things to be thankful for

Everyone in the world has seen the the commercial for the anti-psychotic Abilify with the bipolar lady wandering dangerously close to a cliff. Or you have seen the Abilify commercial that pretends that Abilify is an anti-depressant.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful that less airtime will be available for deceptive mental health marketing. The Abilify commercial lady will (hopefully) pull a George Bailey, making room for better bipolar role models, such as the manic and depressed Heat Miser and Snow Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus.

What are you happy for this horrible holiday season?

Octopi are awesome

First of all, Wild Chronicles is my new cable-free favorite show. Second, this video does not show the best part of this segment, which is where the octopus waits until all of The Scientists have gone home for the evening, slithers out of its tank, across the room, and then hoists itself into the crab tank for dinner. But it does show a 600-lb. octopus squeezing through a tube the size of a quarter.

I want to know what you're looking at

I think it's important that we tell each other what our gmail themes are. I will go first. Mine is Tea House. It features an adorable fox who currently is sweeping his house, but earlier was playing with birdies in the bird bath. It is only a matter of time before I start cross-stitching big-eyed kittens on my high-waisted, tight-rolled mom jeans.

Also, this weekend we watched a movie called Brothers of the Head, which is about conjoined-twin rock stars. It was much better than I was expecting. Don't let the Netflix description get you too pumped though: The additional head growing out of one of the twin's shoulder is only rumor. Remember when I wanted to have a conjoined-twin party? Gosh, that would have been great.

French & Saunders

Something more interesting out of something that was only mildly interesting

Everybody has seen those Rosie O'Donnell spots about her new show, right, and we all agree that she has had an aggressive facelift, yes? Well, Abby and I were especially freaked out by it because we think that now she bears a strong resemblance to Dawn French, who is awesome, and how this makes Rosie's stock rise a little bit simply because now we can pretend she's Dawn. So I was looking for a facelifted image of Rosie to do a side-by-side comparison and couldn't find one.

Instead, I found this website: http://www.thecelebrityperfumery.com/. It is hilarious. It tells you what stars (probably) smell like. For instance Anjelica Huston smells like beef bouillon, brass door knob, and black grapes, among other things. Michael Phelps like anti-fungal foot cream, dill pickles, sticky poker chips, and much more!

I wish I smelled like oranges, grape koolaid, grass, gasoline, and almond extract.

i'm pretty sure the devil is manufacturing diet coke

i want diet coke all the time, even when my stomach feels like a bomb. do you guys ever read my blog? i never see you on my activemeter. grading papers is not enjoyable. i want to make quilts. i want a book about the quilts of gee's bend. i will probably order it after lunch. i will probably eat a bagel at dunkin' donuts for lunch and a diet coke. this is because there is a dunkin donuts right next to this building. this building is roosevelt university. i might not get classes again. ew, papers. i wish i would go outside and see hundreds of balloons in the air.

I am pretty sure the devil is manufacturing Quorn

It's been a while since I ate chicken, so if someone (or a company that manufactures fake chicken, for example) tells me that something tastes like chicken I'm likely to believe that person or company.

But damn. Seriously. I just had a Quorn "chicken" cutlet and it not only looked and tasted like chicken, it also shared chicken's weird striated, fibrous texture. This is not a commercial for Quorn. This is freaking me out.

I do not understand how they are doing it. There are eggs in it, but unless eggs is a euphemism for chicken that shouldn't make any difference. Are they test tube chickens? And why can't they do this with steak?

I heard a rumor that it was made of mysterious fungus that no one really knew the long-term effects of eating, but that turned out to be a lie (probably propagated by Tyson). I keep feeling like there must be something wrong with it. It's because I cannot let myself be happy.

Overheard on the way to the union

"Yeah sorry I've been so sleepy the last few times we've talked. I've been sleeping between all of my classes because I wasn't eating anything so I was really sleepy. And then I got really dehydrated and stayed up till 5:30 in the morning."

Ah, those were the days, when you just sort of experimented with your body to see how it would react to extremes. Also, is dehydration like caffeine, or speed?

Yesterday I watched a baboon eat a baby gazelle

It was on television. I almost died. I had to cover my eyes and make la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la noises so I couldn't hear the pretty little bones crunching.

I am learning a Haydn sonata for piano for the first time in 15 years. I am suddenly very interested in finger placement. It makes sense to me in a way it did not 15 years ago.

I have to find a picture of a baby gazelle on a piano now to connect these two thoughts.

The Dog-Cat-Rat Man

Abby's famous

You guys, Abby and I were out to dinner the other night, and this woman came up to us and said, "Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt, but weren't you in that extremely depressing play?" And Abby got all skittery and shy--but gracious!--and said, "Um, yeah." And then the lady started gushing about how wonderful she was. It was really weird. I feel like Felicity's handyman husband who looks like her twin brother or Julia Robert's cameraman husband or the dude from Lost's wife who wants to open a salon.

I can't wait till she appeals to all of middle America and then I can live in a hammock on a beach somewhere off the spoils of her labor. Actually we could probably do that now, if only she would recognize her calling as a seaside bartender. She could search for doubloons with a metal detector in her spare time to keep me in mai-tais.

Holograms are Awesome

The best part of the election coverage last night, other than Barack's speech, was definitely the hologram-people on CNN.

I don't know what to say about the hologram-people, except that it was hilarious to watch Anderson Cooper holding conversations with people who weren't really there.

I think I like the holograms mostly because they were completely pointless, counterproductive, and absurd--why would you prefer to talk to a transported, pretend Jessica Yellen in the newsroom when she was in the center of the excitement in Chicago? Well anyway I love it. There should be more hologram-people in the world. I hope this is at the top of Obama's list.

I have to vote at 6 a.m. tomorrow

You know how when you vote in Chicago, you go to the church gym, and there's like 20 ancient people there, and they shuffle you through the line in a surprisingly efficient fashion, and then you vote, like, immediately?


Apparently, that is not the case here. People keep knocking on my door and telling me that if I early-vote it will only take 45 minutes. Which means that it's projected to take much longer than that on Nov. 4. Which means that I am getting there as soon as the polls open because if I wait more than 45 minutes in line and then I don't get to go on a rollercoaster, I am going to be angry.



My goal is to be the foggiest, most disheveled person at my polling place. I bet I will say "wait, what?" a lot. I hope the ballots are clear.