More Social Drama

I fully expected to write a post about the thing Aubrey did at work that she didn't want anyone to know about, along with her real name and not a pseudonym, but she finally complied with my blackmail after I extended the deadline and fudged the terms that she agreed to and said were fair, so I won't. I'm too nice for my own good. Not only does this set a precedent for people to walk all over me, it also makes coming up with something to write about far more difficult, but that's never stopped me before. To take up space, here's a picture of the prank email I sent her from a brand new address created for that purpose. It went into her inbox while the legit email sent from my real address went into her junk folder.

(Context: she claims to no longer be a Justin Bieber fan.)

The whole thing is tongue-in-cheek, of course, as I have no problem with Justin Bieber and have never even heard "Despacito" (though I'm automatically disinclined to want to because of my knee-jerk rebellion against anything viral). Writing it kind of felt like playing millennial bingo. Timely pop culture reference, check. Twerking, check. Derogatory comment about white girls because that's totally not racist because they're white, check. It's a pastiche and a parody, a loving tribute and a sarcastic rebuke, all at once. And it would have gone to waste if I hadn't been there to make her read it instead of deleting it immediately on seeing the subject line. Instead, she shoved it in my face and said, "Did you do this?! Did you do this?! Did you do this?!" Also, the "Norwegian" bit is plagiarized from a Dilbert strip.

Mackenzie invited me to go paddleboarding at Bear Lake with her and Charlie (another person who I've rarely mentioned). For those of you who are unfamiliar with Utah/Idaho geography, Bear Lake is a lake. I love it and since I hadn't gotten to go yet this year, I agreed even though I wasn't entirely sure of what paddleboarding is. It sounds kind of like something the CIA does to brown people. When I showed up at her house Charlie wasn't there yet, but one of the many Emilies I know (and because I know so many, I don't bother giving them pseudonyms because you'd never guess which is which) was there with her husband, who was the one who actually knew Mackenzie. I met this Emily in Animal Science class in fall 2012, so wow, it's been a while. I took that class because I wanted to even though it was only tangentially related to my then-major, Wildlife Science. Animal Science and Wildlife Science are not the same thing and if you think they are you're ridiculous. I tried to end up sitting by this other girl and was initially disappointed to end up by Emily instead, but she ended up being fun to talk to and a good friend.

In this class there was an optional field trip that we both went on. If you have a weak stomach, skip the rest of this paragraph. I got up around 4 am on a Saturday to get on a bus to drive out to a sheep ranch near Evanston, Wyoming (not to be confused with Evanston, Brazil). There were hundreds, maybe thousands of sheep, and the main task of the day was restraining the males one by one and inserting some kind of shock probes up their rectums to make them ejaculate so their sperm could be collected and tested. The first time I witnessed that, I felt so lightheaded I had to go back to the bus and sit down for a while. I got over it and had a good time for the rest of the day and we had our lunches there and then on the way home stopped at a McDonald's where the TV was playing a news report on the latest thing Mitt Romney had said to offend people. So that, not to put too fine a point on it, is why the sight of Emily yesterday made me think of raping sheep. Oh, and we also had a horrible terrible soul-crushingly boring Pre-Algebra class together that I flunked because depression robbed me of my ability to give a crap.

She was real friendly. I should have warned her not to be friendly with me in front of her husband because then he'd think she was flirting and get really upset. It sounds ridiculous to me too, but as I've recounted before, that's what happened with a couple of my neighbors just because the lady said hi a few times and invited me to play hopscotch with her two year old. Her husband is so insecure. I saw him just a week or so ago, unexpectedly chatting with some people outside my house, and I had to get past him real fast before he saw me laughing at the look on his face. I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to find this situation funny, but my dad thought it was hilarious so I adopted him as a role model and absolved myself of any responsibility for it.

So we went to Bear Lake, and I found out what paddleboarding was, and I immediately decided to spend most of the time sitting down instead of standing like I was supposed to. The wind was pretty strong and I didn't want to fall in the water. I'm a little skittish about water because I can't float. I don't have enough body fat. People tell me that all humans can float and that if I just relax, I'll float, but they're wrong. The only person who understands is my dad because he's the same way, so thanks for those crappy genetics, I guess. (Just teasing. I love you.) Anyway, I did fall in once and experienced the horrifying moment of sinking before my life jacket popped me back up, and once was enough. I spent some time just laying on the paddleboard and drifting around like a shipwrecked sailor who's given up. At one point some kid drove his own paddleboard over the top of mine and said "I think I'm stuck on you" and I said "That's very flattering" which would have worked better had he been a female around my age, but a compliment's a compliment.

When I tried to head back the way we'd come, the wind erased in seconds what little progress I was able to make in minutes, so I gave up and moved closer to shore and got in the water and walked it over there. Mackenzie was frustrated because she had worked so hard to paddle over there and she has seen me just being lazy and it wasn't fair that I made it over there too. Then we stopped for shakes and I was supposed to get a raspberry shake because Bear Lake is famous for raspberries, but I actually like peanut butter better so I opted for that instead. Of course Mackenzie gave me a hard time about that too.

Information Society - Think

This is one of the songs I discovered via YouTube during one of the periods when one of my laptops was fried. I'm not sure now when that would have been because I'm not interested in doing the math. Suffice it to say that I loved it, but I forgot what the band was called and was unable to find the song again. The prominently featured audio clip "Think about it" is obviously from Captain Picard, but searching for that quote availed me nothing. My luck changed one day in Hasting's when I saw Information Society's 2015 album "_hello world" on display - on vinyl, because that's a thing again for reasons beyond my comprehension. I guess I'm lucky that my senses aren't attuned enough to tell the difference in audio quality because I enjoy having everything as computer files and shuffling them all together. Anyway, the band's name triggered my memory so that I was able to find this song and several others, and they're one of my favorite bands now. This one is still their catchiest.