Hello bloody piece of gum

Yesterday I finally dealt with something that had been bothering and frightening me for months. See, I had a little lump on the ventral side of my right fore-arm. I figured it was nothing, but over the past few months it's steadily grown. It grew large enough to occasionally see rather than just feel, and had an almost chewy, gumlike (but not hard) consistency. It was annoying, tender to the touch, and worrisome.

I didn't think it felt like cancer should, but nonetheless, the growing worried me. Odd lumps in your arm shouldn't exist in the first place, and having them grow is an even worse sign. So, last week I played Racquetball with one of my coworkers. I've never played before, and I tended to use my right hand. Needless to say, afterward the arm was sore. The rest of my fatigued muscles returned to normal within a day, but the soreness and weakness in that arm remained til Sunday.

My father, a nurse at St. Mary's Duluth Clinic, told me that I should go to the doctor after he felt it. So, on Monday, upon my return to Minneapolis I called and made an appointment. I saw a doctor at about 4:30 on Monday, and she felt the lump. She told me not to worry, but to make another appointment for a couple days later (Wednesday). I left after this 20 minute check up, made an appointment and worried slightly til Wednesday.

I had to fast, then go in to the doctor at 4:30. Dr. Kim came into the room after my basic check with a nurse. He was maybe 34 or 36, acne pitted, pleasant to be around and bespectacled. He made a few jokes before grabbing my arm, feeling the lump and reassuring me that it wasn't cancer. After that he gave me two options, leave it alone, or take it out.

I opted to take it out, so he led me to a greenish room with an operating table. There was no armrest on the table, so I simply held my arm in place. He then had a nurse grab several tools, injected my arm with lidocaine, and began to work. He made deeper and deeper cuts into my arm, trying to squeeze the thing out. At one point he cut something more important, caused a fair bit of bleeding and cauterized the wound with something I would have mistaken for an electric fountain pen.

The smell of my burning flesh, coupled with me lacking any ability to feel the burn was strange. It prefaced the stranger experience of watching Dr. Kim pull out what looked to be a bloodied wad of chewing gum out of my arm with some sort of fancy tweezer, perhaps forceps.
He then cut whatever was holding with with surgical scissors and closed me up.

The wad of gum was apparently fatty tissue.

I lost enough blood to find "Horton hears a Who" to be touching.

MeloDrama: Cheeseburgers in Hades

I'm fasting until my doctors appointment today. Just water, no coffee, juice, food etc. I also have an exam today. The exam is before the appointment. I will be answering a bunch of questions about historical linguistics, methods of language change, etc. I generally eat breakfast and lunch by this time in the day. Every food smell is a temptation. Also, I recently heard Jimmy Buffet's "Cheeseburgers in Paradise," and somehow managed to get it stuck in my head.

My big hope is that on my test I don't end up writing about wanting mine with lettuce and tomatoes, heinz 57 and french fried potatoes, big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer...

I don't care for Jimmy Buffet's music, so this is all the more foul.

Hussy!!!

Remember Goody Proctor from The Crucible ? I didn't know where it came from. And I imagine most people don't. Goody comes from a contracted form of the old term "Good-Wife,"
a term totally archaic by our standards, but just kind of archaic in the 17th century.

I imagine you can guess what this is leading to.

Think, Good-wife, subtract wife, add "y" ending, what do you get?


Goody.

Think House-Wife, once a term of venerated respect (as it meant someone was the wife of a free landowner in a feudal society), eventually being familiarized in the same manner.

So,

House-Wife.

-Wife

House

+Y

Housey

, Then, accounting for how people said house back in the 17th, 18th centuries, you need to mess up the vowel slightly.

Housey

ou --> U / C_C

Husy

Then, for the sake of spelling conventions,
+s

Hussy!!!

This used to be a neutral or pleasant word for a wife. Many words for women in power or respect suffer a similar phenomenon of pejoration, becoming negative.

Thus, today Hussy means some kind of sexually loose woman, in a bad way maybe.

Thus, in order to avoid this negative connotation, the term "House-wife" is restored to it's former use! Only, it's less prestigious.

Cat's away!

My boss is gone on vacation today, Easter monday I think. This means that laziness, love, good feelings and happiness generally permeate the Dental Engineering Shop today. This has little to do with her actions, with her personality or skill as a boss. It's more justa celebration of perceived freedom from her eye. Without her, there is no fear of anyone with authority telling me things to do, and the same goes for the real technicians as well. This allows us to set our own priorities moreso than before, and generally live as we choose to, not as is chosen for us.

What this translates to is that people are a bit more relaxed and chatty than normal. I was manifesting hazrdous waste in the shop when I listened to Rex and Dennis, two of my co-workers (one of whom I just played Racquetball with) talking about various things. They somehow traveled from talking about an actress they thought was in "Goodfellows," to talk of plot points from the third season of the Sopranos, and unsurprisingly ended up on Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the young woman who slept with Eliot Spitzer for copious sums of money.

They strayed into how she was a good looking girl, or at least "good-looking enough," and how she could continue to "make the big bucks." This led to a brief friendly tiff regarding her tenure as a "hooker, " with the eventual suggestion that in fact, her days of hookering are over. That means of course that she will be approached by Hustler. I don't know why Hustler came up, as there are many other magazines that would potentially pay better and be less sleazy, but Hustler came up nonetheless.

As to what I will do, I'm unsure, but it would appear that there must be a filter in need of me somewhere!

Forgot to mention Gygax

Gary Gygax died sometime last week. I meant to write about him, then forgot, but this cat says it all.

I learned quite a bit as a result of his work, so I guess it's fitting to mention him.

It's a beautiful day

Really it is. The sky is like some kind of blue crystal, maybe a sapphire or blue diamond. The only cloud I've seen is the long trail of exhaust from a jet. It's warm too. I brought a hat and a jacket to school today, and have barely used either of them. It smells good out there, and snow is melting. It brings joy to my heart to see it like this.

I am starting to lose my Minnesota-born hardiness for winter. I just don't care for it. I find it to be pretty, definitely, sometimes exhilarating, but it lasts longer than I care to deal with. If this makes me a baby, I don't really care. Whatever label people choose to affix to me is fine.

So far I've gone to Syntax, which was pretty easy, just a review for a test I feel fairly prepared for. After Syntax I ran into a largish man who used to work in the dental school. He and I would talk occasionally, so we caught up. All the while, my former French teacher kept looking at me, and started to approach, but stopped half-stock. It was awkward. I should have gone and said hi, but I needed to get to the gym.

Then I worked out for about an hour, trying to work through a problem of reconstructing the proto-form of a number of words in some Basque dialects. It comes down to looking at the dialects, seeing what sounds are different, and trying to use what I know about naturalness and sound change to make a decent hypothesis as to the proto-languages inventory of sounds, as well as what the words were in their old form.

I then ate lunch, chicken cellophane soup, while continuing to work on the problem. I followed up lunch with Bubble tea, and here I am.

song of the day: Beautiful Day-U2

Cleaning Duties of Strangers

This document was saved on the desktop of the computer I'm posting from. It appears to be a roster of house-cleaning duties for a Sorority or other gigantic house filled with women.


Yay!



House Cleaning Duties Spring 2008


Attic – Sheila, Marie
• Sweep the floors
• Throw away old stuff
• Organize boxes and skit clothes
• Take down cobwebs

Hallways/Walls – Missy, Ellie
• Wash the walls (Don’t Use Pine-sol)
• Sweep/vacuum stairs & entryway carpets
• Clean/organize the front closet
• Organize/Clean the mailboxes
• Wash the rugs
• Mop the floors
• Clean the bulletin boards

Upstairs Bathroom/Kitchen Bathroom – Niqi, Kristine
• Mop the floors
• Clean the toilet
• Wash the showers
• Wash mirrors/sink
• Dust
• Organize the cupboards in upstairs bathroom
• Fill the soap dispenser/toilet paper/paper towels
• Wash the windows

Kitchen – Vanessa, Kelsey, Janelle
• Clean the oven
• Organize/clean cupboards
• Clean and wash out the fridge
• Clean behind the fridge
• Clean the stove/microwave
• Throw out old food
• Mop the floor
• Wash rugs and towels
• Throw away recycling and garbage
• Wash the garbage and recycling bins
• Clean the breakfast nook
• Wash the windows
• Clean/wipe/organize the pantry

Windows – Laura, Brianna
• Wash all the common/personal windows
• If they pull down, then wash the outside also.

T.V. Room – Jess A, Jill D, Theresa
• Wash all the windows
• Vacuum the floor and the couches
• Dust everything
• Wash the blankets
• Organize the T.V. stand/phone stand
• Empty the garbage
• Wash the linoleum floor
• Wash and polish the walls

Dining Room – Karin, Emily, Katie J
• Clean out/organize the buffet
• Clean/organize dish shelves and cupboards
• Wash windows
• Vacuum curtains
• Clean the radiator
• Dust the lights/dining table/benches

Chapter Room – A-Tab, Cassie, Ashley L.
• Dust everything (pictures, plaques, shelves, awards, mantle, piano)
• Vacuum the curtains
• Clean the mirror
• Clean/organize the President’s closet
• Wash the walls/windows
• Clean the fireplace
• Vacuum the floor
• Clean the piano/side tables/little and big lamps
• Vacuum the window seats


Laundry Room – Brittany, Steiny
• Wash the floors
• Clean the fridges/throw away old food
• Get rid of cobwebs
• Clean the washer/dryer
• Clean/organize the detergent shelf
• Wash the rugs
• Combine items, if possible
• Throw away the garbage


Study Room/Storage Room – Megan, Mal
• Throw away the garbage
• Recycle the paper
• Clean non-LDPhi documents off of the computer
• Dust the countertops
• Vacuum the floor
• Put new tests in the test file
• Dust the shelves
• Organize and neatly label filing cabinets
• Sweep/mop storage room floor

Garage –.Katie O, Kato
• Organize the freezer
• Organize the tables/cupboards/shelves
• Sweep the floor


Outside Duty – Amanda E, Amanda O.
*Due date TBA*
• Pick up cigarette butts/garbage around the WHOLE house
• Weed and clean out the rocks and “landscaping”
• Sweep the cement/sidewalk
• Clean the leaves out of any window pit

Remember to:
 Dust above all the windows.
 Change any burnt out light bulbs.
 Add repairs to list on top of mailboxes.
 When you are done, help someone else, otherwise House Managers will find something for you to do.

Pain and Grotesquerie!

I've been into the gym for a while. I have an interested in getting a bit more fit, developing a more lean and muscular shape, and keeping my heart healthy. Also, lowering of stress helped quite a bit during my most recent semester of hell. Going to the gym is generally pleasant. It's funny, it shoots endorphins through the body and is generally good news.

The problem is that it causes physical discomfort, and exposes a man to depths of depravity that none should see. I've seen grown (and nude) men talking to each-other about how they feel like golden gods.

"Yeah, I fucking love the steam room, I lift for like a half hour, then get all sweaty, I come out looking like some kind of god!"

There's a guy that always is in the steam room, who goes in and shaves his head. He probably does this every day. It's part of his routine, but to me, shaving in a public, germy environment is fucking disgusting. He's exposing his head to god knows what. Also, he's probably giving himself small bleeding wounds (unless he has a smooth head), and that blood is probably being carried in the steam. So, in a way, we get to breathe him in. Well, more-so than normal at least.


song of the day: None

Goals for a longer term

I'm looking forward now at a large span of time. About a year. So, it's apt to set a few goals. I think this will help me in the long run, as otherwise I tend to walk through Jello. By that I simply mean that I tend to do more reactive thinking and useless thinking than proactive thinking. I think that with a list of goals, I will make some steps towards the completion of some of them. So, here is my list. Feel free to offer critique!

1. Learn Enough Spanish to "Get by," This is a goal I'm already working haphazardly on, with Rosetta Stone
2. Improve my Arabic speaking, reading, writing, listening : Not sure how to go about this
3. Improve my German skills
4. Learn the basics of C++ programming
5. Lose about 10 pounds of fat, continue to develop musculature, tone. (Working out 4-5 times a week and not overeating could help this, but I need to be sure the workouts are effective.)
6. Go to/Cover The Republican National Convention, I'm slightly obsessed with this goal of meeting my political enemies in the flesh. Plus, for whatever foolish reason, it's in St. Paul, a place I do not associate at all with Republicans.
7. Vote for my hopes rather than my fears in November (Note: This doesn't necessarily mean I will go green)
8. Clean Up slightly. I need to develop better habits regarding personal hygiene, the cleanliness of my car, living space, etc. No more fear of the basement.
9. Move into a place that I like and can afford.
10. Improve Cashflow slightly. (I made all of 12 thousand dollars last year, only slightly above median world income)
11. Budget a little better.
12. Visit Duluth Several Times
13. Take a couple other trips at least one with Vanessa
14. Learn to bake.