the fountain of menfolk

Be grateful for this post, as I am typing with solely my right hand. My left hand is in a medium-sized square Tupperware* filled with Comet*. I am sure you are completely nonplussed by this (you know, I'm just not sure I can surprise you guys anymore), but just for fun, I'll explain: there are these weird tiny blisters on the side of my hand and the inside of my wrist. They are clear and very small, but extremely itchy and irritating. I typed in a weird Google search about it and read somewhere that sticking your hand in bleach for a bit is helpful, and so, because the Internet NEVER lies, naturally I did it.

So far it burns in an alarming fashion. This may or may not be better than the itching. How long is "a bit"? If my hand falls off, who wants it? It is very well disinfected by this point. Practically good as new.

Anyways, right, back to the Fountain of Menfolk. Today I realized, that aside from my roommates and a few from high school, I have virtually no female friends. Neither of my roommates really do either. This isn't terribly worrisome to me, as girls are really a bit of a pain. But on the other hand, we have quite a number of male friends. The problem is when they all come over at once. Our (quite small and dingy) living room becomes a steaming pot of testosterone, and it can actually get a bit tense.

So I've fondly nicknamed our door The Fountain of Menfolk.**

Why do you read this, again?

By the way, life is good. It's stiflingly hot. I work in an office that may actually be cooler than my refrigerator (which is broken, or at least sucks at being a refrigerator and wishes it were just a box to put stuff in and not necessarily keep that stuff cold. Only if it feels like it.Which is not very often.) My apartment is very small and a little smelly and on the third floor and the furthest possible apartment from the stairs and it has a singular, diminutive AC unit in the corner of the living room, which does nothing to cool the house unless you sit directly in front of it. Which we usually do. I am going to visit my San Diego family in mid-August. School starts in a month. Nothing is new. But same old goodish is better than new bad, right? So I'm calling it good.

Love,
Lizzy

*I realized people in other countries read this and may be confused by those terms. "Tupperware" is...well, it's...hmm. How do you describe Tupperware? It's a brand name of plastic food containers with snap-on lids for storing leftovers in the fridge. There! And "Comet" is a type of powdered disinfectant cleanser made of sodium dicholoro-s-triazinetrione dichloride. Yeah, that didn't help me either. By the way, putting hands in Tupperwares full of Comet is not a typical American pasttime. Don't judge America by me. Please. Ever.

**This should not stop you from coming over, if you're male. It's merely an observation. We like your visits. Like I said, girls are a pain ;)

people die in weird ways. (or, texas in the 1800's.)

I like my job, largely because it utilizes my talents. Namely, biting sarcasm and an absurdly comprehensive--as well as detailed--knowledge of Disney movies. I am well-liked at my job. For one, I have a habit of saying things without really thinking them through, and while I am rarely trying to be funny, it seems to end up that way very frequently. For another, I am a veritable font of embarrassing and awesome stories, because if one thing can be said about me, it's that I have led a BIG life. One of my coworkers' favorite games is to give me a topic, and wait for a story to ensue. As you can imagine, this tends to be quite entertaining for everyone involved.

My job, which is technically called "being a quality assurance editor for Fold 3, a division of ancestory.com", but better known as "making offerings to the Great Computer of Doom", mostly consists of me and about 20 other BYU students sitting around at computers, digitizing death certificates and civil war pension applications, while brutally teasing one another and laughing very hard. 

Lately, we've been spending a lot of time on Texas death certificates from the 1800's. I'm not sure who filled out these things, but I think it may be some random person who was handed the form. "Cause of death" seems to be a blank that many of these random individuals have a hard time filling. While it is supposed to be filled out by the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, and say things like, "pulmonary embolism" or "cardiac arrest," what fun is that? Instead, responses to "cause of death" include: "Beats me, I just found him," "Who can tell," and, "She just dropped dead in her kitchen, it was crazy." My favorite response is "physician done sent him in," which seems to have been a charmingly uneducated Southerner's way of saying, "I have no idea." 

There are a number of insane ways people have died, such as "He got bit in the head by a shark," "His car exploded, covering 100% of his body in 4th-degree burns" and a baffling one-liner that desperately needed more detail: "He fell onto a chair." How did falling onto a chair kill him? Was it a very sharp chair? Was he very old?

Some of the people on our death certificates are very old indeed, with the "age at death" field being filled out with numbers like, "417." I may be very much mistaken, but I somehow doubt anyone in the 1800's lived past 80, let alone into his 4th century. 

And then there are the answers to "occupation," with things like, "old lady" and "neighborhood drunk" being written in. And someone should explain that "sex" is asking for "male" or "female." "No" is not an appropriate response.

In any case, just be glad your name isn't Eula Beula, William James Outhouse, Irilly Yodel (say it out loud) Henry Porno, or Oglesberry Higginbottom (yes, these are all real names).

Love,

Lizzy ;)