Not again...

My solitary faithful reader (that I know of, if there are others, comment and let me know) has tagged me once again. But this one is so geeky, I couldn't resist.

A Book That Has Changed Your Life: The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffeneger. I never considered this to be the sort of book I would like, but then my dad told me to read it. It is such a neat perspective on relationships.

A Book That You Have Read More Than Once: I like to reread books. It feels like revisiting old friends. People make fun of me for my giant book collection and my inability to dispose of any, but you can't throw your friends away. A favorite reread, though, is The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, I can't even begin to describe the power of this. It's such a simple story, but it was such a powerful coming of age tale.

And to make myself sound smarter, I also read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley at least once a year.

A Book That Makes You Laugh: Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington. I love British novels and this one is so bizarre that all you can do is giggle over it.

A Book That Made You Cry: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, I didn't get a lot of sleep while reading this. It was a mystery and a love story and an emotional whirlwind all in one novel. It's another one I never would have bought for myself, but it turned out to be the best birthday present I had ever gotten.

A Book You Wish You Had Written: You mean besides wishing I had a piece of the Harry Potter pie? I would have to say Empire Falls by Richard Russo. It's this wonderfull complex tale that boils down to a father's love for his daughter.

A Book You Are Currently Reading
My tastes are way schizophrenic.
The Second Summer of the Sisterhood, Anne Brashares
Milestones in Microbiology, Thomas D. Brock
goodbye lemon, Adam Davies
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Dracula Tape, Fred Saberhagen
Microbe Hunters, Paul de Kruif
PopCo, Scarlett Thomas

A Book You Have Been Meaning To Read:
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Rememberance of Time Past, Marcel Proust

Tags:
Again, I am too lame to have anyone to tag. If I have any other readers out there, make yourself known.

If I Were Harriet the Spy

Wonderturtle got me thinking about favorite childhood novels the other day. I did more book reports than I should have on Harriet the Spy. I was always and advanced reader and was reading Ray Bradbury stories in the third grade, but I think I got away with doing book reports on this one until the sixth grade.

From the ages of seven to ten I got it into my head that I was Harriet. I carried a notebook in my pocket anywhere I went. I turned out my bedroom lights and peered through the next door neighbors' windows trying to observe their lives and record observations about them. I convinced Jenny from next door to wander the neighborhood with me looking for people to spy on. I hid in bushes under open windows.

But I lacked the nerve and daring of Harriet. I couldn't bring myself to go into people's homes. I wasn't even brave enough to go into their yards to get a closer look. My observations were pathetic.

It is my biggest failing in life.

I was never tough enough to be Harriet.

Maybe if I had found the courage to sneak onto private property and hide out in dumbwaiters, I would be something more exciting than a scientist today.

Gimme an...ew.

A small girl came to make a Shrinky Dink at the Science Center today. She had her hair in pigtails, tied with frilly red white and blue ribbons. She was wearing tiny blue bicycle shorts and a tight red tank top that only covered the top half of her body.

She was six.

She proceeded to tell me that she was a cheerleader and did a cheer for me.

This is not the first time I have encountered a highly inappropriately dressed small child who was dressed that way for a cheerleading practice/competition. For competitions, they are also wearing overly heavy makeup, usually.

I was a cheerleader for Pop Warner football as a nine year old. I am not sure if Pop Warner is just a particularly wholesome organization, but every team wore sweaters (polo shirt sif it was warm) and respectable length skirts. For competition, heavy make up was against the rules.

Why are we dressing our little girls up like hookers and sending them out to shake their barely-out-of-diapers booties? There's nothing alluring about a small child acting like an oversexed adult, so why do it? I, for one, am disgusted by it.

Childhood Trauma

The tagging of the previous post got me thinking about the biggest of all childhood traumas: gym class. There are very few people who thoroughly enjoyed gym class. I once heard someone on TV or in a book or something describe it as "45 minutes of Lord of the Flies in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day." And it was.

Let's throw a bunch of wild kids out on a field and give them an excuse to throw things at each other and exclude the weird kids and be more competitive than they already are.

There are so many ways to get into trouble: trying too hard; not trying hard enough; tripping; falling; dropping something; having the nerve to cry when something hard gets thrown at you; wearing the wrong gym clothes; getting picked last; picking the wrong kid last; liking the wrong game...

Even the moderately popular/athletic kids had their bad moments in gym. In sixth grade gym, one of the cool girls who made my life miserable got pantsed. In tenth grade gym one of the cool boys knocked an uncool kid's tooth out in a basketball game and was immediately deemed evil. In ninth gade gym a know-it-all smart kid walked right out of the locker room wearing nothing but his sky blue briefs.

The biggest torture of all was the annual volleyball tournament. From seventh grade through twelfth grade we were forced to partake in a class-wide volleyball tournament every winter. Do you know how lame it feels to be picked last out of the entire grade? Even after the weird semi-punk girl who won't take her jewelery off for gym? Or to be the kid who keeps getting shoved out of the way when the ball comes her way.

One year, I was on a team that decided we didn't care if we wanted to win. We were just going to enjoy ourselves. A four and a half foot tall freshman decided he didn't agree with the rest of the team and started pushing people out of the way and insulting them. I was a full head taller and a girl, so I was silently nominated to handle him. I threatened to inflict bodily harm if he didn't stop. The gym teacher overheard and, rather than yell at me, offered to put him on another team. See, the environment turned me into one of them.

Nerds can't resist a challenge

Wonderturtle tagged me and she knows I'm a total type A sort who can't resist a challenge. Here goes:

4 jobs I've had:
1. Research Scientist
2. Baby Bop at a small child's birthday party
3. Mad Scientist (okay, it was an after school science program, but this sounds better)
4. Newspaper Girl

4 movies I could watch over and over:
1. Center Stage
2. Dead Poets' Society
3. Annie
4. The Wizard of Oz

4 places I have lived:
1. Freehold, NJ
2. In a crazy house full of college kids in Trenton, NJ
3. Louisville, KY
4. Cincinnati, OH

4 TV shows I love to watch:
1. Gilmore Girls
2. The Office
3. My Name is Earl
4. The Simpsons

4 places I have been on vacation:
1. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales
2. New Mexico
3. Washington, DC
4. The Finger Lakes Region of New YOrk

4 websites I visit daily:
1. CNN.com
2. phdcomics.com
3. wonderturtle's blog
4. my google homepage where i long for interesting e-mail

4 favorite foods
1. sushi
2. peanut butter
3. cheese of all sorts
4. mushrooms

4 places I'd like to be right now:
1. asleep in bed
2. watching Gilmore Girls instead of cooking dinner
3. somewhere fabulous where it isn't so dang humid
4. at a masseuse

4 tags:
I am so lame that tonly two people read my blog and one of them tagged me and the other one would ignore this. I long for readers.

More advertising ideas that frighten me

Those weirdo Charmin bears. Who dances that much about toilet paper? Why are they so happy? Where does the toilet paper go since they can't flush a tree? Why aren't the other woodland creatures getting together to put a stop to this?

Sprite "Sub-lym-onal" ads. Um...what the hell?

The ad for the DVD of "Scary Movie 4". I can't handle 90 seconds of two morons spitting soda on each other.

The PSAs about HPV and cervical cancer. (a) I'm a scientist. Lots of types of cancer are caused by viruses. Stop being so shocked. (b) That girl is way to happy about her mom discussing her cervix with the doctor at her back to school check up.

Fruit Roll Ups Commercials. Those kids in the factory weird me out.

Trix. Just give the damn rabbit some cereal. Or, why not buy his own cereal? Same goes for the kids always trying to steal Lucky Charms. Just find a grocery store.

Cell phone commercials featuring whiny teenagers. Those of us of a certain generation distinctly recall that it was the biggest deal in the world to get an extension in your bedroom. Stop whining about not having enough minutes or text messages or the coolest phone. We should make them all go back to one rotary dial phone in the living room until you're old enough to pay your own bills.

Signs, people and things you will only find at the Kentucky State Fair

1. Grown men in overalls with no shirt underneath.
2. Pork butt on a stick.
3. T-shirts proudly declaring "Redneck" on a back drop of a Confederate Flag.
4. Purses designed to display photos of your dog.
5. A small girl curled up in the hay talking to her cow.
6. A man absent-mindedly dangling his fingers in a rabbit cage right next to a big sign (complete with cartoon) saying "Keep your fingers out, rabbits have teeth."
7. A four year old and a six year old riding in a double stroller.
8. Multiple dogs riding in those wheely wire carts my grandmother used to use to pick up her groceries from Grand Union.
9. People who think nothing of walking barefoot through the livestock pavilions.
10. "Fried Candy Bars: Snickers $3, Twinkies $3"

Why?

Why do slow people drive in the left lane?
Why would you get a job that doesn't pay a lot a requires a lot of work if you're inherently lazy?
Why is it illegal to rip the tag off of a mattress, but nothing else?
Why does the music the ice cream man plays have to be annoying?
Why do you think I want to hear you discussing child birth while I'm eating lunch?
Why has the sitcom theme song and the TV jingle died?
Why can't the recycling guy wait until after everyone leaves for work to come collect trash on our tiny little alley?
Why is pool a spectator sport?
Why is the self-scan at the grocery store so slow to respond after I put my item in the bag?
Why are you driving with your turn signal on?

Do scary costumes sell more food?

I have a dear friend who is totally creeped out by people in large costumes. As someone who earned extra money in high school by dressing up for children's birthday parties, I always found this amusing. Nowadays, I am starting to think she's right.

There seems to be a trend to use people dressed in uncomfortably blank looking costumes to sell things. Mostly food. The most famous, of course, is the one where our disturbing little friend at the left sits there staring at people and offering them life-threatening fast food meals. (Burger King commercials in general have become weird. That muscial one with dancing girls lying on each other? The one with the little people building a burger? Ick) But there are others.

Quaker has decided that it's formerly loveable pilgrim-looking mascot wasn't scary enough sitting on a box. Now he pops up in offices and elevators holding a bowl of cereal bars.

But the creepiest yet has to be the soy milk commercial with cows. Or, should I say, people dressed as cows. It bothered me enough when Chik-Fil-A decided to sell chicken by having cows beg you not to eat them. Now, we have to watch them expond on the virtues of milk? Ew.

Listen up advertisers of America: We do not like creepy people in costumes. They do not make us want to buy your prodcuts. They stick in our minds only in the form of nightmares. We do not eat things that keep us up at night.

Thank you.

Slow news day in the 'Ville (now, with photos)

At least, that's what I assume it was. The top news item all day was the fact that this man, one Mick Jagger, and his little group of musicians had added a concert at the famous Churchill Downs sometime this year. This was the biggest news anyone had to report all day. It was annoying.

I mean, the Rolling Stones are okay and all, don't get me wrong. I'm not sure I'd pay $300 to be in a large crowd watching them strut about the infield, though. Mick is older than my dad. I don't think I want to see someone older than my did in those pants, strutting around singing suggestive lyrics. It make me feel icky.

Why can't famous people grow old gracefully? The Boss and Mick are the same age, how come he's found a way to adapt with grace.

And with baggier pants.

The Oracle

Despite majoring in biology, when I was in college, I was the freak science major who hung around with all of the journalism and professional writing students. The logical conclusion of this hanging around was to embark upon a professional writing minor in my sophomore year. This put me in a position of having a whole new pool of English major friends. It also meant that I took most of my "electives" from Prof. P, the college's sole professional writing instructor. Prof. P was cool in so many ways, not the least of which was the conversion of circumstances that made her fit like 6 definitions of "minority" which had lead to a fascinating series of life experiences.

I took all of my writing classes with my partner in crime, ME, who was a year behind me. We worked together on annoying web projects, the painful uploads of the school's online magazine and one very bizarre desktop publishing/financial reporting project. Interspersed among our work were a number of poems, rude jokes and a lot of amusement (often at Prof. P's expense).

For her part, Prof. P would go around spouting these prophetic statements about our futures. She would tell us what she "knew" we would end up doing soon. We would argue that she was wrong and tell her our youthful view of what we "knew" we'd be doing. We were 19 and 20. Of course we knew better. At that age, everyone knows you know everything.

We've been out of college about seven years now. I recently reconnected with ME. We're both at kind of turning points in our careers. Turns out, we're both delving into exactly what Prof. P predicted we would do.

We're worried about what else she may have been right about.

We're terrified to let her know how right she was.

We think she needs to be immortalized as a character in a science fiction novel.

Cruel (yet hilarious) practical jokes I have played on coworkers

1. Setting up a plastic barnyard throughout a friend's lab. This was returned to me in the form of one hidden plastic animal at a time.

2. Letting the aforementioned friend return from a vacation to find every water-filled object in his lab filled with several of those plastic creatures that grow when they get wet.

3. Wrapping a coworker's desk in bubble wrap, complete with a crash pillow, following her 4,000th stupid accident.

4. In a lab full of left handed people, a not-too-bright young girl says "It's not my fault you're a left handed freak." She left the room and we took everything on her lab bench and reset it as the perfect mirror-image of itself.

5. Wrapping aforementioned not-too-bright young girl's bench in plastic wrap.

6. A $1 rubber rat named Taco has been hidden in more places than you can imagine.

7. Hiding plastic cowboys and indians throughout a co-workers' bench/belongings so that he was finding them for over a week. At least three went home with him.