Leggings are stupid.

I promised myself I would commit to writing more often in this godforsaken blog. I think I convinced myself that blog writing had to be a full time job (and well, I was unemployed at the time so it sure felt tedious). Now I realize that this blog is more about venting my daily frustrations in a creative and aimless way. So I will continue to do so. But I am not making any promises. I remain consistently inconsistent.

So what’s the point of eyebrows?

If they are for keeping dirt and hair out of your eyes, I contest! I always get dirt in my eyes. When I was in Costa Rica I had them pinched shut along the dusty roads to Tamarindo and that dirt just slipped like a dirty whore. My eyebrows were definitely poor watchmen that week. Little locals on motorbikes morphed into a blur of threatening colour as road and bike converged into swirls of dust. As for the cat hairs, well, let’s just say I can knit an angora with my eyelashes. I’ll get you a sweater by 3 o’clock this afternoon. Not a hair to be found in my longish uneven eyebrows (except my own), but my eyes tear up and I can’t see for most of the day because my eyebrows are slacking off. Believe me, our cat is capable of dropping a rug a day’s worth of fur. What a joke.

Maybe if I let them grow a bit longer, we’re talkin’ George Burns style, they might stop the occasional bug or cashew from clobbering me in the eyeball. But, I have heard unsightly eyebrows can be grounds for divorce. Sorry @louderthan10, I am far too vain to go this route, and you’re a bit easy on the eyes, so forget it.

Okay, so if there is a god, and he does have a sense of humour, perhaps he had a greater purpose for the eyebrow. I have no idea what it is, but I’m not God. God would also understand the human comedy of, say, the unibrow. Talk about the classic tragedy: you wake up one morning and realize you’re single and much to your chagrin, it’s likely because your two hairy windshield wipers are doing more freakish mating than you ever will. Someone should sign to Koko and ask her if she’s landed any hot silverbacks after picking the lice off her arches (and eating them). 

I arch my supraloral line at this fact: we (ladies, this is for you) have rendered our eyebrows completely dysfunctional anyway by plucking, waxing, trimming, and arching them. It’s like an obsession. So even if the brows would have caught the stray bug or loose fleck of tinder while at Burning Man, these shapely supercilium curves (or plucked atrocities depending on who did it) can serve no purpose save a ‘come hither’ glance (likely directed at a naked man with neon body paint).

At any rate, I am due for a shaping. The weekly trim is not enough to keep these grassy hilltops of mine at bay. I’ll let you know how it goes. I don’t really need any more odd eyebrow looks.

How did the ancients decide who would be the sucker that would have to sample foods never been tried for human consumption? We are not talking about Baskin Robbins here. Take, for example, tomatoes. Origins point to Peru before the Spanish showed up. If people had tried to eat the leaves of these poison treats, they would soon be dead or wishing they were. So imagine that first brave soul touching his tongue to a ripe tomato, hoping to God that he didn’t croak like his older brother Manuel, all mottled and frothing at the mouth, with the leaves sticking between his teeth. Is this what we call taking one for the team?

So how did people decide who got to be the food tester? Was it the bravest of the group? Or was it the spindly little elderly ladies that were forced to do this task? Was it a noble thing? Or was it a punishment for abomination? Well, if the strongest were ’sacrificed’, and the food was indeed poisonous, then a tribe would have lost its strongest member. However, if the weakest person was sacrificed, then did that person give up because he was weaker and couldn’t tolerate the poison? Makes you think, doesn’t it? I wonder if there were a lot of poison-related deaths in the Dark Ages.

Maybe tomatoes are evil. At any rate, I still think it would have been an adventure being a food sampler. Think of how much money you could make (as long as you didn’t value your life). Or imagine a party, where new dishes were offered on silver dishes bedecked with jewels. If you didn’t like your guests you could just suggest some succulent blowfish, or perhaps a lawn mushroom and they wouldn’t gossip anymore about great aunt (or was it uncle) Patty.

Why did we suddenly flop from driving left side of the road a fifteen hundred years ago, to driving on the right? Suddenly it seemed like a good idea to move steering wheels to the opposite sides of our cars. Poor cross-country travelers and truckers–it must be disorientating to be staring the micterating dogs and elderly women in the face as you try to make a right turn with a tub of highly flammable anhydrous ammonia or crunchy potato chips swaying dangerously behind you.

Still there must be a reason for this odd change. I think it encourages the motor strip in our brains to work overtime. Or maybe it had something to do with the Fall of Rome. Either way, chicken is fun no matter which side of the road you crash on.

Are humans actually the measure of all things? Or are they just a part of a size chart where they happened to fit into the mix? Take, for example, the sizes of insects > trees >whales versus microscopic bacteria.

Is it a coincidence that most of the naturally occurring things we eat such as eggs, and fruit are sized precisely to fit into the palm of our hands? Imagine a world, where the majority of food was minuscule or perhaps too large to eat in one sitting.Where would that leave us?

The Golden ratio (1.618…) asserts some power over the general ordering of plants and animals in the world. So there does appear to be a mathematical logic behind the whole thing. Still, humans seem so self-assured that the world was built to suit them and their needs.

A future post: what’s the deal with humans requiring at least 900 sq. feet to squelch their fear of enclosed spaces?

BTW: Is the blue whale the largest animal on earth today? And if so, why does it stop at like 30 or 40 feet? What kind of regulating force is causing animals to top out at 40 feet?

This is the first post to be sited on The Stray Muse. To give you an idea of what you will be experiencing, consider the following…

Ahem. Wood Be Answers.

Why is it called sawdust if the dust actually comes from the wood?

And there you have it. There will be more musings posted soon.