Tales From This Side

An occasional perusal of news sites can relay a lot of information to the reader about the state of affairs in the U.S. and beyond, but sometimes I think the most revealing information lies in tidbits that don’t get the benefit of headlines. For instance, White House press secretary Tony Snow recently spoke to the media regarding the massive troop increase President Bush has slated for Iraq, despite large scale public and government disapproval of the action. Snow said “"The president will not shape policy according to public opinion, but he does understand that it's important to bring the public back to this war, and restore public confidence and support for the mission." Interesting. Let’s break this one down a bit, shall we? So, according to the public relations officer for the executive branch of the U.S. government, the President of the United States is no longer willing to perform actions that are desired by the people that he was assigned to work for. Further...

Sometimes, things just seem to fall together correctly. Chance? Maybe, but maybe not. My day began, as usual, with a laundry list of things to get done. The first order of business was to pick up a few items at the grocery store so that I wouldn’t go hungry, food acquirement being one of the prime directives in my life. The store is close and I own a bicycle, so off I go, backpack strapped on. I’m about 40 feet from my front door, getting ready to leave the sidewalk and become a fearless member of the Pacific Beach driving community, when a curled up twenty dollar bill catches my eye. Needless to say, I stopped. I picked it up and quickly realized that it was actually three bills, all twenties, folded up together. The bills were crisp and clean. Clearly they had only recently fallen there. I looked around to see if anyone was walking away from the spot. Regardless of whether I am believed or not, if I had seen someone who might have dropped them I would have gone and asked ...

Phew! Haven’t been here in a while. My apologies go out to the two or three regular readers I don’t have. The thing is, I have run into a problem with the blog format. This blog began as a tribute, of sorts, to the general ludicrosity of an exuberant lifestyle. However, as my intuitive roommate is quick to remind me, “Dana, you’re just not very exciting.” Never has the truth been more poignant. Thus have I been at a lack for blog-worthy material, being neither foolish and drunk enough to re-ignite myself nor, lately, hugely fond of the herbal intoxicant that fostered my seminal blog entry. I guess, at 30 years old, I just feel a little less interested in college “road trip” adventure stories and a bit more interested in the usual, opinionated chatter that so many intellectual adults idly engage in. That said, my ravenous fans will forgive me for any change in direction that comes over this once young, vibrant, and “exciting” blog. So, to get to another point, I recently wa...

Continued from Part II To the squeamish: At this point, the story becomes a bit more graphic. I wake up the next morning feeling hung over, but oddly, not in pain. The night’s events come flooding back to me. I slip the sheet off, which is a bad idea since it is partially stuck to my legs. Luckily, I can’t feel anything. According to a surgeon I talked to, 3rd degree burns destroy the nerves in the skin and muscle tissue that they damage so that no sensation of any sort is relayed to the brain. Hooray for that. Anyway, my lower legs are both now two gigantic welts. Seriously, they are pretty gross. So I enlist a friend to take me to the local hospital whereupon telling my tale I am derided and otherwise humiliated by the staff for my stupendous idiocy. They wrap me up and tell me that their hospital isn’t equipped for an injury of this magnitude (they really did tell me that), sending me instead to Van Nuys where, by some luck that I’m sure I don’t deserve, there lies the G...

Continued from Part I Ok, back to this story. When last I left you, I had learned of the non-dairy creamer-fireball secret, but had yet to envision its far flung ramifications. Enter alcohol. You all remember the first time you got drunk, right? It was like a revelation. Everything suddenly became exciting. Sitting around the house was suddenly a party. Jumping off roofs into pools becomes “the coolest” idea ever, lifted from its former rank of “dumbest.” Before I digress into further reminiscing, though, a little theme music, regarding one’s man desire to reach beyond his limitations. Kind of like those cavemen in Quest for Fire, who, as chance would have it, were doing the same sort of thing I was doing. Between this and Hellboy, how has Perlman not won an Oscar? The only difference is I didn’t have to wait for lightning to strike in order to get a flame. As we shall see. It’s the summer of 1999, back at my parent’s house which apparently is the staging ground f...

Secret insight into my thesis chair's hopes and dreams... http://www.theonion.com/content/node/48461 ...and I swear I'll get back to the fireball story shortly.

In a cruelly ironic twist, whilst writing this bit about the time I put myself in the hospital I actually ended up in the hospital per an entirely unrelated event. Last weekend, after enduring several hours of wrenching pain in my digestive track, I finally succumbed to my roommmate's will and took a trip to the hospital. I was therein informed that my appendix would have to be removed within the next few hours. Being unable to perform such an operation myself, I resigned to the doctor's knife and got down to business. What a worthless organ the appendix is. What the hell is it? What does it do? Whence has it come? All worthy questions. Wikipedia defines it as such: "Currently, the function of the appendix, if any, remains controversial in the field of human physiology." In my body, however, the function of the appendix seems quite obvious: to fall victim to inflammatory, catastrophic failure (a failure of an aforementioned, unknown function) and render me...