I have never been to a state fair. A county fair, yes. Those weird traveling carnivals that set up sometimes on the grounds of a church, or a school field, with approximately three rides and a ferris wheel? Yes. But I have not yet witnessed the majesty of a state fair and its cornucopia of foods-on-sticks.
I am hoping that Jeff and I can check out the Maryland Renaissance Faire this year. Renaissance Faires are the most frivolous things on earth, and they please me greatly with their overt silliness, pervasive anachronism, and smattering of people who are wayyyyy too into the whole thing. Once, I ran into a sort of renaissance faire in Spain. But Spain never experienced either the Robin Hood or Elizabethan eras that make up the American-style Renaissance faire historical pastiche. So it was a Visigoth Faire! Everyone was dressed like barbarians, with large chunks of fake fure strapped to their feet with twine. Utterly bizarre, and yet delightful.
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I'm on my second week of running. Man, I hate running. I wake up a bit before I really need to get up, and spend the time until I need to get up thinking about how much I hate running. Then I get up and run, while thinking about not doing it, or who would know, or etc. I really have to try to distract myself (mostly with loud, pounding music), in order to get through a whole mile of it.
So I found this article, about a woman who became an ultra-marathon champion after brain surgery, pretty fascinating. They operated on her in an effort to control seizures. The surgery was successful on that account, but also damaged her ability to orient herself, or to understand how long she has been doing a task. So she can literally run for hours, because her brain doesn't actually know how long her body has been doing it already! Aiee.
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I want to know (1) who also hates this, and (2) if this ever happens to dudes, or is some kind of weird patriarchal subjugation maneuver reserved only for the ladies.
One thing I hate beyond all reason, beyond the fire of 10,000 suns, is when some perfect stranger (always a man, at least in my experience), tells me to smile. "Smile, beautiful." (Umm....fuck you too, buddy) Or "Why don't you try smiling?" (Why don't you try shutting up, you jackass.) I'm just minding my own business, walking along, and here come the unsolicited commands to change my facial expression. For the record, this does not make me want to smile. It makes me want to commit unrelenting, merciless violence.
Jeff pointed out that smiling is often a good idea in general, if you are in a bad mood, because it kind of perks you up, even if you're faking. Eventually, the fake becomes the real; your mood is lightened, and the world is a better place. But I do not believe that the "smile" guys are offering their comments in an air of zen mindfulness. They do not say, "The Buddha would have you smile." Or "happy are the thoughts of those who are unattached." No, indeed. My theory is that they are perpetrating a unique form of jackassery, indeed a kind of thought/speech violence, by invading the personal mental space of passing women with a command that said women conform to the jackass's personal notions of feminine prettiness, jolliness, and the illegality of women's having or expressing negative emotions, etc.
But maybe this happens to men, too? Let me know. I would be much happier thinking that there are just equal-opportunity jerks out there acting imperious towards all other people's facial expressions, and not that women are being singled out.
Or maybe even other women do not experience this. It could just be me, because I have some kind of uniquely dour neutral expression (this is actually kind of a family trait that we Thorsons have designated "Mailbox Mouth." Our neutral, thinking expression looks sort of like a mail slot, and is interpreted by many well-meaning people as uniquely sorrowful, perturbed, etc. This leads people to ask, "Hey, are you okay, you look all angry." Given that a be-mailbox-mouthed Thorson is generally engaged at that point in deep, complex, and rewarding thought, the interruption is unwelcome, and invariably leads to a statement along the lines of "I was fine...until you came along." We are not socially smooth at all times, we Thorsons.)
That said, to all of you who may be guilty of the "Hey, try smiling" routine...CUT IT OUT. We don't want to hear it. Mind your own beeswax. Get a life. If you want a smile, you can make one on your own time. It's free, and doesn't require bugging me!
SO THERE.
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That was Saturday. Ye Gods. A day chock-a-block with small errors, disappointments, misjudgments, and indiscretions that, individually, were beneath notice. And yet they joined together into a parade of horribles that seemed to grow like an inverse pyramid: each new incident carrying extra weight by virtue of all that preceded it.
(1) I spent way too long in the line at the itty bitty gourmet deli, behind a family of around 20 people all of whom had insane dietary restrictions that made everything the deli actually sold completely unsuitable, and so they had to put in special orders. Which they changed frequently. There is only one person at the deli: she has to take the orders, make the sandwiches, etc. So all that took a while. I waited because the soup of the day was Curried Pea, which I had tried a couple of weeks before and loved. After the wait, I lovingly ferried home my soup, only to find it had been over-curried, and under-yogurted.
(2) I was baffled at the grocery store by the fact that I needed two spaghetti squash, didn't really know what spaghetti squash looked like, and of the two squashes in the grocery store that could be spaghetti squash, only one was labeled as such, and the other didn't look much like the first one.
(3) In my glee at repotting and caging my two tomatoes, I accidentally removed the top foot of my largest plant. Which was only about two feet high. And had four flowers on it. Arghhh!
(4) My popsicle recipe was written in such a way as to drastically understate the amount of blueberries needed, while drastically overstating the amount of lemon juice. Also, the can of grape juice concentrate exploded.
(4) Dinner took far longer to make than anticipated, as the two squash (both of which turned out to be spaghetti squashes) cooked at alarmingly different rates.
(5) I made fried green tomatoes as a side dish. First, I poured oil into a deep pan, slapped a candy thermometer in it, and turned on the burner. After about five minutes or so, I began to wonder why the candy thermometer was not registering any increase in temperature. Then I realized the burner had never lit. I was just flooding the whole house with gas. When I tried to turn the burner off, it caught, creating a basketball-sized flame cloud. Aieee!
(6) Then I got the oil heated, and started frying. I don't do much deep frying: it freaks me out. Boiling oil! After the flame-cloud incident, I spent the whole time worrying that I would somehow upset the pan and end up looking like the Phantom of the Opera. Instead, I just filled the entire house with smoke, leading Jeff to run about opening windows and doors, in an effort to keep the smoke alarm from going off.
After all that, I kind of wanted to die. Luckily, dinner turned out fine, I did not burn myself, the smoke alarm remained silent, and the decapitated tomato plant is doing pretty well. Also, I figure that I must have worked off all karmic negativity associated with my person for at least the next six months. Whew!
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(by Jeffrey Eaton & Maureen Thorson [1976 - ], American, early 2000's,
Gift of Mrs. Robert McKay Pennyspangle Wentworth, National Gallery of Art - Massachusetts Avenue Wing)
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