Maximum Possible Blood

 

I’ve been watching that show Vikings lately and I find it impossible not to wonder how so many diverse cultures individually came up with the idea of human sacrifice. Because: really. What was even the thought process that led up to that? 

In order to figure out where these people were coming from I have devised a little thought exercise in the form of a very short play to imagine the origins of human sacrifice, especially in the case of the Aztecs who appear to have descended into a veritable extended blood orgy on a scale not often seen. Here is my Aztec play.

DRY SPELL

Brock (a surprisingly common Aztec name): Guys, we’ve all noticed that the weather has been dry around here lately. I’m thinking it’s time to put our heads together and come up with a plan.

Pierre (also a surprisingly common Aztec name): Well…………..okay, this is gonna sound crazy, but hear me out. What if we did some kind of dance? Like, a dance to the Gods asking them for rain?

(The group considers.)

Kanye (at least a million Aztecs were named that): That does sound crazy. 

Brock: You’re such an idiot, Pierre. This is why nobody takes you seriously. I’m just sayin’.

Pierre: You can’t just call someone an idiot and make fun of their legitimate idea and then say “I’m just sayin’” and make it better. 

Brock: Sorry.

Pierre: Okay. Let’s think of something else.

(The group considers.)

Kanye: I think I’ve got it. 

Brock, Pierre: Yeah?

Kanye: Yes. I was remembering this one time that somebody died and how, by apparent coincidence, the sun came up the next morning. But I’m thinking: what if that wasn’t a coincidence?

Brock: No way.

Kanye: Yes way. I mean, seriously, this lady died and the next morning the sun just comes up? What are the odds of that?

(Brock and Pierre exchange looks and nod.)

Pierre: But we don’t need the sun to come up. We need rain. How did you say that lady died?

Kanye: I cut her heart out.

Pierre: Huh. So cutting the heart out raises the sun.

Brock: What do you think causes rain?

Pierre: Yeah, what causes rain? Something less violent? More violent?

Kanye: I’m thinking blood. If we could murder someone in, like, a really violent way with the maximum possible amount of blood, that seems like it would somehow be connected to raining.

Brock: What would we do with the blood we take out? Like, roll around in it? Make someone drink it?

Kanye: I don’t know, but what if we took the blood of, like, a hundred people?

Pierre: Or a thousand!

Kanye: Yes, we’ll take the blood of a thousand people and just, like, pour it down the steps of the temple until observers start vomiting from the smell! 

Pierre: So much blood!

Brock: Ha! Yes! Blood! Blood for everyone! 

Pierre: So who do we start with?

(Brock and Kanye exchange looks and then both look at Pierre.)

THE END

The Best Weight-Loss Tip of Ever

I have this idea that, because I weighed less ten years ago than I do now, I’m much too fat. No civilization before us has ever had this particular idea but that doesn’t stop me from caring about what people if this particular civilization think if me. (Although YOU should not. You’re much smarter than the rest of us. Yes. You. Right there.)

Since I’m normal and eat more during times of stress, bounty, or celebration, I go through periods of being very perfect in my diet and periods of ‘feck it.” You know how that works……..you have a very challenging child with special needs whom you love more than life but who drives you to tears regularly but whom you also feel the need to defend from the rest of the world so at the end of the day you go off your diet because you’re a good person who deserves some pleasure? Sure you do. And as you all know, this is a ‘feck it’ trial.

Right now I’m in a period of ‘feck it.” but I did ask a friend who was successful in losing a significant amount of weight (don’t know how you guys do it. I’m still pretty certain you’re all some kind of supernatural creatures with inhuman constitutions) for her advice on what I could do to lose weight. Since my tendency is to do great during the first part of the day before all the noise of other humans starts getting under my skin and then drink wine and eat popcorn at the end of the day (those things go together) as a way for rewarding myself for surviving life, my friend suggested I find a non-food way to reward myself at the end of every day.

She recommended a bubble bath.

That seemed like a great idea, so here I sit in the bubble bath I truly deserve WITH my glass of wine beside me. I can juuuuuuust reach it from here. I’d be surprised if I lost any weight from this method, but you know what?

Feck it.

Oh, That’s How You Do Marriage

Saw THIS on Pinterest.

I don’t know how long this lady has been married, but I will have been married 13 years this year. Marriage is hard. Some things work and a lot of things don’t, but one thing I have never been a fan of is saccharine relationship advice.

Clicking on this list of 100 Ways to Make Your Marriage Rock did nothing to change my mind about that, but I decided to try a few pieces of the advice anyway.

Tip #3: Write his name in lipstick on the bathroom mirror.

Is my marriage rocking now? It’s hard to tell. Maybe fewer toothpaste splatters on the mirror would make this a more romantic gesture, but if I’m expected to clean in addition to reading helpful articles, forget it.

Tip #4 says “revitalize the romance with intimate dates” but tip #2 says “go on regular dates”. We’re not even in the top ten (of 100) and we’re already getting repeats? This is doing nothing to increase my expectations.

#5: “Pray together.” Hmm. I tried this with my first husband and we got conflicting messages from Jesus. Jesus told me that my husband should quit beating me up all the time, but Jesus also told my husband I should go to the store and get more beer. I don’t feel like that rocked very much at all.

#6: “Hide notes in secret places.” First I thought out some very carefully worded notes to hide. Since there wasn’t any reason not to combine romance with usefulness, I wrote out individual items on my honey-do list. Next time my husband opens the sugar bowl, he will be reminded to install bookshelves in the sunroom. So far, this is the first tip that will actually improve anything about my life.

Getting bored with this whole thing, I skipped ahead to tip #17, which is “Porn-proof your home.” Oh! Okay, then! Yeah, I have often thought that one of the worst things a couple could do together is be sexually adventurous in a way that doesn’t challenge their monogamy. In fact, now that I think of it, I’ve gotten a lot of sexual advice over the years in regards to having good married-people sex (the married kind being the only kind Jesus wants you to have, so I’m told) and a lot of it boils down to this: If you are enjoying yourselves, you have lost track of what love-making is about. It’s about appreciating God by linking up your genitals. If you’re doing anything that might embarrass you if God looked through your ceiling while you were doing it, you should repent.

I do wonder if this lady went through her Bible first and blacked out all the parts referring to breasts, prostitution, rape, semen, and sodomy. She can not trust her husband to love her if he knows that those things……you know, are things.

Wait, #12 is “Read the Bible together.” Now I’m just confused.

#20 “LOOK TO HIM TO MAKE THE BIG DECISIONS.” *gagging* Okay, this one I have to approach carefully…….*still gagging*…….

Ladies, look. Are you in the same general intelligence range as your husband? Are you in the same general range of emotional intelligence? If you are not severely deficient on one area or the other, what possible reason could there be for you to cede monumentally important decisions that will impact your family’s future over to your husband? Who could possibly be telling you to do this, and WHAT IS THEIR MOTIVATION?

#21 “Let her make the small ones”. Well, thank god. He loves you enough to let you decide whether to use powdered dishwashing detergent or dishwasher tabs. Sweet. Is your marriage rocking yet?

#26 “Fight naked.” I fail to see how looking at your husband’s giblets is gonna help in any way here, but I’m going to reserve judgment and admit that people get their jollies in a lot of different ways. If naked yelling does it for you, it’s not my place to judge.

#27 “Tell him you like him.” If he wasn’t sure, this isn’t going to make anything “rock” so much as establish a baseline of existence. Get your act together.

#46 “Set reminders on your phone to remember him/her throughout the week.” Again, WTF is going on in your marriage that you have to have an external reminder to think of him/her? You live in the same house, don’t you? Is there really no point in the day that your thoughts randomly stray to your spouse? You are failing at love.

#65 is “Plan your budget together.” This one seems pointless. Obviously you don’t need to have a say in the budget because you have lovingly looked to him to make the big decisions and he has respectfully left you a few hundred dollars a month for the small things like whether you eat out at a Chinese place or an Italian place this week. (BTW, if letting her make the small decisions means you never get to decide what movie you watch, that’s jacked up.)

#80 “Bring him/her a favorite drink during the middle of the day.” Score! This tip I can get behind.

#95 “Doodle his name.” Done.

In all honesty, this is significantly less creepy than the earlier ‘redrum’ style. Maybe there’s something to this list after all.

Dalek in a Forest

Having a dire case of tennis elbow, I’m not allowed to do any of the things I normally do like play piano or harp, paint my house, yoga, sew, or crochet. I was pretty heartbroken looking at months of doing nothing until I realized that I could probably paint pictures with my left hand. And even though they might not be good, they could be fun. So I give to you: Dalek in a Forest, Painted Over Pages of Moby Dick, Left-Handed (I Am Not Left-Handed).

Dalek in a Forest, Painted Over Pages of Moby Dick, Left-Handed (I Am Not Left-Handed) was inspired by a marathon of Doctor Who due to a foot of snow rendering us stuck in the house all day and also, forests.

Here is a close-up of the Dalek:

I have no talent or training and thus have to rely on gimmicks. That said, I had fun. You can even read some of the glued on pages.

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Moby Dick. It rulz.

How to Win a Fist Fight (In Fifth Grade)

Let me first establish one thing: I have never been one of those people who get into fights. Not even as a kid. I wasn’t some tomboy, tree-climbing, army-playing kid; I was one of those ‘inside children’ who read lots of Anne of Green Gables and played the piano and watched cartoons and avoided sweating at all costs.

All-in-all, the fact that I did so well in my one fist fight (using the phrase loosely) ever speaks decently to my survival ability.

Here’s the story: in fifth grade I rode the bus to and from school with two brothers and a sister, and it was a long, sweaty ride. By the time we got home my hair came loose from whatever ponytail or braid it had originally been wrangled into, had curled up from all the humidity, tangled, and was pretty much a wild bramble–and not in that charming forest maiden kind of way–that got in my face all the time. This figures in later, stay with me.

On Wednesdays my siblings and I would go straight from the bus to our piano teacher’s house, where her three kids, the three kids she babysat in the afternoon, and the four of us would all run around in her backyard like rival dog gangs who thought they might want to play together but weren’t sure. Most times I was inside quietly reading, but I guess I didn’t have a book this particular day. That is how I came to be in the backyard when a kid from a rival dog gang picked on my little sister who would have been only in first grade.

Yelling ensued, and this feral rival-boy picked up a heavy toy record player and flung it at me frisbee-like. It hit me in the hip with enough force to (later) bruise and (instantly) send me into the kind of rage in which any glimmer of humanity is erased and….well….it’s rather feral, if I haven’t drilled that into this story enough.

In a lot of pain and blind from the constant tangle of hair that was never NOT in my face, I roared–I’m certain that happened–and made the angriest of grande jetes across the yard with one single thought in my head: I will pull his nose off. I WILL PULL HIS NOSE OFF.

He seemed pretty scared running from me and I doubt he relished the sight of this fiendish child-witch coming at him, but I knocked him down and straddled his chest. Blind as a shih-tsu from the aforementioned hair, I did my level best to literally pull his literal nose off his literal face.

But my aim was off and it turns out that I was pulling on his upper lip instead, which, if you give it a try right now, you will see can actually be very painful.

He squealed and wriggled madly until my brother and sister pulled me off of him, which is apparently a thing that people do when they are afraid someone they love is about to commit a criminal assault.

Rival Boy cried a lot after and I feel super bad about it now, but if you are interested in someday winning a fight and you plan on going Red Ross, don’t rule out pulling on your opponent’s upper lip. Guaranteed: if you are up against a third grade boy, you will totally win.

The Importance of Being Thank You

If I ever tell my kids the story of The Princess and the Pea, in my version the princess wouldn’t be a whining, complainy bee-yotch. She would say, “Thank you for your gracious hospitality. I had a lovely stay.”

Unless the Queen was actually pretty rude and unpleasant. Then the princess would say, “Thank you for putting up with my irritating presence. I understand how trying being a good hostess can be, especially for people with such wonderfully inflexible personalities as yours,” because maybe she’s a passive-aggressive princess. I don’t know her life.

Why I Joined the NRA

I’m not particularly interested in guns. At least, not any more than I am in forks or steering wheels or lawn mowers. To me, tools are tools. Now, crochet hooks are important to me. I feel the way about those in the way that self-proclaimed gun enthusiasts do when selecting particular guns for different competitions or hunts.

I have fired guns. Having the ability to properly operate my home defense tools is the entire point of having them. I would say that I am a decent shot, considering I have all the enthusiasm of my third grader doing his math homework. To me the “excitement” of guns is that when my husband goes on an overnight business trip I can sleep easily. A hulking, evil linebacker (those guys are evil, right? People always say it like you should be afraid.) could break into my house and I don’t have to resort to screaming and hiding in the shower. I can sleep well because I can keep my babies safe.

How is this not something everyone wants everyone to have if they so choose?

The fact is that all the arguments in support of the second amendment have been heard; most of them are highly logical. All the arguments in favor of strict gun control have been heard; most are highly emotional and deeply illogical.

Anyone who wants to make their life decisions based on sheer emotion is free to do that but what they cannot do is limit my personal rights based on their emotions and unwillingness to see reason. My rights already exist. They are already established, as are yours. I have a right to own a gun and you have a right to not get shot unless you pose a real threat to me or my family. (Don’t come in uninvited. I’d dare you to try but I actually don’t want that kind of trouble.)

The issue is simple. The president has no authority to infringe on the second amendment, no matter how grandiose his sense of self is. The fact that all his arguments are absurd is actually beside the point…..he simply has no authority to do this. However, people are so wrapped up in his celebrity and his personality cult that they are actually willing to let him get away with this completely illegal maneuver.

Being just a single, not famous person, I have no power to stand up for my own rights, but the NRA does! Hooray for numbers and money! They have my 35 bucks for the year. If you give them your 35 bucks, they will have two times 35 bucks, which I’m pretty sure is more than $35. If thousands of people do this who wouldn’t have done it otherwise, the NRA has immediately more power. Hey, there’s a metaphor here. It’s like the NRA is the firearm of civil rights. Kewl!