Bring Me My Sugar Sack

I don't have to eat flour today! I have thought of another brilliant invention: a refrigerator with a Dutch- (or "stable-" [if you are British] or "double-hung" [if you are early New England-ish]) door. It's a regular refrigerator with a separate stacked (not side-by-side) freezer compartment, but the door to the refrigerator compartment is, to quote Wikipedia (as of right now), "divided horizontally in such a fashion that the bottom half may remain shut while the top half opens." (The reverse is not true: opening the bottom half also opens the top half.) That way only some of the cold air in the fridge compartment will drain away when you get out the cream for your coffee, which you keep on the top shelf.

You know what? Make that my brown sugar sack: the lower part of the door should be fitted with a hinged panel that opens outward and down so that you can remove the ginger ale or tonic (or milk, if that's your thing) from the lower door shelf without having to open the entire door.

My Own Diet Secret

Only going to eat on days that friends or family call (on) me, and only during the part of the day after they do.

Celebrity Diet Secrets

Probably not what's in the Yahoo! article, but accurate nonetheless (and true to boot!):

• To lose weight: burn more calories than you eat.
• To maintain weight: burn as many calories as you eat.
• To gain weight: burn fewer calories than you eat.

You're welcome.

Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart? I Dooooo . . .

I need to engage with others as much as I need to spend time alone.
My enthusiasm is fragile and my disappointment robust.
I trust very few people and am apprehensive of most.
I worry more about doing the wrong thing than missing a chance at the right thing.
I fear disappointment and rejection, even by those I trust.
I reduce the potential for disappointment and rejection by closing myself off to people, including those I trust.
Sometimes I have spurts of inviting people to do things with me, but the answer is too often 'no'—a kind 'no,' but 'no' nonetheless—for me to sustain them.

Good Riddance, 2012

Once again I am feeling oppressively sad and lonely. My crazy-meds don't seem to be working so well as before: or, I suppose, it's rather that they can only do so much and lately my psyche has been too shrunken for them to have much effect. I imagine I'd feel even worse without them. I'm not sure why I have shrunk. I suppose it's mostly the combination of the holidays, and having only six local friends who are all busy with their families, and the shortness of daylight. I've also been feeling the weight of my (admittedly limited) obligations to others, and feeling as though I have little to lighten them. I have been waking at 7:30 but unable to haul myself out of bed until 9:30. There are several things I would, in the abstract, like to do but cannot muster the energy for so I waste time on the computer until aroune 12:30 when the sense of wasted time finally guilts me into dressing. Then I waste more time on the computer until the last possible moment before I must leave for an obligation. Upon returning home I waste still more time on the computer until it is time for bed.

Repeat. 

There are movies I would, in the abstract, like to see, and books I would like to read, and projects I would like to undertake, and even chores I would like to complete; but just thinking about them seems to sap whatever energy and interest I have for and in them. Since at least my middle-school years I have been able to undermine myself by thinking immediately past whatever I feel any enthusiasm about, to the moments when whatever-it-is is over and my responsibilities remain; and my enthusiasm seems pointless and transient, and wanes quickly. There are always more responsibilities and they always outweigh my enthusiasm. I seem to see enthusiasm as a distraction from responsibility rather than an easing or lightening of them, so that I feel too guilty about deferring my responsibilities to indulge an enthusiasm (but never too guilty to indulge procrastination on the computer); or I so convince myself of the pointlessness of an enthusiasm that I cannot enjoy it even if I do indulge it.

My Neighbors Suck, and They're Probably Terrorists

Kept track over about a 10-hour period the other day:

• Next-door neighbors stomping on floor & banging on walls (supra-ambient; acute instance or chronic episode): 12
• Using car horns for doorbells (unique cars): 4
• Doing nothing while watching infant or toddler scream (episodes): 2
• Slamming apt door (instances): 3

Other crimes that they commit, just not on that day:

• Kids hollering in hallways for fun
• Inflicting lack of musical taste on all residents

Things I Don't Hate

This year's Ig Nobels are out!

This is an astute move. I cannot tell how pleased I was by the Supreme Court's decision earlier this year to invalidate patents on isolated human genes or alleles. I don't know how extensive patent trolling really is, but many of the high-profile patent-infringement lawsuits seem to involve it, to the public detriment (e.g., NTP's threat to interrupt BlackBerry service). To me it is a symptom of what seems a legalistic (rather than just) economic and political climate, leading to public injury. Anyway, the first link of this bullet won't be a panacea and it isn't reform, but it's a start. If only there were a way to do something similar with copyright.

What I think of movies of within 3 months of now:

• There are too damn many 3D movies. A movie that is unappealing in 2D is sure as hell not going to be appealing with a price premimum of 25–50%. And here I'm only referring to new releases: 3D re-releases are even less appealing.
• Limited-release flicks that interested me enough to see: The Intouchables, To Rome With Love, Chicken With Plums, Farewell My Queen, Moonrise Kingdom
• Flicks to the opening of which I am looking forward: Anna Karenina, Frankenweenie
• Flicks the to the opening of which I am indifferent: Beasts of the Southern Wild (despite the fact that the little girl reminds me very much of my niece), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Life of Pi, Hotel Transylvania (I'm not actually indifferent to this: I'm hostile), ParaNorman, End of Watch

Krabappel's Klassroom

I have been reading, off and on, Yeats' [Irish] Fairy and Folk Tales [of the Irish Peasantry].* Here are some (curious, interesting, or surprising) things that I learned, directly or indirectly, as a result:

• Tir na nOg is analogous to Tolkien's Undying Lands. I wonder whether it was inspirational.
• gumption seems to be of Celtic origin. The free online dictionaries I use attribute it originally to, if anything, Scottish; but it came to my notice as an apparently Irish word in a book of Irish folklore compiled by an Irishman.
• I wonder whether the same might be true of knickknack. The free dictionaries don't mention a source language. The use of nic-nackenes in the book might be a borrowing from English by Irish, or vice versa.
• It was in urban fantasy novels that I first encountered references to the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of fairies. Yeats does not discuss them, and the terms themselves appear to be of Scottish origin: so, although I have encountered modern fantasy that affiliates Irish fairies with one Court or the other, I wonder if that might be a conflation.
• Fairies and elves are not the same thing. Fairies are Celtic and elves are Germanic. One school of Irish folklore holds that the (early-)modern fairy is the diminished descendant of the Tuatha de Danann, the residents of Ireland immediately preceding humans. Like Tolkien's elves, the Tuatha were, or could be, stately and regal. While many of the gentry in Irish folklore appear smallish and rude, there are others (apparently largely of Yeats' "trooping," i.e., non-solitary category) who can appear as both churl and aristocrat (it is unclear to me which form is thought to be real and which illusory, or glamourous). It has been some time since I read any Norse folklore, but I do not recall that the elves (or, indeed, the gods) were particularly stately or regal. It rather seems as though Tolkien appropriated fairies of the character of the Tuatha and renamed them "elves." Given the popular fairy-image testified by positive responses to the Cottingley fairies—an image that Disney used to complete the ruination of the Celtic fairy—I can comprehend a desire to distinguish the Middle-Earthly ones.
• I suppose fairies, elves, gnomes, sprites, and all were smooshed together into an undistinguished menagerie by the American melting-pot of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

___________
*I own it with the title Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. The other seems to be its original 1888 title.

Some Blind Tiger Jerking Suds on the Side

I took Tabby the Cat in for her semi-annual physical last week. For a 20 y ± 3 mo with incipient renal failure, she's doing quite well, apparently...aside from the blindness.

I've suspected for a few weeks that her vision might be impaired. She'd been hesitant about leaping gaps between furniture, and it'd been some time since she's gone on one of her mad tears around the place. She'd seemed to ignore moving string, but since there was always an initial look at it I figured she's just over string, which at her age didn't surprise me. Same with the glitter-poms. Her eyes, while not cloudy, still didn't seem quite as clear as they'd always been. So I thought maybe she had cataracts or something.

But the first thing the vet did upon entering the exam room was check her eyes. I don't know if I just never remembered that from before, or she noticed something about Tabby's behavior (certainly possible; Tabby was much more subdued on this trip than she has ever been). Anyway, apparently her retinas have detached, which the vet seemed to attribute to undiagnosed hypertension.

I felt mildly guilty, but after asking about it there didn't seem to be anything I should have done but didn't. Mostly I feel bad for Tabby. It sounds like it would have happened suddenly, and if so she must have been scared; but she can't talk about it, and I can't console her.

What's remarkable, though, is how little difference it seems to have made to her routine. As I say, I thought she might have somewhat impaired vision, but blindness never occurred to me. She doesn't bump into things (except for earlier this week when I left a box in the middle of the floor), and although she's hesitant about leaping gaps, she still leaps them. But I do notice things. She's more careful about climbing into my lap, testing before she transfers weight to that next step to make sure she has a solid footing.

Still, I suspect she isn't entirely blind. I suspect, from some uncontrolled ad hoc experiments, that she has some middle-distance vision remaining in her right eye. The idea makes it easier for me to bear, and if it's real, it probably makes her condition easier for her to bear.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Fashionese for "I got nuthin'."