Whine Whine Whine

I got a chance to use my newly acquired knowledge of knots today and failed utterly and completely. Yuan Yuan was trying to tie her short hair in a short stump of a pony tail with one of my knot-trial-dedicated shoelaces. I saw her struggling and volunteered my services. I'm thinking now that I should have used the Constrictor Knot, but for some reason it didn't pop into my head at the time. Instead my head swam with images of Fieggen's Shoelace Knot, figure 8 variants, fishermen, fond childhood memories of trying to convince my mother to let me pull out all her hair ("how about just one?" "No! All of them!"), and shibari. Would it be easier to tie her pony tail if I first bound her head and foot and hung her from the ceiling? I wasn't sure enough to suggest it. Plus, I haven't taken the course on unknotting yet so testing should be conducted using other people's girlfriends.

Based on what I've read and this latest experience, maybe it's time to learn the Icicle Hitch. If I'd tied a quality one of those around Yuan Yuan's pony tail, not only could I be sure it wouldn't come undone, but I could also have hung her head out the window and climbed down the remaining 6 inches of shoelace without worrying about whether the knot would hold.

The Icicle Hitch looks pretty complicated and I've already knut (the past tense of "to knot" in the vernacular of 2047) enough for one day today...so maybe tomorrow. Today's knot is the Double Figure Eight Loop:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

For some reason my brain struggled with this one for a while. My figure 8 kept looking like a pretzel. Then I tried passing the loop in from the other side in one of the steps and everything fell into place. Well...actually just the figure 8, I still have to sort out my visa. In the directions on animatedknots.com, they don't tell you from which side to pass the loop. Now that I know, it seems rather obvious, but when it wasn't obvious, it wasn't obvious at all.* I wonder if this is how my students feel when I teach them English. "Oh...so there's a verb in every sentence! You said every sentence, not EVERY sentence, be more explicit next time!" (It's probably more like EVeRy sentence, if you count the little phrases we use in dialogue, like "Yes way, Ted!" and "Excellent!")

I missed my chance to be stared at more than usual today, which would be MORE than usual if the "usual" was measured in America. Confused? I bit my cheek two days ago and now it hurts every time I move my mouth or Yuan Yuan slaps me playfully across the face with the front door. Well...I don't really like pain, so when I eat I put the food in my mouth with one hand while pinching my cheek and holding it stretched out with the other. It's not an ideal method as I have to pull pretty hard on the outer cheek to get the inner cheek to separate from my gums and teeth. It's also not very comfortable and I'm already dreading turning 90 years old, when my arms won't be long enough to hold my cheek out far enough. Good thing we have that fight to the death scheduled for when we're 80.

I scoured the seven w's for cheek-bite remedies, but the more I looked, the more pathetic I seemed to myself. When I saw this...

"I thought there was food stuck between my teeth but it was just a piece of my gum that must have gotten a bit knickered. Anyway I pulled on the gum and peeled it off and now it's red and half of my mouth is swollen and a bit painful. It will heal right?"

and

"How long does it take for a dog's wounds to heal?"

...I almost punched myself in the face for being such a wuss (luckily I chickened out). People out there in the real world had far worse problems. I decided to just rinse my mouth out with salt water and hope that the 3rd day's a charm. Now I just have to wait for them to turn the water back on...

Yuan Yuan's two liner of the day (first aired while we were watching Terminator):
Yuan Yuan: I'm sure I've seen this movie!
Mark: Really?
Yuan Yuan: Well maybe not this one.

Yuan Yuan's creative spelling of the day:
sombile
("symbolizes," duh)

* This reminds me of a conversation with Lucy that took place a week back. She said something to the order of "good food is REALLY good," and I told her that that made no sense. However, after some discussion, I decided that the universe would be much more entertaining if that made sense than if it didn't. So one explanation is that the first good is more or less objective. It refers to the quality of the preparation. The second is subjective. So if "good food is REALLY good" to you, it means that if the food is prepared decently well (fuzzy linguistics), you'll enjoy it disproportionately. I think in my case it would be "good food is just as good as excellent food," with the second good being negative...maybe.

Q & A

Morning meditation:

Oof. Today was one loooong hour-long hour. I was really impatient for some reason, even more than usually. Maybe it's because today I meditated at ~11:30AM instead of the usual 9:00AM, and my brain had already had time to sink into the afternoon mindset, apparently one of ADD. Also, there were lots of distracting sounds today. Planes, trains, automobiles, humming refrigerators, ringing cellphones, garbage pickups, the walls crackling from minute changes in temperature, pretty much everything you could ask for except for the ice cream truck and carolers. And Santa Claus.

I did have a couple of interesting moments when I felt curiously misaligned with my body, as if I had drifted over a couple of inches, but was also simultaneously in the original spot. It was a tricky feeling to hold onto, because the moment I'd notice it, I'd snap right back into place. The day I can hold it I'll probably end up blaming it on excessive calorie intake.

I was thinking yesterday that God is a lot like the Placebo Effect. It doesn't really matter whether he's a sugar pill or an antibiotic or a big jolly bearded guy in a cloud, riding a dinosaur. If you manage to believe in him, even if you're tricked into doing so, you can extract benefit for yourself. Or harm of course. Let's forget about God for a second, and just think about the Placebo Effect. Basically it says that whatever you believe, happens. Like, if you take a sugar pill thinking it's a cancer cure, you have a 99.99% chance of being cured (Note: figures are not to scale). Or if you jump out of an airplane and believe you have a parachute, but you really don't, then you're totally screwed. Actually...ignore that last one. OK, if you believe in Santa, your parents will give you presents addressed from him. If you believe in a wrathful and vengeful God, I will come shoot you in the head. If my physician tells me my lymph nodes are OK, I will believe her, and they'll stop spraying fountains of blood. So you see that the Placebo Effect is very powerful. And now I forget where I was going with this.

A joke my friend Pei wrote about me:

It happened as mark was in primary school...
teacher : mark, how come u r late again!!
mark: I met a lost 3 year-old kid by the railway on the way here.
teacher: come on... pls use a better story next time.
mark: I did send him home.
teacher: where is his home?
mark: ya when I asked him that, he was pointing to the railway. So I put him on the rails.
teacher: .......

(my reaction)
Mark: that's good!
Pei: when I was thinking of u, I thought, mark, he is a baby-killer... here we go...

A joke I wrote about my friend Pei:

Pei: talk dirty to me, I love it when you talk dirty to me.
Mark: mm...your apartment's so dirty, so dirty, I'm going to go clean it right now!
Pei: yea baby! you know what turns me on!

Yea...that may take some background to understand.

And one more about Pei (we're collaborating on a joke book that only the two of us will understand):
Pei is walking down the street. She sees a 5 year old kid and his mother. The kid must have been misbehaving, because the mother is beating the crap out of him, spanking him like there's no tomorrow.
Pei: ah...I wish I had a kid.

(today, in the kitchen)
Mark is peeling a clementine. Michelle walks up and puts her hand out, demanding some. Mark shoves the whole clementine in his mouth.
Michelle: Mom! Mark stole my clementine!

I tried writing some more jokes today, but in a different style. I tried posing a question and then thinking of responses from different people, with the responses caricaturing the answeree. I can't really tell if it's funny, and you'd have to know the people reasonably well to understand what I'm getting at, but it made me crack up when I wrote them:

Question: You have 24 hours to live, what do you do?
Mom: 24 hours...that's 12 movies!
Dad: 24 hours...that's eight 3-hour meditations. No, wait! Twenty-four 1-hour meditations!
Mark: 24 hours...can I at least get an extra half-hour to blog about it after?
Grandma: 24 hours...do you know what happened in Israel in only the last 3 hrs? No? Well let me describe it to you in gory detail for the next 24.
Boris: 24 hou...(snore)
Pei: 24 hours...that's enough time to try 240 new sex positions!
Manlin: 24 hours...how fast do they deliver chocolate?
Zhang Xiao Yi: 24 hours...damn, my parents are going to kill me when I tell them!
Chun: 24 hours...OK, first 5 minutes - call my Mom and Dad to tell them the news. The next 23 hours and 50 minutes - plan out the remaining 5 minutes. Aha! Not a minute gone to waste!
Tina: 24 hours...wow, life sucks.
Mario: 24 hours...that's time enough to learn 3 new Chinese words, forget 5 Russian ones, and start learning three new languages!
Igor: 24 hours...Renata! What am I doing for the next 24 hours!?
Frank: 24 hours...no problem. I have a business plan just for the occasion! It's a franchise. We're going to have 12 stores open within the first 10 hrs and we should be up to McDonald's scale by hour 24.
Serge: 24 hours...that's enough time to build a successful family, right?
Perry: 24 hours...convert as many Christians as I can to antheism. Now that's time well spent.
Lucy: 24 hours...bull. I bet I can live longer than that.

Question: What will you do when your son's begging you for a new toy he doesn't deserve?
Mom: don't give it to him, but then cry myself to sleep at night.
Dad: don't give it to him. Instead, make fun of him till he develops a serious psychological disorder.
Michelle: I have a son? That means I had sex! EWWWW!!!
Grandma: buy him every toy in the store. Oh, wait! Did you say son or grandson?
Mark: my son? Did the condom break? This is a completely unrealistic situation! Fine, I'd probably go get a DNA test then, see if he's really my son. There's no toy in existence that a son of mine wouldn't deserve. Ah, he's already so much like his father.
Chun: tell him he can have the toy in installments. Get him planning his life early on!
Mario: how old is he? 5? Trade him in for five 1-year-olds. No! Half of a ten-year-old!
Pei: give it to him. I love him, so why wouldn't I buy it? Wait, that's not how you raise children?
Zhang Xiao Yi: Chinese children know better than to beg for toys. I knew I shouldn't have married an American. They're inferior!
Manlin: play mind games with him. "You really want that toy? You don't not really want it? You wouldn't want not to not want to want to not have it?" Hehe.
Tina: toys? Yay! Mine mine mine mine! Phew, OK, sad now.
Igor: oh Christ. Renata!
Frank: wait, how did he get out of his cage?
Serge: buy myself a new car. And a new house. And then work harder and earn more money so I can buy the toy. Man, where does the money go!?
Perry: you know those noise-canceling headphones? What did you say? I can't hear you.
Lucy: beat the little devil half to death. Studies show it's optimal for his development.

Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Mom: because we're vegetarian.
Dad: it's a reincarnation of a nomadic tribesman, come on dude, ask me something harder.
Mark: I told you ten times already! Don't tell me any news unless it's good news! I've heard this all a million times. People are dying, there's war and povery, blah blah blah.
Michelle: a chicken? Where?!? I'm scared. Wait, are chickens dogs or insects?
Grandma: a chicken? Do you know that ten people were blown up in Israel today?
Igor: Renata, didn't we discuss this the other day? What did we decide?
Chun: aha! All part of my plan for getting into medical school! Check!
Frank: I don't know, but someone grab that chicken! The chicken/turkey exchange rate is climbing faster than my blood pressure!
Paul: hahaha! Someone saw a chicken! That's so crazy, man, that's so crazy!
Mario: I don't know, but I trust it. I'm getting outta here.
Pei: chicken? Who cares about chickens? Ask me about fish.
Tina: crap, I had this at my Google interview...and I remember getting it right...what was it!?...ugh!
Manlin: mmffhhahmm...sorry, was eating chocolate. Umm... (pause) did you get that? My MSN died. No? I said "maybe there's better Internet connection over there?"
Serge: a chicken crossed my road!? Where is it? Give me that chicken, we have some words to say to each other if you know what I mean. Quickly, before I forgive it!
Perry: don't even get me started. And no, chickens were not created by Jesus, they were created by a little thing called evolution, heard of it?
Lucy: did you know that chicken blood is green? I swear. It's true. Fine, look it up nay-sayer. It's not true? No way!