I absolutely hate the word “blog”

On our commute in to work this morning, Grant and I got caught in the worst of the precipitation. Like, buckets of rain that we had to splash our way through, accented by lightning and dangerous idiots who don’t put their headlights on.

But I noticed a really weird phenomenon - as soon as we got over the bridge, the road started to be covered in what looked like soap bubbles. Each wave of water had a little seafoam-like suds on it. It even continued off the freeway - in Grant’s parking lot when I dropped him off, my tires left bubble-tracks in the water. Now what the heck is up with that?

I’ve never seen soapy rain-water before, to my knowledge. Is it an exclusively Eastside thing that I’d never noticed? Do people on the Eastside just wash their fancy cars more, contributing to a massive buildup of Turtle Wax? Do all the Hummers tooling around Sammamish contribute so much to the overall polluting emissions that they wind up poisoning the rain with some sort of freak surfactant? Is there some other plausible scientific explanation that I’m missing?

Man, it makes me wish Bill Nye the Science Guy was still on; I bet you’d get a good explanation outta that dude. Or not. I’m about two steps away from emailing my middle school science teacher to ask his opinion. In his class, we habitually poured hydrochloric acid over a beaker of zinc chips, funneled the hydrogen into a balloon, tied the balloon to the end of a broomstick, and exploded it loudly over a Bunson burner flame to wake people up. We also created a giant chunk of sodium, placed it in a puddle, backed up far away, and threw in a rock to cause the water to splash over the sodium, causing the entire puddle to blow up and totally freak out the eight graders playing basketball outside right next to us. And this is to say nothing of when we played with liquid mercury by floating pennies and lead fishing weights in it (safely, in a container so it couldn’t poison us, but still) and having dry ice air-hockey tournaments and pouring the CO2 over Zippo lighters to prove that they could, in fact, be extinguished, and cranking us full of a few amperes to see what a shock felt like, with a device he’d created out of a pencil sharpener and a few loose wires. Oh, and poking at the innards of a deer he’d hunted and autopsied so we’d be able to see what its organs looked like. So not only was Mr. Olson approachable, but he’d probably have a really fun and possibly slightly creepy or dangerous way to figure out an explanation. Man, those were the days.

Anyway, science. Bubbles. Anyone have a plausible theory? Could it possibly involve us blowing something up?

Aaaah. I’ve been whining about how I hate plastic for ages, but finally, some hard evidence in agreement that hasn’t been inaccurately discredited by Snopes.com!*

A webcomic I read recently linked to this article, which I think all you Imaginary Readers plus everyone else in the world should read. Why? Well, mostly because even knee-jerk anti-plastic folks such as myself will actually learned things that we probably didn’t already know. And even though it fails to mention some other drawbacks of plastics - like, when you do burn it, it vastly escalates the air pollution and greenhouse gases we environmentalists are so concerned about, and that many plastics used for food-related purposes actually do leech scary toxins into the things we eat, no matter what shoddy journalism to the contrary claims.

Anyway. Read the article if you feel like it, feel enlightened, la la la. :) I’ve always been freaked out by plastic and the way its taste leeched into certain foods since I was a little kid, and that feeling hasn’t gone anywhere. Even if it turns out to be perfectly stafe, it’s still kind of gross in my opinion!

*Pet peeve of mine with Snopes.com - when they discredited the “microwaving in plastics” article here, they quoted less than half of what the interviewed professor had actually said - and neglected to mention that he in fact described the exact dangers of plastics with hot foods, recommended avoiding the very uses of these plastics with foods that Snopes was condoning, and stated specifically that for cooking, “Inert containers are best, for example heat-resistant glass, ceramics and good old stainless steel”. While bashing Snopes, I’d also like to point out that the good doctor did also say that there are some plastic-based toxins that are worrisome but are actually different than the ones mentioned in the admittedly stupid hoax email. I understand not wanting to perpetrate stupid hype-based hoaxes, but you make just as big a mistake by only reading the first two sentences of a scientists’s explanation.

So I’ve been sick on and off for almost a month now, in a weird stomach-but-not-flu way that comes and goes unexpectedly and sporadically, and kind of zapped my appetite and ability to really enjoy food, and whose effects never seemed to last more than about a day. And since I’m unusually succeptible to food poisoning and such, I just assumed it was a series of flukes of that vein, and thought nothing of it. Until I had to miss work TWICE in one month, at a job that I love and hate to be absent from. So last Friday I finally went to the doctor to figure it out. So what, you may ask, was the problem?

Turns out I’m a HOST. I have PARASITES. More specifically, some sort of flagellated protozoa. I don’t remember which kind. Nor do I care, frankly, as long as they DIE. But seriously, how gross and, more importantly, UNFAIR is that? Why unfair, you ask? Because my friend Steve went travelling in Vietnam, Cambodia, Argentina, and Mexico in the past couple months, eating whatever he came into contact with and felt like consuming, raw or not, risky or not, and he came out fine, whereas I got frickin’ PARASITES by staying on domestic land and eating food from the Whole Foods deli or something. Screw that!

Anyway, this is probably the most unpleasant blog posting I’ve ever done, but I’m just mad at the little fuckers for taking away my joie de vivre/et manger for so long. Jerks. For the first time in my life, I think I’m happy to be on a terrifyingly powerful medicine that wipes out all life in my body. I hope they’re sentient so they can feel their impending death. Die parasites die!

P.S. To everyone I’ve turned down a brunch/lunch/dinner date with in the past month - let’s go eat!