If you like beet pulp you are in LUCK

Fun fact about me: Sometimes when I’m bored, I dink around on the internet and look for advice for recent college grads who have moved to a new city and don’t have any friends. In case in the future I move to a new city. And I don’t have any friends. And then I will be like, “Ah, I have read many articles about this!” and in my mind that is good? WHATEVER everyone has a weird thing and this is mine and I would just like to point out that I am not a serial killer.

Anyway, I tried to Google this yesterday, but my search term was too vague–it was “moving to a new place advice.” I could tell it was too vague because the first thing Google turned out was a thread called “Moving horse to a new place–advice please?”

From Horsetopia’s Horse Forum.

You can read it if you want–there’s a nice little anecdote about beet pulp. So if you were ever like, “I hate the modern era, everyone talks about Twitter and no one talks about good old-fashioned topics like beet pulp!!!” then you are in luck. You are also Dwight. From the Office. Hi Dwight, I always knew you were real!

General Life Status Update

Okay so I have barely been posting this summer because I was writing this nonfiction thing, and I got really anal about it and so I have spent the past like TWO MONTHS (you think I am exaggerating but no) editing it and the past like TWO WEEKS (still for real) just moving around all the commas in it. This is why I should not be allowed to budget my own time…

But I am finally done with it so now I am hopefully back and grooving on the blog!

Boring AND thrilling!

I have really boring dreams.  It’s just who I am.  I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do, they’re like, “I counted my fingers and there were five!” (made up) or “I walked down the stairs in my dorm and then, when I got to the bottom, I woke up!” (not made up).  If I were to follow my dreams, I would end up in Boring, Oregon (an actual place!).

But in India, I had my first boring dream that was ALSO THRILLING.  It sounds impossible but that’s why I am here: to educate you.  So:

I DREAMED

That I dreamed I cut my fingernails, but then I woke up and I actually didn’t.

THEN I WOKE UP AND

I actually had cut my fingernails.

I have never before had a dream that made me simultaneously think “WOAH NELLY!  Am I in the Matrix?  Is reality a social construct?  OH MY GOD I need some sort of snack” and “This is so effing boring.  Fingernails.  I am dreaming about my own fingernails.”

It was groundbreaking.

My Christmas Wish List (From Me To The Universe)

Dear Universe,

Please produce the following shows for me in 2010:

Desperate Housepets

Making The Emo Band 1

Making The Emo Band 2

Making The Emo Band 3

Making The Emo Band 4

I want Desperate Housepets the most.  Thanks!

Love,

Mae

PS – To the two people who actually read my blog, I swear I will write something soon that does not make the same exact joke four times in a row.  Today just wasn’t a day for writing.   It was a day for eating an entire container of guacamole, and trust me, I did.

Whips

My high school friends – Hepzibah and two previously umentioned ones, Rachel and Sarah – went to India the year after we graduated and lived there for a while, working at an orphanage and sending me hilarious e-mails.  One of my favorite e-mails I ever received was from Rachel, right after she got to India.  It said, basically, “People keep trying to sell me whips.  Why do they think I want whips?  That are seven feet long?  Do I look like that kind of girl?  The kind of girl who wants to do kinky things to people seven feet away from her?”

It was great.  (It was especially great because the next year, when she was in college, she one day walked into her dorm room and discovered a whip she had never seen before leaning against her wall.  BECAUSE IT WAS HER DESTINY.)

So I went to India thinking that people would also try to sell me whips.  Which didn’t happen.  (I apparently do not look like that kind of girl.)  Whips were, however, still a presence, because of the Whip Guys.  (Not to be confused with the Blanket Guys.)  The Whip Guys would wander the streets, carrying seven-foot-long whips that looked like they were made out of live snakes, and periodically whipping themselves.  Then, after they whipped themselves, they would ask for money.

I wouldn’t give them money – I very rarely pay to see people whip themselves (unless it’s a holiday) – but apparently, this was a bad call.  I heard later – although I can’t confirm; I’ve spent some sad, unsuccessful time on Wikipedia researching this phenomenon – that these dudes are eunuchs, and have huge religious significance.  If you don’t give them money, it makes you cursed to five years of celibacy.  So that… is hopefully not true.

Maybe this is all a misunderstanding and it curses THEM to five years of celibacy, which doesn’t even matter because being a eunuch curses you to forever of celibacy.  As they always says, “Severed junk, severed sex life.”

(They actually don’t say that that often.  Oops!  Lie.)

Welcome home, Mae!

MY DAD:  Oh, hey, I forgot – I got you some gloves.  It’s sort of a welcome home gift.

ME:  Wow, thanks!  Where did you get them?

MY DAD:  I got them for free in the mail.

Bathrooms

I just got home to the good old US of A, which means I have internet that actually works AND access to bathrooms that do not surprise or bewilder me.  While I was in India, I did not have this privilege.  I mean, I was able to successfully use the bathrooms (I should write a book called “Things About Yourself You Should Definitely Share On The Internet”), but there were a lot of curveballs.  

First of all, every bathroom I experienced in India had a butt hose.  This is a hose that you use to spray your butt.  It is ostensibly instead of toilet paper, but to use it as such takes skill and also, if you are a Western kind of person, a change in how much water you are willing to keep in your pants.  We were lucky because our program usually got us into situations with a butt hose AND toilet paper.  I was also lucky because, before I went to India, my friend Hepzibah took me behind a tree in a public park and gave me a very useful mime demonstration of proper butt hose use.  (Even though no one was naked or anything, I’m pretty sure that if a policeman had found us, we would still have gotten arrested.  For being strange.)  Still, the concept never really got normal to me.   I feel like hoses should be in gardens, not in… butts.

Another constant curveball was buckets.  Most of the bathrooms I went to had a bucket or two in them, and I never knew what they were for – handwashing clothes? Bucket showers? Holding… pudding? – but there was one bathroom in particular that really threw me for a loop.  It was in one of the more rural areas we stayed in, and it had no less than ten buckets.  They ranged from egg-size to person-sized.  The biggest one was metal, and was actually more of an industrial vat.  I was so stressed out staying there – I always felt like I should be undertaking exciting, ten-bucket projects and I just wasn’t and I’m SO SORRY.

Also, there were some really special showers every once in a while that were just not at all separated from the bathroom.   There was a showerhead on the wall and a drain in the floor, and that was it.  So when anyone showered, water got everywhere.  If you left the door open while you were showering, you could spray your bed.  You could shower ONTO YOUR BED.  And if your roommate was there, and you didn’t find that awkward, you could shower AT YOUR ROOMMATE.  I didn’t do that, because it would be kind of messy and psychotic, but I could have.

The wonky bathrooms were definitely fun while they lasted – and it is always nice to know that if you lose your bucket, you have nine spares, so no worries! – but it is also nice to think, on your way out of the bathroom,  ”That was exactly what I expected.”  Which I thought today.  It was downright pleasant.

Peace out

Hi!  I am leaving for various places in India that have archaelogy in them right now, and I’m not going to have internet for a long time.  I also have like fifteen minutes to write this.   So I will be concise:

The other day in Hindi class, one of the example sentences our teacher (very seriously) used was “Please touch the cat.”

HAHA you think there’s more to the story but there ISN’T!!!  Must go-a to GOA! Arrividerci!  This is what happens when I have no time to edit!  I’ll write something again starting probably in December.  Please touch many, many cats while I am away.

Blergh

I’m really sick right now. Like snot fountain, coughing up a lung sick. So I don’t really have anything interesting to say, except that if you need a way to very cheaply and efficiently produce phlegm, I can HELP YOU OUT and you should call me.

I feel like I should post something from my bed of pain, though. So here are a couple lists I have made over the past couple of months and then not used for anything, because what on earth do you use tiny lists like these for?

Okay. Let’s go.

WORDS THAT SHOULD NOT BE WRITTEN ACROSS THE BACK OF SWEATPANTS
1. Jury Duty
2. Analog
3. Damp

THINGS STRANGERS HAVE SAID TO ME AND MY FRIENDS ON THE STREET IN INDIA
1. “Which country is suffering without you ladies?”
2. “Oh! A sexy bitch!”
3. “It was very nice meeting you!” [Shouted from across the street, with no previous interaction]

HALLOWEEN PARTY-THEME IDEAS BRAINSTORMED BY EMPLOYEES AT THE STORE*
1. Rodents from Hell
2. Zombie game show hosts
3. Food

*not made up.  I wish I was that good at party themes, though – I would be famous!

That’s the best I can do for now but someday, when I am not feeling bad, I plan to write some groundbreaking things about toilet paper so HOLD ON TO YOUR HORSES.

DEATH!!!

Yesterday, I was at work, and I pulled the refrigerator out of the wall to clean behind it.  (That sounds really badass, but it actually isn’t because the fridge is on wheels.  I’m not King Kong.  It’s important to me that people know that.)   And in the fridgeless space, there was this big dustball.  Like, way bigger than usual.

I looked at it and I was like, “Amazing!  It’s so big!  And it has a nose!”

And then I realized that it was a dead mouse.

(Also OMG THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID kind of!)

Okay.  So mice exist, and they die in places, and I work in places.  This is not an unreasonable event, cosmically speaking.  However, I don’t happen to like dead things much,  especially when they smell dead, so I screamed REALLY LOUD.  And ran away.  And kept screaming.  (It was the most girlish behavior ever.  Gender stereotypes? All true, babies.)

The mouse wasn’t even the worst part, though. The worst part was that one of our unpleasant customers, Joseph, was sitting at one of the tables outside our kiosk, reading the newspaper.  I ran out screaming, and he ignored me.  But when I continued to scream, he said, “What’s wrong?”

“I found a dead mouse behind the fridge.”  (Probably not something you should tell a customer.)

And he was like, “Oh, yeah, I don’t like mice.”

But not in a sympathetic way.  In a judgmental way.  Like, “Only a mouse-liker would find a dead mouse under the fridge.  This peasant behavior is beneath me.”

I swear, I would rather hang out with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.