Today’s Words:
catty
Valium
rancid
gravel
unsinkable
approximate
jellyfish

One day Emily and I were at the beach and there was a jellyfish washed up. It was dead, of course, but the degree to which I was eager to dig into it disturbed me. It was like silicone or some other inert substance. It was fascinating, but still, it was a corpse. But I dug my fingers into its mangled body anyway. Why not - how often do you get to play with dead bodies? Probably, you are thinking, not nearly enough. 

One time in college I brought some roadkill home. A rabbit. My best friend, who I was walking with when I found it, thought it was absurd, but she had long since gotten used to my antics so when I said I wanted to skin and tan the hide she nodded with that biting-my-tongue look and  quietly pointed out that wouldn’t my apartment start smelling, you know, fetid, and wouldn’t my roommate mind? Well obviously I’ll clean it, hello! And I started to, but then there were the maggots. I hadn’t really thought through the whole idea very well. I thought roadkill would only need cleaning from, say, gravel. Not squirmy flesh-eating larva. I ended up tossing it in the dumpster and crossing my fingers that there wasn’t a law against that.

Why woud I do this? I was in a phase of trying to approximate an uber-hippy. While I was vegan, roadkill, being already dead and a fellow victim of “the man”, needed to be reclaimed and used for something purposeful. This is the unsinkable logic of uber-vegan-hood. Luckily I didn’t get so far as to have to figure out what to do with my rabbit hide, since just processing the body was far above my disgust threshold. Carrying it home in a plastic Safeway bag was, however, not. So while I had a threshold, it was somewhat higher than most sane people. I attribute this, of course, to growing up on a farm.

Speaking of disgust, I am tickled with the Word Spittoon and am delighted to get into the guts of Wordpress and find it shiny and pure. Code can be many things - clean, orderly, and robust or fragile, rancid, and so completely fubar that it requires Valium to stomach. Wordpress, the engine that runs wordlush, is beauteous and bright. It makes me happy.

I also accidentally on my home machine pulled the bleeding edge v. 2.4 from subversion and it looks like they are redesigning the look of the admin, which is pretty snappy and about time. Not to be catty, but the admin right now looks a little boxy, like an 80′ Volvo. I love shiny guts, but I also love shiny outsides.