PREFACE: At least once a week, I'll be struck by a thought so basic, invasive, stupid or otherwise off-kilter that it'll bounce around in my head all day, maybe for a few days, like a catchy song or a joke I should have told during that conversation but I missed the opportunity and now it's too late to do anything but rehash the conversation in my mind but now with the joke spliced in like it should have been, replete with satisfying response from relevant audience members. You know what I'm talking about.
Anyhow, these thoughts: sometimes I get the feeling that they'll just leave me alone if I push them out into the open instead of quietly mulling over them during team meetings at work. It at one point struck me that this is what Twitter is for, so I tried it for a while, long enough to learn that it's really hard to sustain an active presence on Twitter when you have no followers and no impetus to attract followers. I've been told since then to give it another go, because Twitter is apparently important? Something about the Arab Spring and breaking news and getting a chance to insult your least favorite celebrity in a way they might actually take notice and feel a little worse about themselves for a while. But it's ruined for me- since my whack at it, Twitter will forever and always be only another high tech reminder of my own social inadequacy and low Clout score. High school 2.0.
But yeah, random thoughts. They still persist, sometimes long into the night when I should be asleep, resting up for the next Big Team Meeting. No. I'm kept awake: if my cat was a person, he would be Wilford Brimley. How am I supposed to comfortably pet my cat now knowing that?
These thoughts need to be shared, and in so sharing purged from my brain so I can focus on more important things, like rent and utilities. I suspect I'm not alone in this. So I think I'm going to try a weekly random thoughts thread, to give all applicable parties a chance to break the cycle. Feel free to share, affirm, belittle, interact or abstain as you see fit.
Without further ado, week one:
There should be a specific word for being milk-thirsty.
Oh god, that felt great.
1) The secret to Twitter success is automation. There was a guy on Reddit who put some girl pic up on a twitter feed then wrote a script to randomly retweet stuff it pulled out of the aether twice an hour. Inside a month it had 5,000 follwers. Shit, the only thing I have on my twitter feed is books I've read on Kindle and I've got followers. It's depressing. 2) Wilford Brimley would be adorable if he weighed less than 10 lbs. He'd be like a grumpy garden gnome. 3) We need a specific word for beer-thirsty before one for milk-thirsty.
When I was in France this year, I picked up a poem book with local poetry. One of the poems really struck me (and I wish I had the book with me, but sadly I don't). The part that really got me was, and I'm paraphrasing here: The best ideas come in the shower,
The best ideas come on a long ride on a train
Then they are passed into the ether never to be seen again. That isn't the poem, but the basic "idea" of the poem. I loved it, because I always have these flighted ideas in the shower, or waiting for an airplane or at 3:00am. I never revisit them (but to my credit I have started a text file on my laptop where I just throw them in now). Milk-Thirsty is exactly like one of my ideas, but I'm never thirsty for milk. Please keep doing these (Whoops thought this was posted by someone else) fuffle!
Reminds me of a story I heard about Tom Waits (and now you've read it). What idea did you have that was milk-thirsty in a different format?
I absolutely loved that Waits' article! That is perfectly fitting to the conversation. Here are two ideas from my text file:
Robot Dragon story, something about a boy who builds a robot dragon who ultimately destroys an entire town Asteroid story, an life long astronomer discovers an asteroid and gets it named after herself, only to find that it's heading straight toward earth and will kill her grandchildren. She has an existential crisis. I also get a lot of software ideas.
This is what separates writers from others - the ability and desire to put the fucking pen to the fucking paper. I have a couple friends that hassle me during NaNoWriMo. One of them wrote me an email recently saying "I've got all the big set pieces but all the stuff in between is boring and I don't like writing it. How can I change this?" I told him "that boring stuff between the crap you want to write? THAT'S THE JOB. The art of writing is the art of taking the shit that isn't interesting and making it interesting not just for you, but for everyone who reads you." That is what keeps people from "writing the stories."
We are getting about 4 1/2 hours now, usually we get the sun from about 11:30am until 5pm then it gets dark again. The snow is completely covered in ice right now so it's hard to even walk very far without slipping! Planes aren't coming in or out, and there is an Olympic Cross Country skier (Lars Flora) stuck at the school until the planes can get here. Sorry about the misplaced shout out I think I was looking at the shared items and not the "By"!
Instagram satisfied that place for me. I enjoy using photos to satisfy my witty quips. Took this one 30 minutes ago. It's my sister 5 minutes after breast feeding. Her feeding cover is still on her shoulder. Check out the look in my nephews eyes. That's something I would have linked to on twitter. I'm looking forward to your "random thoughts" series. As for wanting to drink milk, that just seems crazy to me. Who wants to drink milk? That is, aside from my nephew. -He's about to get a buzz. But as an adult, do people really still drink milk? I think it's odd. I do still like cereal and I of course love most cheeses... But milk?
My entire family thanks you. I've just texted this to his mom/dad and got an immediate response from his father: "classic"
Pretty crazy what 3 months will do. Incidentally, I felt my son kick for the first time last night, then sat back and watched my wives stomach move and contort as he did his thing.
I love to drink milk! I still drink it with a good amount of meals, and do the whole chocolate milk thing every so often. I even go as far as buying locally sourced milk from time to time.
Every once in a while I'll get a strange milk craving. It happens less and less now, but it once happened periodically. "Milk thirsty" is right. It's its own kind of thirst: nothing else will do, and it gets more intense as you have more milk in your diet until you're over it about a week later.
Looks like I'm woefully outnumbered here. It might have something to do with the following story: When I was a kid, my brothers and I would have to drink milk surreptitiously because if my dad saw us doing it, he'd fly into a rage. No joke. No clear reason to it, he'd just get really mad. So I was always functioning on a milk deficit. Maybe that helped inflate the value of milk in my mind. Now there are days when it's all I can drink. Besides whiskey, I mean.
I want to know why your father was so enraged? Any ideas? Also, I wonder if you've got "milk" on the brain because currently your wife is having to nourish two infants. I can't imagine having to do that for one, yet alone two. Logistically I'm not even sure how that works.
Growing up my dad was a riddle. An angry, angry riddle. Funny, because now he's unflappable, and a lot of fun to hang out with. You should see the pillow made for nursing twins. It's more architecture than upholstery. That is a fantastic picture, by the way. That kid looks like he's brimming with character. Is he as much of a ham as the pic suggests?
Is he as much of a ham as the pic suggests?
-So far, yeah it seems so. Lot's of smiles with this one. He's only 3 months old though so a smile can come from waiving a flashlight in front of him as easily as it can from him passing gas. But I think the "ham" is strong with this one.
I was 14 or so, at my buddy's house, and bored. Raiding the fridge we came across his father's stash of peppers, along with one sealed in a bag that his dad said was "the hottest pepper known, in existence." To this day I don't know if it was a Ghost Pepper or not, -only that we decided that coupled with our boredom, it represented the perfect challenge. His dad was the farthest thing from full of shit, so it was with some trepidation that we worked ourselves up to it, flipping a coin to see who would bite directly into it first. He lost, and after psyching himself up for a moment, he bit into the very tip of the pepper. He began sweating almost immediately, and was grimacing hard while insisting it wasn't as bad as he thought through clenched teeth. I could tell he was bullshitting, but he had bitten into it and now it was my turn. What is sort of common chile knowledge to folks who love spicy food and are older than 14 years old, is that the heat only builds and increases in intensity as time goes by in the short term after consuming a hot pepper. That, and the fact that the majority of the heat is found in the seeds themselves...not the tip of the pepper where my friend bit. So seeing him able to cope I pick up the pepper and bite half of it off. And proceed to LOSE MY FUCKING SHIT. I was howling with pain and literally slapping myself in the face. I was sputtering a deformed mumble of "MALK! MALK!" while my friend blocked the fridge to enforce our pact before biting, which was "No beverages allowed" because um...I guess we were trying to prove our manliness. Seeing me obviously overreacting as I began beating him to get at the fridge, he decided to show me what a weakling I was being by chewing up the other half of the pepper. I remember watching in horror as he literally made a show of chewing into it as he looked at me smiling. Oh god was he fucked. In his refrigerator, there was a half gallon of milk opened, with another full gallon unopened. There was, for the roughly 3 minutes it took to consume that gallon and a half of milk, a period of relative nirvana that we attained. It was followed by hours of Hell on Earth once the milk ran out. My mouth has never known such pain.
I, too, had friends with Pepper Bullshit Syndrome. Each one of them ate a dried habanero just to prove they could. Each one of them suffered greatly. One of them got to the point where he'd carry around one of those little Mexican cellophane bags of dried habaneros to crush and sprinkle on his food. He'd keep them in his baja jacket. Where his hands went. And he had a nasty habit of rubbing his eyes. You can guess how well that ended. He resolved the problem by buying a small can of pepper spray. He'd squirt it on his Taco Bell. We had to have an intervention.
I'm with you on all of those examples, but I have never as an adult craved a glass of milk by itself. I know this is odd, but one of my favorites are Oreo's and milk, that and any soggy cereal. But just a glass of milk? No thanks.
They really aren't. Pretty sure that's why so many people are lactose intolerant, or otherwise have milk allergies. But people do all sorts of weird shit. Don't the Masai consume cows' blood as their number one staple? I had a friend who traveled around the Himalayas and constantly got offered fermented yak milk as a delicacy. People would throw it in a bucket and put it under the bed and forget about it, and then when honored visitors came by, voila, warm rancid yak yogurt.
I don't think humans are really supposed to be craving cows milk in the first place.
Exactly! But then, cheese.
Not only do I love milk, I actually keep a chilled glass in the freezer to enjoy it extra cold. Y'all are crazy.
Post them here where they can be mused and remused and maybe amused rather than lost in a teeny tiny notebook. Are we all invited to post random thoughts over the week? Specific word for "milk-thirsty": Nursing mothers call that word "hungry" as in "the baby is hungry" -- once we've been weaned though, "hungry" changes meaning. Please invent one and post it on Urban Dictionary.weekly random thoughts thread
I thought hubski was a random thoughts thread.These thoughts need to be shared, and in so sharing purged from my brain so I can focus on more important things, like rent and utilities.
I think you mean these thoughts need to be purged from my brain and maybe sharing will do that. Absolutely!!!
Milk-thirst as a holdover from being a newborn. You just blew my mind. Kind of like how hiccups are supposed to be a relic of our days in the womb when we were practicing breathing. Do you mean invent a word for "milk-thirsty," or do you mean that there's already a word for that- "hunger"- and the real trick is to create a new word for what we assumed was hunger? Yeah, I was hoping everybody who wanted would take the opportunity to post random thoughts. It's a democratic tag.
Platonic love is defined as chaste and non-sexual. Platectonic love is similar: no sex, just lots of rubbing against each other.Do you mean invent a word for "milk-thirsty," or do you mean that there's already a word for that- "hunger"- and the real trick is to create a new word for what we assumed was hunger?
I see I've been unclear. I meant invent a word for "milk-thirsty." I suspect you realized that but were subtly letting me know about my unclear pronoun reference. Thank you, I always appreciate being called out on opaque writing.post random thoughts. It's a democratic tag.
I've had this random thought that I'd like to release into the wild:
I've heard this referred to as "Brain Crack", i think to either the credit of Ze Frank or Hank Green.
Ask and ye shall receive: This pic doesn't really depict his full Brimley- he's certainly not as far gone as, say, this guy (I can't believe this is a thing I can just Google), but his weight and demeanor really tips him over the edge. P.S. in case you can't tell, that is a 25 pound cat. He gave me back problems in the course of this picture.
Wow, pets do often look like their owners :) edit: I know people always say these types of things, but you really do look surprisingly rested for a guy that has infant twins.
Ah. Got it. You get a chance to make any collaborative Hubski sounds of late?
That's awesome, I can't tell you how excited I get to hear any changes. This is one of the more fun things I've done in a while. It's a cool way to work with zero expectations or pressure.
The only similar word I can think of is the word "horny." I can't think of another single word that is dedicated to craving something. However, the word "fiend" also comes to mind, as in "people who crave drugs are dope fiends." Google defines fiends as "an evil spirit or demon" which makes sense. To me, it is that intense and deep craving or desire to acquire something and get the satisfaction you want from it. It's also commonly used as "I'm fiending..." for crack or for sex or for alcohol or whatever you need at the particular moment in time. That is the only thing on your mind and you are unable to think or function at 100% until you get it. I've heard it used in pretty ridiculous situations, like "after he took that bong rip he was fiending for some doritos." I don't know how universal this word is though. It's common in my circles of friends - even the ones who aren't druggies. It's just a word that works for a lot of things and lets your cravings and desires be known. As it has been used more and more, the ugly connotations and image of a drug fueled heroin head wondering the street is no longer attached to it. The power of the word remains though. I like the word. It gets it's meaning across instantly. But I find the concept of "fiending for milk" is a bit odd because milk is commonly associated with newborns and children and therefore has ties to innocence. To put milk + fiend in such proximity is a bit jarring but it does get your point across. A quick google search reveals that it has been used before. There is a blog dedicated to cooking without dairy: Dairy Free Dairy Fiend. There is also a dark but pretty cute video of a cat who is obsessively attempting to get the milk from her master's bowl as her master is still eating. And another more properly lit video. And a baby. D'awwww. Although you could just say "I'm craving milk." It takes about the amount of time to say.There should be a specific word for being milk-thirsty.
Funny- I always just kind of saw horny as another delineation of hunger. The way you just put it almost flipped it around so that hunger is more a delineation of being horny. Next time I want to eat, I'm going to tell everybody that I'm food-horny, and see where it gets me. Maybe jail, depending on whether I'm at home or in a restaurant.