Whistle While We Twerk

This is how I spent my weekend:

I also went to a swim meet and learned that wrestlers and swimmers treat food in totally different ways.  At wrestling tournaments there is so much food.  SO. MUCH.  And it isn't healthy.  If someone had deep fried paper and poured soy sauce all over it, I am sure I would have eaten it after weigh-in.

Swimmers have fruits, vegetables and whole grain muffins.  And they're not scarfing it down like they haven't eaten all week.

What the fuck.  It felt disappointing.

Let Me Culturally Appropriate Your Penis

Lately, I've taken to thinking the treadmills are like a two/four player fighting game.  And the only way to win at it, is to run faster and longer than everyone else.

So, when someone hops onto the treadmill next to me, it's like, "A CHALLENGER HAS APPEARED!" cheesy music and all.

And it's not even that I can run particularly fast or particularly long.  It's just running on a treadmill is pretty boring and I feel like this wears some people out, so lots of them tend to hop off sooner than they wanted to.  I'm winning at the treadmill only because I have a high tolerance for monotony and am button-mashing in my brain.  

In other news, I wrote an email to the developers of an app, Hula, regarding their cultural appropriation and cultural insensitivity, and how they were only further marginalizing a group that they actually meant to help, and they wrote me back a non-apology and pat on the head, saying they didn't mean to be offensive and are talking to community leaders.  The app is supposed to help people find free/affordable STD/STI testing and also help them share their status to, I guess, viable bang buddies.  

Huh.  

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that while educating yourself is good and building understanding and compassion is better, but I wrote that letter so you would rename your fucking app.  Like, literally.

Not only is it offensive (hula being an art form and form of non-written history; also see the banning of hula by colonizing missionaries), but you could have SO MUCH FUN with the name of an app that is meant to help find people find free/affordable STD/STI and HIV/AIDS testing.  Just flipping through Urban Dictionary for five minutes will give you at least 25 viable names.  This is just uncreative laziness.  It's named Hula because it helps you get "lei-d."  Huh.  

And I could see someone arguing that for the sake of sexual health becoming a more acceptable topic, it'd be okay to just go with the flow, but no.  Continuing to marginalize and appropriate culture isn't going to help foster an environment that encourages open communication.  

Furthermore, this only underlines the tired trope of native people being uncivilized and lazy.  "Oh, hey. Instead of talking about our sexual status and discussing our sexuality, barriers to sexual expression and sexual health, let's just fiddle with our phones before we bump uglies." 

I'm conflicted because I deeply want sexuality and sexual health to be discussed, but I don't want it to be at the expense of an ethnic/cultural group.  It shouldn't be.  

Whoa.  I didn't mean to get serious.  

The Ghosts of Thousands of Plastic Army Men

The sun came out without anything having to die, which I think is a good deal, all around.

Today while driving back to work, I saw this gaunt man, smoking a cigarette at what might been a jaunty angle.  Except there were two of them, one at each side of his mouth.  So, instead of looking grizzled (think homeless Spike Spiegel), he resembled a sickly walrus.

I also saw a man wearing a shirt that said "Prison Jesus."  I don't know what that means.

I'm gonna water bend all the blood in your arm and make you punch yourself in the face.

There used to be mountain in the background, that all changed when the grey nation attacked.

It's been dark for three days.   I'm going to start crying and/or making soggy, soggy sacrifices to whatever god/hero/weather pattern can make the sun come out.

This is the end, Wiggin.

Wait, guys!  Noooo!

Doesn't this look like this guy is being chased by snakes?  Except one snake has already bit him, and he's falling and screaming out for his friends to help him, but his friends are jerkfaces and they're going to let him be devoured by snakes so they can save themselves.  

And if the floor is wet, it's wet from his tears of betrayal.

I've Seen All Kinds of Girls (And they were all therapists).

My co-worker likes to listen to 80's pop ballads.  I can hear them from my office.  I don't mind (I won an 80's Night quiz because of this), but the amount of cheese in these songs is kind of amazing.  So, today, I told her I would assign a dysfunction to each one I could hear (and if I had time to do it).  This is my list so far.  The analysis aren't as in-depth as I would like (I literally just jotted down whatever I could think of), but this is a pretty good sampling of the immense cheese I am exposed to on a daily basis.

Gloria - Laura Branigan
Paranoid Schizophrenic, delusions of grandeur, persecution complex

Eye in the Sky – Alan Parson
Stalking, delusional

Brass in Pocket – The Pretenders
This is definitely a stalking and torture fantasy.  I can’t think of it in any other way.

Sunglasses at Night – Corey Hart
Self-harm, delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, substance use and abuse
Authority complex?  Fear of authority?
Social anxiety?

Endless Summer Nights – Richard Marx
Unhealthy obsession with the past, early onset Alzheimer’s?
Perhaps a kidnapping?
Suppressed memories
Dyscalculia

California Girls – Beach Boys
Prosopagnosia, Megalomania, blatant objectification of women, lack of better judgment.  

Lazy, undead mushrooms

I hate writing cover letters. It's like the essays I used to write in college, where I couldn't get the first sentence down.  Or even the second, third or fourth.  Except in this case, I need to write it.  Not that I didn't need to write those papers, but getting a bad grade isn't as dire as being out on the street.

Man, that's depressing.

So instead of writing that, or in between writing that, let me tell you about my drive to Lahaina this morning.

The drive is beautiful.  That's one thing about Maui:  It's stupidly pretty.  I see multiple rainbows on a 5 minute drive, sort of pretty.  It is travel brochure pretty and just a 15 minute drive from Costco.  And when you're constantly bombarded with this overwhelming beauty it just becomes...commonplace.  Like when you've date a smoking hot girl for years.  This girl has farted in front of you, and you've held her head over the toilet as she's vomited, and you've gone digging through her purse to hand her a tampon.  She's still a smoking hot babe, but she's also the girl who steals all the blankets.  That's what Maui is to me.

But that's completely off topic.  Anyway, on my drive there, sandwiched between mountains and ocean, I noticed these mushroom things on the side of the road.  Maybe about 5-8 inches tall, their mushroom head long and conical, reaching out of the ground like the lazy undead, stretching in the morning sun.

They looked a little bit like the creepy kodama spirits from Mononoke-hime, actually.

Give us your delicious souuuul!

And then I noticed the side of the road was swarming with them.  Before this, I had never even seen mushrooms that tall on Maui, much less dozens of them.  I keep Googling "tall mushrooms Lahaina" without anything helpful showing up.

And while I imagined piles of creepy mushroom baby dolls crawling from their roadside perches, covering my car like maggots swarming rotting meat, I felt the road bumps thump-thumping, warning me that I was straying from my designated lane.

Thump-thump-thump.