Febsy

I would hate to be February. All the other months are all macho with their 2-3 day leap on lil ol febsy, while February has to deal with the inadequacy of having 28 days. Or sometimes we mix it up and tack an extra day on there, like a tail onto a donkey. Lack of a concrete identity? Persnickety pith plus perpetual paucity? Pity. I bet February cuts itself. Not only is February shorter than all the other kids, it has a dinky holiday that a majority of the single population either despises or ignores. Now I just looked up the history of valentines day on google in the hopes that what James McCormack said about Hallmark inventing Valentines Day was true, so that I would have some juicy gossip to spill. But alas, vday is just a boring amalgamation of various and sundry traditions from old world Europe. I simply adore valentines day when I've got a beau on my hip, because I love thoughtful, effortful romance and little tokens of affection. I love chocolates and roses and smelling chocolates and roses and I love seeing a face light up after you've given them something amazing. I love to love to be loved.

What my family does with chocolate boxes on vday is pretend we're buying them for one parent or another (there is a 50/50 chance of which parent it will be, since there are only two [which you probably assumed anyways {although I guess some people could say they have 4 with step-parents, or 6 if god-parents count. Do they usually count? This is irrelevant.}]), then tuck the box conspicuously beneath some magazines on the kitchen table. A shrewd sibling, or my father shifting through the Victoria's Secret Catalogues, alights on the treasure trove, and lets out a cry of ecstasy that alerts the other family members, who stampede from all ends of the savannah to converge at the watering hole. The ensuing frenzy is regulated by two established rules: 1. We must take one bite only of each different type of chocolate. 2. We must alert others of the comparative merit of the chocolates we have sampled. And one unspoken rule: If you break these rules you will be verbally beaten using expletives graciously supplied by my siblings.

But even with these rules, there's still the feeling that you'll be copped out of the good chocolates unless you're the vulture who camps the corpse the longest. With other desserts, (i.e. thin mints), civil conduct is a bust. When that $3.50 box of cookies is opened, we let fur and feathers fly, in a primal sort of way. Traces of primal instincts emerge when one's needs are at a relativa extrema: hunger, exhaustion. But that's a given really. What's interesting is to look at the more subtle ways these instincts weave into instances of lust, desire, attraction, jealousy. Whenever you think "Zoinks!" ...nevermind, you never think zoinks, that's just me. Whenever you think "Dayyum, that chick is bangin," your subconscious is saying "Her physical features suggest that she is biologically pre-ordained to be exceptionally fertile and apt for rearing offspring, and I would like to mate with her since our babies would have a high chance of survival." But humans complicate things by adding an extra component to the biological mix: mental compatibility. Thus emerged the starry-eyed terms "soulmate" and "true love." Does every person have a soulmate - a missing piece who fits and complements them both physical and personality-wise? Or is it just personality-wise that fits the criteria for a soulmate? Wouldn't the ideal love be one that transcends boundaries and disregards appearances altogether? Well, if so, then the ideal love is impossible. Even blind men can measure attractiveness by the feel of their partner's flesh. Perhaps transcendent love could occur between people with no sight or touch... but what fun would that be? You could never dress up as a well-hung stable boy and his virgin milkmaid!!!! Well, I suppose you could, but it would be pointless, because the fun of dressing up is in showing off the outfits. I guess blind people rely a lot on sound porn.

Seeing the movie Taken made me extremely thankful that I'm not sexy enough to be trafficked and sold for $400,000 to a sheik as his 17-year-old love slave. Unless he's a sightless, touchless sheik...

Guess I'll just cross my fingers.

(Although in retrospect, I can't bring myself to feel thankful that I don't look like this.)

Maggie Grace, 25. Believable 17 year old? Hardly.

• Awesome blog, awesome chocolate
• Chocolate heart by Gaku Otomo
• "La Voglia" by Marcus Tomlinson - 'La voglia' is to desire... someone or something.

So I Was Making Yeast Bread

Babies are like yeast breast.

The man is the yeast while the woman is the sugar, the water, the eggs, the flour, and the oven all bundled into one. This is not genetically correct of course, seeing as the 46 chromosomes that come together to form an embryo are comprised of 23 from the man and 23 from the woman. However, from the minute that bun is stuck in the oven, women proceed to harbor, protect, nourish, develop, and birth the baby. Men just squirt and go; afterwards, they can kick back, relax, and watch that sports game on TV. All they have to harbor, protect, nourish and develop is their beer bellies. Of course the picture I've painted is blatantly stereotypical & mainly serves as a verbal shudder at the thought of the very probable reality that I've come to fear. My man will become fat. He will watch TV shows that do not interest me. He will not have to suffer through childbirth... I will. And, going back roughly to my previous topic, he will have an overactive libido.

Now, a voracious sex drive is not necessarily a bad thing. If my perpetual significant other, or husband, or whatever he may be is highly desirable both physically and mentally, then I'm sure my libido will match his and I will be ready to throw decency, caution, and presentable clothing to the wind at every waking opportunity for babyless lovemaking. Or babyful, when the time comes. Hopefully the insertion of a man's yeast into my bread dough will be as conscious and purposeful as clicking "Try For Baby" rather than "Woohoo," in classic Sims fashion, and hopefully the pregnancy will be announced by signs as clear as a 6-note lullaby and that little thought bubble with a pacifier and a question mark. But perhaps not. -- In which case I'll nip that embryo in the bud. This is a major reason why I initially dismiss extremist Republican platforms; how the elk could I ever support a politician who believes in snatching away women's reproductive rights? Who cares if Catholicism says contraception is wrong? Well, Catholics, I guess. + Republicans. Is there a notion that religious people abide by a stricter moral code than agnostics or atheists? If there is, then it would be just that, a notion.

It sucks that metabolisms slow down so much during sleep, because this means that I'm just as full of three slices and 700 calories worth of pizza at 9 PM as I was at 6 PM; so, I won't be hungry for girl scout cookies for at least another two hours. Damnation and hellfire. But I digress...

And I digress from my digression. A main purpose of stretching after slumber is to jump start the flow of all that lymph that has been lazing around in your body for the entire night (or the entire 2.5 hours of unplanned, dream-ridden naptime while curled up next to your Beagle in her dog bed, in my case). Supa' coo', supa' coo'.

... Seeya in two hours, thin mints. In the meantime, I will sing yearnful* Beatles songs... or rather type them and sing them in my head in the hopes that you will know the melodies and sing them in your head as well. In that moment, we will be connected in the only way that we will connect with the majority of the other people who have or will have inhabited this Earth: not by time or place, but by culture. Approximately 106,456,367,669 people have lived on the Earth. Out of this colossal number, you've only known, what, a couple hundred of them? Each and every one of those people had hopes, wants, dreams, likes, dislikes, victories, failures, skills, relationships, emotions, a birth, a death.** But they weren't special. They were so unspecial in fact, that we don't give them more than a fraction of a thought. Why should we? I mean, they were no Gandhi. They were no Martin Luther King, or Adolfe Hitler, or Albert Einstein, or KevJumba -- assuming you know who Kevjumba is. I LOVE ASIAN DADS SO MUCH. But I'll leave the subject of Asian dadship and interracial babies for a later time.

Do not fret, an in-depth discussion of wasians and wilipinos (?) and half-elves and half-nymphs and puppykittens and all sorts of wonderful hybrids will occur in good time. The evening is young and ripe with possibility! The possibility of... girl scout cookies (It wont be long, yeah, yeah, yeah). But! To revisit my rant about All the People Who Have Ever Lived: so they remain an insignificant blip, just a miniscule part of the unfathomable mass of people used to deduce historic trends and analyze the evolution of human institutions and psyche. And this is how most of us will live and die, with names markedly absent from the history books. You'll carve out your puny existence and most of the over 100 billion other people that have lived or will live will never have the faintest idea that you existed. But you know you exist. And that's all that matters. Right?

^ Sex in the bread world

*This is not a real word.

**This sentence does not use correct parallel sentence structure. I despise the subtle nuances of grammar... the ones that I don't use automatically, at least. Struggle and inaptitude = dislike... which is a concept that can be applied in a variety of cases.

Bread art is cool!

• Look at it full size, detaillll
• Asians!
• You can see the toast better in this one
• This guy's artwork is ingenius
• Eeeee!