Angry Birds

Once upon a time, there was a very popular app called Angry Birds.

It was, for some time, the most popular game sold in the app store.

It has spawned its own full-length movie. (It won't be any good -- something that takes three seconds to explain is almost never a good 102-minute movie.)

It was actually truly amazing how the oinking pigs could mock you derisively through their little pixels and make you upset. Maybe even angry. Maybe that's why the game was so popular -- it made all the "birds" playing it angry.

I'm going to tell you some things that seem unrelated, but they're not.

Today, I went and spent some time with a friend. We played with a bird. It was a dead bird that had been cooked. I was teaching her how to make broth. It will make a very tasty soup sometime. We had fun picking the meat off the bones and just generally laughing and talking together.

Late last week I had a bird adventure: I chased a band of coots in a current on foot. At least, my non-local but very loyal bird enthusiast contact assures me they were coots. I was mostly chasing them so I could tell her what kind of bird they were. I don't even like birds, really. When they bomb my car, I get upset. Angry, one might even call it. So annoying, the birds are! The crows with their noise and invasive ways, the geese with the honking and the droppings everywhere...the swallows and their porch-bombing habit...you get the idea.

Today, I got ANGRY.  The scary part is, I kind of enjoyed it. It felt empowering to be so upset. I felt like my wrath was fully justified (highly unusual) and like it was useful (moving me along an emotional path I need to explore further). I was so angry. Angrier than even the Angry Birds! I have been angrier in my life, but I can only think of a handful of times where this has been the case. I reveled in the anger. It brought me joy and sparkle. Hot and spicy was how I felt today. Being mad at someone else instead of yourself is actually kind of liberating. No wonder people do it so often.

squish

squish
it's a nearly perfect word
onomotopoeic
able to be drawn out to match any circumstance:
squish
squeeeeesh
skaweesh
squishsquish

it looks odd if you analyze it

it is nearly impossible to misinterpret the meaning

it conjures up clear images when you say it

and applies to physical and emotional situations: squish a bug, feeling squished in your feelings

can be injected with horror, vehemence, playfulness


and also, many things that have been squished taste better as a result.

so it's not like it's all bad, this squishy business.

Mondegreen in Ceylon; Picture

A few things:

1. Playing with colors on your face (also known as "makeup") can be fun.

2. My hair is really long.

3. This song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fncjgN88xUE

4. In conjunction with this song, every person deserves to feel like "warm night air" in each of their relationships. There is nothing like that time when the sun goes down and the yellow-orange-green-fade-to-blue is streaking across the sky.

5. Watching this happen with someone you care about is the keenest of pleasures.

6. When the warm air surrounds you without being too hot or too humid--it's comforting, familiar, and you just relax, that's when you know it. 

7. The people from Erasure knew what they were talking about when they wrote the lyrics, but I actually have been focusing on the happy part of the lyrics, and didn't even hear the sad part, really, until I went to look for the lyrics just now.

8.  From the window in the kitchen/To the fireside by the chair/Sat in familiar surroundings, warm night air...
All the feelings I remember, I cannot hide/Not for want of trying

9.  I have recently discovered that mostly, I don't want to hide my feelings. I want to feel them. 

10. Now comes the funny part...I thought this song had lines saying "On, into Ceylon."

I was pretty impressed with the band's geography and history awareness. Little did I know it was just another mondegreen. The lyrics really say: Longing to sail on/Through the night to the stars/On until sunrise.

Oops. I still just love the overall feeling of this song.

11. The bottom picture reminds me of my niece. She sometimes stands the same way. I didn't realize we had a similarity like that. It makes me happy that we do.

12. My socks not being the same height makes me smile.

beyond a solecism: made to look

Recently, I did something I'm ashamed of. I took a picture of someone who didn't know I was taking his picture. He was sleeping, though, and I didn't have the heart to wake him up to ask him.

I don't think I have seen someone who so obviously was so particular about how he looked in a long time. I mean, I know people who care about their dress and appearance...but this fellow was so meticulous, so exacting in his standards. I wondered if he was extremely insecure or just very confident. Probably a mixture of both, like most of the rest of us.

My eyes probably widened when I saw him. I had just sat down on the bus.

I noticed his hat first. It was the little feather, sticking jauntily just so, that grabbed my attention. Then I looked at the rest of his hat. It was perfectly clean -- no little bits of anything stuck to it. (With hats like that, it's hard to do. Trust me, I know.)

Then I looked at his face. (I had just seen pictures of the Facial Hair competition [I did not know there was such a thing] --  some of these are pretty outrageous.)

This picture doesn't do it justice...I was very impressed by his facial grooming. His beard was perfectly pointy. Perfectly. Perfectly enough that I imagined the chin it was hiding was classic storybook villain pointy, as well. His moustache blended in so well it was scary.

His nearly full length wool pea coat fit him as if it were made for him. He had a leather briefcase (black) that was on his lap, and a large umbrella with a wood handle (it was a knob, not a cane-head shape) was between his knees. His entire person was so very well put together, I wondered how long it had taken him to get out the door that morning...if he did it every day, or if this was the Wednesday Special.

We got off at the same stop. I walked behind him. He had on black leather half boots with silver zippers with pointy toes that clicked when he walked. As I walked behind him, I imagined that the silver was a sticking point with him, but that he had been looking for the perfect boots so long he decided he would accept this quibble and just move on. His step was measured. He walked resolutely, but carefully, as if he were wanting to get to the his destination, but wanted to not disrupt anything about his appearance or seemed rushed.

His hair, which was almost to the bottom of his shoulder blades, was trimmed neatly. The only thing that anybody could argue threw off his look at all was that his hair was not perfectly straight in the back -- it looked like it had some wave, but only in the last four inches or so. It was like he had partially braided it the day before and then didn't realize there were still braid marks in it today. (Not that I've ever had this phenomenon happen to me...)


 

A Pressing Matter

Facts about pressing cider:


* It is always more fun to press cider with other people than with yourself. Kind of like a barn raising, quilting bee, corn husking, or any other sort of work "party."

*  20 lbs of apples = 1 gallon of cider. No wonder it tastes so good -- all that fructose, condensed!

 *  Pressing cider is the most fun when you do it in a fun, beautiful location. (See picture <--. You'll get what I mean.)

*  When you freeze apples before you press them, your cider turns out a lot differently -- more like applesauce than apple cider. It's not a bad thing -- just leads to extra thick, almost syrupy goodness. W says it's because the freezing action helps break down the cell walls.

*  Pressing is a multi-step operation.

1. Buy apples

2. Wash apples

3. Cut apples into halves

4. Put the straining sack in the barrel.

5. Put the barrel under the press.

6. Use the press, hand cranking, to chop the apples into tiny bits that go into the bag.

7. When the bag is full, close it up, ties inside, and put the lid on the barrel.

8. Screw the lid of the barrel down tightly. Leverage (see yellow rod) helps. Don't get dizzy!

9. Enjoy the hissing and popping of the fruit and watch as the juice oozes slowly out of the cracks in the barrel.

10.  When you can't press any more juice out, let it sit under pressure

11. Unscrew the lid. This is actually harder than it looks because your hands will probably be cold and it is hard to unscrew something smoothly.

12. When you've unscrewed it enough to clear the barrel top, remove the barrel and the bag for cleaning.

13.  Tilt the table to make the juice run into the container under the spout.

14. Funnel the juice into your final carrier.

15. Enjoy!!!! 

*  And then you enjoy dinner, ever so tastily. And enjoy the view, too. This picture of one of my favorite people basically sums up how I felt about Pressing Day.

the power of numbers

Tonight I hung out with four guys and played video games. I haven't hung out with that many guys, with me the lone lady, in a very, very long time. I also wasn't very good at the video games, but it's okay, they beat up on me mercilessly anyway.

We were sitting around eating tortellini and dark chocolate chip peppermint cookies (rather, they were eating) and something that a friend of mine I had in middle school used to say popped into my mind: "You know when the odds are good, the goods are odd." (Meaning, if you're vastly outnumbered by the opposite sex, they are all likely bound to be weirdos, too nerdy for words, painfully awkward, unattractive, or some combination of all the above.)

I don't agree with her assessment, but it has made me smile a time or two when it came to my mind. The thing is, odd doesn't mean bad. It doesn't mean below-average looks or intelligence. It can even just mean "not even." (Not in the Valley Girl sense, either.) It's not negative -- it just...is.

But there's something about the numbers being very uneven that does change behavior--I'm not a psychologist, or a sociologist, so I can't tell you why. And I really don't care, to be honest...because  tonight, I was happy to just be "one of the guys."

Eagles vs Shakespeare

Another song plug for you:

I don't really like the Eagles. At all. I have never liked them. I was really upset when they were voted the band of the 20th century over the Beatles. At the time, Hotel California was the only Eagles song I could name, whereas I know almost all the Beatles songs by heart. The Eagles didn't have fans tht were so loud they couldn't hear themselves play. The Eagles don't have more than one "sound." The Eagles got back together after claiming they never would. The Eagles just...well...when your claim to fame is Hotel California, what else can I say?!? Hotel California seems to last an eternity for me and I really think it should be banned from all karaoke bars, as a matter of course, along with Piano Man. But that is neither here nor there in context of what I would really like to talk about, so I will move along.

There is one song that I heard earlier in the summer on my Tom Petty Pandora station that I considered for awhile. It had lyrics that, in part, went like this: [I was infuriated that the station ran amok -- I think the same day I heard it for the first time, I also heard a U2 song, which you can best believe earned a prompt thumbs down, and, thank goodness, I have not heard one since.]

I've got a peaceful, easy feeling/
I know you won't let me down/
cause I'm already standing on the ground

If that's all you hear, you might think: wow, that's a really awesome perspective to have. To be peaceful, secure, and comfortable in a relationship! That's amazing. How logical -- he's recognizing that although he isn't feeling the butterflies anymore, the peace and calm he's feeling, knowing he's not in the clouds, hoping for someone to return love, but that the person is already returning the love and it's a firm reality, a grounding, rooted relationship--solid and secure.

But if you bothered to listen to the song in its entirety, you would probably hear something else: the exact opposite of what I just described, which irritates me. He already knows the end is coming, he's seeing the fruitless inevitability of the ending of the relationship. He's already over it -- there's nothing she can do to hurt him any more, and he has his eyes wide open. He's either already hurt so much, he is either numb or already has worked through it so the fact that he is standing on the ground with zero expectations and singing this laid-back country song is just a testament to how those darn women always do you wrong and why should you expect anything else?

Or perhaps there's another meaning that I just didn't hear. I did, after all, practically fail the poetry interpretation portion of my English Lit class. That is putting Don Henley on par with Shakespeare, which I am really not comfortable with, though.

Either way, I'm probably protesting too much, methinks, about the merits (or lack thereof) of an Eagles song. So I'll leave it after this--except to say that I hope every person I know gets a chance to experience the first interpretation at least one time in their life.