Salamander Update

Yeah, this is mostly just an excuse to post a ton of cutesy salamander pictures I've been taking lately. It seems like X, Y and Z's appetite changes with the season; right now since its spring they've all been extremely hungry. They're also getting a lot smarter. Every time I walk by the cage they stick their heads out looking for food, and yesterday when I went to lower insects into the cage Xenon jumped up into the air, mouth open, tongue outstretched, four separate times. How do they even have the muscle for that kind of thing!? Anyway, they're all about 10 inches long now, and Zinc is for sure a girl.

(Zinc is in the back, Xenon is the left-most foreground salamander, and Yttrium is on the right. You can tell them apart because Zinc has a black stripe down her spine, Xenon is full of spots, and Yttrium has thin, black stripes.)

A lot of people say that salamanders don't care whether they have company or not, but I'm not so sure. They tend to all congregate together in a big cute lump more often then not, so I think they enjoy each other's company. Also, the general opinion about plants in cages is that since salamanders burrow, they couldn't care less about whether or not there is greenery in their cages. I disagree. They seem to like burrowing in the plant's roots, and definitely like taking shelter under it. So I have no idea what those people are talking about.

I also recently gave them a bath, as you can see by the first picture on this post. It's one of those things that people tell you not to do, but salamanders are amphibians! And they seemed to like it, except for Xenon who is a huge poop and just wanted to climb out. I even took a video of that so if I get around to it, maybe I'll post it on youtube.

Anyway, that's that. Maybe I'll post again sometime soon. :)

Bad Pick-Up Lines

Do you work at Subway? Because you just gave me a footlong.

*beckon the person over with your index finger* I made you come with one finger, imagine what I could do with the rest.

Hey, did you know I'm an astronaut? My next trip is to Uranus.

Are you a fan of Pokemon because I'd love to Pikachu.

I'll give you a nickel if you tickle my pickle.

If snowflakes were kisses I'd send you a blizzard!

You have 209 bones in your body... do you want another?

Do you work at UPS, because I swear you were just checking out my package.

Do you want to see something swell?

Wanna come over to myspace and twitter all over my yahoo until I google all over your facebook?

You must be a parking ticket because you have “fine” written all over you!

I'm like a rubrics cube, the more you play with me the harder I get.

I'm 5 foot 9 inches. Now enough about the five feet, lets talk about the nine inches.

How heavy is a polar bear? ...heavy enough to break the ice!

That shirt is quite becoming of you. If I were on you I'd becoming too.

- - - - -

Back in 2003 I burned a disk of my computer files. It was a good thing too, because that computer and its hard drive is long gone now, and I had a lot of art and stories that I saved that way. The best part was the mass of old art files I found on there, a lot of them almost painful to look at now. However, there also was an image I once considered to be the best picture I ever made. I still think it is quite good, especially since I made it when I was about 13.

Larger Image Here: Click Me!

I still like that image a ton actually. The only downfall is the color blemishes on the lettering, which I messed up with white-out and then had to try to make presentable. Oh well, art is just like that sometimes.

God

"Oh, what," she says to me. I shoot her a glance, slightly annoyed.

"Can't I hide anything from you?" I pout, mostly on purpose but slightly because I actually mean it.

"Oh come on now, don't go there. Don't go changing the subject before you've even had anything to say." She looks at me, arms crossed, eyes narrowed, brow slightly pressed until mini folds of skin wrinkle up somewhere between her right eye and her left. Small enough that you don't really notice unless you're looking right at them, and even then you don't normally notice unless for some reason you do. A lot of things are like that.

I look at those small folds of skin and cross my own arms. "Hmmph," I say, not really a word but more of a sound. I don't want to talk about it. I really don't. In fact, I'd rather chew my own toe off then talk about it. She knows that. She does! That wrinkle of skin, right there, that proves that she does. "Hrrrmm," I express again. Maybe she'll get the idea and go back down to wherever she came from. That place that, well, I'm not quite sure where it is to be honest. She just sort of comes up from there and then disappears back into it, whether I want her to or not.

And, of course, she always has to come at the wrong times. Like now. Why now?

"It's God again, isn't it."

"Oh, shut up!" I snap back. I'm uncomfortable. I don't want to talk about it. She knows this! In fact, God is definitely the absolute last thing I want to even pretend to think about. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm probably so angry precisely because I don't want to think about it! Think about Him. It. You know, the whole situation surrounding it. Him.

It occurs to me that grammar might be a good skill to learn some day.

"He's a sock puppet you know," she says slyly, mockingly. "People just, you know, poof Him up into their minds, take some of that old glue they used to chew on as a kid and paste their beliefs all over Him." She takes a step to the side. "Kind of like those construction paper monstrosities you see in the kindergarten section of elementary schools. They're all ugly and horribly misshapen, little bits of extras tacked on to the side, some weird marker scribbles in the corner, a freaky attempt at a face in the upper middle." I growl, and she just nods, lip slightly curled in an expression that makes me furious. "God, really, is just as significant as those pasted artworks. Oh, wait!" She lifts a finger, as if a new idea has suddenly struck her. "In fact, less important! Because, obviously, every intelligent person in the world knows He doesn't actually exist. Unlike kindergarten art, you see. Walk into any elementary school and you'll see that exists, plain as day, hanging on the walls. But you can't really walk anywhere and see that God exists." She looks at me for a moment, head cocked slightly to the side, eyes looking painfully masked.

"Grrrmmm," I say, again, more of a sound than a word. She knows she's just making me angry. She knows that I'm feeling those thoughts again, the ones the bubble up from nowhere, that want to gurgle their way up my throat and squeeze their tiny hands through my teeth until they wiggle themselves so far through the cracks that my mouth just bursts open and out they come, spilling like a hypothetical overflowing toilet, spurts of words that when put in the right context would probably make sense but the way they're splashing out just makes them a jumble-

"Haha, ha!" She laughs. She laughs because even though I'm not saying anything, she knows what I want to say. "Oh you're silly," she mocks again, stepping closer. I can feel the anger oozing up my chest, thick and warm and swirling farther up my throat. "You think you can hide yourself from me? Oh, haha, how silly!" She steps close and places one, dainty, dirty, disgusting finger right square on my lips. "You can't hide thoughts from me. I'm you! I'm that part that you always want to ignore, that part that you want to forget about and pretend doesn't exist so that one day, maybe, I'll just disappear and never return." She smiles. "But you know that's not how it works, baby. Oh no. You try to hide things from me, you try to ignore me. But it doesn't work like that. In fact, I'd wager that I can hide your thoughts from you better then you can hide your thoughts from me!"

Oh that fucker. Her face with those wrinkles, that look, oh if I could just take my hands and wrap them tight around her metaphysical neck, and then squeeze-oh it would hurt so bad-squeeze until her little dull eyes pop straight out of her head, and her fingers wilt down the the ground like dying wildflowers, and her blood spurts out of her, pure evil I'm sure, smelling like rotten eggs and the dying piss and shit of babies-

"But then, darling, you'd be dead too you know." She says, simply. "You'd be dead too because as much as you don't want to admit it, I am you and you are me. Every evil thought I have you have too, every good thought that you grasp for is tainted by me." Her eyes narrow. "You can't escape me. Just as you can't escape God you can't escape me. You can't even breathe without Him saying its okay, without him pulling back your tiny little diaphragm, without him letting that oxygen and nitrogen and whatever else the fuck is in the air swoosh into your lungs so that your tiny little red blood cells, created and maintained by His power alone, can carry those essential things into your body and keep you alive."

"You're wrong," I say. No, I spit. I spit it right out of myself, thick and heavy and hot. "God is even stronger than you," I say, the words fumbling out. "Whatever you are, you disgusting thing, whatever you do to me, however I choose to go with you (for everything you do is done by me), God is greater than all of that. ALL of it!" I feel sick, somewhere in my body. It doesn't matter. "I don't care how bound I am by you, you twat, you disgrace, you piece of slime. Because you don't matter! You DON'T! You wish you had power, and you hold on to what you can, a parasite, self-bound, self-destructive, but in the end you have nothing because without God you are nothing and I, with Him, am stronger than YOU."

Her lip curls and her face is unreadable, and really, at the end of it all, what did I even say? Did I even believe myself? Does she believe it? That thick anger is still there, thumping, squirting, roaring. She opens her mouth and then closes it, not because she can't speak, but because she is fading away again, leaking back into that place where she lives deep within myself, that dark place, and hidden place, that place where she sleeps until the time is right...

She'll be back. She always comes back.

I roll over, exhausted.

Sleep.

I'm totally a college student.

I experimented with making Ramen today. I had some celery laying around and was in the mood for something quick yet delicious, so I was like, "what the heck?" I then dug through my food cupboard and found a can of chicken, kinda like a can of tuna only it was chicken. So, I put some water in a pan and cut up two stalks of celery, and then threw the chicken in there and the flavoring packet too. (The flavor was roast beef, and I figured I wanted some of that flavor to ooze into my celery so I better cook it together, you know?) Anyway, I dug around some more and found a few beef granules, like bullion cubes mushed up. So I threw some of that in too. Add the noodles, boil it for a bit, and tadaa! Food! I definitely like the celery, but I probably didn't need two stalks, and the flavor is pretty good but maybe some garlic would make it even better. Oh well, there you go. Proof that I'm a college student. :)

Sonnet

So, I have this online poem class I'm taking right now where once I week I have to write two poems and send them in. It's pretty easy and kind of fun, since I've never seriously wrote any poems before and the atmosphere is so relaxed I can just plop down whatever I want and not have to worry about it. This week I had to write a sonnet for one of my poems, and I actually think mine is pretty sweet so I'm going to share it. (If you need a brush up on what a sonnet is, it is a 14 line poem with an iambic pentameter meter. That is, an unstressed-stressed pattern, and there needs to be five of those in each line. Confused? Yeah, me too!)

So, anyway, here you go!

Trans Fat

What is the use of a mere onion ring,

Dripping with oil and full of gross fat?

Who in the world would eat such a thing?

Taste and shape not even fit for a cat!

And yet sometimes when I order some fries,

I peek inside and what do my eyes see?

Amid the sticks of potatoes it lies,

A round deep fried product of greesery!

"What is this monstrosity?" I exclaim!

With a finger and thumb I fish it out.

"An onion ring?" I say with clear disdain!

Looking at it my mouth forms to a pout.

But after a moment I plop it in,

"It's not that bad," I say with a small grin.

I seem to like silly poems, hehe. :D

Also, I had a project due for my drawing class this last Tuesday and of course I didn't start until the day before. I was feeling a bit crappy just in general about life, (I feel a lot better now, it was a weird funk) and so I just used that to pump out a big charcoal mess. My favorite is the little dude in the upper right:

Otherwise, I'm thinking for my final painting project I might get a little ambitious and try to pump out a short little animation... I dunno though, that's a lot of work. Corey has inspired me though and I'm always trying to work up the motivation to make an actual hand-drawn animation, so maybe this is my chance!? We'll see....

Why do deer move around in the morning? Why!?

Deer hunting is pretty much the lazy man's connection to being awesome. All you do is sit around for hours and hope a big meaty deer comes waltzing past. Deer, surprisingly, are amazingly quiet. I always assumed I'd be able to hear a deer coming a mile away, but they are very sneaky animals and very rarely do their feet make any noise. So, you have to keep your eyes open and look for movement. (Which of course makes everything look like a deer whenever it moves, and then you know you're getting way too excited.) But, if you do see one and are able to sneak your gun up to it without it noticing you (in addition to being silent they have great hearing, so you can't make any noise or they'll hear it and run like a bitch), there is pretty much no way you can miss. Compared to duck hunting it's basically cake, if you can sit still that is. But it occured to me today that there is one freaky thing about deer hunting that completely blows duck hunting out of the water.

Walking out to your stand.

Because deer move around the most when it is just getting light out, you want to be sitting in your stand ideally at least a half-hour before it gets light. Yeah, you know what that means; you gotta get up early and walk through the woods. In the dark. Did you know there are wolves and bears up in northern Minnesota? Of course you do. But it really doesn't seem like that big of a deal... until you need to walk blindly through the trees in complete darkness. Suddenly, a place that is usually peaceful becomes a full of hungry, rabid predators. All you have is one measly flashlight, and it bounces off all this brush and trees you didn't even notice in the daylight. It feels like you're boxed in! Boxed in, and only able to see a few feet in front of you, with the possibility of anything creeping around to your sides or behind you or anything. And when you're tramping out there, hoping you're not lost, and you hear those wolves start howling... I'm pretty sure I lose a few pounds in sweat everytime.

Then, of course, are those times you get lost. You have markers, gashes, broken twigs, shiny little tacks, everything, and still you get lost. So you sit there in darkness with your one little flashlight, shining it all over the place trying to look for that one shiny tack that'll lead you farther into the mess of trees around you. It sucks! Today I had to sit for a while on a big rock because I took a right when I was supposed to take a left. I was following my trail and then I started following another path and then I was in a clearing and there was no where to go! And then I was like, "Uhm, where did I come from?" so I poked around and realized I had no idea. Luckily I eventually figured it out once I calmed down and just sat, but still, getting lost in the woods at 4:30am is not how I like to start my day. Luckily, there were no wolves howling this morning. :)

And, of course it was worth it!

I'm actually feeling quite good today.

Do you ever feel like the stuff you care about is something that no one else really understands? I mean, really. No one cares to see it, or look for it, or even think that it's worth caring about. They're more interested in making what you're interested in into something that they already like, or persuading you to move away from it, or trying to tell you that its dumb and obviously not as important as what they care about. I mean, shit, I do that all the time so just typing it out makes me feel a bit hypocritical. But at the same time, there are days when I just feel weary and wish I had more little "Sara-groupies" to keep me inspired and wanting to pursue the things I like. In general, I'm just lazy and devolve into this strange fleshy doormat that agrees with profs and peers and whoever about how my stuff sucks. And hey, sometimes they have great points and great insights so I love that. But other times I think, "can't you just try to like this? I like it. There are things in there that I know are worth liking." I think the fault in all this comes in my timid nature. I am not always the best in articulating what I think, and honestly it makes me nervous. So I devolve to this safe place, this comfort zone, where I don't try to explain what I was going for in a piece of artwork or whatever creative vision I may be working towards. I just agree with what people say and don't try to fight it... why would they care about something when I'm not showing them why they should care?

Hmm, this reminds me of how I go about stating opinions. Very similar really. Arguing for an opinion is way more difficult though, for me anyway. Though I'd venture to say my sense of right and wrong is persuasive, my logical explanations of said rights and wrongs leave me feeling very dissatisfied. Most of the time if I get to the point of explaining what is on my mind, what people mirror back to me is not what I was trying to say, and other times I just get poked in the logical holes I created for myself. Our world is such a logical place, and I know that all people have strong logical sides if only they'd let them out. I strangle mine and kill it with fear, and so it struggles and gimps along and leaves me with exactly what I try so hard to avoid: rejection. How ironic!

It occurs to me that maybe people don't preform as well as they wish they did not because they can't, but because they stop themselves. They have all these abilities but they are hard to those things, they fear rejection and failure and so they try to "toughen" themselves in order to avoid the unavoidable. Life, I think, is important because of rejection and failure. And if you think about it, rejection and failure are not bad things. They're sort of like getting a cold. No one likes getting stuffed up and sick, but the reason your body is doing that is to save you from death. Not that rejection and failure is that extreme, but I think they serve a similar purpose. They're uncomfortable and unwanted, but they are not bad things. And maybe, in an ideal world, they would not be quite so uncomfortable and unwanted. Maybe they're so feared because we try to harden ourselves to them, to stop them from happening. Maybe colds wouldn't be so bad either, if we just opened ourselves to them and allowed our bodies to fully and completely fight whatever is making us ill.

Or, maybe not. :)