Prepoceros

Nope, still not excited. I never told you how the story ended, did I? Well, I did in the comments, but maybe you don’t read those.

So the next day I went back and tried pulling on them again. I pulled and I pulled and I pulled, but no dice. Then I came back a little later and tried AGAIN. This time I figured out how they were stuck and was able to pull the right parts in the right directions. Soon my pants were mine again. All mine!

Not that that does me much good. There are so many irreparable rips in them that they might as well still be stuck. You’d think maybe I could pass the rips off as a fashion statement, but no—there’s an enormous hole right in the crotch. I’d show you pictures of me wearing them and how ridiculous they look, but this is a family website*.

Poooooop. I’ve had those pants since high school, and they were my favorite favorite. Black, stretchy, dressy, flared, with slits up to the ankles and ties at the top of the slits. A little hard to explain, but believe you me, these were some bitchin’ pants.

RIP, pants. You been good to me, and I’ll miss you.

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* Not really, but it’s fun to say that.

I’ve mentioned that I hate death. HATE. I realize this is not an uncommon reaction, but I *actively* hate death, several times a day. I wish I wouldn’t dwell on something that upsets me so much. That’s just dumb.

NOT helping is the news that one of my brother’s high school friends died in a car crash* earlier this week. Nicholas came back from school to be at her funeral this morning, as did about half of his graduating class, plus friends from two other schools she attended—about a thousand people in all.

I’ve never been to a funeral, which I think is strange for someone my age. Everyone I know well enough to say goodbye to is still alive**. I’m horribly terrified of funerals, mostly because I know I would be a huge sobbing mess. I cry easily. I don’t mind it so much when I’m around people I’m comfortable with, but in public it’s just embarrassing***. I could show up at the funeral of a total stranger, and I would be guaranteed to dissolve into puffy, snotty tears as soon as anyone began to speak.

I had never even met this girl, and I could still barely keep my shit together just listening to Nicholas talk about her. I was about to make fun of him for a golf cap hanging from his rearview mirror, until he told me that Brittany had always liked that cap and would steal it from him whenever he wore it. In fact, she was wearing it in a bunch of the pictures from the slideshow this morning.

That makes me so sad I want to cry a lot, then punch things, then hug everyone I know. I’ve cried a lot already today, and in lieu of punching things, I think I’ll go to bed.

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* She somehow lost control of her car on the freeway and drove onto the wrong side of the road. Just as she seemed to have regained control and began to steer back across the median, an oncoming vehicle hit her driver’s side door, killing her instantly. She had just gotten her wisdom teeth removed an hour or two earlier; the drugs involved in that were likely a contributing factor.

** With the exception of my maternal grandmother, who died in the Netherlands seven or eight years ago. I only saw her for an afternoon or so every other year, we didn’t really speak the same language, and the funeral was of course an ocean away, so I didn’t go.

*** As those sorts of people are few and far between, embarrassment and frustration often rule the day.

Did that exclamation point make it sound like I’m excited? Because I’m not. The soak-and-spin did absolutely nothing—my pants are still exactly as stuck as they were before.

I tried pulling on them a little more this morning, because, you know, maybe the elves came in the night to free my pants, like in the story about the guy making the shoes, but alas, still stuck. (Did that sentence have enough commas?)

Angry angry. I want my fucking pants back.

An hour or so ago I started a load of laundry, in which was one of my favorite pairs of pants. When I went to move the wet clothes to the dryer, however, that quirky little turdmuffin of a washing machine decided it didn’t want to let go of my pants just yet. So now they’re stuck. In the washing machine. And I can’t get them out.

I can sort of understand the machine’s position, as they are a quality specimen of pantsness, but what would a washing machine do with a pair of pants? It has no legs! It could wash them, of course, but it’s done that already. Perhaps it’s protesting the piles of poo that appear in front of it every night.

It’s difficult to explain exactly how the pants are stuck. I didn’t think it was possible myself until a few minutes ago. Apparently the piece that sticks up in the middle is separate from the drum (the better to agitate, I suppose), and somehow about half the fabric of my pants had become lodged *beneath* the sticky-uppy part. So of course I pulled, and I pulled, and a little of it came free, so I pulled some more until I heard the material start to rip. Now the legs are mostly free, but the butt part is still jammed down in the guts of the machine. I have no idea what it could be caught on, nor is there any obvious way to lift the sticky-uppy thing to find out.

For lack of a better idea, I closed the lid and set the machine to “soak and spin.” Will my pants spin themselves free? Since they spun themselves tangled, it hardly seems possible, but it’s worth a shot, no? I’ll keep you posted.

I think Samson is sick again. I’ve cleaned poo off the kitchen floor three times in the past 48 hours. No blood this time, fortunately, but still disgusting (I’ll spare you the details). He seems to be feeling fine otherwise, but we’re going to the vet anyway on Saturday to have a growth on the side of his mouth checked out, so I’ll ask about it then.

Thank goodness he always does his business on the linoleum in the kitchen or the laundry room. What a good doggy I have. I’m trying to take him out for walks more often now that I know he’s having poo problems, but it’s hard when I’m gone for eight or nine or ten hours at a time during the day.

Speaking of which, my LSAT class meets for the last time tomorrow night. Praise Jebus. Like I’ve said before, I like teaching the class, but I also need some evening time for myself. Like tonight—look how productive I’ve been tonight. Why, I’ve watched Project Runway, eaten dinner, written this post, and…never mind.

UPDATE (8:49am) — FOUR times in 48 hours. This is not something I’d like to be really good at.

Though my school/work schedule varies from day to day, my at-home schedule is consistent like molasses*. The procedure is as follows:

1. Get home. (This can be any time between 6:30 and 9:30. Today, for instance, I got home at 7:15.)
2. Walk/feed/play with the puppy.
3. Eat something. (optional)
4. Open up my email and RSS aggregator to catch up on what I’ve missed during the day.
5. …
6. …
7. Walk the puppy again.
8. Sleep.

It doesn’t take an “efficiency engineer” to see that the problem in this routine lies entirely in Step 4, that problem being that Step 4 has the near-magical ability to expand to fill whatever amount of time it is allotted. I could conceivably read my email and all the feeds I subscribe to in about half an hour, leaving plenty of time for homework, blogging, laundry, etc. But invariably there’s an interesting article to read, which links to an essay, whose author has a blog…and all of a sudden it’s 1:00 in the morning and I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. You know how it goes**.

This evening is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Early on in Step 4 I read an essay*** to which I planned to blog a response. I composed about half of the post in my head as I was reading so that it’d be ready to go and I could publish it and get back to work. But when I got to the end, I decided to realquick check out some of the other essays this guy had written…and three hours later here I am*^. As you can see, this is not the essay-response post. That post will never be written.

Fortunately I finished all my homework for tomorrow while I was at school today, but some days (yesterday, for one) things don’t work out so well. I know it’s still early in the semester, plenty of time to change, yada yada, so I hereby commit, for the next week, not to open my email or read any feeds or blogs or news sites until I have completely finished my homework. Hopefully that will create the positive motivation I need to get things done. (Getting to bed on time is another story, but I’m hoping this will help.) A week isn’t much time, I know, but saying I’m going to keep it up for the whole semester is just silly—I need something short-term and feasible.

Um, so that’s the plan. The end I’m done bedtime.

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* In place of ‘molasses’, feel free to insert a witty simile-object that retains the same casual folksiness but actually makes sense.

** And if you don’t, I hate you and you should never talk to me. Just a heads-up.

*** How to Do What You Love, by Paul Graham. I read another of his essays (Why Nerds are Unpopular) a couple years ago and found that it changed my perspective slightly, and this new essay did as well. I recommend his writing in general, though most of it doesn’t apply to people (like me) who are not hackers and/or running a startup.

His writing style seems to be designed to affirm things the reader already believes (at least in my case) and make one feel better about oneself. This is, I think, part of the reason I enjoyed reading these essays, though I’m not sure that’s a good thing, objectively.

*^ Oh, and I also spent part of that time transferring my music files from desktop to laptop and ‘rediscovering’ my electric piano. SO PRODUCTIVE I COULD CRY.

I have a writing assignment for work that absolutely has to be done tonight, and I’ve barely started. It will take at least two or three hours, probably more. I’ve promised myself that this post will be the last procrastinatory thing I do before I get back to writing those questions. Go me go.

UPDATE (12:42) — One down, seventeen to go. As much as I like making money, I need my sleep. I have class at 10 tomorrow morning, and starting out with a huge sleep debt would make this whole week miserable. Bedtime.

My Classics prof, who is Italian [Edit: and female]: Many people consider the Classical age to be…to be the apex of… [pause] Does ‘apex’ have a sexual connotation?

Class: What? No, not really.

Prof: Because it’s so hard to remember, you know, all those words that mean something else. Sometimes I say things and people are like, “Whoa!” and I don’t even realize it.

Class: Heh heh.

Prof: So anyway, the Classical age is usually considered to be the apex, the climax of—

Class: OH. Climax. You were thinking of climax.

Prof: Yes! Is that one about sex?

Class: Ha, yes.

Prof: Ok. I will write ‘climax’ on the board so I will remember.

I left the apartment at 9:30. I got home at 9:30. I will be thrilled when my evening LSAT class is over (next Thursday). I enjoy teaching it, but I’d also occasionally like to be home when the sun’s up.

When it comes to TV commercials, Honda is a class act. Remember Cog*? Most awesome commercial ever. Anyway, they have a new one. It’s rather nifty. You can watch it if you like. Skip the intro (less nifty), then click “Watch.” Easy peasy. I couldn’t get the rehearsal clips to play—servers overloaded—but maybe you’ll have better luck.

That is all.

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* Too busy/lazy to find link. Google it.

It went…about as well I imagined it would, which is to say, fair to middlin’. I was reasonably well-prepared, but several quirks* of going to a large public school took me completely by surprise. Some of these surprises were ridiculous, others merely interesting.

I have most of the post that tells you about all those things written in my head (because I did a LOT of walking and driving today and had time to ‘write’ about things as I was experiencing them), but that will have to wait until later. I didn’t get home from teaching my LSAT class until 9:30, after which I had to walk the dog, make dinner, eat dinner, and get caught up on the email I missed today and the work email I didn’t check over the holiday weekend. Now it’s one minute to midnight, I have class at 10:00 tomorrow morning, and I haven’t picked out my clothes or packed my lunch yet. Blargh. I hope this doesn’t become my life from now on—I haven’t even thrown homework into the mix yet.

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* Can I really call them ‘quirks’ if big public schools are the norm? It’s quirky to me.