I shamelessly yoinked this from ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
cadhla from a link here. It is, by far, one of the the funniest thing I have ever read. It's long, but well worth the read. It also made me aware just how boring my life has been :)
One hundred surreal things that have happened to me.
This is a list of one hundred surreal things that have happened to, around or involving me. All of these things really happened; in almost all cases, there is some sort of proof, be it photographic or just testimonials.
100-91: Surreal Things Involving Chemical Reactions.
100. I once went without sleep for three days, then mixed enough Tang into eight ounces of grapefruit soda to make two and a half gallons if mixed at normal strength. I then drank this mixture, thus proving that I am sometimes entirely without the sense of self-preservation that the gods gave to all the little green apples. When came to my senses, I was wearing different clothes, lying in a different house, and utterly convinced that the ceiling wanted to eat my kidneys. I was fourteen, which really explains it, I think.
99. NyQuil — ah, the sweet, magical Q — causes me to have mild hallucinations, including (but not limited to) the watching of purely imaginary television programs. I have been able to accurately describe what I was seeing for hours on end, although I generally don't remember a word of it afterwards. This is a source of endless amusement for people who aren't me.
98. Thanks to my iron allergies, if I eat enough red meat, I will actually start to cry blood. This resulted in my wandering through DragonCon after a trip to the Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Atlanta, Georgia with bloody tears rolling down my cheeks. This freaked out more goths than I really care to think about, although it was funny as heck, all things considered.
97. Antibiotics cause me to have really, really severe hallucinations, to the point that I'm frequently entirely divorced from the world around me. A course of antibiotics, as for pneumonia, literally means that many days spent in bed, because otherwise, I'll hurt myself. Or wind up walking up the side of Mt. Diablo, thinking that I'm on my way to visit the Wizard at the end of the Yellow Brick Road. (Fortunately, I was found by a park ranger before I walked off any cliffs.)
96. Chocolate milk is a base. Guinness is an acid. When you mix the two, you get a towering mountain of foam which does its best to shoot entirely free of the bottle unless stopped. You can stop it by shoving the bottle into your mouth. This is enormously unfair to your largely male gaming group, but also enormously funny to everyone involved.
95. There is a point achieved between three and six bottles of pear cider wherein everything I say comes out in natural (and actually disturbingly good) iambic pentameter. If you keep giving me pear cider whenever I start to slide back into actual, normal speech, I can be kept there indefinitely, and will recite Shakespeare that was never actually written. This is fun for the whole family, really.
94. There is also a point achieved between three and four blenders full of mudslide wherein I am completely plastered beyond all sense or reason, yet remain fully capable of conversing in a coherent and functional manner. This isn't a good thing, because it means that when I declare I'm going to walk to the 7-11 in my three-inch heels and little black velvet minidress, no one stops to think 'golly, this is an area where there are lots of hookers'. This results in someone needing to retrieve me from the Pleasant Hill Police Station, where I have been taken for solicitation. Again. (Picked up many times, but never charged.)
93. During a production of 'Into the Woods', I threw out my back so badly that I couldn't function without pain pills. Since I was playing Little Red Riding Hood, not functioning wasn't an option; I lived on little red magic pills mixed into a bowl with red M&Ms and red Skittles for most of the tour. This resulted in my being so happily stoned that I once walked off the edge of the stage, landed on a viola player, and kept singing, because I simply hadn't noticed.
92. Did you know that if you eat seventeen big sticks of cotton candy over the course of a single day at the carnival, you will become so incredibly amped-up on sugar that you are actually reasonably convinced that you can fly? And may then, in a fit of 'I can fly'-osity, climb the side of the Ferris wheel, thus forcing your uncle (who works for the carnival) to try to get you down by turning the Ferris wheel on, under the assumption that you'll just sort of slide gracefully down to ground-level? And more, that people that amped on sugar are capable of feats of super-human strength, and may cling to the bars of the Ferris wheel like lemurs once it starts to move, resulting in several hours of riding the Ferris wheel in a whole new way? Because, well, yeah. That can happen. (I was thirteen, I was stupid, sue me.)
91. You may think that coating yourself in Pop Rocks and then diving into the Pacific is a great way to demonstrate what it feels like to be an Alka-Seltzer. Really, you may think that. You may be seriously deranged, but you may think that. Just don't do it. Because it is absolutely no fun at all to be an Alka-Seltzer, and also, when you do that, it makes this GINORMOUS cloud of tiny fizzy bubbles, and someone screams that you've dived into toxic waste, and then the lifeguard comes, and ain't nobody gonna wind up happy.
90-81: Surreal Things Involving Food.
90. Jell-O sets and solidifies at temperatures much like those found in Concord in late December, as long as you're having a nice, dry winter. Jell-O can be found, on clearance, at ten boxes for a dollar. Most people do not guard their swimming pools very well during the winter. Most people also do not chlorinate their swimming pools during the winter, as they're pretty much just full of rain water and ignored. (Chlorine does not help Jell-O set.) It takes approximately four hundred and thirty-seven normal-sized boxes of Jell-O to completely fill a standard-sized suburban swimming pool. Swimming through Jell-O is extremely hard, but worth it. Despite what the movies tell you, however, you cannot use a pool full of Jell-O as a trampoline. If you do, well, it becomes a neat exercise in 'get Adam out before he suffocates'.
89. Whipped cream is a perfectly functional substitute for snow when you want to build a snowman and it's the middle of July and you've just found eighty cans of whipped cream past the sell-by date in the dumpster behind Lucky's and you weren't planning to eat it anyway, so what's the big deal? Please note that I said 'functional' and not 'clever'. Parents, it turns out, are not delighted when they open their front doors and find that their front yard has been transformed into something from a Rankin-Bass special, complete with cookie-tray sledders and a jolly, carrot-nosed snowdude. They will become even less delighted when noon hits and all that whipped cream begins to melt and curdle. Curdled lawns smell really bad.
87. Stew is a tradition in my father's family. Every girl, when she gets her first house, gets her first pot of stew to go with it. This stew is made by taking stock samples from every active pot that can be reached, then combining them in the new household. There are several women in the family who are vegetarian, except for The Stew, because you can't throw away something that's been in the family for twenty (or more) years. One aunt stopped eating meat and got the last chunk of beef out of her stew three and a half years later. We're very dedicated. My stew contains pretty much every kind of meat known to man, and a variety of exciting vegetables, grains and legumes. It also contains, three and a half years after the fact, a large amount of pigeon. We still find the bones at the bottom of the pot. This fascinates me, but creeps out enough people to be considered surreal.
86. For an entire winter, when I was twelve, I only ate what I called 'nuclear meals'. These were meals made entirely by combining random things from cans in bowls and microwaving them until they suited my somewhat dubious standards of 'done'. Water was not an acceptable additive; dried spices were. The idea was that these were the things we'd all be eating during the nuclear winter, so I might as well get used to them now. (The question of how I was going to work the microwave during nuclear winter never exactly came up.) Nutritionally, this was near-suicidal, but my mother let me do it anyway, because it went a very, very long way towards totally cleaning out our pantry, and we were getting ready to move.
85. While on a business trip to Florida — all expenses paid, all meals expensed — I was able to go anywhere I wanted, and eat anything I liked, without cost being an issue. So I went…to Steak and Shake. Seventeen times. Why does this qualify as surreal? Because the nearest Steak and Shake was a) three miles away, and b) on the other side of a substantial swamp. Yes. I walked three miles, through a swamp, seventeen times — well, technically, thirty-four times — to get strawberry milkshakes and tasty steak-burgers. Why? Because I am insane, because I am picky, and because nothing closer to my hotel was even a tiny little bit appealing to me, that's why. I can be a tiny bit obsessive, sometimes.
84. Speaking of being a tiny bit obsessive, at one point, every AM/PM in Lodi had a different flavour of soft serve. Chocolate, vanilla and other. I decided that it was vital to my continuing existence that I try absolutely every flavour of AM/PM soft serve known to man, and set out on a weekend-long campaign of past-midnight visits to the local convenience stores, seeking soft serve. Three in the morning, hyped to Hell and back on sugar, and I come ploughing through their doors, demanding frozen treats. Maybe it was more surreal if you were there, but it was plenty surreal at the time.
83. I have been the proud — well, sort of proud, sort of disgusted — owner of a bag of Dulche de Leche M&Ms. Never heard of them? You're not alone. I'm reasonably sure that the bag I found was, in fact, an artifact from the Twilight Zone (or possibly some sort of test market thing). They tasted pretty much like rancid pig fat in a tasty candy shell. It was both vile and bizarre, made moreso by the fact that absolutely no one else that I have ever met, other than Chris, who was driving the damn car, has ever seen one of the things. I'd think that I'd hallucinated it, except that my hallucinations don't usually taste like chocolate-dipped evil.
82. In order to make the transition from drinking a million cans of Dr Pepper a day to drinking a million cans of Diet Dr Pepper a day, I timed the switch-over for a drive to Seattle — roughly fourteen hours in a car, during which time, the only caffeine I allowed myself came in the form of DDP. By the end of the weekend, the backseat was pretty much a hill of bottles, I was hopelessly addicted, and Chris had developed a minor nervous twitch. The first two things are not necessarily connected to the third, but it seemed that way at the time.
81. I dislike avocado. I also dislike dinner parties where I have to wear starched velvet dresses and pretend that everything is all right when everything is all wrong. And that's why I mashed a big bowl of tomato horn worms, mixed it with some salsa, and put it on the table as a dip. And that's why I won't eat guacomole to this day, because no one noticed the difference. Yeah. Ponder that one with me for a little while, and then move on. I recommend moving on quickly, personally, because ew.
80-71: Surreal Things Involving Wild Animals.
80. While walking to school one morning — in my senior year of high school, mind you — I found a bullfrog of epic size and muscle tone, just sitting on the walkway. Just chillin' like a villain. Being me, and inclined to such things, I decided that the bullfrog needed to go to school with me, picked him up, and took him there. Sometimes I'm nuts. I spent the entire day at school, with the bullfrog, just as happy as a clam. The bullfrog, also pretty mellow. My teachers, sadly, had achieved 'used to me' by that point, and didn't even object. I think I really desensitized that school.
79. I assisted in the process of enrolling a large white duck named Thatticus in the marine biology department at Diablo Valley College. I still have his student ID somewhere. Unlike many of the people involved in enrolling him, the duck graduated.
78. If you ever hear about the African hyenas getting loose on the second floor of a hotel during a science fiction convention and chasing attendees? Yeah, those were with me. Mitzi and Mimi were really good, well, hyenas. But they were really sorry afterwards, and it was totally an accident, I swear.
77. A coyote once came into the room I was watching television in (through the open back door), ate half my pizza straight out of the box, licked itself to show a total lack of concern for its surroundings or the fact that Angel and I were both staring in horrified dismay, and walked calmly back out of the room again. We got up, shut the back door, and spent half an hour arguing over whether or not the pizza was still good once it had coyote germs on it. (I elected that it was still good; Angel did not. Thus I had more pizza, and Angel did not…and she's the one who got food poisoning.)
76. How many people return from a trip to Disneyworld with gleeful stories of all the wild mammals, reptiles and amphibians they encountered inside the amusement parks? Because yeah, that would be me.
75. Miss Kitty is a three hundred and fifty pound California mountain lion who was declawed and had her teeth blunted by idiots who thought they could keep her inside an apartment. When it turned out that they couldn't, she wound up with animal rescue, and eventually ended up living with me for a short period of time. Miss Kitty rocks. Miss Kitty is fully capable of putting my entire head in her mouth, and would do so to show affection. This was not good for the blood pressure of anyone who happened to walk into the room while she was doing this, especially since she liked to do it while I was sleeping. Very good cat, Miss Kitty. Not her fault she weighs more than I do.
74. During a tomato-gathering quest in my back yard, I was bitten no fewer than three times by black widows, and nearly died of cardiac arrest the following afternoon, after putting in a full day at work. Sometimes, I'm dumb.
73. In other 'sometimes, I'm dumb' news, I decided that shoving my arm up to the shoulder into a mudbank to see what was moving in there was a good idea. This is how I discovered that sometimes, people's mothers decide that their red-tail boas should be allowed to live free and proud, and let them go while they're away at camp for the summer. And that those boas can really thrive when allowed to eat a steady diet of California bullfrogs and squirrels. And that five and a half foot long constrictors are really, really surprised when suddenly yanked out of their holes. And that mothers are even more surprised when you bring your new friend, Bobby the Boa, home for dinner. (At the time, Bobby was longer than I was. No, she didn't let me keep him.)
72. During a field trip to Mt. Diablo with my herpitology class, I managed to avoid being bitten by anything…right up until I went to get a drink from the covered water fountain, and the baby rattlesnake that had been sleeping there lashed out and tagged me. 'Seanan's been bitten, get the anti-venom' was practially the mantra of my herpitology classes. There's a reason I was heavily encouraged to change majors.
71. While eating lunch in Briones State Park, a raccoon walked up, calmly picked up the second half of my sandwich, and walked away with it. It came back ten minutes later, took my grapes, and left again. It was deeply baffling. But hey, at least the raccoon got a mostly balanced meal.
70-61: Surreal Things Involving Famous People.
70. For many years, my friends and I gave each other phone calls for our birthdays, since that was really all we could afford. This turned into sort of a sadistic game of 'how early can you call', and 'how mean can you be'. Well, several years ago, a friend of mine managed — only the gods know how — to arrange for Stephen King to call me on my birthday. Yes, the author. Yes, called me. Did I say intelligent and witty things? No. I sort of squeaked and hyperventilated…but he wished me a happy birthday, so there you go.
69. This year, having heard this story as a 'you will never ever top this so don't try' too many times, my mother got my uncle the architect, who was in the process of working on a new house for the lead singer of the Counting Crows, to get the Crows to call me for my birthday. Again, I did not say intelligent or witty things; I squeaked and hyperventilated, and generally wanted to die. But then I danced a dance of joy and was giddy for three days, so it balances.
68. Walking past an open elevator at WorldCon, I was greeted by an older British gentleman gleefully shouting “Come and give your Uncle Terry a hug!” I did so. I then got stared at by my friends as I resumed walking, because in their worlds, Terry Pratchett doesn't just randomly demand this of people. Their worlds must be very dull, that's really all I've got to say about that.
67. We have a picture of me at the age of five, hugging Vincent Price and absolutely beaming. He signed it and everything, when we sent it to him (after it was developed). I have no idea what box it's in, but if I ever find it, it is fully going up on my wall.
66. I bartered wristbands for the better part of an hour for the chance to meet Elisha Cuthbert, having become a fan of hers solely based on a television program she was never actually in.
65. During a lengthy drinking session at a pub in Berkeley, I joined in flicking chips of dry ice down the blouse of an actress who had featured heavily on a television show I never watched.
64. At a TimeCon, I had a vigorous shouting match with a woman I assumed was just in a very good Ace costume. Rather too good; it was Sophie Aldredge. I found this out afterwards. (Just to be clear, the shouting match was a) amiable, and b) purely done for show, as we were both — I thought — dressed as blonde Companions from roughly similar eras. It just turned out that she was a liiiiiiittle more authentic than I was. Ooops.)
63. At a different WorldCon, while waiting in line for an autograph (from Emma Bull), a reasonably famous science fiction author called me out of the line and asked me to come sit on his signing table. When I balked, he promised me lunch. I sat. He then instructed me to strike a cheesecake pose. I did. (I was in cutoffs and a tie-off shirt at the time; my default attire at the age of eighteen.) “This,” he said, to the gentleman who had apparently inspired my summons, “is a woman.” I was then released back into my own autograph line. Bizarre.
62. Stephen Sondheim and I once got into a very involved argument regarding my neckline.
61. Despite having attended and worked the Northern California RenFaire for years, I have never met either a) Robin Williams or b) Claudia Christensen. This is, frankly, somewhat bizarre.
60-51: Surreal Things Involving Airplanes and Airports.
60. On a flight to Canada, I once found myself seated next to a woman who recognized me from a Great Big Sea concert…by the colour of my bra. Sometimes life is weird, even for me.
59. On another branch of that same trip, I organized an impromptu children's choir at the back of the plane, and spent most of the trip cheerfully teaching them Broadway songs and keeping them out of their parents' hair. No one minded this much, except perhaps for the poor, serenaded stewardesses, and even they had to agree that this was better than howling all the way to Toronto.
58. A man walked up to me in the Phoenix Skyharbour Airport, handed me a bottle of Diet Dr Pepper, and calmly walked away.
57. While waiting for my baggage to arrive at the Orlando Airport, I watched a man come up, pick up a duffel bag from the carousel, unzip it, remove a very, very large iguana — five feet, minimum — put it calmly on his shoulder, and walk away. The iguana looked stiff but not particularly annoyed, and was last seen riding the man's head as he exited the airport. This was enough to calm my airport anxiety for several minutes.
56. The first time I flew out to meet Mike and Mary, they got hung up in traffic. I'd never met them before, and I freaked out completely, to the point that airport security was offering me a free ticket to anywhere I wanted to go, if I would just get on a plane and leave. I seriously considered it, but settled for sitting on a bench, rocking back and forth and panicking for the better part of an hour.
55. I scoured huge swaths of London for a copy of 'Homeward Bounders' by Diana Wynne Jones, only to find one at the bookseller's in Heathrow Airport.
54. I found the cheapest traditional eggs-beans-bacon-mushrooms-horrible fried things breakfast of that entire stay at the airport as well, and if this doesn't seem surreal to you, you don't understand how much time I spent trying to find a good plate of fried mushrooms to begin with. I boggled pretty much entirely over the fact that the airport food was apparently what I had been longing for over the course of the last several weeks. Bizarre.
53. Ever written 20,000 words of a more than reasonably clean first draft on a romantic comedy while flying fifty thousand feet up in the air? Well, I have. And wow, does it make plane flights happen faster. Like, lots faster. Like, 'what do you mean, we're about to land?' levels of faster. It's bizarre, and I highly recommend it as a survival mechanism if you're seated next to an annoying jerk who believes his elbow has a divine right to your side.
52. Once, the cabin pressure on the plane actually snapped my back back into true. I stopped hurting. It was splendid.
51. Finally, during a trip to Ohio, I got spun completely around at my transit station, and wound up boarding the plane I had just gotten off of. They realized what had happened, and pretty much marathon-raced me through the back halls of the airport, delivering me to my actual plane two minutes before the doors were shut for liftoff. This resulted in my flying business class, because it was the first place with seats they could jam me into in order for us to get the hell off the ground. Good times.
50-41: Surreal Things Involving Other Forms of Transit.
50. During a Greyhound trip to Indiana, I fell asleep, only to wake up as we were crossing into Salt Lake City. Lifting my head, I looked out the window, and was treated to the bewildering sight of a covered wagon train making their way across the fields. As there were no other cars in sight, and I couldn't see the city from where I was sitting, I spent several totally bewildered moments convinced that the bus had managed to drive backwards through time. It was not good for my sense of equilibrium.
49. On that same trip, we got stopped for an hour in Sacramento while drug-sniffing dogs came onto the bus and checked for, well, drugs. Since I had twenty dollars worth of nickel Twinkies in my bags, I was of great interest to the dogs, although their owners quickly came to realize that this was because their canine assistants were drawn to the irresistable combination of cream and angel food cake, not because I was running some bizarre new form of drug ring. Thankfully.
48. Did I mention that this was also the trip where I blew my entire food budget on Twinkies from the Hostess Discount Store, where they cost a nickel for a twin pack, and then resold them all the way across the country at fifty cents a pop, thus enabling me to eat normally all the way to Indianapolis? Because, well, it was.
47. Following the end of my college career, several of my friends and I got royally sloshed at Spats to celebrate the fact that I would no longer walk the hallowed halls of UC Berkeley. Cindy saw the chance to finally score a major coup in our ongoing group prank war, and drove the rest of us down to the trainyard in her pickup truck, where she somehow managed to load us into the back of a freight train, acting under the assumption that we'd wake up before it started to move. Ha, ha, Cindy, ha, ha. We came to at different points, but Alaric still had several bottles of vodka, so we flickered right back out again. And that is how we wound up in Vancouver. Some of us without wallets; others missing articles of clothing. Yeah.
46. We dealt with the lack of ID by using Dominic's uncle's friend's hot air balloon service to cross the border back into Washington, and got a ride from there. So yes, I have illegally crossed the Canadian border in a hot air balloon. Stop looking at me like that. Everybody's Angel is the only one who threw up on the way over.
45. During a horseback riding lesson at summer camp, my horse decided that while I might be doing the riding, it wasn't sticking around for the lesson, and took off down into the canyon. They found us three and a half hours later, both completely covered in mud and daisy chains; I had filled my pockets with frogs, and was trying to figure out how to weave a hammock out of willow boughs. I honestly think that was the best time that horse ever had.
44. Somehow, by transferring buses three times, I managed to go from Concord to Petaluma. Not only is this considered impossible by every transit agency I've ever asked, but two of those buses were supposedly going to San Jose. I still wish I knew how I'd managed to do this one, because it would be neat to do it again.
43. My mother fully hot-boxed me in a van on the way to a Bette Midler concert.
42. A spontanious conga line that I didn't start broke out on a train that I was riding from Indiana to Virginia; I wound up spending twenty minutes doing the conga-ah with total strangers. Once we finished the conga, no one on the train seemed even vaguely aware of who had started it, or why, or what inspired it, or anything else that you'd think somebody would have stopped to ask at some point.
41. I sang a complete duet of 'Suddenly, Seymour' with a man on the opposite BART platform, before his train came and he left. I still have no idea who he was or what he was doing there.
40-31: Surreal Things Involving Theatre, Gaming or Other Costumes.
40. For my senior project, I staged and filmed a complete production of 'Godspell' on the BART system. This required some of the tightest theatrical timing I have ever been responsible for in my life. I would do it again without batting an eye, because it was brilliant.
39. The first ever production by the Guerilla Musical Theatre Troupe that I'm involved in happened totally by accident. We were hanging around at the SunValley Mall, bored senseless, when Everybody's Angel turned to Adam, and sang, 'Think about the sun, Pippin…' She stopped. We've never been a group that lets go of a song cue, however, so I picked up with '…think about her golden glance.' Then we sang the next line together, Adam joined in, and the rest, as they say, is both a) history and b) an eight-person dance number in the middle of the mall concourse. Since we'd never all eight been in 'Pippin' together, we used a dance routine from 'Grease II', instead. Which is why I am sure that was also the only performance of 'Think About the Sun (Finale)' ever to involve Fastrada slinging Pippin backwards in a floor-slide between her ankles.
38. Our second production was actually from 'Grease II'; we did 'Reproduction', with a cast of fifteen, on the DVC quad. We were then politely dissuaded from ever doing that again by campus security, who seemed somewhat displeased by our choreography. This was just the beginning of our long story of problems with The Man.
37. Adam and I were disqualified from the DVC Young Actor's Festival for 'overt sexuality' due to our use of negative space in performing Tom Smith's 'Heat of the Blood'. Now. When the fat chick and the boy a foot shorter than her can get disqualified for overt sexuality in a competition that included 'Whatever Lola Wants' and several numbers from 'Sweet Charity', you know you damn well did something right. As far as I'm concerned, we won.
36. After doing my Oathbreaker makeup for a session of the Sunday Night LARP, I was stopped and grilled by campus security for about fifteen minutes while they made sure that I wasn't going back to the boyfriend that had obviously been beating me. I, personally, consider this to be proof that my makeup was very, very good that night.
35. Ah, sweet, sweet Shakespeare, bane of my youth. In a production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' when I was twelve, I was playing Puck, and had to present the closing monologue while hanging upside down from a balcony (it made sense at the time). The night before closing, my ankles didn't get hooked properly, and I fell, landing on my head. I finished the monologue before passing out cold and being taken to the hospital, where it was determined that I had suffered a concussion. I still closed the show the following night, despite being stoned stupid on cold medication.
34. Opening night of '1984', our O'Brien walked off the set, and I — as director — had to take over for him. Problem: I didn't know the part. Bigger problem: Act III was largely just O'Brien lecturing Winston about the Party. If you've ever wanted to see me improv for twenty minutes about how much humanity sucks, you have totally missed the window.
33. When Adam decided to quit his job at the pizza parlour, the entire GMTT invaded, performed 'La Vie Boheme' from 'RENT', and left, taking Adam with us. This was even more surreal than one of our usual productions, because it was done entirely within the context of our location — we didn't need to invent any props or setting pieces — and because Adam, in his waiter's apron and carrying pizza, was singing the part of the waiter. Which just made it absolutely brilliant, and very, very strange.
32. On a dare, several of the girls from Junior Honours English agreed to speak entirely in rhymed couplets (iambic pentameter mandatory) until such time as only one of us was left: the English geek version of 'Survivor'. After three solid days, they declared me the winner, gave me twenty-three dollars in assorted coinage, and begged me to stop. I am still very, very proud of having managed to out-geek the geeks.
31. Katrina and I decided — thanks to whatever served us for a brain that summer — that we would really have a great time going up to Half Moon Bay and pretending to be mermaids. So we got my Gramma to make us some really snazzy mermaid tails out of spandex, trimmed them with fishnets and beads and bits of scale, learned to swim in flippers with our ankles strapped together, went up and spent most of a weekend lounging on rocks, diving into the water, and feeding each other sardines that we'd carefully removed from the cans. We made one of the cheap supermarket tabloids. I still have the clippings.
30-21: Surreal Things Involving Pets Or My Family.
30. I ate an entire Thanksgiving dinner with a live tarantula perched on my chest, just to see if it would make my mother crazy. It did, in fact, make my mother crazy. This struck me as absolutely brilliant, at the time.
29. Leela, my bluepoint Siamese, developed the most horrible method of hunting bats that I have ever seen: she would climb up into the laundry room loft, yowl until they got agitated and took to the air, then dive on them from above, riding them down to the laundry room floor, where they would splash. It took me months to figure out where the little commas of dried blood were coming from. She would then drag the shattered bats through the house, proudly singing her victory song. The victory song became practically hard-wired with 'get the mop' in my head.
28. During the summer we were living in Lodi, Nyssa stalked and killed an entire Domino's pizza. Literally. She got out of the apartment, went down to the pizza place, stole a pizza from the counter, dragged it all the way home and all the way up the stairs before we caught her. She wanted to feed her kittens. We let her have a slice, but the mean humans took the rest. We suck. (And no one wants as much puking as you'd get after allowing a cat to eat an entire pizza. Sorry, but no.)
27. One of Nyssa's sons, Rorschach, fancies himself the Great Black Hunter, and spent most of his kitten years dragging dead things into the house to show them off. When he realized that the humans just didn't appreciate them enough, he took to leaving them under the kitchen table. Ever stepped inside a rat? Both surreal and disgusting. And remarkably colourful.
26. One of my iguanas, Rocky, spent a great deal of time stalking my mother. I think this proves that iguanas don't have many hobbies. His moment of greatest triumph involved pinning her to the bed while she slept, then very nearly giving her a heart attack by eyeing her throat in a speculative manner. Rocky was a great, great lizard, and a source of endless amusement to me.
25. Leela fell into the toilet, taking most of a LUSH bubble bath bar with her, and proceeded to demonstrate that one cat can thrash enough to make an enormous quantity of violet-scented foam, given sufficient incentive to do so. Like, say, being trapped in the toilet with an enormous quantity of violet-scented foam. See the cat invent perpetual motion!
24. My first iguana, Phluphy, developed an addiction to showering with humans. This turned truly surreal when it resulted in his chasing my naked grandfather through the house, trying to figure out why the human had so abruptly abandoned a truly lovely shower. Very good lizard.
23. I once attempted to mail Melissa (my middle sister) to Zimbabwe. Blame this on Garfield, since he did that to Nermal and it actually worked. I was a big believer in what I read in the funny pages working out for the best.
22. My cousin Davo has been on a multi-year campaign to discover what, exactly, you are not expressly forbidden to do as a County Connection bus driver. This is how we learned, for example, that technically the bus driver can bring his goats to work if he really wants to. And that nothing in the terms of 'casual Friday' actually forbids pantslessness. And that live chickens are classified not as animals, but as hats. I only wish I were making this stuff up. (I believe several of these issues have since been corrected.)
21. Princess — my tortoiseshell — used to demand pancakes whenever my mother cooked them. With syrup, thankyouverymuch. It got bad enough that if we didn't make a plate just for the cat, she wouldn't stop screaming. That cat ate a lot of pancakes.
20-11: Surreal Things I Probably Shouldn't Have Survived Doing.
20. Never attempt to lure a monitor lizard out of a drain by shoving your ungloved hand into a bucket of raw hamburger, then holding it out to the giant, flesh-eating lizard. Not if you enjoy having the same number of fingers that you started out with, that is. I managed to pull back before I lost something, but it was a somewhat closer call than I really liked.
19. My uncle Nabeel is, like many of the men in my family, deeply convinced that a) he is immortal, and b) he is bigger than nature. Which is why, when we discovered that the Russian River had managed to flood in the area we'd been intending to cross, he decided that he could just drive his van directly to the other side. Which is how we discovered that VW vans don't actually float, but wow do they fill with water quickly. I have never been a particularly strong swimmer, despite my fascination with water, which is how I discovered that it is, in fact, possible to float your way to safety while clinging to the top half of a cheap-ass barbeque grill. Isn't life fun sometimes?
18. I like to climb things. Going up is a real pleasure of mine. Coming back down, however, is both difficult and sometimes enough to cause me to panic — I have literally screamed my head off while clinging to a rock wall less than three feet above the ground. (This does not, mind you, stop me from climbing.) One day, climbing 'just a little bit' up the side of one of the rock faces at Rock City turned into 'Seanan is now fifteen feet off the ground with no logical way back down'. Rather than doing the sane thing, staying where I was, and screaming, I decided to keep climbing and find a path to the ground. Instead, I found a path to the top of the hill, and spent five and a half hours walking down goat-trails to get back to where I started. I also got the mother of all sunburns. No one is particularly surprised.
17. When exploring an abandoned farm at the edge of a big wood, if you hear a noise, you SHOULD NOT say 'What was that sound?', then agree to split up with the people you were exploring with. I cannot even begin to express just how bad of an idea this is. By all rights, we should have become victims eight through eleven in 'It Came From The Grave, Part VIII', instead of just finding a porcupine and getting rained on.
16. So we had this sattelite dish, see, and we thought 'you know what would be fun? Riding the sattelite dish down the side of Mt. Diablo like a giant tobbogan!'. I never claimed that my friends and I were smart. Most of us were AP and Honours students, which sort of makes us automatically dumb in some non-academic ways, like realizing that maybe it isn't a good idea to get into a giant dish-shaped object and let gravity take you for a date wherein there are no brakes of any kind. We didn't have seatbelts, either, on that first trip. It's not just amazing that we survived, it's practically a miracle. And we did it more than once.
15. After sattelite-sliding down Mt. Diablo enough times to get cocky, we decided it would be fun to try sliding down another biiiiiiiig hill. This one was right next to a lake. Sattelite dishes don't float. We were unwilling to abandon ship. Mayhem ensued.
14. Many years before the dish incident, some friends of mine and I decided that the best way to travel really, really quickly down the side of Cardboard Hill involved a) a cookie tray, and b) greasing the side of the hill with Crisco in order to make ourselves go waaaaaaay fast. We were right: we went waaaaaaaay fast. We were lucky: we didn't wind up skidding into anything more fatal than the creek. I'm still not sure exactly how we managed to survive.
13. And speaking of stupid things that seemed like great ideas at the time, never steal hotel luggage carts, outfit them with wind sails made from sheets, and ride them down Geary in San Francisco. The best thing you're going to get is road rash when you have to tip your cart over to keep yourself from shooting out into traffic and getting turned into street pizza.
12. If you're going to start petting the mountain lion, and allow it to put your head into its mouth, make sure it's Miss Kitty, and not some new, totally unsocialized mountain lion that's just sharing her pen to see if breeding will occur. Fortunately, I still have a head.
11. Don't pick up the rattlesnake. I did it, and I'm telling you, don't.
10-1: Surreal Things I Just Can't Put In A Category.
10. Upon noticing that heat, humidity and an excess of human contact had rendered me deeply cranky, Mars ordered me to go and play in the swamp. Mars is wise in the ways of Seanans. Upon getting lost in the swamp, I called the apartment, and was told to follow the train tracks home. I assumed, stupidly, that this particular bit of good advice would not have been given if they still ran a train on those tracks. Ha ha ha ha ha. Have you ever wanted to see me run for my life as I realize that the track I'm on is only big enough for one of us, and that the train is probably going to win? Again, missed the window.
9. During a choir trip to Disneyland, I became separated from the group and somehow wound up in the queue of people there to do voice auditions for 'Rescue Rangers'. The rest, as they say, is really weird history.
8. I toured retirement homes for a summer with a group called the Sunshine Pals. My 'act' consisted of singing songs from the 1940s and 1950s, while accompanying myself by rhythmically beating a pair of drumsticks together. Yes, really.
7. Thanks to getting turned around in the woods in upstate Washington, I once walked to Canada. Gotta love that border patrol.
6. Up until the age of twelve, I believed that 'Doctor Who' was a documentary series, which really goes quite a long way towards explaining my grades in history all the way through school. My timeline gets a little scrambled by the part where the Cybermen were responsible for the dinosaurs becoming extinct, you see.
5. Because I was bored and had a container of glow-in-the-dark paint, I painted myself ghost-glow green, taped fake blood pellets to my feet, lit a candle, and wandered through my apartment complex glowing and leaving bloody footprints that vanished completely in the middle of a walkway. Half the neighbors moved out over the course of the next month and a half.
4. When stranded in Billings, Montana and in need of money for dinner, you can probably find better ways to make up the lack than hopping onto a table and performing selections from 'Jekyll and Hyde' and the My Little Pony movie. But I seriously doubt that you'll have as much fun as I did, because damn, that was a great party.
3. Seanan vs. the World of Coke.
2. I rode the train two hours out of my way to hike through Crystal Palace taking pictures of giant stone elk. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
1. Making this list. Biz-ZARRE.