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Snoopy,

is the baking soda of comic strips. Ooo, look at me, I can do this, I can do that. I can cook, coach ice skating, sew a costume, sing, dance. If he's such an expert on everything why doesn't he help Charlie Brown kick the football at least once?

My cat,

is cute and beautiful and gives cute kisses, and even has a sweet voice when she's not talking my ear off. But it's really hard to find her cute when she wants to hog the entire frickin couch. So when I get home after a hard day and want to eat dinner on my couch in front of the tv, she gets nudged off, end of story. Hey, I pay the bills and clean up after myself, does she? Plus she got to sit on the entire couch all frickin day. If I were living with a human being I'd ask them nicely if I could have alone couch time.

So it's not my fault she speaks cat and not English.

Imperfections

One of my favorite parts of the Seinfeld show is how the four of them break up with people over silly little reasons. It's hilarious to see all those clips put together in the show's finale:



He's a re-gifter!
She's a two-face.
She's bald.
He's poor.
He's a close talker.
He's a high talker.
She can't hear very well out of her left ear.
She eats her peas one at a time!
She's too tall.
She's too good.
She wasn't my type.

Some other reasons they break up with people include not eating pie, not offering pie, not keeping a bathtub clean, and not using an exclamation point in a sentence.

Hilarious. Well I've got one to add to the list: drinking soda out of a coffee cup. WHY???? Why would anyone do this? He was over at my house and didn't want to drink his soda out of the can so I told him he could help himself to a glass in the cupboard. WHAT does he take out? A coffee cup! There were LOTS of glasses to choose from! (shakes head in confused disgust)

In my defense, I already knew I wasn't that into him before that incident. It just happened to be that after that incident I broke up with him. So perhaps unlike the chumps on the show, I'm not a total lost cause. ;)

What the world needs.

You know that song, "What the world needs now is love sweet love"?

Well I think that what the world really needs is more parking spaces. And I think it needs more parking spaces more than it needs more love. Cuz think about it, with more parking spaces it'd be easier to tolerate others more.

And tolerance of each other is needed before we can love each other. :)

The purse

I think the dilemma of the purse is a timeless one. I don't forsee a solution. It'll always be problematic, like clogged toilets or the socks that get lost in the dryer. I mean, it needs to be big enough so you can carry everything, but not so big so that you're not lugging a suitcase. It needs to allow you to have easy access to things without being so big that you have to dig around to get a hold of your keys. So it needs lots of compartments, but need not look like a briefcase. The strap needs to be long enough so that you can access your wallet at the cashier without taking the purse off your shoulder, but not so long that the purse is hanging by your knees.

And living in the frickin desert makes it worse. Gotta have your water bottle and lotion cuz it's so ridiculously dry and hot. In which case, to fit everything, you pretty much need to carry a backpack around with you. I have a backpack purse, but that doesn't solve the problem of having to take it off your shoulders at the cashier.

I got a new purse as a gift from a friend last weekend which seems to be workin' so far, or so it would seem (side note: the nice thing about being Asian is you get gifts from other Asians all the time for no reason :) ). I can fit in it my palm pilot, phone, wallet, chapstick, kleenex, pen, grocery list, small tube of lotion, sunglasses, and I can hook my keys on the side. cool huh? It is deep and has a lot of volume but doesn't look huge.

But like I said, so it would *seem.* It can't hold a water bottle. Or a book (at least not such that I don't have to take the book out to get to other things). And of course to be green I combine all my errands into one trip, hence the water and book are really needed. (And of course I won't come back home after each errand to sip some water and read and grab something I need for the next errand). So what do I do? Leave my book at one of my appointments. Thankfully it's not due back at the library soon.

I can't believe it's 2010 and we don't yet have a way to shrink all these things so that they fit in our pockets, and then when we need them we somehow, you know, UNshrink them. Like some sorta laser beam-thingy built into our forefingers. I mean we have nanotechnologies don't we? And we can put a man on the moon but still have to deal with traffic, plumbing problems, a 28-hour journey to India, and cats vomiting on the carpet. How have we progressed? But we can break up with someone over texting cuz we're too chicken to talk to them directly. *That* we can do.

Blood

Conversations with folks involving blood, in some form, have always kinda made me snicker. Like once I had casually wondered out loud how a pain killer works, and my cousin's husband said "well, it thins the blood." (Actually, I'd heard that many times before.) Well, what the hell does that mean? Thins the blood? How does that answer my question? What does thinning the blood have to do with getting rid of the pain? I bet a lot of folks probably don't ask this question, they just nod along knowingly probably cuz they think they *should* know what that explanation means: "Oh yes, of course, it thins the blood."

I had also gotten into a conversation with one of my cousins about what happens in the body after eating that leads us to feel colder than before we ate. I said that perhaps it's the digestive process creating more energy in the body, causing the heat in our bodies to go up, leading us to feel colder. Kinda like how you feel cold when you have a fever, probably due to the contrasting temperatures between inside and outside the body. But my cousin's response was, "No silly, it's cuz all the blood goes to your stomach for digestion." I've heard that explanation quite a bit too.

Well yes, of course, all the blood goes to your stomach. I mean everyone understands that's why you feel cold. So if I cut my arm after eating, no blood would come out?

Of course I could research these topics if I'm really interested in the details of these physiological processes. But I'd rather gripe, and have a blog post about it. Naturally. :)

Instructions

Isn't it funny how recipes often give such special instructions? Like my pina colada mix recipe ends with "garnish glass with an orange and pineapple slice." Not just an orange slice, or just a pineapple slice, or no slice at all, or strawberry slice, but both an orange and pineapple slice. I mean the audacity to be so specific! They don't even say "garnish with a paper umbrella and/or your favorite fruit." I mean, who reads or edits these? Who has the final word on how a pina colada should be garnished?

Well in therapy it's certainly not ethnical to give specific advice, and certainly not if it's not presented as just one of many possibilities. I suppose as a client walks out the door I can pat them on the back and say "take the day off tomorrow, you deserve it." But I can't say "do as I say, not as I do."

ha ha ha

Birthdays

It seems a bit funny to me that we celebrate our birthdays. The one day in the year that we expect to be all about us, despite all the other chances we have to get things from loved ones like Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, etc.

I was thinking to myself yesterday, "Self, why do you expect your birthday to be about you?" It's like, we want to get credit for being born? Why do we get credit for that? It's our parents who had sex, moms who got knocked up and parents who dealt with us being terrors as toddlers. Further, it's the moms that did the work on this day, work that seemed like what was pushing a watermelon out of a hole the size of a pea.

Ah yes, parents, the flawless travel agents of guilt trips. So I've figured it out:

We should buy our mothers presents on our own birthdays, and yell at our grandparents on our parents' birthdays!

:)

Top 10 ways you know that your psychology grad program has taken over your life.

10) You unload the dishwasher as a break from work.
9) When reading food labels, you look for p<.05.
8) You automatically ask your friends how they feel.
7) You process every interpersonal interaction.
6) You overuse the word process.
5) You conceptualize every character when watching a movie.
4) You soil yourself during your dissertation proposal defense.
3) You feel like punching the next person who asks you how your dissertation is coming along.
2) You feel like killing the next person who asks you when you're going to graduate.

and

1) You're convinced your advisor is responsible for the middle east conflict.

Family members,

are like allergies. You can't completely get rid of them. You can only manage them.

And cuss them out.

And they still come back.

Med names

As a BHT I often assist clients with their meds, and med education is a part of that process, so that clients know what, how much and why they are taking their meds. This got me and a coworker talking about how long, unpronounceable and forgettable the names are, particularly when there is a constant switch back and forth between brand names and generic names. If WE can't keep them straight, how the hell would underfunctioning clients keep them straight??

Then we got to talking about how if the names were easier to remember, then clients would know what they're taking.

Like the Happy pill. Or Calm Me Down Pill. Or Poop pill. Or I Can't Feel Anything Pill.

Then the med assist conversations that normally go like,

"And what pill is that that you're taking?"
"I don't know"

would instead be,

"What pill are you taking?"
"The Happy Pill So I Don't Blow Someone's Brains Out. I know what pill I'm taking."

The belt

At what point did wearing a belt stop being the norm? There was a shift, I just don't remember when. We went from tucking our shirts in and wearing belts to no belts and leaving the shirts out. I think the latter looks better but silly me forgets that I could still wear a belt with my shirt out, to help keep my pants up. DUH. So at work the other day I was walking around like a dork cuz I kept having to pull up my pants!

Mouthwash

I try to buy different flavors of mouthwash each time, to give myself variety. Plus someone had told me that if you vary your tooth products, then it has a greater impact on cleaning your teeth. I guess you're teeth stop responding as much to the same product, much the same way that your body stops responding to the same antihistamine?

Anyway, so when I'm at the store I'm thinking, "Shoot, which is the one I have at home, green or blue?" The last 3 times I thought I had green and ended up buying blue again! Why I'm not this OCD about my toothpaste is beyond me.

Do you know how annoying that is?

(Imagine crazy Joe Devola saying that.) lol

Necessity,

is the mother of invention? Um, sure.

Cuz we would absolutely DIE without the MP3 player.

Seems more like capitalism is the mother of invention to me.

Oops, better be careful for lightening might strike me for being a socialist. Like all those crazy-assed Europeans.

Security

Online security has become about as pathetic as airport security. Every 2 seconds I am asked to sign back into my email account. Um, can you see me Mr. Computer? It's still me, Margaret. Hence the system works more against us than for us. I mean there is a point of diminishing returns where you make the system so overprotective it's not really functional anymore.

Similarly, we must look really pathetic to Al Qaeda as they watch us on the news. Because SURELY they haven't thought of us thinking of body scanners once one of their men gets caught with a bomb in his underwear. I doubt they're thinking, "I'm going to do it the EXACT same way next time!"

And what do the CIA and FBI do then exactly? At what point are they going to realize, "Oooooooohhhhhhh, we want to stay one step AHEAD of the criminals! Oooohhh!"

Industrial engineers

Industrial engineers or ergonomists have gotten a bad rap for not being "real" engineers. Yet there are so many things that seem to be common sense but they obviously are not because they are conducted in an idiotic manner. Well now steps in the industrial engineer with a couple scientific principles and her critique:

The toilet paper needs to be reachable from the TOILET. Not from the SINK. I want to know what architects or building designers or whatever are thinking. I'm staying with a friend and in her bathroom, the toilet paper is like a mile away from the toilet! I'd like to be able to easily REACH the toilet paper but hey, that's just me. Unless it was some NBA player who tested the distance and his 4 feet arms could reach it. But oooohhhhh, the little short peon doesn't matter.

When you get coffee, you pick up the cup, pour the coffee, add the cream and sweetner, then attach the lid. However at the Texaco here, I poured my coffee and then see that the creamer is at a *different* counter. And the sweetner? You guessed it, a different counter than that! And the lid, well, I couldn't reach it!

I need to buy my own state and use my Empress powers and engineering knowledge to make things more convenient for short people only in that state. Tall people: you've had your way for TOOOOO long!!!!!!!!!