At Random

Sometimes I like to steal ideas from other blogs. Like, this one guy, he has this thing on his blog where he asks himself random questions and then answers them. Yes, he makes up the questions and the answers, just like I'm about to do:

How's your niece doing in school?

Oh, thanks for asking! She's doing great actually. She got an 86% on her last chemistry exam, so that was good. And it's finals week, so yesterday she had her first chemistry lab final. This coming week is her chemistry lecture final. She was pretty worried about it, then she talked to her teacher and found out that she only needs a 77% on the final to get an A in the class. (It's really at the end of the semester that all the hard work pays off. I remember one semester when I was really sweating my immunology class final. Then I sat down and figured out that I needed a 46% on the final to get an A in the class, so instead of pulling an all-nighter, I got the best pre-final night's sleep ever.)

What did you eat for lunch today?

For lunch, I made vegetarian sloppy joes. No joke. I used Quorn Crumbles and vegetarian BBQ sauce (no, most BBQ sauces aren't vegetarian) with ketchup, cayenne pepper, soy sauce, and black pepper mixed in. Then I put it on a hamburger bun and ate it with about half an English cucumber on the side. Now I'm stuffed. It was pretty good!

What are your plans for the day?

Well, my plan to go to the gym fell through, so I'm going to...hmmm...I'm going to go to Cost Plus with Dave. He has to buy some light beer and snacks to take to his studio drinking club tonight. (I don't think it has an official name, but every Saturday he and some studio people have a new drink and some snacks. Nerdy Drinking Hour? Geek Drink Hour? Since I don't drink, I don't go. But I do like making suggestions of things they should try. I think a champagne (or prosecco or cava) day would be good. Add some caviar, too, I think. And a Mexican beer day, complete with Mexican snacks like chile tamarind and pork rinds with hot sauce on them, would be excellent. So, that's Dave's day all sorted out. Me? I think I'll netflix a movie and take it easy. The usual.

What's the worst book you ever read because someone suggested or gave it to you?

I asked Dave for a question and he came up with that one. I think that's a good question!

Years ago, a friend of mine, Sue Hansen, sent me out the door at the end of a study session with a copy of some Harlequin romance. She says that she lent it to me in a fit of enthusiasm and that as soon as she gave it to me, she thought: Oh, god! Did I really just give Brenda, The English major, a Harlequin romance?! (Brenda The English Major should be my Indian name.) Yes, she did. And, yes, I enjoyed it. I had never read a Harlequin romance before and I realized, reading it, that Harlequin romances are nothing more than stroke books for women. There's a reason they print them in little paperback sizes. That's so you can hold them with one hand.

But that wasn't the worst book anyone ever lent me, is it?

One of the worst was a Neil Gaiman novel. I know Gaiman is hot stuff these days, what with Coraline and The Sandman, and all the other crap he's written. But as far as I'm concerned, Gaiman is basically Stephen King's younger, talentless brother. The only reason I read the Gaiman novel was because Andre, the guy who runs the coffee cart at the last job I had, lent it to me. You can't fuck with the guy who controls the caffeine supply, so I took his novel and read it. It. Sucked. (And it was a painful sucked. Not a good sucked in any way.) And then I took the book back to Andre and thanked him. Right to his face, I said, "Wow. That was something. Thank you for lending it to me. Can I have a latte, please?"

I told Dave once (in a low moment probably brought about when someone lent me some bad science fiction or something) that I was going to start carrying around some Thomas Pynchon and when someone laid something like a Judith Krantz novel on me, I was going to whip out Gravity's Rainbow and lay that on them. (Here, you'll really enjoy this!) No, that sounds terrible. I have enjoyed books that people lent me. Most of the time I enjoy the experience of being introduced to something new even if I don't like the book. But I really don't like the expectation that comes along with being lent a book by someone. I don't like that people are all, like, I LOVED THIS BOOK AND YOU WILL TOO! Most of the time? I'm not going to love that book and I'm still going to have to return it and, since I am anti-watching-my-friends'-faces-fall, I'm going to have to say, "WOW! THAT WAS SOMETHING! THANK YOU FOR LENDING ME THAT BOOK!"

Gee, I kinda sound like an ass here, don't I? Well, I'm not a good person, and I'm not trying to hide it from you. Face it, I'm kind of a snob when it comes to reading materials. That's what earning an English degree really gets you. It gets you the right to say that Neil Gaiman can kiss your well-read ass.

What was the last movie you watched?

Okay, just to show you that I'm not a snob about everything, I will tell you this: I'm kinda embarrassed to admit that the last movie I watched was My Faraway Bride, which starred Jason Lewis. Jason Lewis's most well-known role was as Samantha's actor boyfriend Smith Jerrod on Sex & the City. So, yes, he's a hottie. That is why I watched My Faraway Bride. It is not, I'm sad to say a particularly good movie. Jason Lewis used to be a model and he is still mucho easy on the eyes, but as an actor, he has a, let's say, somewhat limited range.

Just before that, I watched a really interesting documentary (I love documentaries) called Cocaine Cowboys. It's all about the rise of the drug trade in Miami. It's got interviews with police, lawyers, drug runners, dealers, and hit men hired by the heads of the drug cartels. One story was pretty amazing. It was about a woman, Griselda Blanco, who ran her own drug ring in Miami. She was absolutely brutal. Police think she's responsible for over 200 murders in Miami alone. How nuts is that? The murder rate in Miami dropped by about a third when she moved to California. The filmmakers didn't interview her, but they did interview one of the men who worked for her. His job was to kill people for her. He started out at $1,000 a day in the early 80's (that was good money back then, yo) and was making close to half a million dollars per murder when he was arrested. Griselda was eventually caught but because of a technicality served only a very minor sentence and was released in 2003.

Hmmm. I'm not sure how to feel about the random question thing!