Lazy Summer Anecdotes

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… For any of you out there looking to write the next Dickensian classic, well folks, summer 2020 is your golden opportunity.

Like many people I’ve been working from home, biting my nails while the rest of my future plans, which had been mostly dependent on international travel, crawl slowly on burdened with unresolvable uncertainties. You’d think this would leave me with plenty of time to explore other hobbies and write riveting blog posts, but it turns out that being locked in the house (or during May, in my room for *ding ding* health reasons) does not make one particularly creative or provide stimulating experiences. If the following anecdotes are rather sad well, ain’t we all, honey, ain’t we all. Nonetheless, I did finish two comics, the second of which is Coming Soon to a blog near you.

The Case of the Savage Cabbage, and other Grimm Tales

Misfortune Level: 10

The first sign I believe, that I’ve been placed under some sort of curse, came when I was cutting cabbage for dinner about five weeks ago. Being a little tipsy and a lot stupid, I wasn’t being particularly careful and put the cerated knife right through the tip of my finger, splitting it open.

There was a lot of blood.

The EMTs, luckily, arrived in two minutes, stopped the bleeding (mostly), and also helpfully cleaned up the living room, which was good because the Lawyer reported the bathroom looking like we had murdered someone in the sink, and I had only spent about 20 seconds in there before realizing my finger needed professional assistance. I refused an ambulance ride, and got my housemate to drive me to urgent care.

“You need to take this to the ER,” the urgent care doc said.

The Best Laid Schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

Friends, I am aggrieved. There be beady-eyed whisker monsters in this house.

It all went down on Tuesday, as I was mindlessly browsing the Internet, watching Jun’s Kitchen on Youtube while browsing pictures of hakama on Amazon, when frantic movement caught the corner of my eye. Lurching from the bed and to my feet, I yelled at the Lawyer in the room next door to fetch me a butterfly net while trying to locate the invader with my phone light. It was 10pm but I was ready to Shizuo the heck out of any rodent stupid enough to make its presence known in my territory.

It took some convincing, but I got the Lawyer to come in my room and stand on my bed while holding the phone light. I proceeded to turn over bags, box poised, hoping to unearth and capture a pest smaller than a ping-pong ball but faster than a freshmen in a room with free pizza. Unfortunately, he made a run for it first. With a scamper of claws and house-sandals, I chased him into the Lawyer’s bedroom and pinned him against the dresser. Black eyes in a head bigger than his body eyed me warily. I made a valiant but clumsy attempt to catch him with the box, but he skittered back into the hall and then into a small hole between the lowest stair step and the baseboard.

Grad School 2.1: First Lessons I Didn’t Get in Class

Semester two has begun. The following are four things I learned this week.

1. Snow is a thing

Last Saturday, the heavens clouded over and a strange substance began falling eerily from the sky. Now, as a Texan whose secondary domus has been various points in East Asia, I’m pretty familiar with ice and wind. Not Canadian levels, of course, but enough to know that shiny roads = Not Safe For Bicycling. Consistent amounts of frozen precipitation, however, are a new experience, at least in terms of having them thwart my regular activities. By 4:00pm I was astonished to look out my window and see this:

Full disclosure: This photo was actually taken post-shovelling. The snow did not magically disappear from the driveway, most of the credit for that going to persons other than myself.

Hello 2019! 圣诞快乐 & メリクリ

It’s Good to Have a Lawyer When Dealing With Bodybags

Cat REALLY likes the bag.

It all began last Saturday, when me and my housemates were lounging around the living room, them recovering from a week at work and me preparing for a week of final examinations. There was a somnolent atmosphere, the kind helped on by booze and low-scale trauma. I was staring at the stretch of floor between the couch and the wall separating the living room from the dining room, which was empty save for some charging cables, feeling appropriately uninspired with holiday cheer.

“I want a tree,” I said.

There was a mutual grunt.

“I want a real Christmas tree,” I continued, pointing a finger, “and I want it to go in that corner.”

The Cat Lady perked up. “Maybe we can get one off craigslist,” she said, “and some stockings for the fireplace with our names on them.”

This line of conversation dwindled. My brain, however, tired of plotting the relationship between exchange rates and the money supply, set about new machinations. Craigslist proved disappointing. I am, by admission, too cheap to pay $25 bucks for a tree without a base and only half-working lights. Do you know how much ramen I can buy with that money? Or 14.5% of my semester textbooks. Or two hours of parking in D.C.! No, paying for a tree would never do. Instead, I put out my feelers on freecycle.org, craigslist’s picture-free cousin for all your garage sale needs, and waited for a bite.

I was not to be disappointed.

Curious Consequences of My Bad Habits

It’s dead week in in D.C., and all the students are in the throes of finals-preparation anguish. In fact, as I submitted my last paper for history class today, I looked the professor in the eye and said “pity the damned,” which has come to summarize my current worldview quite succinctly. In consequence, I have nothing vaguely epic or inspiring to share, so instead I submit for your consideration this mundane admission:

I don’t cope well with stress.

I don’t mean in the existential, Romeo and Juliet, throw down your books and drink cyanide kind of way, tho’ I have a kind of alacrity in sinking, to keep with Shakespeare. I mean I have bad coping habits, specifically the kind that empty my wallet a little too fast. You see, 99% of the time my brain is running on some abstract, higher plane cataloging the differences between Maoist and Leninist Marxism or whether I can glaze leeks like onions. Put me under enough stress, say, my laptop breaking down after having the dentist at my teeth for three weeks straight, and my brain starts to turn itself inside out. Suddenly, I’m in this sensory tunnel where my mind wants to consume a lot of physical material with having to actually think about what it’s processing, usually in a frantic or overloaded fashion. Thanks to modern technology, the coping mechanism that best fits this tendency is online shopping.

Bezos, you’re such an enabler, you devil.