Bad Luck and Boarder Crossing

The laws of irony state that if, in the morning, after several increasingly frustrating discussions with a number of idiotic people, you announce that you may be the only smart person left in the world, then that very same evening, you will find yourself stranded at the Canada/US border with no money, a faulty cell phone, a purse full of tap water, and a damp passport that expired two years ago, wondering how to ensure none of your associates never hear about your own little bout of stupidity*.

The best part of all this is that there was absolutely no reason for me to actually be in the States, anyway.

Health, Wellness, and the Cool Hair Club

Have you ever thought about how impractical it would be to wear a bike helmet while sporting a 6-inch mohawk? I didn't until the other day in the Village, when I saw a guy with said hairstyle riding his bike and I thought, "he might just be the only guy in the city who has a valid excuse for not wearing a bike helmet". Then I wondered whether that is a valid excuse for not wearing a helmet. And I decided it was, which says a lot about where my priorities on safety lie.

To be fair, I had just dyed my hair purple, which meant he and I were in the special Cool Hair club together, and he acknowledged this fact by making a strange roaring sound in my direction and waving (really!), and I'm pretty sure having cool hair protects you from bodily harm anyway.

Walking that thing line between eccentricity and normalcy

If you haven't noticed, I do my best to advertise my strangeness to the outside world. I'm not sure why I started doing this. I may have been under the impression I would some day live off the fruits of my strangeness, like maybe people would pay to have their photo taken with me in my Cookie Cat outfit, or would buy t-shirts with the Snake Foot on them, or actually pay to hear the story of the time I got into a flame war with Virgin Mobile. 

I could at least be famous for my eccentric qualities, like Salvador Dali or Gertrude Stein*. But I haven't yet figured out how to grow a luxurious mustache and I am not in a long-term relationship with the inventor of pot brownies, so I'm not sure if the road of eccentricity is really open to me yet.

I feel like a lot of people have no choice but to make a living off of appearing to be normal. This seems exhausting, but I figure some day, one of those people will be me. I've been left under the impression that most employers out there require a certain amount of normalcy from their employees (which is why many of the most interesting people are unemployed). Like you have to wear a suit to work, or not come to work with purple hair and cupcakes on your fingernails**, and you definitely shouldn't have a blog filled with letters addressed to your house-cat, no matter how well-received those letters were.

Generally, meeting these sorts of standards takes an extensive amount of effort. But every once in a while, I accidentally do something too normal to put on the blog, like buying clothing from big box stores, or sleeping past 8 a.m., or reading Eat, Pray, Love. So then I've got to wonder, if you can be normal by accident, am I slowly becoming increasingly more and more normal over time? Is there a median of (outward) normalcy we all generally gravitate towards? And how will I know when I've reached it?



*I know I know, they were also famous for their artistic abilities, not just their mustaches and romances.

**This is why it's best to pick a job where the majority of customers walk through the door hoping to find a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the other side.

The glamorous life of the unemployed

When I was younger, I worried a lot about choosing the right job. It would have to be one I enjoyed but also one that made me enough money to survive live off of comfortably*. The money part was pretty easy to figure out, but how on earth was I supposed to predict what sort of job I would actually enjoy?

The Triumph of Cyborg Amy

Ever have one of those days where you wake up and discover the gym you've been going to on a weekly basis for the past 3 years has replaced your ID photo with a picture of your second cousin? Really? Maybe we can form a support group of some sort.

I'm Back!

I’m back! Finally. In the weeks I’ve been gone (from this blog, not from life in general), I’ve learned some important things about my character. For instance, the side-effects of being done school include an aversion to cell phones and a sudden determination to run a marathon but also eat cake every day.

Things I actually DID learn in elementary school

I tend to be a bit hard on my childhood education, based on the few elementary school lessons where I was told men have less ribs than women because that's how God created Eve, or that time I realized my 5th grade teacher was illiterate. However, my school did teach me several valuable lessons.

For instance, when I was in 4th grade, one day, we all came to school and our classroom had been transformed into a room on the Titanic. By that I mean there were portholes and a flotation device with HMS Titanic on it, not, you know, that the room had hit an iceberg and was filling with water (though I'm pretty sure we pretended it had at one point). We spent the next few weeks learning about that ill-fated ship--we learned morse code*, the names and intimate details of several of the passengers on board**. But there was one fact I learned that I really took for granted, and that was this: the Titanic was an actual ship. Apparently that is not common knowledge:***

Then there was the day, also in 4th grade (it was a good year), when we came in and the room was all covered in police tape and there was a chalk outline on the floor, and our teacher read us the report of the early-morning crime, which involved someone being assaulted with a spoon (they lived. The chalk outline was a bit misleading). From this I learned about police reports, and how to draw a really nice mugshot, which I'm sure will serve me well in the future.

4th grade was also the year I learned what ramparts are, what a gauntlet is, how to make stained glass cookies, and that not everyone would respect my aversion to gutting pumpkins. 4th grade is NOT the year I got over my aversion to gutting pumpkins, but I did learn to be on guard at all times, in case someone (such as my teacher) would force me to come in contact with raw pumpkin guts during a pumpkin carving contest or any other time when pumpkins are around.

*which I promptly forgot
**Like Molly Brown, whom everyone remembers, and that guy who wouldn't pull his wife back onto the lifeboat, whom everyone has forgotten.
***Alright alright, I'm sure some of them are trolling.