As You Wish

So, I must really like monkey boy cuz we were sleeping in a strange bed in a strange house with a door in the bedroom that led to the outdoors, and I didn't even make him take the side of the bed closest to the door even though a person sleeping in that position is far more likely to get murdered in their sleep than the person on the far side of the bed. And I slept well even though I knew I might get murdered in my sleep while he slept like the proverbial log on the other, the SAFER side of me. He likes the right side of the bed (as determined from laying on one's back) and so I gave him the right side of the bed despite the danger to myself. THAT, my friends, is LOVE.

And neither of us were murdered in our sleep. And this was technically in the month of October...the scariest month of the year. I'm fairly certain that, IF I was gonna be murdered in my sleep, it would be in the month of October by a man with a hideously scarred faced and a penchant for wearing white gloves cuz he likes to watch the red stain spread when the blood spatters him head to toe as he cuts the carotid artery of his victims while they sleep soundly on the side of the bed closest to the door. Or perhaps in the month of April by one of my children because no one in our immediate or intersecting circle of family members has a birthday in April so they have lots of spare time on their hands and nothing to show for it. They won't wear white gloves though; they're smart, so they'll wear latex gloves. Except Amy, because she is likely allergic to latex.

If Scarface murders me, I hope my still-alive boyfriend will avenge my death, he should since normally he would be sleeping on that side of the bed so he is living and I am dead because I loved him. If my children murder me, then I release them from all sense of guilt because I likely deserved it for telling them they would get skin cancer if they drew on their arms with sharpies. Hey, it coulda been true!

In any case, when I am murdered, I would just like my readers to know that I LOVED my boyfriend and I LOVED my children. To death :)

What I'm going to be for Halloween...

Boo Hoo subtitled Jody Don't Read This!!

(Viiiicky...)

During the month of October, monsters live under my bed. Vampires float outside my window. Pocked-faced escapees from the psychiatric unit of Western State Hospital stand in the shadows that line my driveway leaning on their sharpened axe which they will use to chop me limb from limb and hide me in my own blackberry bushes.

But only during the month of October.

(Viiiiiicky...)

Some time ago, I gave up the ghost of being scared all the time. I first became afraid when I was five. I stopped being afraid when I was 49 and fell into a deep depression from whence not even the Blair Witch could scare me. One day, a spectre rattled my shower curtain and I said, "Oh, just kill me and be done with it." Since then, I've only been truly frightened during the month of October and then only once or twice during that time. That Gerry is around when that happens is no small coincidence.

(Where are you, Vicky?)

So why the scaredy pants? When I was a child, Parker Brothers made a new game called Ouija Board. The game came with a whole two pieces - a board on which were letters and numbers, and a planchet on which two players lightly rested their fingers to "channel" a spirit. A question was asked by someone in the group of onlookers, and the spirit then guided the hands of the two players to the letters and numbers spelling out the answer. In our house, the Ouija Board only worked when I was one of the two players.

Now, clearly there is room for speculation on whether it is actually a "spirit" being channeled, or if the players themselves are subconsciously directing the planchet. I can only tell you that once, the planchet moved before any hands were placed upon it.

(Vicky, won't you come out and play with us?)

Then there was the time my best friend and I had a sleepover. In the middle of the night, her musical teddy bear began to play Clare de Lune from across the room. The musical box inside the bear, however, had always previously played Rockabye Baby...

(We like you, Vicky...)

And once, my mother stood by the side of my bed holding a butcher's knife, telling me it was time to get up. I mumbled something in my sleep, not fully waking. When I eventually woke up, she was gone, but her slippers were next to my bed where she'd been standing. I got out of bed and went down to the kitchen where she was cutting our sandwiches with a butcher knife. When I mentioned she'd left her slippers by the side of my bed, she looked at me with the strangest look on her face. I recounted the episode of her attempting to awaken me; she claimed to have never been in my room and pointed to her feet which were inside her slippers.

(Don't you like us?)

Fear is considered one of the baser emotions, similar to anger and joy. So how is it that fear has so much more power to incapacitate than those other emotions? Wikipedia hints that fear stems from a sense that an unacceptable situation may continue or worsen - as in the axe murderer waiting for me at the end of my driveway. It isn't the axe murderer I'm afraid of...it's what he might do.

For instance, the planchet didn't really move when there were no hands on it, but I was always afraid it would. The bear did, indeed, start playing music in the middle of the night, but it was the same tune it always played. And my mother never stood by the side of my bed with a butcher knife, but anytime she walked into my room, I was scared because I was fairly certain she was not there to hug me and kiss my anxious brow. In each of these cases, my anxiety over an unacceptable or uncomfortable situation turned to fear when I could not stop myself from thinking what if...

Is there, then, a mechanism in every human being that, during the normal course of maturing, develops into an ability to think rationally during moments of stress or anxiety? A recent study on talk radio indicates that spanking a child results in lower IQ because the child must cope with emotions that accompany pain, sorrow, perhaps even fear or anxiety. Is it possible, then, that other forms of child abuse result in a similar inability to envision realistic outcomes?

If that's the case, then FDR was right - the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.



Fear Itself "Chance" - Exclusive Clip
Uploaded by dreadcentral. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

Neither Tortoise nor Hare

As mentioned in the past (this one, not my previous ones), I don't believe in reincarnation. However, I was a sea turtle once upon a time, and I had a great many acquaintances under the sea and on sandy land. Wrasses and tangs and sunfish galore, flying fish and eelfish and an occasional bigeye tuna.

I spent most of my life swimming in the balmy waters of Lapakahi, off the Kohala coast, where annual rainfall was never more than a lovely 5 inches. I met my fate not far from there, on a tropical day in paradise when a 300-pound tiger shark took a bite-sized chunk out of me, snapping my carapace in two like the proverbial twig. I soon found my mortal self the center of some very undesireable and extremely frenzied attention, and that was the end of my life under the sea and the beginning of my sincere lack of desire for attention of any kind. I returned as a stupid rabbit in stupid Great Britain, annual rainfall a stupid +30 inches. Thank GOD for hawks.

But this is about my turtle-life, my sojourn of tropical bliss. Quite often, as a turtle, I would take lunch with my friends, Parrot and Trigger; we'd swim right up to the table coral and tuck into a nice peppery bed of Caulerpa. Then we'd push ourselves back from the table's edge to drift lazily until Angel and Butterfly would dart up from behind, to challenge us to a game of wits amongst the brain coral.

After a bit of lazy feasting and feisty play, I would float to the surface of the turquiline sea, avoiding the golden shafts of sun that pierced the ocean blue as if I were a human child and they sidewalk cracks. I'd poke my turtley head above the surface, take a quick look around, 1 second, 2 second, inhale fresh lungfulls of salty air, then sink below the surface and drift down to watch the silly clownfish gracefully slipping through the fingers of colorful sea anemones.

Daily, I would swim to shore and pull my bulk awkwardly from the ocean, across the jet-black volcanic sand, to rest dead-like while the sun dried every drop of seawater from my leathery skin. Then, shaking off the slumber-dregs, I would heave myself up and and drag my way back to the foamy edge where the gentle surf would lap around me and ultimately carry me back into the ocean deep, to sink and dive and eat and play with my friends, beneath the sea.

And then one day I was swimming with the mantas, admiring the way they fluttered by like butterflies, when they scattered and I felt a pain, and then I woke up pooping pellets and eating my own poop.

Malcolm in the Middle is now On Top

Once upon a time, there was very little difference between geeks, dorks and nerds. The terms were interchangeable and applied to anyone with a high level of intelligence, weird or non-existent fashion sense, or a tendency to behave in a quirky fashion. Misfits in a land where one size fits all, these social pariah were given the cold shoulder; they were mocked, their lunch money stolen and their food trays dumped in the laps of their high-waisted trousers. Being labeled a geek, a dork, a nerd was akin to wearing a six-point star on one's breast. You walked to school alone, you ate alone, you masturbated in your bedroom while looking at pics of Nyota Uhura and sometimes Leonard McCoy...alone.

But then, along came Paul Feig and Linwood Boomer and that other guy, what's his name? The one with the glasses and reddish hair? He does something with computers, but I can't quite remember what...

And suddenly being scary-smart overshadowed weird looks and strange behavior. It might also have had something to do with making like a gazillion bucks on stocks that have split nine times since going public - let's see...if you were given 5,000 shares when you joined, first split is 10,000, second is 20,000, third is 40,000, fourth is 80,000, fifth is 160,000, sixth is 320,000, seventh is 640,000, and blah, blah, frickety blah.

Regardless, scary-smart is now our bread-and-butter. It physically occupies half the city of Redmond, and much of Bellevue, Issaquah and Seattle as well; its mental occupancy is worldwide. You are infinitely smarter because of that thin wafer of a machine sitting in front of you on which you tap out your monthly mortgage payment - a machine that scary-smart made; he designed it, he built it, and he's virtually programming it at this very moment.

Scary-smart can also now afford a business coach whose expertise lies in what to wear and how to act. Scary-smart drives a beemer (black) and has a maid (white) and a stay-at-home wife (size 6...for now). Scary's home is a showcase, except for that one room, the one in which he shuts the world out. In that room, Scary has seven computers (all running), 269 miles of coaxial cable, sixteen network switches and a variety of keyboards and mice that belong in a space station at the end of a very l o o o n g elevator cable he is designing from spare bits of carbon nanotubes.

And suddenly we are having to redefine what qualifies as "acceptable." The misfit your brother kept shoving into lockers is now your husband, and your son has more friends on Facebook than you ever had at school. Like Koothrapali who speaks only to Penny when he gets drunk from half a grasshopper, Smarty McSmarterson speaks directly to his former tormentors and tells them in a clear, strong voice, "Oh, yeah? How big is your portfolio?"

Dorky Is As Dorky Does

I had lunch today with mein schonen Junge eine. She went to Oktoberfest in Leavonworth this weekend past, and she was all a-twitter because she got hit on by a youngster! He was 21, she is 23. She's a dork.

After taking my seat, I casually placed my purse and a page from Maxim, a pic of Jim Parsons, on the table near the chips n' salsa; she glanced down and immediately began drooling in the bean dip. A geek/nerd will turn her head nearly as fast as a soccer/rugby hottie. If she could just get them all rolled into one...

The topic went from geeks and nerds to dorks. To review, geeks have mental prowess; nerds lack physical prowess. Geeks are intellectually superior beings created in a special, top-secret room by God himself; nerds are made from the bottom of the matter batter.

Dorkiness is different from both. It refers to aberrant behavior. A dork is someone who does funny/stupid stuff not giving a flying rat's ass what others think, and generally pulling it off as eye-rolling, but cute. A dork, in fact, is likely to have thrown the rat and shouted, "Hey, look! A flying rat's ass!"

Dealing with a dork is significantly easier than dealing with either a nerd or a geek. All you gotta do is say, "You're such a DORK." Generally, dorky behavior requires nothing from you except that simple acknowledgement. And since calling someone a dork is more a term of endearment than an insult, there are generally no hard feelings on either side. Dorks are socially tolerated if not fully accepted.

You'll not get off so lightly with a nerd or a geek. First, a nerd is rather like a wombat - shy, gawkish and, where a wombat has a backwards pouch, a nerd would totally wear a fanny pack. A nerd is socially unacceptable and likely aware of it; his/her ability to survive under such harsh conditions of rejection depends upon whether or not he/she cares. Once a nerd accepts his unacceptability, he becomes accepted in a circular logic sort of way.

Geeks present a more complex problem, which is funny because a geek lives to solve problems as complex as he/she presents. Again, circular logic - except a geek likely knows the exact circumfrence of the circular problem he presents. And hot geeks do not wear fanny packs.

Of the three, dorks appear to be the better-adjusted, being physically and mentally not that different from normal people. Geeks may look normal, but their neuroanatomical nucleus is actually just a giant monitor running a thousand lines of code written in a complex programming language. Nerds have no neuroanatomical nucleus, or underdeveloped ones at best.

Clearly, I spend way too much time at work thinking about geeks and nerds and dorks. Hm...I wonder why that is?

Geekspeak

For anyone that cares, geeks are HOT. This is fact and therefore not open for discussion. But, since I haven't blogged in forever, I will discourge.

Merriam Webster has three defs of geek, but here, in the Pacific Northwest, we mean one thing when we use the term - expert in the field of technology. Geek refers to a person's intellectual properties.

Nerds, on the the other hand, have a dimension to them not necessarily inclusive of geekiness. The term nerd is understood to refer more to a style (or lack of style, actually) than what's up in their noggin.

Nerds can be geeks and geeks can be nerds, but they are not synonymous. Goodbar, for instance, is a geek; however, he dresses well (most of the time) which saves him from being a nerd. Monkeyboy is most definitely a geek but, here again, too stylish in his $200 Oakleys to be called a nerd. Sheldon, on the other hand, from The Big Bang Theory, is both a nerd and a geek, but he has Chuck Lorre dressing him so that's understandable. Rather than confuse his viewing audience, Mr. Lorre opted to develop Sheldon's character as both nerdy and geeky. And may I just say, "Well done, Mr. Lorre. Well done."

And now for Jody, who considers herself a bit of a geek and a wholelottasmarterthanDanBrown:

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