26.2.12

blindedarm A.























Above: view from my window yesterday.

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I've been eating a bit of turkey lately. As kind of a pork substitute, for ethical reasons. I'm pretty sure I'm working my way towards vegetarianism, ultimately I think. Or at least pescetarianism or whatever the fuck you want to call the diet where you only eat seafood b/c they're more alien-seeming and less cuddly than land mammals.

So in that spirit, and as you may know I'm refining the do's and don'ts of my 2012 eating policies: I think one of the limitations I'm going to institute for 2012 is: only eat land animals that I wouldn't mind killing with my bare hands. 

All birds definitely fit in this category. Cats occasionally do. I think that's pretty much it in the meat department. I don't have any aggressive or hateful feelings towards non-avian mammals. The occasional bromfietser maybe, but that's a whole nother kettle of fish innit.

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One of my favorite things about finally building a Dutch vocabulary is when I see a new word and spend some time trying to figure out what it means by looking at its parts. I'm taking a practice test and just came across the word blindedarm for the first time. I kind of have to know what it is b/c the subject of the question has to do with how long a person will be out of work due to an operation.

I knew both parts of the word:

Blinde: blind, dummy, ghost, phantom.
Darm: intestine.

But what the fuck is your phantom intestine? Dummy intestine. It kept seeming like utter gibberish, I was wondering if I was missing something. Now that I know what it is it makes (kind of) perfect sense: appendix.

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Holy shit! Actual sleep last night. Like 6.5 hours. I feel like a king today. Possible secrets? Take two passionflower and 0.8mg melatonin at 9:25pm. Oh yeah, and get like 4 hours of sleep a night for 5 days previously. ahahahahahaha. And no naps. In any case, I was yawning by 11pm and out by 12:30. Fucking faaaantastic.

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One of the episodes of Intervention I watched yesterday featured a very pathetic girl who would overmedicate herself via her chronic pain pills and just kind of habitually pass out on the floor of her sad suburban apartment. Family members would come by to pick her up for, say, her sister's baby shower, and she'd be unconscious on the kitchen floor, in her sweatpants, surrounded by broken glass and the food that she'd been trying to eat when she suddenly became "extra sleepy".

In preparing for her actual intervention the doctor tried to explain to the family that, even though they (the family) were horrified by this practice...he reminded them that "she is suffering. She's in pain, and doesn't want to live like that, so of course she doesn't mind being loaded. So 8 hours a night unconscious on the kitchen floor, as bizarre as it seems to you...this is comfort for her, this is the only time she feels comfortable."

My point is that my takeaway from this was....jealousy. Eight hours a night?

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