June 2013 – Like I Say…

Uh Oh Nintendo

I just came across the International Geek Girl Pen Pals Club, and I totally had to sign up. I’m actually surprised I didn’t hear about the site sooner. But then, I’m not your typical geeky girl. I’m more of an 80s-cartoons, The Sims, and Fallout kind of geek. I likely would have been more of a gaming geek, had my mom not taken the Nintendo…

When I was maybe 10 or so, some of our cousins gave us their old NES and a couple games. My sibs and I had never had a gaming console, so even though it was pretty old by that time, it was quite a big deal to us. We LOVED it. If we weren’t jumping up and down with the Super Mario Bros, we were likely running in place with World Class Track Meet (that is, until my brothers figured out they could just sit on the floor and use their hands), or expressing our utter frustrations with the stupid whirlpools in Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival. Yeah. Those were our games. We also had good ol’ Duck Hunt, but Mum didn’t like that game much. I think you could also shoot skeets instead of ducks, but that didn’t matter.

In fact, Mum didn’t seem to like the Nintendo much at all. She had several rules about it, including not playing on Sunday WHATSOEVER. It sucked. A bunch of kids. At home most of the day except for the few (painful) hours of church. Too hot to go outside. And we couldn’t play our games. What else were we supposed to do on a Sunday? Get three-degree burns outside? Take turns mailing each other to India? Volunteer at a soup kitchen? (To this day, I don’t think there even is a soup kitchen within 40 miles of my hometown.) Since there really wasn’t much to do, we tended to just sleep, or fight. I hated Sundays.

And then the worst possible thing happened – our Mom got rid of the Nintendo. She didn’t put it aside for a while, or say we had to earn it back by being the perfectest of children. No. She simply just threw it out. I’m sure gamers everywhere are cringing and face-palming right now. If she hadn’t trashed it, it would probably still work today – those things were the Toyotas of the gaming world. But she did. And why?? She said we fought about it too much.

Now if that were the case, I could probably understand why she’d want to be rid of it. No one wants to deal with a horde of warmongering children. But that wasn’t true at all. We fought when we couldn’t play Nintendo (such as on Sunday, bloody Sunday), not when we were playing it. In fact, some of my best getting-along-with-the-sibs time involved that old NES. It was a family game. Even Dad tried to play it once or twice. (He didn’t get far – the whirlpools got him.) We actively played and watched the fun, (or relatively stupid) games as a team, and cheered each other on. Not one of us ever got to finish Super Mario Bros. Not a single one.

Sometime later, the same cousins offered us their old Sega Genesis, this time with SEVERAL games. Mum threw it out before we even got to attempt setting it up. The Genesis apparently involved fighting.

So that’s why I’m not much of a gaming geek. Not that I didn’t have the potential – I didn’t have the consol.

Butt Hurt

I’m not completely sure what “butt-hurt” means figuratively, but I’m speaking literally anyway. So my neighbor apparently didn’t like bicycling much, because he put a stationary bike out on the sidewalk with a big “free” sign taped to it. I’d kind of been wanting such a torture device (I have a little pedal cycle, but you have to sit on just the right chair to be able to use it, the tension constantly loosens, and the metal gets so hot I’m surprised the plastic parts haven’t melted yet), so I got my husband to snarf it.

I used it yesterday after attempting to douse the squeaky parts with sewing machine oil because I couldn’t find the WD40 in the garage and kept running into spider webs, which was really creeping me out (spider webs = there’s got to be a spider or two somewhere). In hindsight, it might have been the piecing screech the bike makes that prompted the neighbor to dispose of it. Maybe said neighbor wanted me to take the bike. Touché, neighbor.

So I cycled on the bike through two episodes of American Dad!, sweating like a pig and feeling pretty self-congratulatory for doing so. I also did some arm exercises with free-weights until it became too difficult to balance on the bike whenever the pedals got stuck, the wheel screeched to a halt, and my arms were out to my sides like I was trying to imitate a freaking bird. A very uncoordinated bird with heavy wings. Maybe an ostrich, or something like that.

I figured I had done pretty well for a first try. And though I knew my arms would probably hurt the next day, I was quite satisfied with my effort and told my passive aggressive body to go ahead, bring on the pain. But then I got to work this morning, sat down at my desk, and discovered that, although my arms were still just fine, sitting there in my not-too-bad-but-definitely-not-that-great office chair, my butt hurt.

No joke, it really hurt. And the worst part was that I didn’t know why. A mysterious ass-pain is no laughing matter. I searched my brain for a reason for such pain in such a strange place, and the only explanation that really came to mind suggested alien abductions and anal probes. I didn’t like that theory much. I really don’t care for aliens at all except for old Marvin. You know, the funny little Martian with the Romanesque helmet?

Anyway, I eventually (to my relief) figured out that it was the ear-splitting stationary bike that had caused my buttocks to protest every time I sat down. And though it’s not nearly as satisfying as the lovely pain in my arms that has since settled in, I figure my ass could probably use a workout too. So thanks, neighbor and little, blue bike, I now know what butt-hurt truly feels like.

The Hazards of Living with a Giant

My mom would usually read us bedtimes stories when my sibs and I were little kids. On occasion, however, Dad would read to us instead. And he would invariably choose his favorite book, The BFG (or Big Friendly Giant) by Roald Dahl. Little did any of us know at the time that one of us would actually marry a giant someday. That turned out to be me.

Living with a Giant Husband is not always fun or easy. I had my own little place when we were married that he moved into, and though I loved it (including the purple shag carpet in the bedroom), Giant Husband just didn’t fit. His head touched the ceiling, he had to duck through doorways, and the ceiling fan in the living room was likely to decapitate him if he wasn’t careful, so we had to move out.

Giant Husband also has giant feet, and his shoes can be quite dangerous. Tripping over a pair of regular-sized shoes isn’t fun, but ever trip over a pair of size 15s? Those things are killer. Since I often mistake his shoes for the cat because of their similar size, you’d think I’d notice them in time to keep from tripping, but no, they migrate through the house so much that I never seem to see them coming before it’s too late. And sometimes they hide, such as under the blankets on the floor at the end of the bed. Someday the headline proclaiming my demise may indeed read: Tripped To Death By Giant Shoes On Stairs.

Now like a lot of people (regularly sized or otherwise), Giant Husband has a habit of putting his hands on his hips while standing. This wouldn’t be any cause for alarm except that this puts his large elbows right at the level of my head. And because I’m like a small mouse in comparison, Giant Husband often doesn’t notice me, and turns around in said position before thinking. It’s like he’s wielding a great, sharp, equilateral triangle and my face is a circle and he’s trying to determine the cosine or something and… okay, so I was never very good at geometry. But basically he hits me in the face with his elbow and it really hurts. I’m surprised my nose hasn’t been broken yet.

I did, however, nearly likely have a toe broken once because Giant Husband accidently stepped on it. Ever stub your toe on a table or other hard piece of furniture while stumbling around in the dark? Well this was pretty similar, except that it hurt for days. I probably should have gone to the doctor, but I just looked into purchasing steel-toe slippers for myself instead. Step on me once, shame on you, step on me twice…

And don’t even get me started on the furniture. Beds, sofas, chairs, fridges, toilets – these things just aren’t made for giant people. They don’t fit, and they don’t last. Take refrigerators, for instance. We can’t have a freezer-on-top type of fridge, because Giant Husband can’t see what’s in the fridge below without face-planting into the freezer part. And a side-by-side type still doesn’t work well, because Giant Husband can’t see most of the shelves, which means most of the leftovers don’t get noticed, don’t get eaten, and then get pushed to the back of the fridge in the dark somewhere until they grow mold, legs, and self-consciousness and move up to the front of the shelf on their own accord for me to carefully (that means wearing rubber gloves and using a pair of tongs) throw them away.

Living with a Giant Husband also makes a lot of things hard to find. If I put an item away, it will usually be within my line of sight, or at least within my reach. The same probably goes for Giant Husband, but because our individual lines of sight vary by about two miles (okay, okay, two feet), if he puts away the duct tape, the cocoa-maker, a plastic poncho, or some other item that doesn’t necessarily have its own specified place, I’m not likely to find it. I can’t count how many times I’ve looked and looked for an item and never saw it, or finally did find it but I’d need to stand on tiptoe on an upturned trashcan on top of a chair to reach it.

And that’s why not only living with a my husband makes me feel like a hobbit residing in a human-sized house with a troll (a very good-looking troll, but a large troll nonetheless), it’s also quite dangerous to my self preservation. So please cut fun-sized girls some slack. You’ve no idea the hazards they might be going through on the daily.

The Internet Doesn’t Get Me

If you’re reading this, you’re most likely on the Internet. And if you’re on the ‘Net, chances are you’ve been profiled – not quite the Criminal Minds kind of profiled, but profiled nonetheless. The World Wide Web likes to keep track of you, your likes and dislikes, where you live, if you have a pet, whether or not you like strawberry cheesecake ice cream, etc. Why? Why would the Internet care? Why, to sell you stuff and sign you up for ridiculous things you didn’t yet know you wanted, of course!

Facebook knows what you like. Google remembers what you search for. You can do anything at Zombo.com. The Internet knows.

The Internet knows I’ve recently gotten addicted to Candy Cush Saga after quickly tiring of Castleville. It knows that I want to learn how to “knook” (that’s not a dirty term nor is it an E-reader, by the way). It knows I have a fondness for Reese’s peanut butter cups, and that I also enjoy sucking on strawberry Crème Savers, which have gotten REALLY hard to find. The Internet knows that I still like watching cartoons from time to time, that my dishwasher likes to stop working pretty consistently, and that I’m a sadistic type of person who hates body hair enough to want to buy an epilator.

I’ve grown pretty accustomed to the ads everywhere on the Internet. You can’t seem to read a page, play a game, watch a video, or research why some people have unibrows and some people don’t without running into at least a few of them. And having them tailored to your liking isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it helps you avoid being bombarded by ads about crickets if you just don’t like crickets. You’ll get to see lovely advertisements depicting your favorite bug, such as butterflies or cockroaches, instead.

But something has changed as of late, at least for me. Instead of the familiar sewing-, kitteh-, or geek-related ads I’ve gotten used to but seldom actually click on (I tend to give Amazon and Hancock all my money, and no, that’s not dirty either), I’ve been seeing other things. Strange things…

I guess, based on my likes of several good-tasting-but-bad-for-you foods, the Internet has decided that I must have gained weight, as ads for plus-sized women’s clothing keep popping up. I also keep seeing advertisements for credit cards and casino slot games, so I must have lost quite a bit of money recently without even knowing. But the most interesting change as of late is that I just keep getting messages to meet hot Asian women.

Now, I must admit that the girls depicted on these ads are pretty cute, but last time I checked I was still pretty happily married to a man. A man about the size of at least 3.5 of those hot Asians, FYI. So unless I’m wearing clothing that is much too small, I’m losing all my money betting on chicken fights while sleepwalking at night, and I’m actually a lesbian without knowing it, the grand ol’ Internet doesn’t know me very well any more. Either that, or a large drag queen who’s low on cash and has a thing for pretty Asian ladies has been using the Internet under my name/IP.

But at least the Netflix sign-up ads haven’t changed. Because I already have Netflix, and thus I could use some reminders to watch it.

Karma

Driving home from work today, a woman in a truck cut me off. This same vehicle kept weaving around, cutting others off and nearly causing an accident trying to get somewhere apparently very important in a hurry. It didn’t get her any farther, however, since I ended up right behind her at a stoplight. And then I noticed her license plate said KARMAS (I assume meaning belonging to Karma). So, it looks like Karma really is a bitch.