Flickr Fiction: The Couch

HIM: "So I says to the guy, yeah, I did that, I'm not proud, sure I'm not, but still, ya know sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. It's, like, the law or something. And then I pull my hand back and I notice I'm wearin' these brass knuckles, like I'm some kinda mobster or something, and somebody grabs that hand and pulls me back, and then I'm falling backwards like there ain't nothing there. You know. Like bungee jumping. You think you're gonna die for a second. The wind is rushing past your ears like it ain't never gonna stop, you know what I'm saying? And then it does, and you bounce back up. Well, this time, I didn't bounce back. I just kept falling and falling. That was when Mazzy shakes me awake, she says, honey, you were thrashing around there like somebody had you by the neck."

HER: "You want to know what I dreamed? I'll tell you what I dreamed. I dreamed this was back before I lost Devon, when I was still pregnant with her and huge, like I was carrying a prize watermelon. Oh, I miss that.

"Anyway, I'm huge and I'm walking down the steps of the church after Jack and me got married when suddenly I can feel my water break. I break out into this huge grin, I can feel it stretching my face, and then I feel the water just gushing and gushing out of me and I know there's something wrong. I look down. The steps are covered in blood, pooling in the cracks and corners and angles. My head spins and I close my eyes, and then I feel the gushing stop. I open my eyes again and look down. I'm not bleeding any more. I'm not pregnant any more. And there's no blood. There's just rose petals, scattered on the concrete, bright red everywhere, falling down in a shower around me. And people are laughing."

DOC: "I would tell y'all that you're perfectly normal, but I think you're both a pair of raving lunatics. All I ever dream about is breakfast."
***

Well, there ya go. Once again it's Flickr Fiction Friday, this time inspired by this photo by YanivG. This one was just me playing around with first-person voices. Chris, Elimare, Teaandcakes, Littlegoat and The Gurrier are also participating this week. Click on the links to read their versions.

Nielsen Day One: Rerun City

It's now near the end of our first day as a trial-period Nielsen family, and I have come to the conclusion that we watch way too much TV, a lot of it reruns. Granted, we're talking quality reruns: The Simpsons, M*A*S*H, Monty Python's Flying Circus. In fact, I just watched the Lumberjack Song on PBS--a classic.

I also saw a lot of commercials. The one that annoyed me the most was a commercial for Frosted Mini-Wheats or something similar. The commercial showed a little girl on stage at a spelling bee. She is asked to spell "aardvark." She begins: "Aardvark: A-R..." At which point a Frosted Mini-Wheat appears on the microphone and prompts her. She corrects herself: "A-A-R-D-V-A-R-K, Aardvark." Everybody applauds wildly.

At the risk of sounding even more like a dork than I usually do, there are several things wrong with this picture. Firstly, and most glaringly, you would never be allowed to correct yourself in a spelling bee once you screwed up. If you say the wrong thing you're just fucked, plain and simple. You're out of there. Bu-bye. And speaking of bu-bye, you can't just prompt people from the audience. It's highly forbidden. That Frosted Mini-Wheat would have been hella kicked out. And lastly, who gets asked to spell "aardvark?" I would have killed for "aardvark." Instead I got "pixilated". Screw that. On the other hand, I got a guy three years older than I was to hate me for several years because I almost beat him. But then he spelled "pixilated" right. Bah.

Perhaps I'm a bit pixilated myself right now--I just re-read that. 1.5 beers isn't exactly going to make me sloshed, though.

I forgot to mention that the Nielsen company sent us $15.00 in cash along with our TV diaries, presumably to compensate us for mailing them back. But cash?? Um, okay. Thanks. Sure. We love Nielsen. Send us more.

Rewards for Bad Habits

Rob and I are finally being rewarded for watching so much television. This week--starting tomorrow--we are officially on a one-week trial period to become a Nielsen household. I always wondered how you got hooked up with that. I'm still not sure how we got called by them, unless it's my idiotic willingness to take part in phone-based market research. (I don't know why I do this. One time I answered a half-hour's worth of questions about Snapple. Yes, I'm a dork.)

So this week we're supposed to fill out these detailed TV diaries with everything we watch, when, and who watched it, on which household televisions. Sadly, they will probably love us because we tend to leave the television on when we're doing things like household chores, and therefore our passive media consumption is truly abominable in scope.

They're going to get an inordinate amount of soccer on our TV diaries. We look forward to skewing their results with our strange watching habits.

It Was Just a Dream!! Really!!

I've been having some really bizarre, probably stress-related dreams lately. Last night, among other things, at one point I was part of a really racy dance number with a number of other South Asian-ish women, wearing only various towels draped over ourselves, to the song "Tattva" by Kula Shaker. Strangely, the number was sort of unrehearsed and we were all watching on a TV screen what we were supposed to be doing.

Later on in the dream, I was hanging out with my friend from Wales, Mark (who teaches Welsh in Swansea and will be at this year's Cwrs Cymraeg), and I was lying on my back on the floor trying to formulate sentences in Welsh in my head so I could tell him what a difficult year this had been, but instead of the word for difficult (anodd) for some reason the word blasus (which means "tasty") kept popping into my head.

Anyway, that leaves me in a rather bizarre mood for this Fourth of July. We plan to watch the Germany-Italy World Cup match on our large television in the noon-ish hour, then go over to a friend's house in the late afternoon for some charring of meat and vegetables on the barbecuing apparatus as well as setting off some small colorful explosives in the street.

By the way, I've been a huge flake the past several days in various situations, and I apologize. I had to get things done for this conference or else I was going to continue in evil-high-stress mode forEVER BWAHAHAHA. So I feel much better after getting some stuff done and will be less flaky now. I think. The Welsh course is in two weeks. I can definitely guarantee a much happier and more productive Sarah after about July 23.

Suckiness

I think my life sucks right now, if only in minor irritating ways that tend to compound and seem larger than necessary. I can't seem to rely on people to do what I ask them to do; that's a biggie right now with planning this conference. And I really need to delegate things because if I don't I will officially go insane and require happy pills, and goddamn it, when I ask people to do something that means I'm actually already at the breaking point because I hate asking people to do things for me. So when I ask, I really need it done. I am so not meant for management.

I also hate Norton Internet Security right now for making go through an hour's wild goose chase figuring out why suddenly the pop-up discussion board messages were being blocked from Rob's online classes. I love to do these things at midnight, really I do.