Lasagna

The one food I have trouble eating is lasagna. It looks nice and everything fresh out of the oven, but when it comes to chowing down, it’s anything but.

I recall my last experience with lasagna—a family dinner around Halloween this year. My mother placed a pan of freshly-baked lasagna on the table, cut it with surgical precision, and scooped identical cubes of lasagna onto each platter. My father and brother, both plenty experienced in the ways of mastication (master-caters), immediately started cutting and eating. I, however, was not too keen on how to tackle such a slab of noodle, tomato sauce, and meat. I thus took my knife and fork, and started sawing at a corner. Obviously I was doing it wrong, since the result of the initial incision was a small lasagna-explosion from the opposite corner. After seconds of sawing and ignoring my family’s disapproving glances, I finally had a passable bite on my fork. But at what cost?

At this point it would be quite easy to look at my plate and judge me as either domestically challenged, blind, or using chopsticks. Spread quite evenly among the plate were three wafers of noodle, a froth of tomato sauce, and a good splattering of hamburger. I venture to say that I could sprinkle a bit of parsley on the side and call it culinary art. After shirking my mother’s condescending stare, I decided to continue my undertaking. A cut here, stab there; pin, cut, pin, cut; lather, rinse, repeat.

My second attempt to sustain myself was no more fruitful than the first; a look at my platter now would induce vomiting, seizure, and in some rare cases, death. To attempt to eat my pureed lasagna would be as successful as trying to eat chicken soup with a pinecone. A knife and fork were obsolete. I opted for a spoon.

After eating my lasagna in the most avant-garde way imagined, I resolved to learn how to eat lasagna properly. To be honest, though, it’s a lot more fun the hard way.

That’s what she said.

Background

I suppose I could give a short anecdote on my background image.

One fine, completely normal evening, I was saving a picture of my cat….’s face to my “Pictures” folder. I didn’t want the horrible .jpeg quality drop that MS Paint did, so I selected the (*.bmp) extension. Upon saving, my cat….’s face became an almost indistinguishable blob of grey, white, and black. After a few confused obscenities and a quick check to see if I hadn’t gone totally colorblind, I realized that I had saved her face in a monochrome bitmap file by accident….but my feline friend’s new look wasn’t that bad. After changing a few white pixels to gray, and vice versa, I had a passable monochrome image of my cat….’s face. After saving again, I decided to slap it onto my background here. Then, after a few more minor alterations, wham-o. You’re looking at my cat….’s face.

 

Pictured: The Culprit

Teeth

If it’s one (of the) thing(s) that bother/s me, it’s brushing my teeth with food still in my mouth. I’m not saying like mouth full of turkey and stuffing, because that makes no sense and you’d look like a ninny brushing your teeth with a mouth full of food, but just a little bit—like you’ve just washed the last morsels of turkey down with a glass of ginger ale, and have little bits of stuffing and cranberry sauce stuck in your molars, and unsightly bits of Thanksgiving salad stuck between your front teeth.

That…That just feels gross. Imagine after a good long brush, pulling your toothbrush out, to stare at a potpourri of bristle and gristle, a forest of nylon and potatoes and yams soaked in cranberry sauce. It’s enough to make me (ever-so ironically) vomit.

Instead, I prefer to brush when most of my food has been washed clean. While I would prefer to brush my teeth with mostly clean teeth, I accept the fact that food always rests in places I can’t help, such as the far reaches that are my back molars. Such places are a hassle to reach with tongue and finger, and if attempted to clean, you would look like you’re either suffering a facial seizure, or trying to massage your lymph nodes.
I’ve almost never brushed my teeth with a food-y mouth, and the times I have, I immediately blasted my toothbrush with a fine mix of antiseptic and isopropyl alcohol.

You know.

The little things.

Focus

You ever stare at something, but not focus on it? Try it out. When I do it, my mind blanks. Absolutely nothing comes in, absolutely nothing comes out. I may as well be in a coma. It takes something big to snap me out of my eye-induced comatose state. Simply put, stare, but don’t focus. You might be surprised at what you experience.

Stage

Some things are absolutely unnecessary. A fine example is embellishments on the ceilings of stages.
The other day, I had the privilege of being on a balcony-esque fixture on stage left. I looked to the ceiling, and saw….chains hanging from the ceiling. I hit one. It swung meaninglessly.

What possible function could these chains hold? Perhaps a prop for a baroque, industrial Tarzan musical? Perhaps a decoration for a goth party? Or maybe somebody got bored with a chain and threw it. The latter was soon refuted, as I saw an identical chain on the opposite side of the stage. The chains were not that long, either; they were maybe three feet in length, invisible to off-stage observers. I was and am perplexed.

Player

Ever wonder who’s playing you?

Think about it. You feel pain, right? What feels it? Your finger? No, that’s what’s sending the message to your brain. Yeah, okay. Your eyes see? No, they send messages to your brain. What makes us interpret these things like we do? What gives us exterior motives? Ulterior motives?

What’s observing us observe? For example, what’s controlling us? Something’s controlling us. And I mean it exactly in a Halo or a Call of Duty sense. We control the players. Maybe in their world, everything they’re doing is what they think is Of Their Own Accord (bad reference, I know). That is, what we control, they may believe they’re doing on their own. What about us? Maybe there’s some quasi-omnipotent something out there (I never said it was a being) that’s directing our every move, yet we may think we have free will. I may be typing this post because Cthulu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster wills it so.

     Pictured: Me??????

Words

Say the word “tree” out loud.

Say it again.

Again.

Again.

Keep repeating it until the word starts to have a whole new sound to it. Think about the word. Why does the “tr” cluster elicit a “ch”-esque sound? Ask other questions like it. What makes “tree” associate with that we commonly know as a “tree?” The word might start to sound absurd. Keep repeating. Keep questioning its denotation and connotation.

Try another word.

Snooze

Connections between the number of times I hit snooze in the morning, and how my day is going to go.
(Also aptly titled “Proof I am human”)


0: A bear is attacking me.

1: Good day. Stay conscious throughout school.

2: Normal day. Doze off every now and again.

3: Bad day. Seriously zoning out. Public ridicule received.

4: Mom drags me out of bed.

5: Mom leaves me at home.

6: I am catatonic.

7: I accidentally the alarm clock

Resolutions

This is not about New Year.

What makes music—chord progressions, speaking specifically—so pleasant to the ear? What makes a “I IV V I” progression sound good? Furthermore, how do we define good chord progressions? Lately in a lot of pop music I’ve been seeing a lot of “VI - VII - i” progressions (e.g. California Gurls, Tik Tok). How does the resolution to the tonic minor sound pleasing? or some unorthodox chord? For example, a progression in Fleet Foxes’s song “Blue Ridge Mountains” resolves on a B7+13 chord. What? I’ve also seen a lot of Broadway musical scores resolve on 7 chords. Last week, while performing for a musical (Snoopy, if you’re interested), I noticed many resolutions on 7 chords.

Speaking very very broadly, how do we define “good music?” Look past genres, and instead look at how the songs are constructed, and how it pleases not the masses, but the ear.

I bet that’s how Lady Gaga is so successful.

Clothing

Late at night, I heard a door open.

Normally, this wouldn’t bother me. Bumps in the night aren’t such a big deal to me after laughing at Paranormal Activity 2.

Normally, I would have gone back to sleep. However, the person or intruder or whoever it was proceeded to take off his shoes, walk up the stairs, turn a corner, turn another corner, and walk into a room.

Normally, I would have been sleeping at this point.

Normally, I would have only heard him open the door and shut the door to his room.

However, said person had on a coat made of leather. He did not remove it when he entered the house. Thus, I heard every single movement he made. It was only when he closed the door to his room that my selective hearing finally settled down, and I drifted back to sleep.

Happy Thanksgiving to you too, bud.

It wasn’t until a night like this that I realized how loud clothing can be. Listen to a person with a collared shirt on. Listen to the shirt when he walks, moves around, does something. Maybe even make some eye contact. A smile, a wink.

*ahem*

Bottom line: Clothing is loud, in more than a visual way.

Commercials

I’ve heard that peoples’ brain waves while watching TV correlate to those in a coma. I’ve never really acknowledged it until yesterday.

Commercials are the most interesting part of television, at least to me. A company as nigh fifteen, maybe twenty seconds to showcase their product, to glorify it in a kinetographic, yet extremely concise manner. They fascinate me, but most people are too busy flipping from channel to channel to notice. However, I had the pleasure of the remote control during the Lions and New England game (to which I never really paid attention), so the channel went unchanged for the whole game, commercials and all, much to the chagrin of my extended family.

It was during a commercial break at the third quarter that I noticed now people don’t tune in to commercials. There was a particularly witty commercial that has been recurrent through the whole game, and every time I see it, I snicker a bit. I believe it’s a Geico one. During said commercial break, the commercial aired, and I once again laughed. My cousin looked at me in a quizzical manner. I pointed out the humor in the commercial, and only then did she laugh. I was perplexed.

It was a fairly unique commercial, too. I thought it was hard for it to go unnoticed.

Apparently not.

Anyways, I hope you guys had a good Thanksgiving.

Stairs

Today, while walking down a set of stairs, I almost slipped. This made me think.

Why are some stairs in houses made of wood? Varnished wood at that? Unless people wear shoes inside the house, but this was not the case. The stairs were

• Varnished wood, which is slippery as Antarctica in July, and
• Extremely similar in pattern, which screws up my depth perception, and
• Similarly lighted, as in, even lighting across each stair.

The combination of those makes for a treacherous trip down. However, I did make it down the stairs safely and relatively comfortably. Next time, though…

Tubes

Before we rail on Ted Stevens any more for his famous line “The internet is a series of tubes,” let’s look at it from a different perspective.

When you boil it down, isn’t the internet really a series of tubes?

Ethernet cables. They’re tiny tubes at that, but…tubes.

But I do have to admit that his perception of bandwidth…

(“…an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.”)

is a little kooky. Where can I find one of these Internets?

Ladder

As I was holding a ladder for a window-cleaner today, I was reading the label on the side of the ladder. On the bottom was a notice: “DO NOT MISUSE OR ABUSE THE LADDER.”

It warns us against abusing the ladder? Since when does a company care about the product in the hands of the consumer, especially when there isn’t anything about warranty on the ladder? I can see misuse because of liability issues, but I can’t see a company caring more about abuse of a warranty-free ladder. Consumer’s loss…

Unless there’s an anti-abuse ladder vigilante group at large, which they may have hinted at in a subtle manner.

Naaaahhh…….

Plastic Bag - Part Deux

(Indeliberately continued from Plastic Bag)

That plastic bag?

It’s still there. Swinging from that very same branch of that very same tree.

And I wrote…an unrhymed Shakesperian Sonnet about it:

The plastic bag that’s swinging from a tree?
It hasn’t left its branch for days and days.
The winds are fierce, and I adore the strong
tenacity of oak and twig and bag.
And while I discipline myself in sleep,
the bag remains to taunt me in its dance;
the pirouettes and flips it does for me,
they mesmerize my broken, tired eyes.
A solitary audience of one
is entertained by silent crinkles. Why,
however, is my focus broken? I
must keep my diligence and vigilance in class.
And so, I must desert a dance macabre
until another day - perhaps a week?

I am turning this in for English class.

Tension

Today, as I was cleaning up water I spilled on the floor with <insert shameless brand plug here>, I was wishing that surface tension didn’t exist.

Without surface tension, standing water would evaporate quickly. Why? Well, what causes water to lay in its own pool on a flat surface? Surface tension. If surface tension didn’t exist, water would keep expanding its own pool, to the point where the water would immediately evaporate because the water is so widely dispersed.

That would be nice and all, but what if you spilled, say, apple juice? What a mess.

But goodness, would that look cool.

But...you know, maybe surface tension isn’t so bad after all.

Bathrooms

Two posts in a row about bathrooms is purely coincidental.

Most bathrooms ring at certain pitches. Like, if you hum the right pitch, the whole bathroom will vibrate, and loudly at that.

The boys’ bathroom by the auditorium at my school? That rings at about 108 Hz. That’s a low A, two octaves below the “tuning A” pitch.

The bathroom by one of our gyms rings at a G#, a half-tone below the aforementioned A in the auditorium bathroom.

The bathrooms at home? One at B flat (octave +1 half tone below concert tuning A), and the other at the C just above said B flat.

Try it out.

Seats

Whoever invented non-metal/plastic/polished wood toilet seats is a genius. I’m thinking along the lines of…say, A WARMER MATERIAL THAN THOSE LISTED. Today I sat down on a toilet a home, which is all metal, and I was basically like

“holy shit.”

Pun totally unintended. It was cold. It doesn’t matter how warm or cold the air is—THE SEAT’S ALWAYS COLD. Sometimes I even lay lines of toilet paper on the seat before I park myself to drip oil. But I mean, who wants to do that every time they need to empty their bowels? I’m saying that the first person who sensibly thought, “Hmm, this metal is pretty cold, I’m gonna use some other material that’s warmer, like vinyl,” and actually carried it out, is great. He/she deserves a pat on the back.

Plastic Bag

The other day, I was daydreaming during class (and totally not sleeping) when I looked out the window and I saw…I saw…a plastic bag swinging from a tree. I was on the second floor of the school, and the bag was snagged up pretty darn high on the tree.

Where did the bag come from? And how did it get so high up there? I mean…the twig it was snagged on was pretty thin. There’s gotta be some reason beyond “bag on ground flew up there lol” that it was up there. Maybe…Some sharp elementary child timed it just right? Or maybe I just read too much Calvin and Hobbes.

Or maybe I’m just off my rocker.

Time

How do birds flap their wings so fast? Especially hummingbirds, they freak me out. How do they do it? I think….that every species of animal runs on their own perception of time. What’s normal to us might be extremely slow to a bird. They perceive and do things faster than us, because their perception of time is faster. Like houseflies. Ever tried killing it with your bare hand? Slap it while it’s on a table. Notice how hard that is? Even move your hand towards them and they’ll fly away. It doesn’t matter if you’re just shaking your fist at it, muttering curses under your breath, or maybe just reaching for a passionfruit on the table, or even just patting your cat on the head. Or going to squish that mofo. They fly away.

Or maybe they’re just weird animals, and I’m off my rocker.

-cide

I was looking at some vocabulary the other day, and I saw the word “matricide,” which basically means whackin’ your mom. After questioning the moral value of the educational system, I started thinking, and I remembered the word “alimony,” which basically  means a payment to a divorced spouse. Look at those two words. Can you see another word between those two? “Matrimony?” So….would matrimony be basically a “Payment to a woman?” Goodness gracious, marriage rites.

Veins

Today I donated blood, and I noticed something strange. Did you ever notice that some people, if they move their fingers just right, can make their veins in their hand move? I can make one of my hand-veins dance in each of my hands by moving my middle finger up and down…

The Mass Exodus

Since I have made my transition from Tumblr to BlogSpot (even though Tumblr has given me a great jump-start in the art of blogging), I have decided to start copying all of my posts. I'm jump-starting with ten posts, and doing the rest one (or more) day at a time, making new content as necessary. Thus the title, "The Mass Exodus." Granted, I didn't have many posts to begin with compared to some, but a little hyperbole now and then can't hurt, can it?

While I'm starting fresh--and mildly distracted at the "SAVE NOW" button clicking itself every three and a half seconds every time I stop typing--I suppose now would be a great time to give my reader(s) a more extended "about me" than what you see in the right column.

Apart from the formalities (my name is Alex, I have a cat), I reside in the wonderful state of Michigan. Besides being the only state which I can use the back of my hand as a literal map, Michigan also is host to a lovely menagerie of weather. I use the word "lovely" in the most sarcastic manner. Amidst snowstorms and rain showers, it can be assumed that Mother Nature is most likely in "that time of the month," all the time. I could go further, but that would be unnecessary and quite perturbing.

Between school and sleep, I enjoy a wide assortment of things, like music and video games. That's about it. Hyperbole strikes again! I play in two bands: Keyboard in one, and drums in the other. I have nigh 12 years of classical training in the piano and violin, and three years of informal training of Guitar Hero. I like good humor. For example, What do you get when you cross an owl and a mouse? An owl! Get it? Because owls eat mice! Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Are you bored yet?

I've never considered myself a writer. More than anything, I've thought of myself as a musician. But I digress. My previous ideas of blogs have been ones like "Grammar Warrior," where I take low-quality pictures of public grammar atrocities with my cell phone, post them on here, and violently vilify whomever wrote it. I have always been a stickler for grammar. However, I have decided to put my ability to pay attention to everything but class to use. Coupled with a fair writing sense, I thought I could get my points across fairly well, and maybe sprinkle a bit of good humor in it every now and then.

With this, I leave you. Have a nice day, eat some cake. Don't run into a bear.

I WILL RAPE YOUR FACE