the sloppy copy

A Reflexology/ Massage/ Income Taxes/ Ear Candling/ Pet Grooming/ Mani-Pedi parlor opened up in a 100+ year old building on the Historic Main Street of my parents’ town recently. This is nice, and probably appropriate, because I’m sure the folks who settled here back in the day would not have been freaked out at all by a bunch of tiny Asian women descending on their settlement to shove candles in their ears and poke at their feet to cleanse their auras.*

If you’re like me, you are a) apparently racist and b) asking yourself just what the eff is Reflexology and Ear Candling? I took the liberty of conducting some superficial intense Internet research in order to introduce these concepts to you, Gentle Reader(s). Because I’d like to think I ain’t nothin’ if not informative.

Reflexology
Our feet are important.** Aside from, you know, taking us every-damn-where, seriously could you just spring for a fucking pedicure ONCE before you die, you cheap asshole?, they have a lot of say in a lot of bodily…things. If you take a look at the bottom of your foots, you’ll notice – well, hopefully nothing, unless you’ve been spending a lot of time barefoot in public restrooms – er, you can imagine the sole of your foots separated into sections. Each section represents a different bodily…thing. And manipulating each of these areas will affect each bodily…thing. Need to kickstart your pancreas? Just give the upper-mid-right-pinkie-toe area a good pokin’. How about that sciatic nerve? Just work the lower-left-heel. Or something.

This is all fascinating to me, and without passing too much judgment, I will say this: the whole damn thing freaks me the eff out. Blaaaaaarfffffuugggghhhhmmmmllleh! is the sound I make when I think about it. I am super-dupes sensitive about the bottoms of my feet. I have a hard time touching them, much less anyone else. They’re ticklish as hell, yes, but it’s more than that. Something about having someone rubbing or poking at them just gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I’ve always been that way. Who knows? Maybe my gall bladder is misaligned.

Ear Candling
Oh, girl, this is a good one.
Do you like pursuing semi-dangerous alternative medicinal practices for the sake of a more-cleansed bodily…thing? Then is this the thing for you! Ear Candling involves you, um, laying down I think, and someone taking a lit-fucking-candle and, uh…. No, seriously. I don’t know what this is, only that every other site I saw about it talked about how dangerous it could be. To this I say: no shit. The thought of hot wax dripping into my brain canal gives me EXTRA-super-duper heebie-jeebies, and I don’t care if that’s not really how it’s supposed to work – the potential is there.  I’d rather have a stranger poke at the center of the sole of my foot with his index finger.

Maybe.

So, there you have it! The next time you find your duodenum in a tizzy, just check out your local Yellow Pages to see if your town’s Historic Main Street offers these amenities!

*Or… whatever.
**Unless you’ve lost one or more to disease or shark attack. In that case, feet are overrated, whatever, you’re going to be fine, sorry about your loss, hang in there slugger, Oscar Pistorius, et cetera, et cetera.

I recently found a bunch of old flash cards – some dating back to eighth grade! – and realized something truly amazing:

At one point in my lifetime, I knew all this shit!

So where did it go?

If I think hard enough, will I be able to come up with TESTS THAT MUST BE MET TO PROVE LIBEL or how to find the cosine of x?

Part of me says sure, of course, it’s in there somewhere!
The rest of me – most of me – says no fucking way, Einstein.

I realize that this is a matter of repetition and use; while I am by no means fluent in any language other than gibberenglish, I think about Spanish enough that I’m fairly confident I could score at least a 50% if I went through those particular cards. But as I’m not the journalist or newspaper editor I once thought I might be, I could give two fucks about proving libelousness now.* And don’t get me started on this sine-cosine-tangent shit. I’m not 100% sure I even understood that stuff in the first place.

But is this knowledge really erased from my brain? Have those neural pathways atrophied and died? This thought truly frightens the piss out of me. Being (sometimes) smart and knowing (some) shit has been part of my identity for so long that if, God forbid, I sustained some sort of traumatic brain injury… Well, I’d rather not think about it.

As I age and become further and further separated from formal education, I become less and less sure of what I actually know. Is it because my world is continually expanding around me?

Probably.

And is this actually a good thing?

Yes, though it doesn’t always feel that way.

*See also: using actual words

When called for, I can be extremely, painstakingly, patient. But the one thing that gets me every time – that final straw that shatters my titanium-alloyed even-temperedness into an exasperated, slushy mess?

When no one around me is able to be patient with me.

No seriously, during [sometimes-long] moments of work down-time, nothing irritates me more (think: to the point of physical violence) than hearing someone complain they are bored, or that there is nothing to do. Reminding them, hey, in approximately twenty minutes it will become so busy you won’t be able to think in a straight line so relish the quiet now? It never works, even when repeated a dozen times.

Maybe I will try a blow to the head next time.

More cases in points:
The majority of items in my Netflix queue are television shows, because, as I like to say: “movies can rarely hold my attention that long.”

Which is funny, because I will think nothing of watching several 45-minute episodes of a show in one sitting. “Play next episode? Oh, okay. But just one more…”

Fast forward to three hours later…

I also say, with little irony, that I’m not really a fan of football because it moves too slowly. The final minutes of a game seem to drag on for hours. Ugh. Who has time for that nonsense?

In other news, my beloved Cardinals played a six-hour, fifteen inning game a few months ago. Had I not been working, I had tickets. And would have stayed for the whole thing.

Unless Juanita started bitching about how long it was taking. Then I would have had to have been escorted out of the park. Something about assaulting my mother.