Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Cat farts.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May you live to regret your breakfast.

Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "mostly".
¤ Usage: "They mostly come out at night.  Mostly."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Deviations: Most any qualifying word you can use in a sentence, and then repeat afterwards for extra emphasis.  Eg: "probably," "sometimes," and so on.
¤ Origin: Newt's famous line in Aliens.
¤ Notes: Cribbed from Cartman who cribbed it from Aliens, this word and its deviations spice up most any conversation.  Malaya and I have developed it to a science, where one of us will speak a viable sentence, and then after a momentary pause we'll both repeat the repeatable word in almost perfect harmony.  Yes, we realize how sickeningly cutesy this is. 

The best usage yet? When I said, after we saw the results of this boxing match: "Who kicked Oscar de la Hoya's ass tonight?
*pause*
*M and F speak together*
"Mosley." -- September 18, 2003

I'll talk more about Sunday and shopping and such down below, after this short and relatively pointless news item.

She and Dusty are getting along better and better.  They have slept leaning on each other a few times, but only when one or the other of them have been on my or Malaya's lap. They often end up on the couch together, but a few feet apart, and sooner or later Dusty always starts meowing and walks over to Jinx and starts licking her, and usually ends up biting and then licking some more, and so on.  All while doing his very loud voiced yowlings.

Jinx endures the experience in silence, except when Dusty gets too carried away and bites her too hard, when she'll fight back or flee.  We have no idea what's going on in Dusty's head, but it's some sort of dominance thing, obviously, and they need to work it out between them, since humans aren't always here to make them behave. Plus it's funny to watch and no one gets hurt, so we're not about to interfere. We paid good money for these mangy felines, and we are not about to pass up entertainment for our money.

Speaking of bite-happy felines...

¤ Roy, the brunette half of the famous, unambiguously-gay tiger boys Sigfried and Roy, was mauled by a big damn white tiger during a show over the weekend, and has been in the hospital in critical but stable condition ever since.

The seven-year-old male tiger grabbed the performer's forearm about halfway into the Friday night show at the Mirage hotel-casino, witnesses said. When Horn tried to fend the tiger off with his microphone -- hitting the animal in the face and saying "no, no" -- it lunged and bit him on the neck and dragged him offstage, causing massive bleeding, they said.

Handlers sprayed the tiger with a fire extinguisher to separate the animal from Roy, who was conscious when he was rushed from the hotel to undergo about two hours of surgery.

"The doctors are encouraged that he will recover, but it will be several days until the full extent of his injury is known," Kirvin said in an interview on Saturday.

There are dozens of articles about this and most of them give some history of the flamboyant duo. Or you can check out their timeline on Rotten.com.  I had no idea they'd been working together for so long, since the damn 50's, and that they'd never had any animal-related injuries.

The first reports about the mauling said that it was the first time they'd had that tiger on stage, so I was thinking, "Nice training, guys."  Later articles made clear that that was just a performance piece, and that they'd been working with the tiger for years.  So there's really no telling why it got pissed off that night.  Bad tuna?

I would say more, but I don't have any real opinion about this. It's a shame that wild animals like tigers have to live in captivity, but then again, people are so busy encroaching on their territory and killing them off in the wild that it's captivity or extinction. And if they're going to be in captivity, they might as well learn to do some entertaining tricks for our amusement to earn their keep.

Sigfried and Roy treated them well, giving them good food and gentle treatment and nice yards to roam around in, when they weren't humiliating them on stage.  Sleeping in the beds of the gayest Las Vegasite since Liberace beats being stuck in a chain link fence pen in some Joe Bob's backyard zoo, or living in a damn bedroom in the projects.

Our first destination was the Sun Coast Mall, in Concord.  It's a mall like most any mall; junk food, sunglasses kiosks, sporting good stores, shoe stores, women's clothing stores, etc. We browsed for a while, growing steadily hungrier, and finally settled upon a Cinnabon for a snack.

Cinnabon, if you've somehow avoided them to this point in your life, is a very sweet cinnamon roll that's just about drowned in a viscous, gravy-like sugary syrup.  Basically liquid icing.  You can get them in several sizes and with or without pecans on top.  I had eaten one in my life, at the San Diego airport some years ago when I was dropped off for my flight, and only found out it was delayed several hours once I was alone at the airport with my ride already having departed.  I had to eat something, Cinnabons smell hella-tasty, and there I was.  I got the pecan type, paying some ludicrous airport price for the privilege, and ate most of it.  I couldn't manage the middle, where the syrup stuff had turned the donut into a sort of soggy Twinkie.  It was tasty, in an overpowering sort of way, but at the same time I hated myself for eating it.

A regular donut makes me feel a bit guilty, but I can get over it. Same with a cookie or (small) slice of pie or ice cream or a soda or whatever.  I don't like that I have the weakness of a sweet tooth and eat such things on occasion, but oh well.  I'm sure to get a zit or two the next day on my forehead, as I always do after I eat too much sugar, but I look at that as a fair penance to pay for my dietary lapse.

A Cinnabon is a step up in guilt though, where I am just disgusted with myself for that sort of an indulgence, in no small part since I even like them very much.  Just the cinnamon roll is too much sweet for me, and when you consider that it's a large cinnamon roll, and one that's simply drowned in the sugar creme icing stuff... ugh.

Anyway, on Saturday at the mall I was disgusted with myself for wanting one, disgusted with myself for eating one, and already feeling cranky since I hadn't slept very well and was hungry.  I got snappy about it when the woefully-flimsy plastic forks they stocked proved inadequate for eating the thing, and the fact that it's basically marinated in liquid sugar makes it infeasible to eat with your hands.  Malaya got annoyed at me being bitchy, I got annoyed at her being annoyed, and she got pouty and withdrew from the conversation.

So I'm sitting there picking at this shitabon I hated myself for eating in the first place, and hating myself more for each bite of it I took, not least because I thought it tasted pretty good, other than the icing goo, meanwhile Malaya is sitting back looking off to the side, mad at me, and I'm mad at myself and mad at her for being weak and letting herself get upset with me when I was being a dope for a few minutes.  And so on.

I ended up eating about 2/3 of it, and feeling a little better with some sustenance in me, even if it was all empty calories.  We walked around the mall for another hour or so, not talking much, but eventually started to hold hands again and

I realize that I have some weird issues about shitty food.  It bothers me when I eat it, and when people I care about eat it.  Malaya has been on a 1200 calories or less diet for a couple of months, and is steadily losing a pound or more a week.  Her diet has changed since I came to live here, and while she's glad to be eating far less meat and more veggies and other healthy stuff, she still gets cravings for beef and chicken and piggy from time to time.  Usually in fast food form, like a cheeseburger or hot dog, and while I know that 99% of people eat that stuff every day and think nothing of it, I get really annoyed at her eating it.

I don't know why it bothers me.  It's not like she's going to have a heart attack from it right then, and she exercises and eats right enough of the time to overcome most of the health detriments from that sort of food.  Plus she's the one counting her calories, and she's harsh about it.  If she eats some fatty greasy thing with fries she'll count that as 800 calories and basically eat nothing else the rest of the day, and she's not whining about being hungry all evening when she does.

And anyway, what do I care? I love her how she is, and though I like that she's getting healthier and losing weight, I'd still love her if she never lost another pound.  She's not obese, my sex drive is fully functional, she's healthy, etc.  I guess it's just that I know how bad such crap is to eat, and since I virtually never have any desire to eat that sort of thing, and hate myself when I do, I transfer that feeling to Malaya, since I see her as a extension of me, in some ways.

We had a fight that led to a frosty afternoon some weeks ago when she was looking forward to eating a big patty melt at the snack shop at Fry's, and I kept making bitter comments about it during the drive down there, so the Cinnabon thing was not the first instance of this issue.  It's just that with Cinnabon I was more or less disgusted with myself and the whole situation, rather than being snarky about something she wanted to eat.

And yes, all of our fights are over things at least that stupid.

Aside from that, there were a few interesting things at the mall.

One thing that we both noticed then, and have been noticing as we shop for cool Halloween Tree ornaments is how lame most of them are.  And by "lame" I mean "not even remotely scary."

I suppose this Disneyification of Halloween was inevitable, as the holiday has become more and more mainstream, but that doesn't make me happy about it.  What I'm talking about are the little decorations and miniatures; ghost and goblins (actually I've yet to see anything anywhere that resembles a goblin) and witches and skulls and etc... they're all ridiculously cute.  All smiling and cute faces, no blood or bones or anything unsuitable for 5 year olds.  You can still see some sort of scary stuff at Halloween stores, but just in terms of masks or larger decorations. All of the tiny little collectibles, the types of things we want to hang on our Halloween tree, are just absurd.

Some cute stuff, for people stuck with kids who can't handle reality, is fine, especially in silly places like the Halloween display at a Hallmark store.  But must all of it be so watered down and cutesy?  It's like fricking Easter with black bunnies and duckies.

Lots of the stores have these cute Spooky Hollow miniature figures meant to be hung from something, like very small Xmas ornaments. They come in boxes of about a dozen for about $15, pretty affordable.  The problem is that while there are 4 or 6 good ones per box, the rest are like happy little witches, or laughing ghosts, or cute black kitties, etc.  We don't want to buy a box of stuff when half of it is too mood-killing to display.  My idea is that we get that and then give away the happy ones, or just don't display them, or hell, destroy them.  Partially melt them to make them creepy, paint their faces black, cut off their heads or arms, and so on.

The whole Halloween Tree project has come to a halt the last few days since we got a golden wire Xmas tree, with plans to distress it and bend the wire curls into creepy shapes and glue bits of wood to it to ugly it up and then paint it all flat black.  The tree and wood and paint are here, but I've been distracted with other stuff and haven't gotten to spend any daylight hours screwing with it. I want to take some pictures of the process, though I'm pretty sure the end result will be more amateurish/home made/cheesy than it will be thematic and creepy.  Like a project far too lame to even be included on the Cockeyed page. *sigh*

Since the final fate of the Halloween Tree is likely going to be a kitty punching bag, I'm not sure why we're so worried about the appearance anyway.  It's just something to do, and I like to decorate since Malaya enjoys it, and she likes to decorate since I enjoy it.  Funny how that works.

In other shopping we got to Bed Bath and Beyond looking for another relaxation water fountain thing.  We bought two of them a week ago, one small one for Malaya's office, and another for use here.  The one here is unexpectedly nice and we put it in the living room up high on a bookshelf (mostly out of kitty range).  However, since we got a big new bookcase at Ikea on Saturday and assembled it in the bedroom, we've got a lot more storage space than we used to have.  And Malaya eagerly took advantage of that added storage space by remodelling the bedroom decorations and book storage facilities, which included taking the water relaxation sculpture thing into the bedroom.

It's nice there, adding a bit of light and some white noise and ambience, but now we want another one for the living room. we looked at a street fair and at a kiosk at the mall, but neither of those had any we liked.  Well, the mall kiosk had some cool ones, but they were real stone and hand made, and cost like $80+, which is more than we want to pay.  The one we have in the bedroom now cost just $20, and we had a 20% off coupon anyway. They didn't have any we wanted at Bed Bath and Beyond either, since we don't want to get the exact same style one again.

So no water sculpture thingie, and no accessories.  The accessory I always want are the smooth-polished "river" rocks. They sell these by the ton, all in little mesh stretchie bags, and in a dozen colors and sizes.  They also sell a ton of candles, as does seemingly every other store on earth at this point.  And both of those items are an incredible scam, as I see it.

Not that you don't get what you pay for, but that they are very easy to produce and sell for a ridiculous profit. Whoever thought to take scraps from every sort of rock-based project (construction supplies, gravel quarries, tombstone production, bathroom tile production, etc) and throw them into a polishing machine and then sell them at about $8 a pound in bougie decorating stores is a fricking genius.  They are rocks, scrap rocks mostly that used to just be throw away or ground up into concrete, and now they shovel them into machines that break them into the nice peach pit-sized hunks, then polish them to a rounded texture, and voila, it's a "river" rock.

I think they get away with calling machine-produced rocks "river" rocks by figuring, "Hey, the earth is like 5 billion years old, and this rock is hundreds of millions of years old.  Let's play the odds. There was probably some sort of flowing water on this stone at some point." 

So they churn them out in factories, sort them into bags by type, and ship them out.  The damn things probably cost about $10 a ton to make and another $50 to package and ship, the yuppie furnishing stores probably pay $.25 a bag, then turn around and sell them for $4 a bag.  For something anyone buying them could walk out and pick up off the ground for free!

Candles are different, primarily in that you can't just go out and pick them up off of the ground.  At least not where I live.

There is some manufacturing in them, but they are still damn near free to create, being as neither was nor wicks have any inherent value.  All you have to do is give them some nice packaging and throw in a few drops of some scented oil, and you can charge pretty much whatever you want to for them.  I've seen 8 packs of tapers for $1.50, cheaper at some crafts faires, and at the same time you can pay $5 or more for a single candle of nearly identical quality.

The bigger candles are even more variable; Malaya and I usually have a tall squat one burning in the bathroom for ambience and Jinx litter scent control.  We favor ones that are about taper height, but much wider.  They're basically 6-10 inches tall, and about as thick as your forearm, and of all colors and scents, though we're partial to blue. (Color, not scent.) We get ones on discount or clearance or with slight damage to them, and pay around $2-5 for them.  Yet in most of the stores we visit we'll see identical ones for $10, $15, $25, and more.

And even though we insist upon getting them cheap, since we're smart and poor, we're still paying enough for someone to make a profit off of the $.05 cent items.

And the best thing of all for candle makers?  The more people like the product, they faster they use them up, and the more they buy. In fact the whole point of their product is that it is consumed quickly, and consumed in the process of using it. Perpetual repeat business!

And even though we know that, we keep on burning, since we like it.

Capping off our day's shopping was a visit to Costco.

On the way there, we were trying to think what to buy, since we couldn't think of much.  I wanted some soda and a big bag of baking potatoes, and we needed some bread.  Other than that, we didn't know what we'd get, so we figured it would be a pretty quick visit. Needless to say, we walked out with a nearly full cart and spent $220 there.

What all did we buy? I couldn't even tell you.

I got a jacket since it was nice and so cheap ($17 for waterproof with a warm fuzzy lining and a hood), Malaya got some imitation Ugg boots and a contour pillow and the Scarface DVD, and the rest was misc food stuffs.  I remember getting some grapefruit juice and baked beans, but other than that... I have no idea.  Big bag of apples, Dr. Pepper 30 pack, the bread we went in to get, big bag of chips, and um... Something.  Like another $130 worth of something, now that I think about it.

CostCo shopping is like gambling with a credit card; you can't remember anything you spent the money on 12 hours later, and when you get the bill a month later, you about pass out.

After that burst of excess, Malaya decreed that we must eat everything here before we shop again for anything other than fresh fruit/veggies.  And she has a point.

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