Check It Out - Library Comix #2 - Where's My DVD?

Another library comic, introducing another library stereotype, Mullet Meg!

Further proof that, no, nobody reads in a library.

Check It Out - Library Comix #1 - Urgent Informational Need

My first Library Comic using Bitstrips. Think I'm going to make it a series. This one stars me and "Pedo Pete"

MSPaint Cartoons: Say Yes to the Dress

So I saw a commercial for "Say Yes to the Dress" the other day, and I felt inspired to make this graph, representing every bride's relationship to the show. Enjoy my crappy MSPaint comic!

On Pajama Etiquette

It seems fitting that I'm writing a post about pajama etiquette while I am, in fact, wearing pajamas. I love pajamas. Seriously, on the list of things I love, pajamas fall solidly between my husband and expensive tequila. Definitely behind polar bears, but totally ahead of watching trashy tv shows off the DVR on a fake sick day.

But pajamas (much like tequila shots) are an example of a wonderful thing that can go terribly wrong when abused. Those who know me well at all are familiar with my stance on leggings-as-pants. Those who don't know me well are about to find out about my stance on leggings-as-pants: NO. NONONO. THEY ARE NOT PANTS. Pajamas, though? I mean, let's put this on a scale. And because I'm feeling moderately creative, let's make it an infographic (or, at least, my lazy, slapped-together version of an infographic that I can make without getting off the couch and using no equipment but my brain, my coffee, and my chromebook).

So as we can see by this highly sophisticated and educational chart, wearing pajamas outside of your home is so bad that it lives, on the wtf scale, somewhere far, far beyond leggings as pants. It lives, actually, "above and beyond" matching sweatsuits in a very literal sense.

So we've established that wearing pajamas outside of your house does not look good, but let's explore why else you should never, ever do it.

Most people want their clothes to say something about them. Maybe all you want your clothes to say is "I know how to match stuff!" or "Look, I just bought this!" and that's okay. Maybe you want your clothes to be a little edgier, say something like "I do crazy things in bed!" or "I briefly romanticized the idea of prison after watching every episode of Orange is the New Black on the same day!" and that's okay, too. Some people want their clothes to say "I have lots of money and nothing else to spend it on!" or "I live on a diet of dehydrated kale and pages from the September Vogue issue", and that's okay, too. Your clothes can say whatever you want them to say, but the general purpose of clothes is for them to say at least one thing: "Look, I got dressed today!"

Pajamas, when worn out in public, do not say this thing. Pajamas in public do not say anything good. Pajamas don't even say anything, they just sort of vaguely and listlessly imply that you're either deathly ill or so lazy and gross that you probably don't even bother to wipe yourself when you poop. Either way, you shouldn't have left your house today... and you DEFINITELY should not have come to the library, but maybe I'm biased.

Maybe you think if you are wearing pajamas you are being cute. Maybe you think it's an updated, revamped version of that weird pacifier-around-the-neck and side-ponytail thing that briefly happened in the early 90s. (Although, if this is the case, I have to seriously question why you would want to emulate the worst thing that ever happened to clothes in the 90s... yes, I'm including hammer pants and yes, I'm including scrunchies. The. Worst. Thing.) And I will grant you, there are some very narrow circumstances that allow for pajamas in public to be cute. Namely, the person wearing them has to be too young to physically dress themselves. So, if you are not a baby, then you should not be wearing pajamas in public.

Maybe you think, in some weird and misguided way, that wearing your pajamas out in public is sexy. It's not. I don't care if they're tweety bird flannels or a lace teddy, if they're pajamas they belong in your house. Nobody is thinking "Wow, look at that person in their PJs. It just makes me think about them being in bed... mmmm yeah I want to be there, too." Everybody, EVERYBODY is thinking, "Oh my god, is he/she sleepwalking? I better go wake them up so they can put some real pants on."

Maybe you're just super lazy/tired/sick and you HAD to go out but you just didn't have the strength or inclination to get dressed. Well, then maybe you should have just conducted all your errands today through a third party, or at least a drive-through. (Unless you are ordering more than three things at the drive-through, in which case you better wear the clothes you want to be buried in, because I'm not fucking around with that.)

If you have the strength to drive your car, or call a taxi, or wait at a bus stop, or walk your sorry ass to a physical space other than the one you live in, then you have the strength to put on some goddamn pants. You know what? Even leggings. Leggings are still better than pajamas. At least leggings say to the world, "I am trying! I got dressed! I'm just not very good at it, and I probably have a very high opinion of the shape of my own butt!" Which, you know, is still a message, so it's okay. It's not a message I particularly want to receive, but taste is relative. Pajamas are not.

They totally asked to be hackedIRL

Saw this today:

and I have to say, with that tagline so conveniently placed after an expanse of blank space, they are just begging to be trolled. Sadly, I possess neither a modicum of drive or a can of spray paint, so I'll just settle for photoshopping some of the many possibilities.

Feel free to steal the original image and be creative - just upload it in the comments section so I can see!

Fake People Crushes

I read "Your Weirdest Crushes" on Jezebel Groupthink today and it reminded me of all the irrational celebrity/fictional character crushes I've had in my life, so I decided to blog them.

 Don't let me be alone in my public shame though. Comment with your weirdest obsessions with fake people!

First up, all my ludicrous childhood crushes on fake people:

Age 4 - Michelangelo from TMNT

Cool action hero on the most violent TV show I was allowed to watch? Check. Good sense of humor (for a turtle)? Check. And... most importantly of all... This dude always had pizza, which as any 4 year old knows, is the best food ever.








Age 5 - Wolverine from X-Men

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that my generation's cartoons were a gazillion bajillion times better than the crap today's youth is watching. Case in point? Wolverine, a la 90's Saturday morning cartoons. Not really a crush because he's literally hundreds of years old, but in first grade, I used to tell people he was my dad.




Age 5 - Gambit from X-Men

This one was a legitimate crush. In my first-grade fantasy world, Wolverine was my dad and Gambit was my boyfriend. (I was also best friends with Rogue and Storm, even tough they were older, because fuck Jubilee. She's practically the X-Men equivalent of a Squib.)






Age 6 - Batman from, well, Batman

Can you tell I grew up with brothers? I loved 90s-cartoon-version Batman. In my fantasy, we used to make fun of Robin behind his back while Alfred made us chocolate-chip french toast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.






Age 7 - Speed Racer (Cartoon version)

Ok, honestly? His eyelashes were longer than his girlfriend's, but so what? He had an awesome car and a PET MONKEY.






Age 8 - Half of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

 Look, I was 8. I couldn't make up my mind on just ONE power Ranger to commit myself to obsessing over for the entirety of second grade! Tommy was always my fave, but sometimes you just need to mix it up. For the record, I never liked Jason (Red Ranger). He was just too... frat boy.




Age 10 - This guy from "Out of the Box"

Apparently his name is Tony, and apparently he has only gotten better looking with age. All I know is, he was the solitary reason I would "begrudgingly" let my little brother put "Out of the Box" on TV even though it was my turn to pick.






Age 12 - Bran from The Dark is Rising Sequence

He was a book character not well-known or popular enough to generate much fan-art, so I'll just tell you he was an Albino Welsh teenager on a magical Arthurian quest... ok NOW it sounds weird, doesn't it?


Age 13 - All of Hanson... and their Canadian counterparts, The Moffatts

I was 13, okay? At least they were real people and not cartoon characters!

Age 14 - Sirius Black and Remus Lupin (the book versions, obvs)

Unlike a lot of people I knew, I never bothered having crushes on any of the characters that were my own age. I mean seriously, who is Cedric Diggory next to an escaped convict, amirite?






Age 15 - Seto Kaiba, Marik Ishtar, and Yami Bakura from Yu-Gi-Oh

 So this was definitely a relapse into crushing on cartoon characters, but whatever. I was in high school during the height of the anime-takeover of US teen pop culture, or at least that is what I will tell them if I ever get called in for a psych evaluation.




Age 15 - Brock from Pokemon

I am not proud of this. In my defense, I suppose I needed a reason to watch Pokemon as a 15-year-old girl, and at the time this seemed better than just admitting I thought it was kind of cool. AT THE TIME.







And I won't lie and say my crushes on fake people stopped when I grew up. Here are some examples from my late teens through present day of completely weird celebrity/fictional character crushes:

Severus Snape

You know what? Any version. Book version, movie version, that one awesome hogwarts-was-real-in-this-dream-I-had  version... I don't even feel (that much) shame. This guy was smart, funny, sarcastic, good-hearted, and really great with comebacks. Really his fatal flaw is not existing in real life.





Gale from the Hunger Games (book version)

This guy is badass, okay? I just can't believe they let Miley Cyrus' boyfriend play him in the movies. Worst casting choice ever.










Samwell Tarly from Game of Thrones

OK, so he's no Kit Harrington, but he is a genuinely nice guy and he doesn't pretend to be anything he isn't... like brave, or physically fit. So you know what? I think he's so endearing it makes him cute.





Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones

What he lacks in height he makes up for in pure wit. Besides, I like a man who knows how to drink like one. I do kind of hope that Bronn comes with the deal too, though.





And rounding out the Game of Thrones category...
Natalie Dormer as Margaery Tyrell/Anne Boleyn

I know a few people who don't care for her, and I don't get it. Something about her perpetually crooked smile just gets me like <3






So there you have my weird fictional character crushes. I mean obviously I also <3 Jon Snow from GOT but who doesn't?

What completely non-existent people have you adored?

Google Tried to Warn Us

In drinking years, I belong to AARP

So I'm hungover today. I fail at not drinking, although to be fair:

1) It wasn't even that much
2) I drank a lot of water in between
3) It was Saturday

So this morning my head was like "You need to keep sleeping BUT I'm going to hurt so you can't, haha!"

And then I was like "Well, fuck you then, I'm going to take some Advil," but my stomach was like "Not if you want to keep it down" and I knew it meant it, so I just had bacon instead. But then my stomach was like "I'm hungry/I'm full/Drink juice/Ack, nono not juice!" and honestly it's just a little ridiculous.

I think they need to lower the legal drinking age to 18 or 19, and I don't care about all the "real" reasons people always cite when debating the point. It needs to be a thing because face it, your years of being able to drink-drink are pretty limited. It would be like if you had to be 30 before you could play professional football - your peak's been wasted. Just like athletes set their career records in their 20s (at least, I assume they do, honestly I don't care about sports so I'm not sure) all of your crazy drinking stories happen when you're young. Once you pass 25, you will never again drink from a funnel or a comically oversized boot glass, shotgun a warm Heineken (so at least there is that silver lining), or even be able to hear the word "fireline" without instantly throwing up in your mouth.

After 25, You'll play beirut (beer pong for those of you that are doing it wrong) in a desperate attempt at a college throwback, and secretly dump most of the beer into the bushes when no one is looking. You'll have to take shots in two gulps and then rub your stomach for ten minutes before even thinking about taking another sip of your beer. You'll buy a 30-rack of beer when your friends come over, only to discover 22 cans of it still sitting on your back porch when you dig out the snow shovels 7 months later. You'll actually have the same bottle of whiskey in your house for so long it starts to taste better eventually. Or maybe you won't do any of those things, but I do and this isn't really your blog anyway, is it?

When I was somewhere around 22, the hubby (then bf) and I split a bottle of absinthe with maybe three or four friends, and we killed it by 10am the next day with the old hair of the dog shot. Now I can't even look at a bottle of that green shit in the liquor store without wanting to vomit and take a nap (not simultaneously, that would be dangerous - I know this because the mandatory "welcome to college, please don't die this semester" freshman class told me so).

Now it's like, someone mentions that whole "hair of the dog" thing and I'm like "omg are you joking? I am never drinking again" which is always completely 100% true. It's just that sometimes, "again" just means "today".

It's hard to accept being drinking-old though, especially when I'm still young for all other purposes. Sometimes I still buy a six-pack of beer thinking I'm going to drink it all on my day off, and instead I watch Netflix and then go to bed at 11. I drink nothing but bottled water all day, or, if I'm feeling adventurous and the expiration date is approaching, maybe I'll go wild and have a glass of milk.

I remember meeting people who were in their mid-20s to early 30s when I was 22 (I feel like I was 22 for like 5 years, is that weird? It's like when I tell stories about when I was a kid and in every single one I'm like "so I was like 11, and...") and anyway, they would tell me how they don't really party anymore, and I'd think they were boring people who didn't like to have fun. I thought of my drinking future in the exact same way that I thought about Disney World when I was a kid, like "Wow, I really hope that when I'm older I will still want to go to Disney World... I hope I don't decide it's lame and only for little kids," except it was more like "I hope when I'm nearing thirty I still think it's fun to play Asshole until I pass out in my chair... I hope I don't decide it's lame and only for college kids" And all I can say in response to that is "well, at least I still do want to go to Disney World."

Maybe the saddest part is that just when I've finally retained knowledge of the rules to drinking card games into the next day, I'm at the stage of my life where being the one that gets fucked by the table actually is kind of a bad thing. (If you didn't get that reference, you probably never played cards with a joker as the 5 of hearts on a coffee table with Jack Daniels ripples in it, and you have no idea what you missed out on.)

I don't know exactly when it happened, but sometime after my 25th birthday, "going out for a few beers" actually became a literal thing and not a downplayed euphemism for getting shitfaced. Sometimes, when you're young, "a few" means "a lot" - usually on the same days that "again" means "today".

I just realized this blog is full of vomit references and random tangents but it is about drinking, so I think it's perfectly appropriate and I'm not changing it. Also, I'm lazy. You're lucky I blogged at all. I pretty much only bothered because my Chromebook was already on my living room couch and the Game of Thrones facebook game wouldn't load.

I think there's also a possibility that I'm being pessimistic about my drinking abilities because I was up until 5am and slept on a couch with my earrings still on, because none of this in any way diminishes my desire to go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans next year.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I am officially drinking-old, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to drinking-retire. I think I'm up for the beerquivalent of bagging groceries in my old-man orthopedic shoes ten hours a week for something to do. Maybe I'll even wink at the cute vodka bottle working the checkout register.

I'll probably blog more, since I'm "quitting" drinking

I know I'm the most sporadic blogger in history (or at least, you know, in my social circle - because non-bloggers are not sporadic, and all my friends either don't blog or blog practically every damn day) but I do have an excuse. See, most of the time, I'm too busy actually doing things to write about them. Like, I would love to tell you some of my awful/awesome drinking stories, but I'm usually to busy creating another one to bother. That's all about to change (for awhile)!

The hubby and I have decided to "quit" drinking for a few months. There are a few reasons for this, and some of them are responsible ones, so let's get those out of the way first:

1) To lose some weight - seriously, on weekends beer probably represents half my caloric intake, and since the other half comes from the buffalo wild wings I eat with the beer, this can only help.

2) To save some money - Duh, we need to save money to go to New Orleans (Hoping for Mardi Gras!) and/or Las Vegas (again, because why not?) so we can drink some more. There's logic in there soomewhere, yes? I just feel like Bourbon St would be more fun than Boylston, Massachusetts to drink at.

And then there's the not-so-responsible reason: tolerance break! Apparently there's science behind the whole quit-for-a-few-months, become-a-cheap-date-again thing. Something about enzymes building up in the liver. Wikipedia says it works, and I'm trusting the guys who co-wrote every single college paper I've ever done.

So those are my reasons, and the result is more free time, and it's twofold: One, I won't be going out as often so I'll be home and probably on my computer, and two, I won't be sleeping off hangovers every Sunday so I'll probably get up before most restaurants stop serving breakfast. I mean, yeah, IHOP, Denny's and Cracker Barrel serve breakfast all day, but 1) There's no way any sober person ever is going to go to Denny's, and 2) I don't care what time it is, if it's my first meal of the day, it's breakfast time. Bring me some bacon and eggs and to hell with your dinner specials!

So anyway, this all sounds pretty solid, right? So why did I put "quit" in parentheses? BECAUSE, I'm still 20-something years old and where the hell else can 20-somethings meet up with friends after work besides  a bar? I'm not going to suddenly become antisocial just because I'm cutting back (although apparently that is what happens to some people). I'm just going to employ the tactic I should be using every time I go out: One glass of beer, followed by one glass of water. Keeps the calories down and keeps me hydrated, so win-win, right?

According to internet lore/annoying advice from know-it-alls, I should be doing this all the time to prevent hangovers, but at the same time, I feel like a hangover is your body's way of telling you you're a fucking tool, and who am I to shut my body down when it wants to take a stand about something? Also, no one wants to be that lame-ass at the bar ordering free fucking waters from a harried bartender who's probably already thinking of spitting in your drink because they're pissed off that they're working on a Saturday night while you and all your annoying friends are still trying to make "epic fail" a verb.

So I guess what I'm saying is I could (but won't, without significant bribing) be a DD for a while. And I'll probably blog more (which isn't saying much, really).

In the meantime, if you're having Stina-withdrawal (admit it, you are), there are always a couple of options for you:

1) buy me a beer
2) buy me a beer
3) Buy me a beer somewhere - if I'm not spending the money, it doesn't count, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't trust people with mustaches: a personal study in the irrational

We're all familiar with the 5-second rule, right? Germs take 5 seconds to latch on to food when it's dropped on the floor... maybe they move slow, or maybe they're just courteous and rule-abiding, like in this picture my friend showed me recently:

I'm not a believer in the 5-second rule myself, but I evidently share with my brother the similarly irrational belief that my breath is antiseptic, because if I drop something on the floor, I immediately pick it up and blow on it. Although in my case, my breath might actually be antiseptic, but only on Saturday nights - fine, selected Thursdays and Fridays, too. (Do you see what I did there?)

It doesn't end there, though. There are several completely irrational things that I at least sort of believe. I'm going to share them with you, but before you judge me, ask yourself how many times you've jinxed someone into owing you a coke you full well know they're never going to deliver. And I'm not even going to ask about all your elementary school cootie shots - we're going to leave those in the past, where they belong.

I don't trust people with mustaches. In my personal experience, everyone with a mustache either looks like a serial killer, a dirty old man, or at the very least someone possessing an unhealthy obsession with the Olsen twins. Now, if you yourself are a mustached gent (or lady) please be aware that I'm not saying that you are any of those things. I'm just saying you look like one of those things.

You know how your car makes all kinds of weird noises at different times in its life? For most of those noises, I have pretty much the same fix... Strange clunking sound that could be anything from stuff rattling around in the trunk to the wheel falling off? Turn up the radio. Odd beeping noise that sounds like probably all the doors are open and/or the car is about to self-destruct? Turn up the radio. Insistent crackling sound accompanied by smoke billowing out from the fuse box? Turn up the radio and roll the window down. But when that noise sounds even the tiniest bit like a buzzing sound? BEE IN THE CAR, hooooly crap, OH MY FUCK, there's a BEE in my CAR! Pull over! Abort! Just jump out, let the car go, it's not worth it, the bee can have it, hellooooo 911, Bee in the fucking CAR!! ... oh hold up, sorry, it was just my phone vibrating. My bad.

Some of you may know that I have been being told for 3 years now that I need to get my wisdom teeth removed. You will likely also know then, that this is never going to happen. Firstly, I've had a cavity filled without Novocaine and IF YOU THINK YOU ARE GETTING YOUR STUPID DRILL ANYWHERE NEAR MY FACE, you vile white-coated fiend, you've got another thing coming! So then my dentist and all of you rational people out there are like, "Well, why don't you just have them put you under, then?" and that brings me to my next irrational belief: if you think that's such a good idea then you do it, and we'll see who's on the front page of failblog tomorrow with Sharpie genitalia all over their face. (Do I mean pictures of genitalia drawn with Sharpie markers, or do I mean actual genitalia belonging to a Sharpie marker? You'll always wonder that now.)

In a similar medical vein (ha) I have a weird relationship with the doctor's office. It's like, first of all, I hate going to the doctor, because I'm a fairly sane human being and the doctor's office sucks once you're too old to get free lollipops there (I think I just now uncovered the secret evil conspiracy between doctors and dentists). The thing is, I also know that if I have an appointment, by the time I get there, absolutely nothing will be wrong with me. I could be vomiting frogs on the way there, but by the time I get in the exam room, I'm miraculously cured. If I decide to tough it out and refuse to make an appointment though, I will just get sicker by the day until I cave, make an appointment, and get miraculously healed as soon as the nurse calls my name. Now my doctor probably thinks I'm a hypochondriac, but the truth is that I really did have bacterial meningitis yesterday. I think I may have had a touch of West Nile, too.

The other thing I've noticed is that night time, in general, is a lot scarier than daytime when it comes to irrational fears. Like if I hear footsteps on my front porch in the daytime, I'm like, "Yay! Mail's here. What wonderful mystery item did I and my antiseptic breath order on amazon last night?!" but if the footsteps are at night there is clearly a serial killer outside my house. So what if it's only 6:30 and my husband is due home any moment? It's dark out, a serial killer is the only plausible explanation. It's fine though, I actually have a foolproof serial-killer survival tactic. It works on werewolves, vampires, and most other imaginary predators of the night, too: I lie on the bed, perfectly still, with all four limbs and all extremities completely on the bed (this is crucial) and pretend to be asleep. The only downside to this tactic is that it unfortunately does not work on bees.

Not every one of my exclusively-nighttime irrational beliefs is a fear, though. Take my alarm clock. (I'm not afraid of it, I just deeply and inexorably loathe it. Big difference.) If I wake up in the middle of the night, I absolutely will not look at my clock to see what time it is. The reason for this is that I wholeheartedly believe that if I don't look at it, I can go back to sleep for like, six more hours, but if I do check the time, it is suddenly going to become twenty minutes before the alarm's going to go off anyway. The worst part is that I will probably still go for the instant gratification of going back to sleep anyway, and be rewarded with a groggy, walking-dead outlook for the rest of the day, when I wake up at exactly the wrong stage of REM sleep or whatever.

My alarm clock is actually not the only non-sentient element of my life that conspires against me, though. Take snow, for example. If a snowstorm is coming when I have to go to work the next day, they will predict 5-10 feet of snow (all those computers, and they still give as wide a range as Charter Communications does when your internet is down) and possibly a tornado, or maybe locusts. And I will be like, "Wow, there is no way they're going to open the library tomorrow! I'm going to the bar!" (because I just love the way the sun reflecting of all that snow affects my hangover). The next day, of course, it will be sunny and unseasonably warm, with not a snowflake in sight, and I will spend the whole work day contemplating whether to trade my soul for a BLT or a McDouble. If, on the other hand, a snowstorm is coming the day before I need to drive or fly somewhere that I actually want to go, they will call for a coating to an inch, and we will get 3 feet of solid ice. This brings me to my irrational belief in this whole thing (because the rest of this paragraph is just solid factual information): I look at the weather forecast every day, even though, regardless of what it says, I am just going to believe that the weather will do the exact opposite of what I want it to do. I've tried tricking it, but it knows better than to buy into "Oh no, but if work is cancelled tomorrow, then no one can download porn in the library, and what a travesty that would be!"

Just when I've gotten to that part of my blog where you're like "Hm, nope, I don't think I can identify with her after all, she's got some pretty weird shit going on in her head" (admit it, it's your favorite part), I'm going to circle around and come back to things that I am not alone in irrationally believing: things that, like the 5-second rule, are met with a worldwide attitude that "I don't know, it could be true, let's not chance it just in case". 

Okay, I've probably stepped on tons of cracks, and my mother's back is still fully intact, but the thing is, I stepped on those cracks without noticing, and deliberately stepping on a crack is a whole different animal, right? Like, if I'm mindful of the surface I'm walking on, I will totally avoid the cracks, because what if? Besides, even if that myth isn't true, there is the whole "the floor is lava" thing that could suddenly become real at any minute, if I open a space-time rift by stepping on the line between tiles at Market Basket. (For some reason, I never picture this end-times scenario happening anywhere else).

I don't always have birthday cake, and I don't always have candles, and I don't always make a wish even if I do have candles, but WHEN I DO all of those things, I never, ever tell anyone what my wish was. You know why? Because at my fourth birthday party, amidst more My Little Pony-themed shit than you can even imagine, I blew out my candles and proudly announced that I'd wished for a real pony. I am still waiting. What I should have done is wish-and-tell to be grounded, but at that time I still legitimately believed there was a chance I could grow up to be a princess, so my logical reasoning skills were clearly not fully developed.

I also don't walk under ladders, not because I think it's bad luck in some abstract sense, but because that's just a stupid thing to do generally. In fact, if you walk under a ladder and it or an object falls on you, it's not even bad luck, it's just the price you pay for being a moron. Breaking mirrors, though? Well, I dropped a little mirror I was using for a craft project once and thought nothing of it when it broke, but guess how many years I've been working at the library?

I'm not really sure how I feel about the whole knock on wood thing, so I compromise. If I say something that seems like it could be jinxed just for having said it, I knock on the closest object that is either made of wood, or covered in laminate that has a fake wood grain on it. (In retrospect, yet another way I could have salvaged that pony wish).

There's a lot of irrational stuff out there that I never really bought into, believe it or not. Like I guess there is some kind of thing where if something-or-other happens, you're supposed to throw salt over your shoulder? I don't know what the myth is, but I feel like whatever you're avoiding can't be any worse than stepping on a salt-covered floor with bare feet. And that thing about your ears ringing means someone is talking about you? (Or is it itching?) There is no way that could be true, or every single person from the People of Walmart calendar would be at the doctor's complaining about their ears every day. Also, what about celebrities? Is there a minute ever that someone, somewhere isn't talking about Lady Gaga or breaking up with Taylor Swift? Wouldn't their ears always bother them? Similarly, a shiver means someone's walking on your grave? I shiver all the fucking time, and I am so not going to be buried anywhere, because hello, serial killers and bees can still find you as long as it's dark, and I'm not completely ruling out the zombie thing yet.