nature is awesome

I love my chickens. I freaking love them hard and a lot. Maybe it's a sign that we need to have children, but I just love them so damn much. They're so cute, even though they poop on each other and scream every time I pick them up. I find it especially adorable that, even though Mitch won't admit it, he says "good morning, ladies!" every day when he checks on them. But honestly, it's making me wonder how, one inevitable day, I will eat them. Well, maybe only Mitch will eat them, but we'll have to have them butchered nonetheless. Frankly, it's making me nauseous just thinking about it. But chickens live for like, 15 years, and they only lay eggs for like two of those, so it's not exactly logical to keep them for the duration of their lives.

Like, imagine for a moment eating your cat. But your cat lays eggs. And you eat the eggs. Okay imagine that you eat your cat's kittens and then one day you will eat the cat when it stops having kittens. Maybe that's not quite the same, but that's what it feels like when I think about it right now. I know I only bought these chickens for sustenance and kind of because people didn't think we actually would, but I guess I should have known better. They're cute and pretty and have personalities and I can tell them apart and I've named them. It was trouble from the beginning. Let's just hope that they're terribly annoying and disgusting as adults that I can't wait to turn them into a casserole.

I'm not ashamed!

Okay, maybe I should be, considering I placed amongst a bunch of 45-49 year old power walkers, but I used to run at a pace of 14 min/mi, and have improved to a staggering 11:26 min/mi, according to yesterday's race results:

my Mercy Heart Mini Marathon - 15k results

Let me just put it out there that I hate running. Like seriously hate it. But it's the only thing that keeps me from being a fat ass. I love to eat, and I particularly love to eat rich, carefully prepared indulgent food. So I have to run. Yoga wasn't cutting it.

I've set a goal of running a half marathon in May, and yesterday was a little check in for me. I figured if I could do 9.3 miles without totally dying, I could do 13.1 in a couple months and be fine. And while I didn't totally die, I did find myself crossing the finish line in a state of confusion and exhaustion. Finish lines are a cluster f*** of people in silver heat blanket capes, medics, family members, and pallets of bottled water. I never understood why people crap their pants during races until yesterday. I also made the mistake of sitting down immediately after the race, and upon trying to stand again, found my legs to be about as supportive as wet spaghetti noodles. But even though I felt pretty pathetic, it feels good to have accomplished running a 15K. I've never been athletic, and I've worked really hard to get to this point. Now I just have to beat the fattest man ever to run a marathon.

So we did this...

So I don't know if it's my fear of the collapse of infrastructure, my need to be a bigger hippie than my neighbor, or my need to prove wrong the naysayers, but we went and bought chicks yesterday. They will live in our backyard in a coop, lay eggs, and poop everywhere. I guess they're cute and whatnot, but after about 12 hours of adjusting the height of the heat lamp so that the temperature inside the cardboard brooding box is EXACTLY 90 degrees, I'm starting to wonder how these animals would ever survive without us. We've domesticated them to the point that we have to feed them ground up oyster shells and tape pipe cleaners to their toes if they get too curly. We have created codependency in the animal kingdom. Regardless, don't be surprised if you get an Easter basket from me with a real chick in it.

We had a good run...

So Maybe's back. Apparently my brother wasn't allowed to have pets in his house. This also means we get to keep the crap-tastic humping bunny. My brother swears up and down that this is temporary. He'll take her back as soon as he finds a job. And an apartment that will let him have a dog. And roommates to help him pay for said apartment and that also love tiny snarky dogs.

It hasn't been so bad having her back, considering that now we don't really give a crap whether the dogs get along or not. All the training went down the tube the second Maybe crossed the threshold into single dog-hood. So we're just not even trying. We do shock the bejeezus out of her every time she attacks Buster in his cage (believe it or not, we were able to refrain from posting the $300 shock collars on eBay), and it's still satisfying, but frankly it's not a means to an end anymore. The means is her leaving and the end is us going back to having one (happy) dog and someone else having the other (happy) dog. I'll be making regular sacrifices at the altar until my brother meets aforementioned goals.

Tonsure (kinda)

I'm getting all my hair cut off on Thursday. I've been growing it out for about 2 and a half years now so it's long enough for Locks of Love. Frankly, the only reason I was ever growing it out was to donate it. And it gave me an excuse to be cheap and not pay for salon services. As I've been telling people this, the general response has been, "WHY!? It looks so good!"

Okay. Rather than the self-flagellation and fishing for more compliments, I'm just gonna say I know. I know my hair's pretty good (when I actually decide to wash and style it). It's thick and a good natural color. It's wavy, which can make me look a little unruly because I don't put a lot of fake crap and silicone in it, but nonetheless, I'll agree that I have pretty good hair. I'll attribute it to my Polish heritage.

Having never intended to grow my hair out so it would be "pretty," I'm suddenly feeling myself struck with a little bit of vanity. I look kind of ridiculous with short hair. I look like I'm in the awkward tween phase again, and I haven't quite learned to control the things that extend outward from my body. This is the curse of the white girl wavy hair. Maggie Gyllenhaal is a pretty good example. Ugh. This is pretty much what the hair does. Yep.

Anyway, I've decided to turn this into an exercise in humility. It's not like I make money off my hair. Nobody is dependent on it looking perfectly coiffed. And honestly, it takes me like, an extra five minutes in the shower just to condition it. My shower drain is constantly clogged (and don't tell me to get a drain cover, I've already done that), and I go through tons of shampoo and styling products. I lose pens in it pretty frequently, and I've found like, three dreads in the last couple weeks. I haven't been willing to sacrifice much for appearances in my life; why start now? Thus, I'm going to offer it up, in an effort to quell pride. So...good bye hair. Hello being carded at the bar.

friend request purgatory

If you're not my friend, don't send me a friend request. If you've seen me play a show, that doesn't count. Gawking at me for an hour while I forget the words to my own songs does not constitute being my friend. If you went to a Britney Spears concert, you would not send her a friend request the next day. No, you would go to her band page and click the little thumbs up thing and like her. It doesn't matter that I'm "accessible" because I'm not a superstar (yet!). Just because you think it's funny that I rhymed the words "breast implants" in a song does not mean that I want you having access to the photos I took on my summer vacation to Michigan last year. You shouldn't know my education history, or where I work at my day job. You have sent me friend requests before, and having denied them already, I have discovered that you are either very persistent or very stupid. Therefore, you are forever condemned to Friend Request Purgatory. You, that girl I went to high school with and have already deleted three times, and my mom. Congratulations.

UPDATE: Your mom is now in Purgatory as well. Stop suggesting me as a friend to people.

one-dog family

REWIND: November 2009 was the month of the Buster.

We only got him because we thought our other dog, Maybe, needed a friend. That was not to be. Shortly after Buster's balls dropped, Maybe decided he needed to go. She expressed this by trying to kill him.

Unfortunately, we had signed a contract with the rescue saying that if Buster didn't work out, we had to return him. Also unfortunately, the rescue owner was a hoarder and the house was deplorable. There were at least 15 dogs that we saw, and upon procuring Buster, we had to treat him (and subsequently Maybe) immediately for fleas and bathe him several times to get rid of the smoke in his fur. We decided perhaps it was best not to return him (plus how could you say no to that face?).

The only other option we saw was training. We hired Scott, the militant bald guy who used to train bomb-sniffing dogs for the Army. We went through a myriad of training mechanisms, each more "effective" than the previous, from the "Trail of Tears" (a line of treats meant to lure Buster to Maybe, which he quickly learned ended in a scuffle), to remote-controlled shock collars. Overall we spent about $1000 trying to cure Maybe of her aggression, and countless hours walking these stupid dogs around the house on leashes. Might I add, Maybe is aggressive towards most other dogs, so the decision to train the dogs instead of just removing one was very deliberate. Anyway, this was as far as we got:
We couldn't seem to cure the crazy eye, though. After a relapse, we thought perhaps it was best to find Maybe a new home. We chose to give Maybe away because she's a much more social dog, and gets along with just about anyone, so long as they're human. My brother traded me straight across for a bunny named DJ (PS no one told bunnies crap their body weight every day).

My brother's still in college, and I was a little worried about sending her to live in a sketchy house with a bunch of dudes, but she quickly made herself at home. My brother posted this picture on facebook, dressed like the yuppie dog we trained her to be. In retrospect, I'm sad. I'm sad that we couldn't provide better for her, and that for whatever reason, she decided that she didn't like sharing her humans with other dogs. It was probably very stressful for her to live in the house with Buster (though I may be projecting human emotions on dumb animals). At least I know she's better off having a group of sappy guys at her disposal, but there is a slight sense of failure. I wonder if we couldn't have reconciled them had we picked a different trainer or sent her to a residential facility. But Mitch had a monetary threshold, and I'm pretty sure we surpassed that. I think we'll be a one-dog family from now on, but I just can't help perusing PetFinder.