NanoPoblano

Persephone got a bum rap.

/ Spoken Like A True Nut / 3 Comments

Last night I cracked open my first pomegranate of the season.

It was perfection.

Except every time I eat one of these, I can’t help but think about how bullshit it was that poor Persephone got roped into spending six months of every year rotting away in the underworld just for eating six itty bitty seeds when poms are so giant and filled with HUNDREDS of the things. Surely half a fruit should equal half a year, not a scant mouthful of seeds, no?

Disproportionate punishment! Disproportionate I say!

Then again, I like winter. Perhaps I shouldn’t be campaigning for a lighter sentence for Queen P when the alternative would be eternal spring.

Sorry Persephone. If it’s between your happiness and my sweater weather, I’m gonna have to pick the option that screws you.

Maybe keep your damn mouth shut next time and we won’t have to make these hard decisions.

In grungy memoriam.

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Today I cleaned under the bed for the first time in…well, I’m not sure exactly how long but I think I might have still been in my twenties the last time I did it. All I know is there was fishing gear under there that I hadn’t seen since the last time Nutty Hubby and I went camping, which was five years ago.

*ahem*

I’m not a slob, I swear.

I just don’t look under the bed a lot.

Anyway, a lot of dust bunnies lost their lives today. I know, I’m a monster. Those guys had names. Families. Jobs. Presumably. I mean, after five years of being left to their own devices, how could they not have gained some kind of sentience and established their own social order?

Just think what magnificent accomplishments they might have had in store.

And then I went and Swiffered it all away.

So let us have a moment of silence for Filthy Flopsy, Mucky Mopsy, Cruddy Cotton-Tail and Polluted Peter, dust bunnies extraordinaire, and their multitudes of kin who I can’t be bothered to mention individually but who also all lost their lives today.

And whom I’ve been sneezing out for the last several hours.

Bless you.

Deck the halls with dino folly.

/ Spoken Like A True Nut / 10 Comments

I found this in the Christmas section of the drugstore. Just let that sink in for a minute.

“And what do you want Santa to bring you, Bobby?” “A fiery cataclysm that I can eat!”

Person Who Thought This Was A Good Idea #1:  We need a new angle on the traditional gingerbread house. Something with movie tie-in potential.

Person Who Thought This Was A Good Idea #2:  I’m listening.

PWTTWAG #1: Are you ready for this? Picture…lava. A cinder cone. Dinosaurs.

PWTTWAG #2: Hmm, cones are hard to cookie-fy.

PWTTWAG #1: FINE, cinder trapezoid. Cinder pyramid. Whatever. You’re missing the point. DINOSAURS AND VOLCANOES.

PWTTWAG #2: Dude, calm your tits. OBVIOUSLY I love it – I mean, nothing says the holidays like man-eating murder raptors and magma, right? I’m just trying to think of the logistics here to make sure this shit happens.

PWTTWAG #1: Oh. So we’re good then.

PWTTWAG #2: Fuck yeah we’re good! Dinos and gingerbread and lava!

PWTTWAG #1: DINOS AND GINGERBREAD AND LAVA!

PWTTWAG #2: And a branding deal!

PWTTWAG #1: AND A BRANDING DEAL!

I want to believe this was not made with Christmas in mind, I really do. I could love this otherwise. But that gingerbread is pretty hard to defend. If that’s not a holiday building material, then I don’t know what is.

Seasonal bitching aside, I think my favorite thing about this is the fancy bordered dirt path up leading up to the cone. Thank god the ritual sacrifices won’t have to pick their way over any sharp obsidian or anything on the way up to be tossed in.

‘Cause volcanic glass in your toes can really ruin your day.

Hi. I don’t care. Thanks.

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I’m getting pretty good at not giving a fuck at work. Funny how the possibility of losing a job you basically loathe you’re not that attached to will do that. I’m more heartbroken about the fact that I couldn’t eat a delicious-looking  scone in the lunchroom this morning thanks to the Elimination Diet of Sadness than I am about the idea that I might potentially be unemployed by The Most Wonderful Time of the Year™.

It’s pretty liberating, actually. All my life I’ve had issues with perfectionism. I’m more or less guaranteed to stress out over stupid details that no rational human being would fault another human being for overlooking. If overthinking stupid shit were an Olympic sport, I wouldn’t be able to walk under the weight of all my medals. And the second I step into a professional environment, my innate need to be above reproach skyrockets even more out of control.

For example, I have a habit of double- and triple-checking any kind of business correspondence several dozen times over (and then once more for good measure) before sending, just in case the first fifty-odd readings didn’t catch a typo like “Kind retards,” which I would never make in the first place because a zillion viral internet posts concerning that particular mistake have drummed it into my head that I need to be hypervigilant about ensuring my regards are pejorative-free.

Later, I’ll hit up my Sent folder and read the whole thing through a few more times just to make sure nothing slipped by my radar. Y’know, ’cause I could totally do anything about it at that point.

Or, at least, that’s how things would have been once upon a time (i.e. a few weeks ago). Now?

I mean, I’m not gonna stop proofreading anytime soon (let’s not be crazy), but for once in my life I feel okay with leaving things at “I’ll just give this a solid once-over” instead of “I have read this email so many times that the text has lost all meaning. ‘From’ is a weird fucking word, isn’t it? It is a word, isn’t it…? Shit. What if I made it up? Should I check a dictionary? Hm. Maybe I should take a half hour break and revisit this when I can brain again. Right after I make sure I didn’t actually type out ‘shit’ when I thought it just then.”

That’s just one example. Now take the time I wasted stressing over the simplest of emails and add it to the time I spent stressing over report formatting, coworker interaction, filling out routine paperwork and even just signing on the dotted line for a delivery, to name a few others. I knew it was idiotic. I knew it was a waste of perfectly good time and effort. But I still couldn’t bring myself to ease up. Not until now.

It’s like someone stuck a plunger into my mind and fumbled it around until my entire workplace thought process suddenly became unclogged. And just like that, the big red “THIS IS LITERALLY LIFE OR DEATH” emergency stop button in my head that used to be so trigger-happy finally learned to calm its damn britches.

Who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll even stop compulsively readjusting the contents of my cubicle’s recycling bin so everything lays nice and flat and even.

Or not.

Baby steps.

Random thoughts on a Tuesday afternoon.

/ Spoken Like A True Nut / 1 Comment

I did something to my neck in my sleep again. The sort of something where you feel as though your muscle has been replaced by piano wire. A few days ago I woke up with a pulled hamstring. Am I beating myself up in my dreams? Is someone else beating me up in my dreams? Either way, I’d never know it. I rarely remember my dreams these days.

I can feel November settling in around our home. The temperature hasn’t dropped any further but the cold feels different anyway: a lingering, searching chill that seeps its way through our poorly insulated perimeter and reaches out with grasping tendrils for bare shoulders and toes.

Thick bathrobe and novelty slipper season has arrived at the Nut house.

The russet and gold October splendor of our tulip tree was smashed into a jumbled heap of soggy browns with the first real November rain. Only a handful of leaves still cling to the branches, tattered orange scraps on a ravaged skeleton. The droning of leaf blowers fills the air by morning. The crackle of leftover Hallowe’en fireworks still permeates the night.

And the days grow ever darker.

The “Nutty Acts Without Thinking” Hall of Fame

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Last night I was so tired and distracted that I almost poured chicken bone broth into my tea instead of coconut milk.

Thank god for the “almost” part of that sentence or I would have had to commission a new plaque for the “Nutty Acts Without Thinking” Hall of Fame, to be displayed among such storied accomplishments as:

  • holding a carrot stick in one hand, a pencil in the other, and taking a bite of the pencil
  • throwing freshly cut apple slices into the garbage instead of the apple core
  • vigorously shaking a bottle of mustard while the cap was open, covering everything I knew and loved in Dijon
  • licking my finger and then using my other hand to turn the page
  • repeatedly putting rinsed dishes back in the sudsy sink instead of the drying rack
  • grabbing my car keys instead of my apartment keys to take out the garbage and locking myself out of the building
  • knitting the same row of a hat pattern two extra times and not noticing until half a dozen correctly knitted rows later
  • photocopying the document I meant to scan (multiple offenses)
  • shredding the document I meant to scan (also multiple offenses)
  • turning the lights off while leaving rooms that were still full of people (yet more multiple offenses)
  • instinctively touching the thing that someone else literally just told me to leave the hell alone (approximately 90% of the Wall of Fame)

And let’s face it, such dubious achievements leave enough of a bad taste in my mouth without also having to toast them with chicken-flavored Earl Grey.