Friday Failure

So I totally failed at reading this week. Which explains why Friday went by and there was no post about books. I really intended to finish my book, and at first, I was like "YAY BOOK I LOVE THIS BOOK" and then "YAY ANOTHER BOOK! I LOVE THIS BOOK TOO!" and then "MAYBE I SHOULD FINISH HARRY POTTER INSTEAD OF STARTING TWO NEW BOOKS" combined with "INTERNET FOREVER!!" and needless to say I am like 30 pages into the book I was going to talk about. So no dice for this week. And now I'm getting yelled at so I can't even finish this. SIGH.

Adventures with Spike - Bath Time

This post is brought to you by allergies.

So I gave my dog a bath today because he was itchy as hell. Now, Spike LOVES baths. Bath time with Spike consists of him trying to escape while wondering why I'm being so mean to him.

Why are you doing this to me? I thought you loved me!

Now, I always try to make things exciting by talking in a high pitched voice like this is the most fun thing I have ever done, ever as I'm pouring the warm water over him. "WHEEEEEEEEE!!!!!! BATH TIIIIIIIIIIIIME!!!!!!!!!! BAAAAAAAAAATH TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMEEEEEEEEEEEEE! WE LOOOOOOOOOOOOVE BATH TIME, YES WE DO, YES WE DO!!!! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Normally that would cause Spike to go into a wiggly, flaily mess, except I'm pretty sure that makes it worse in the tub, because he'll look up at me like he's going to die the more excited I get. 

Then comes time for the soap. To me, this would be the best time of bath time, because it's like a massage, right? And dogs love being patted. Petted? Pat? Whatever. So I get the soap in my hand (with a little exclamation like "Ooooooo, it's sooooap tiiiiiiiiiiiime!!!!!!1") and I start scrubbing and scratching my dog, paying special attention to the places I know he loves being scratched. I've stopped with the excited voice by this point, but I still talk to him because they say your voice soothes your dog. Not during bath time.

Is this what Chinese Water Torture is like?

Poor dog. Of course I had to pile the suds on his head, too. 

When it's finally rinsing suds time, Spike has already tried to surreptitiously escape whenever I am not looking directly at him about 20 times, without fail. He moves really slowly, like I can't see him out of the corner of my eye if he moves slow enough. First, he inches to the corner of the tub. The corner is the place where he can squeeze out the easiest, you see. Then, ever so carefully, he lifts one foot and places it on the edge of the tub, all the while sneaking glances at me to make sure I'm not watching. Usually I stop him at this point, but if I don't, he'll put the second paw up there on the edge, preparing to jump. Note that he does this even if my back is turned and I am not looking at him at all. 

After he's been rinsed and dried, he'll bounce out of the tub as quickly as possible, only to shake and drench the entire bathroom. He looks to damp and pathetic and miserable at this point. 

But once he gets let out, he turns into a flailing, flopping, blurry mess.

The other blurry thing in the back there is my puppy. He's really excited.

Drying off?

Or perhaps attempting to create a rift in the space-time continuum?

Note that this was taken ten minutes after the previous ones. Yeah, he was still going.

He tears around the house like that for a good 30 minutes with a manic look I was unable to capture in the flailiness, rubbing himself on the floor, towel, and anything you don't want him to, such as your clothes, your dry-clean only blanket, and your bedsheets. Once you've laughed yourself to tears and screamed at him to get off your bed, he finally settles down with a bone or some other toy to take his aggression over the whole bath betrayal out. 

But every once and a while, I catch him walking by a low mirror after he's gotten a bath, only to pause and take a second glance, like "Damn, that's a FINE lookin dog right there."

Warning: Rambling Ahead (but there is a point!)

So I promised myself I wouldn't blog until there was something positive in my life for me to talk about. Well... there isn't really much. Nothing of note anyway. I mean I have electricity and a roof over my head but those who have those things aren't interested in hearing about that and those who don't wouldn't want to hear about it, so I can't talk about that.

Instead of continuing to complain like the whiny bitch I have apparently turned into lately, I decided I would go to my old stand-by -- books.

When I was a kid, I didn't have very many friends. Not because I wasn't a social child, but because I went to school in one city and lived in another, thereby making it pretty difficult to hang out at people's houses or go to parties or whatever. And where I lived, in a mobile home park, my neighbors were an old woman, an old man, a gay couple and a lesbian woman. Oh, and an old man who liked to wear women's panties but we didn't talk to him. All adults. And, let's face it, normal adults don't want to hang out with kids. Panty guy might have wanted to -- his penchant for wearing women's underwear was the smallest of his quirks -- but for all intents and purposes, I didn't have companions when I was growing up. None, that is, except my dog and my books.

I started reading at an early age; my mom doesn't remember how old I was, but she loves to tell the story of me hanging over her shoulder, reading her grown-up book out loud, speaking words I had never seen or heard in my life. And once I started reading, I never stopped. I always was advanced in the literature department, reading at a twelfth grade level by the end of elementary school. In kindergarten, when the teachers and volunteer parents would be reading to the students, I would be up there reading to my own group of kids right along with the adults.

Needless to say, reading offered an escape from boredom, loneliness, family troubles, money troubles, etc. when I was a child. One particular notable example comes in the form of seven little books that compose the Harry Potter series. Perhaps you've heard of it. I felt I could really relate to Harry -- we were both ten-going-on-eleven, both lonely, both not in the happiest of families (a bit of an understatement when referring to the Dursleys, but the comparison still stands), and so on. Left alone with my thoughts, I was able to escape into the magical world of Hogwarts. As Harry and the rest of the clan grew up, I grew up right along with them, year after year. When I graduated high school, Harry left Hogwarts and went on his final adventure. Even if I was just a mere Muggle, the Harry Potter characters and storyline were relatable, offering me a distraction from my daily life.

And it still does to this day, even though nowadays I'm more likely to reach for my phone to text my best friend when I need a restoration of sanity. I won't tell you how many times I've reread the series or the individual books (I'm rereading the seventh one right now), mostly because I have no idea myself. Probably somewhere in the hundreds. Yes, hundredS. But I hadn't revisited them in a long time. I had forgotten what it was like to read for pleasure, as I never get a chance during the semester due to the sheer amount of workload I have from all my classes. I can't keep up with my assigned reading, much less additional reading. Occasionally over the summer, I'd read a book or two, but I've literally read every single book in my house except maybe one or two which don't hold my attention (Bill Clinton's "My Life," I will conquer you someday) or which I'm not interested in, so when given the choice between INTERNET FOREVER! and reread Clan of the Cave Bear for the umpteenth time, I'd go for the internet.

Recently, though, I had the pleasure of being able to purchase four books (which I totally never should have bought and can't afford but oh well, I've already read three of them and most of the fourth so why return them now, right?) by Stephen King, who, by the way, is my favorite author ever. Now, King isn't the best writer in the whole world -- I doubt he's going to be winning any Pulitzer prizes or anything -- but he can weave together a story like very few can. He walks the line perfectly between the natural and the supernatural, grounding his stories in reality but allowing enough imagination to seep in that it almost seems plausible. I'm a skeptic by nature, so this balance is essential for me; for a novel to be implausible and grounded mostly in the supernatural, it has to be well-written. The Shack by William P. Young comes to mind. Wholly supernatural, horridly written. I hated it.

My love for Stephen King is evident in the number of books I own and have read of his. I own about sixteen books of his, which is more than twice the number of books that I own from any other author (well, technically I own fifteen, but my friend let me read one of his books and then called me a slut and stopped talking to me so I think that means it's mine now, right?), and I've read probably... well, less than that. Probably like fifteen, because I haven't read the two Dark Tower books I own yet but I read Carrie and I don't own that. But, again, that is way more books than any other author. OH and if you want to count short stories, then you subtract one book (because it is a short story collection) and add *counts* fourteen stories. So almost THIRTY THINGS! That is a lot of things. I've also seen four of his movies because usually his movies really suck, but The Shining, Misery (which I haven't read), The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption which is the greatest movie of all time but I totally haven't read the short story and it makes me a sad panda, those are all good movies.

Anyway, the point of this is, I have a huge stack of books in my to-read pile, ranging from re-reads to "I need to finish this damn book already" to books my best friend's mom gave me which I have no idea if I'll enjoy or not. And if there's one thing I get excited talking about, it's books. So to motivate myself to post, and to give myself something to look forward to, which I think I really need right now, I'm going to try, at least once a week, to write a book post. I have enough to keep me going for a while, and I can generally finish a book in a week at most. Even The Stand, once I finally got going with it, took me less than a week (it's about a 1200 page book). I polished off every single Harry Potter book in one day, and reread it a second time in about three. The only time I have difficulty finishing a book is if I'm busy, like during the semester, or if I hate it, like with Pride and Prejudice or something like that. So we'll see how well this works out. I'm hoping to get one done on Friday, and I think if I start rereading my book (One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of my favorites) tonight, I should be able to finish it by then even though it's complex and you have to pay attention. Or maybe I'll reread Pet Sematary because that book is astounding. Or maybe... actually this post is long enough so I'll just stop now.

/awkward

Humidity

What the fuck, San Diego?

Judging by my phone's weather app, it's currently 86 degrees (at 11 in the morning) and 51% humidity. FIFTY-ONE PERCENT. WHAT IS THIS.

"This" is abnormally high humidity, in case you couldn't tell. It is miserable. Last night it even started raining. RAINING. In the summer. IN THE DESERT. This is just not right. I mean, it was cool because we got that half-sun half-rain thing that almost never happens in winter so there was a rainbow, and rainbows are pretty and awesome, and it was one of those really well-formed and clear ones, but the point stands that walking outside in that rain to see the rainbow was totally almost not worth it because it felt like I walked outside into a sticky, asphalt-smelling swamp. I think summer rain smells terrible normally, like a humid nasty mess, but they recently paved my street so that strong, asphalt-y smell came up too and it was just awful. Plus, like I said, I felt like I was walking into a wall of warm water.

But, see, warm water doesn't bother me. I cannot take cold showers. I last about two minutes in them before I am like GET ME OUT NOW and then I never get clean and that's just not fun. I can handle lukewarm showers but I am pretty miserable the whole time. I have to have at least a warm shower, preferably a hot shower. Yes, even if it's 113 outside. Yes, I have taken a hot shower in these conditions. Twice. Something about humidity though, it's not anything like just plain old warm water. It's like sweat. It's exactly like some fat old hairy man sweated up in the sky and now it's all up in my atmosphere. And I do NOT find that okay.

Damn You, Leon Redbone

I am so lazy lately. Like, I'm sleepy at 9 or 10 pm, exhausted by 11, delirious by midnight. Then when I wake up, I am tired until around noon. Which, I mean, it's summer, so it's not that bad... except I still have shit to get done. For example, today, I need to clean up outside because my puppy, for some reason, has developed a very recent grudge against potted plants and has ripped two pots completely to shreds. I also have to chop up a bunch of leafy produce for my bunnies' and guinea pig's salads, figure out something to make for dinner next week, go grocery shopping, marinate some shrimp, cook dinner, separate my clothes into darks and lights for laundry, do the laundry, etc. And it is fucking FRIDAY. So I should be all energetic and whatnot and go party tonight except I am 20 so I can't do anything, and I haven't even taken a shower and it's one in the fucking afternoon. And I am sitting here in my PJs eating Cheez-its. I slept until 10:30 and from that time until now, the only productive thing I have done is probably gone to the bathroom once.

In other words, this song describes my life recently:

Even his voice makes me want to lay down and be lazy. Which is really very counterproductive.