wafting through the hallways every morning, or the way your pillow always manages to smell like feet no matter how often you wash it. It might have been nice to be prepared for the fact that people apparently don't find it in their hearts to remove their own wads of public hair from the shower drains, or that sometimes the janitors just ignore it for weeks on end. But maybe that's just me.

What they don't tell you about college is that no matter how much you hated wherever you lived before, you're going to miss it at some point. For me, the word "hate" is too mild. Public school was not kind to me; I was bullied consistently from the time I was 8 on through my high school graduation, and being smart didn't get very far socially, even with the smart kids. My town was four hours away from any substantial city, and was encased in a valley in the Rocky Mountains, so feeling like you were caught in an empty fish bowl wasn't far off from the truth. It rarely rained, the foliage was sparse and usually parasitic, and the summers were so dry your hands looked like they were covered in flesh-colored scales. But it was familiar, and familiarity is few and far between 1000 miles from where you grew up.

What they don't tell you about college is that it's nothing like what you'd expected, but you can't imagine a better way to spend the first four years of your adulthood. About halfway through my first semester, as a freshman, I seriously considered dropping out and getting a service industry job to pay the bills while I penned the next great American novel. That first semester I was taking all core classes, and I had a grand total of one friend who was only really my friend because neither of us had met anyone else yet, and I couldn't remember ever feeling more completely alone. But for all the genital stench, all the unexpected homesickness, and all the grandiose expectations of my fabulous college life, I can honestly say that college has made me a better person. I am no longer that angry, deeply wounded kid who left Colorado with a chip on her shoulder and an empty glass. I am now an angry, on-the-mend young adult who stays out until 4am to go for a walk with someone she barely knows, washes dishes for two hours to film a silly cooking video with her roommates, and writes slam poetry about peeing standing up and being an angry, on-the-mend young adult. And honestly, who could ask for anything more out of their college experience?