Spending My Time Wisely

Where was I at 12:12:12 today?
Curled up in my wife’s arms.  Just the way we’d been on December 31st, 1999, 11:59:59, watching the numbers change. No cell phone, no Internet, just ensured that we were together for this transition, as we’ll be together for all transitions.
It’s a tiny, foolish thing.  But our lives are knitted together by tiny, foolish things.  We embrace them, just as we embrace each other when the last-of-a-lifetime event slips by so noisily.
Love you, sweetie.  More than meatballs.
 

In Other News, I Kind Of Adore This Breakup Song

I don’t know why I adore this as much as I do. The song is pretty simple, and the singing isn’t particularly great… but I think that’s part of what makes it for me. This painfully honest and simple breakup, as chronicled via harmonica, wind instrument, and a dance that I think we all should do from time to time.

How Borderlands 2 Lied To Me

So I’ve been playing a fair amount of Borderlands 2, and last night I finally thumped my head against the glass ceiling; level 50, babies.  As high as one can go.
It’s been fun, because Borderlands 2 is not, shall we say, a challenging game.  There’s some mild elements of dexterity involved, but basically it’s an auto-gunner; the game actually has an option to aim your gun for you, homing in on the closest enemy if you get within range.  (Which I use, because the X-Box controller sucks for fine reticule targeting.  I miss my mouse.)  There’s no penalty for dying except they scrape a bit of cash off your account.  It’s nothing like, say, the moderate complexity of Half-Life.
Mostly, Borderlands 2 is about optimizing your build.
It’s a spreadsheet game.  How good a gun can you get?  (As some wag noted, in Borderlands 2, you aren’t a character, you are your gun.)  What skill tree can you max out to support this fabulous gun?  Can you team up with a friend to get better weapon drops?  And from there, it’s all about maximizing damage per second and taking advantages of cooldown times. Occasionally you have to find cover, but if you feel like it you can just walk in guns a-blazing until someone drops you, then respawn and go back.
And that’s oddly relaxing, because I don’t have to work really hard to get ahead in this game, I just have to go here and shoot something and go there and fetch something, and it’s enough activity to keep the game-brain ticking without actually frustrating me.  I can just get into the groove for a few hours.
It wasn’t until the expansions came out, bringing with them special multiplayer-only “raid bosses,” that I realized what Borderlands 2 had done to me:
This was a MMORPG.
A single-player MMORPG.
Once I realized that, it all became clear: the obsession with equipment, the hunt for better drops, even the dudes hanging around with exclamation points over their head.  I’d never played a MMORPG because, well, a game with no end point is a one-way ticket to unemployment for addicted old me.  But here I was, several months of my life into this game, and they’d snuck a MMORPG in under the radar.
And just as predicted, it sucked out several months of my life.  These things are predicated on the Diablo model of advancement; I know Yahtzee hates the “drop and stop” method of playing, but it’s a way of constantly littering your path with just enough rewards to keep you hungry.  It may be another two hours until you level up, but is that gun better?  What about that shield?  Hey, it’s orange, it must be great!  And so you keep yanking that slot machine trigger, firing at things in the hopes of getting the massively great gun.
As it is, I’ll probably quit until they raise the level cap.  The Pirate expansion was quite good, but the Torgue expansion is drier, and as it is the Siren build I have stops dead one level before I get Blight Phoenix, the one skill I was working towards.  So unless they make it level 60, and let me have my gouts of acid, flame, and slag, then I’m not interested.
But I find it fascinating, the way that they basically ripped off much of what made World of Warcraft work and just quietly turned it into a first-person shooter.  Well done, Borderlands.  Well done.

Why I'm Eating Terrible Fruit

The box of blackberries I just ate?  Was terrible.  A sour, seedy box of tartness that even Gini acknowledged was pretty foul.
Yet I ate them anyway.  To the cries of the Internet, who asked, “Ferrett, why don’t you eat good fruit in your quest to acclimate yourself to eating healthy?”
And the answer is simple: it’s another excuse.
The central problem with my snacking is that I don’t want to eat fruit, so I find excuses.  I was doing smoothies for a while, but the smoothies took ten minutes to make, and chocolate milk was thirty seconds tops, so if Gini was running late or I was lazy that morning or hey, Erin’s here, I gotta make three smoothies… I didn’t make the smoothies.  Because they were tolerable, but I didn’t want them in any sense except that I wanted to have had them.  Which is, in much the same way that I often want to have exercised, not nearly the same thing as actually desiring a smoothie.
I wanted the health that came with them.  Not the actual taste.
So as it turns out, fruit is often pretty nasty.  Which I honestly did not know.  I knew there was “rotten fruit,” but I ate so little fruit in the course of my life that I assumed that all strawberries were pretty decent – sure, there were some excellent strawberries that people would drool over, but in my mind there was a certain minimum standard of strawberriness that vendors held to.  Strawberries were like Hershey bars in that they all tasted pretty much the same.
As it turns out, there’s tart berries and sucky berries and out-of-season berries, and you can’t tell the fucking difference.  The blackberries Gini and Erin ate last night were great.  The blackberries I had this morning, which looked identical, were icky.
Yet I chowed them down.  Because “eating only good fruit’ would be another excuse.  I’m trying to enter a new world, one where I can eat fruit everywhere, and part of that bargain is that some fruit isn’t that great.
If I only eat good fruit, then my fruit-not-liking mind will go, “Well, I don’t have to eat those bananas.  They’re not good!  So I’ll just eat this Pop Tart instead.”  And lo, strangely enough, I’ll start finding all of these fruity weaknesses, and I’ll be back to escaping the Land of Icky Fruits.  (And remember, in the World of Ferrett, all fruits are icky, even those delicious ones you love.)
No, my friends; I must treat this fruit like Gini treats her marriage with me.  Is Ferrett always sweet and wonderful and good-tasting?  No.  Sometimes he’s foul and wrinkled.  Yet Gini bravely consumes her daily dosage of me, for this is not a one-time occurrence, but an averaged value.  Some days, Ferretts will be meanish, other days Ferretts will be delightful.  She sticks with me regardless, because I have some awesome benefits.
So, too, shall I struggle through the bad fruit. Because otherwise, it’d be all too easy for my very devious Gollum-mind to create another reason not to have them.  Fruits are good and bad, and sometimes I’ll have bad ones, and I’d better learn to tolerate those tart little fuckers, too.

How To Turn Your Dry, Papery Fucking Into Moist, Steaming Erotica

I wrote an essay that’s just a smidge too sexy for what I now perceive as this blog, but I’m happy to share it over at FetLife (the Facebook for kinksters!).  If you want to read it, it’s over there.
A sample:

“We went to a movie. Then we had two beers. Then he put his penis inside of my vagina.” – bad description of a good date
I have friends who chronicle their sexiest of sexitudinest times, those nights so hot that it looks like a fire hydrant has exploded in the bed… and then, after they’re done jotting down their descriptions of non-Euclidean sexual positions and out-of-body experiences, they wonder why nobody comments.
Well, it’s because you’re listing instead of writing.
Now, keep in mind that written erotica is like porn or pizza in that no matter how bad it is, someone is whacking off to it. (Rule #34, people.) Human beings are basically a big ol’ fuck-making machine wrapped inside a thin layer of justification, so if you told people that this refrigerator was totally hot for their bodies, some significant subset of people would go, “Oh, God, the fridge wants me. Look at the way the cubes in her icemaker are jiggling.”
That said, the #1 sin of written erotica is the list. It goes something like this….

My Nails Are Getting More Ridiculous

Seriously.  This shit is getting out of hand.  Holiday-themed nails?  That’s huts.

I Always Take Advice From Kiki Dee, or: The Coronary Crossroads

I set a record at the doctor’s office yesterday.
“In twenty years of studying blood results as a certified lipidologist,” he said, “I have never seen cholesterol results as high as this!” At which point he started to recite numbers that sounded like the Dow on some record-breaking day.
“Uh, I knew my cholesterol was high,” I demurred.  “…But I was hoping to reduce it through diet and exercise?”
“We could send you to Auschwitz and these numbers wouldn’t drop enough for my comfort,” he said.  No, really, he said that.  The doctors at Premiere Physicians are nothing if not characters. “There’s something about your body chemistry that’s off.  No, no, you need statins.  Now.”
So here we are at a crossroads in my life.  On the one hand, I’m not overly worried.  My stress test and ECG look, and I quote my Auschwitzian doctor, “Great.”  I’ve always had high cholesterol, as does my family, and we’re pretty long-lived.  If my body produces such vast amounts of cholesterol, I’m reasonably confident that it’s probably designed to absorb amounts of it, since my body and my family have proven remarkably resistant to various things that are about to kill you.
That said, I remember my teeth.
The galling thing about my five years spent without front teeth is that I had warning.  I’d been to a dentist before who’d said that I had gum disease and should have my teeth cleaned periodically.  And I said, “Sure, yeah, I absolutely should do that,” and then forgot to hit the dentist for years at a time.  What I should have been doing was flossing like hell, using Listerine, getting a Sonicare toothbrush to ensure that my teeth were as healthy as possible…
…but that seemed like a lot of work at the time.  Flossing was clumsy, hard to do.  I hated the taste of Listerine.  So I went on, and then one day I spent $10,000 on surgery to have my wobbling teeth taken out. And spent several years, embarrassed and mortified and in pain, getting false ones back.
I could shrug and move on, but these days I take an extra five minutes every morning to floss and swish and brush, and it seems like such an obvious habit I’m aghast that I didn’t condition myself to do it before.  But I remember how awkward and clumsy and stupid I felt flossing, since I wasn’t much good at it, and I realize there was a hurdle I should have crossed.
The problem with me now is that I hate fruit.  I mean, fucking hate it.  I like fruit-flavored things, I like juice, but the pulpy nasty skin-shredded texture of fruit grosses me out.  And the taste of fish is like ocean shore rot in my mouth.
…but I also used to hate the taste of salad, and broccoli, and snap peas, all of which are now staples of my diet.  I just ate them.  And learned to like them.
What I need to do is just bear down for a month and eat a box of fucking berries every morning, and have fish three times a week.  I need to learn to condition my body to crave healthier stuff.  Which is why, the other day, I went out and got a box of blueberries and ate half of them.
I despised every bite.  Tried not to gag.  I know many of y’all like fruit, but imagine eating ants.  Imagine sitting there at a big ol’ anthill, scooping out a handful of wriggling insects and choking them down.  Then imagine not only eating ants until you were full, but eating ants daily for the rest of your life.
I mean, you could do it.  If you had to.  Which is what I’m doing now.  I’ve eaten fruit every morning now, and had fish twice, and both times afterwards I was ravenous for real food.  But I’m at a crossroads now, where I can learn to love a leaner lifestyle, and maybe be okay… Or go the route of my friend Steve, who had a huge heart attack and now has to approach food like it’s some traitor at the gate, checking every bit of content, for a bowl of ice cream could literally kill him.
I can ignore shit until my teeth fall out, or I can make a concerted effort to change shit, so… I’m gonna change shit.  These high levels might just be a quirk of my body chemistry, or they might be like my Uncle Billy, who’s had to have heart surgery before the age of 65.  I could hit the snooze button and wait until everything hits crisis levels, or, you know, I could try to be a rational human being.
So I’m gonna wince and cram down some berries.  And some fish.  And maybe, if I’m lucky, in a year that’ll be something I’ve come to enjoy.
Today, though, I’m nose-first in the anthill.