An Explanation for Cats

Is there a particular reason for cats being like that?
We have a small cat. Her name is bug and she's the smallest cat I have ever seen and she is absolutely adorable

Look at this little jerk she knows she's cute.
Anyway.
This cat doesn't really like it when you pet her. What she does like is having a lap to sit on. In the mornings when no one is awake/in the main living area, she likes to yell until someone comes out of their room to pay attention to her. I mentioned that she likes to yell (and she screams her little lungs out) but she also likes to tear up the carpet by your bedroom door because she realllllllly needs you to pay attention to her and if you don't she decides to eat the carpet. Why does she do this?

This is my sisters cat. His name is Henry. Henry spends the night in their living room because he likes to scratch things in their bedroom. Around 5 o'clock every morning, Henry likes to sit outside of their bedroom door and scream because he wants into the room because nobody is in the living room and its food time. After he gets fed, if you have cereal, he decides that you need to share and will be in your face until the cereal is gone or until you set the bowl down. When you inevitably set the bowl on the table, he takes it upon himself to defeat this mighty foe by pushing it off the table. His favorite toy is plastic straws. Why?

I'm just going to stop with those two. They manage to do dumb things and not get in trouble and they're not even the smart cats. Henry is probably the dumbest cat I've ever seen, and bug is not much higher on the intelligence scale.
For starters, Henry doesn't just knock cereal bowls off of the table. He knocks everything off of the table. He tries to open drawers so that he can empty it's contents onto the floor and looks very confused when you are inevitably upset by this.
Bug doesn't like getting in trouble. She is also very impressionable. We have another cat named Romeo and he gets on the counters to drink water from the sink. We're not sure why but that's not the point.
Bug sees him get onto the counters and doesn't seem to realize why he does this. She decides that she needs to investigate as well, so she jumps onto the counter and moves directly past the sink to look out the window. She just completely misses the point. If you don't know, we have essentially a whole wall that is a window. Why she can't just look out that window escapes everyone.

The big question is why do they do these things? You may think its because they're both extremely dumb. This is an incorrect assumption. They both realize the consequences of doing the things they do, but they do them anyway. What do they see that we don't? Where is the joy in emptying a whole drawer onto the kitchen floor? Where is the appeal in sitting in a kitchen sink to look out a window?
It has become very obvious to me that the most essential part of being a cat is just absolutely going apes***
Scream at 3 in the morning if it suits you
Pull out a drawer and just throw its contents everywhere
Find a plastic straw and chase it around the house because why not?
Stand on your kitchen sink and completely ignore all of the other completely functional windows that are part of your house
Or maybe don't do those things. It depends on how much fear seeming crazy causes you. Also please remember that if you throw things everywhere you have to clean them up. I know I'm encouraging this but I'm not cleaning it up. Just have fun. That is the real reason that cats do things like push things off of surfaces. Because its fun. Do something completely harmless and dumb but have fun doing it.

Blog Post of the Vsauce Variety

A while ago I made a really weird vsauce script (the word "script" is used tentatively because the formatting is wrong please don't be angry) and this script is just... Something. Its not something written seriously, but being human entails that you create dumb things purely for fun. If you so choose to read it, it will be below because who doesn't enjoy having their eyeballs scalded for the sake of SCIENCE!

Int. Plain and barren room. The camera is zoomed in against a white wall

A man who is not Michael rises from the floor

Not Michael: “hey, Vsauce. Michael here…”

There is a pause as Not Michael arches an eyebrow

Not Michael: “or is it? Where are we? And where is Michael?”

A door opens and closes in the background

Not Michael: “To answer the last question, we first have to ask a couple of questions.”

Not Michael lifts his hand. He is holding a ‘question’

Not Michael: “Questions like 'where was Michael last seen?’ or”

Another pause as Not Michael stares questioningly at the camera

Not Michael: “'does Michael even exist?’”

Another Not Michael walks into frame from the right side. He is holding a 'not question’. There is an unzipping noise and the original not Michael removes their skin costume to reveal Michael. Michael removes 'gun’ from his mouth and shoots Not Michael. 

Michael: “SCIENCE.”

The 'not question’ raises out of Not Michael's hand and engulfs the screen. Michael's call for science has been heard. Science will arrive soon to assimilate all things. There is no escape.

Take that as you will. It's probably not as funny as I thought it was at the time, but, again, it's something. I actually want more things like this in my life so if you were inspired© by the vsauce "script" and decide to make something similar please send it to me. It doesn't have to be "good". What is "good" is purely subjective, and if its any indicator of my particular taste, I thought the movie "Dr. Bean" was good. Maybe its just because Rowan Atkinson as well as the fact that you can tell that he is living his best life when he's playing characters like that. He just has the best time. I want to be like that.

It also doesn't really matter. Everything you do is simultaneously good and bad and you don't get to choose why or how or when but being a person is difficult enough without having to worry about it. Just make stuff.

Koko, the sign language speaking gorilla, upon being asked where gorillas go when they die, she signed, of all things, "Comfortable hole. Bye." She has truly blessed us with her infinite wisdom.

On this note, I bid you goodnight. What is a bed but a comfortable rectangle. Comfortable rectangle. Bye.

What a Wonderful Bad

Wow a blog post! It's been so long.
If you aren't into people being sad, you shouldn't read this. I don't blame you (yet). If you're into feeling emotions(tm), then boy is this the post!
Just a slight disclaimer: I will not he held responsible for any emotion you feel because of this post. I know I'm the one who wrote it, but you're the one who decided to read it. That's basically like signing a contract, trust me on this one I know some stuff about law (sometimes)

Well here we are. Do you feel an emotion yet? That's my patented emotion that we call apprehension. Or possibly irritation. Why? Because I'm not getting to the point. That's because you need some time to decide whether or not you want to turn back. You're welcome.

Things have been kind of not good. We're currently in a short respite from an ongoing problem that feels like it's tearing the very walls apart; ripping the stones from our houses foundation. It's very possible that the foundation is gone already. That's the really scary part. If we leave it behind there will be nothing left for those left in the aftermath.
I don't know what to do. I'm so tired because I've spent so long trying to take responsibility for things that it feels like my life is being replaced by the sense that I need to fix things somehow, even if it's scary or difficult, even if I have to choke down my discomfort to pretend that something will change. It's exhausting to not be able to be angry because I've never been allowed to be. What's worse is that the anger always resurfaces as resentment, only to be buried again in the hope that it will become acceptance. The resentment only ever returns as a guilt for not being able to do anything, and the cycle continues.
And it never really ends. If I try to remove myself, I meet things with defensiveness and a paralyzing need for privacy. I try to reach out to others, and am met with silence more often than a response. At this point I'm not sure if I'm bad at keeping in touch with people, or if I've given up trying to interact in the first place. There's always the uncertainty of "maybe I'm bothering them," or "they're angry at me," and it's the guilt again, and then more disengagement. I even have nightmares about people being upset with me. It feels like there's nothing outside of the windows of this house sometimes, and maybe that's because the curtains are shut to make everyone think that nobody is home. It's no way to live. And I wish it would end so my life could take place instead.

I'm Either Haunted or Delusional

So this may or may not have been sleep paralysis, but there was a night this last week where it was very dark in my house. This phenomenon is known as night time. It turns out night and day are mutually exclusive in relation to each other (Isn't science amazing!).

On this particular night, I was watching YouTube, as you do when its 11:30 and you should be asleep, and it got really weirdly dark in my room. I have no idea if the amount of light decreased, but it felt darker. I know you don't know what I mean, but there's a salt lamp in the room that's always on and it was like those stupid movies where they make a salt line to "keep out the evil spirits" or something and the demons get past the salt line because it's literally just a rock except it was an LED that changes colors. If that makes any semblance of sense.

It's also important to note that the darkening was only one event out of multiple that happened simultaneously. The increased perception of darkness was part 1 of 3. Part 2 was the feeling that something was sitting on the corner of the bed. If you don't think that's messed up, you obviously don't have a mattress and should consider getting one. If that does sound messed up, congratulations! You know what its like for your mattress to give slightly when pressure is applied to it's surface! The worst thing about this experience was feeling the corner of the mattress move. The second worst thing was that the bed is my space. Nobody touches it but me. So obviously this ghost/delusion felt entitled to be within my space.

The third part of this was a feeling more than anything. It felt like something just kind of walked into my room and was standing in the doorway. The first problem: I keep the door shut. Bug can squeeze under the door if she's feeling particularly spunky, but we put the pets into kennels at night. The point is there is no way for someone to just walk into the room with the door shut. The second problem is that this feeling of something walking into the room also brought a visceral sort of fear with it. Now don't be mistaken, I am all for visceral fear on a weeknight. Its just not cool when its midnight and you're trying to pretend you're winding down to go to sleep by watching cooking videos on YouTube. The third problem was that this stupid thing lasted for the better part of half an hour. What the heck. You're telling me something is going to come into my room at midnight to stare at me for half an hour and then just leave? I mean, good riddance, but what's the point? Are you going to dark me to death? Are you going to lick the salt lamp? What are you going to do, touch a dress shoe? Play a little tune on the piano? Pretend you're good at art? There's just no good way to justify it. Like "oh yeah! Speaking of how our days were yesterday, mine was pretty good! I watched a random teenager watch bon apetit on YouTube after astral projecting into his bedroom at midnight."

So really this house is haunted by something that's extremely rude, or I'm delusional. This does not rule out the possibility that both things are true. Unlike night and day, these things are not mutually exclusive. You can give some feedback on this if you want but I'm not going to go as far as to encourage it.
Sweet dreams. Try really hard not to be haunted.

We Will Never Escape Geometry

Have you ever wanted to fight Euclid? Is that something you've ever felt the need to do? What if I told you he lived in the year 300 B.C. and all of the information we use about shapes are his fault? Think about it. This guy was so good at knowing what a line was that we still use almost all of his theorems and proofs. The worst thing is actually stuff that Euclid didn't do.

Geometry is split into two categories. Stuff that Euclid did, and stuff that Euclid didn't do. Euclid did all of the basic shape stuff, so people pretty much made up other categories of math to figure out. Why the helc would you make stuff up just to figure it out?!

Anyway what defines what is and is not Euclidean is how the math interpretation defines a line. The geometry we do defines a line as a line, but other types of geometry define lines as all kinds of weird things. It's basically a game of find a geometry type and guess what a line is.

Sometimes a straight line is actually a parabola within a circular plane apparently.
Sometimes a straight line is just a circle for some reason.
Sometimes a straight line is just a single point in a 3 dimensional plane or something I dunno.
At some point, someone is just going to point at a shape like a triangle and say, "That's a line," and other math people are going to say, "I see that. How does it work?" And they'll spend like 200 years trying to figure it out even though it effectively has no application but we know it exists so it must be important. It's like looking at your calculator and saying, "In what dimension does this look like my grandmother," and astral projecting to find out.

Thus Euclid has doomed us to forever figure out how he's wrong. He was so good and so very correct at math that people just can't deal with it so they try to disprove it. That's like the exact opposite of the attitude towards Freud (Who was so bad at psychology, and so, sooo wrong, that most of our psychological breakthroughs come from people trying to disprove his theories. Seriously some of them are really weird that guy had a serious problem. Like the Oedipus complex thing. Why? Who told you that that was something you should ever say? Was this from personal experience? Was he just so disconnected from his own humanity that he thought it was normal??? WHAT THE FUUu.) Please don't punch Euclid. Also try out this non-Euclidean geometry simulation thing and punch it's creator.

I Might Like Books too Much

If you want to know the effect that technology has on your mind when your tired, one time when it was like ten at night, I started having a panic attack because I thought my book was going to run out of battery. It was wild. I couldn't stop freaking out after I realized this though and that's a huge problem. Maybe it's the nature of books as a whole, relying on our imaginations to create a story out of otherwise meaningless information, or maybe it's just the fact that you shouldn't be reading the Illiad at 12:30 on a Tuesday night. You really shouldn't read the Illiad under these conditions. Your 3rd eye will open and you will access a pocket dimension in which bacteria are human sized and spray chemical on surfaces to kill humans so that they don't get an infection. In other words: It's like being indigenous in the 1800's and the chemical you spray to not get infected is arrows/bullets in the direction of the pilgrims so that you don't get weird white people diseases that will ultimately kill you.

Speaking of bacteria: THIS IS YOUR WARNING. This post contains mildly disturbing information about disinfectants and bacteria that may or may not ruin your life. 

Now that that's out of the way, a lot of things like hand sanitizer, don't actually kill 99.9999999 percent of bacteria. They do and they don't. What most people take that to mean is that things kill most of all kinds of bacteria, but the reality is that they only kill a few specific kinds of bacteria. The same thing with rubbing alcohol. Some bacteria have adaptations that allow them to live in such environments. HOWEVER there are a couple of good things, the first being that disinfectants do kill like 99% of their target bacteria. The second is that most of the stuff that is not killed by things like alcohol are harmless. Things like yeast can survive in alcohol. Although alcohol is a specific thing. Things like hand sanitizer only kill some stuff like salmonella for example. Really what I'm saying is you should either use bleach or ethanol to kill things you can't see. Or just wash your hands you heathens. Seriously.

This is not to be confused with things like surfactants. Lysol, for example, is a surfactant. Aside from being a good substitute for caring about things you clean with it, it creates an environment that is difficult to live in. Imagine if someone collected things that smelled like your grandmother's dog, and only your grandmother's dog. You would not want to live with that person. It really just does the same thing with bacteria.

"BuT WhAt DoEs ThIs HaVe To Do WiTh BoOkS?????????" HOLD ON I'M GETTING THERE.  Do you own books? If you answered yes, you may have an issue with your life. If you answered no, you may have an issue with your life. Don't worry, these are different issues.
If you said yes, you probably don't have anything to worry about. But if you get used books you should wrap them in a towel and THROW them into the freezer. You don't know how nasty the person who owned it before you was. If you're paranoid about getting contagious skin diseases, or about getting lice or bed bugs, this is a good thing for you. It's weird, but leaving them in your freezer for a couple hours kills things.

If you said you don't own books, the above portion doesn't apply to you. It also means you don't read. You should evaluate why you don't. Is it because you were forced to read books you didn't enjoy? Is it because you haven't found the author you like yet? Is it because you don't like words? Don't worry, you'll find your book eventually. However if the reason you don't read is because you don't like words, I hope you contract cats. You are in league with the people who don't like chocolate.

This Is the Sentence That Always Ends.

One day, I wrote a sentence that was just very strange at the base of the word. So today I have decided that I am going to look for the strangest combination of words in existence. So we're going to start simply: "The octopus decided to wear jeans today." Okay. Nothing too crazy. You may not understand and octopus' desire or ability to wear jeans, but it makes sense on a purely lingual level. Now let's change it up a little bit: "The octopus decided to become jeans today." That's a pretty dramatically different sentence. A subtle change of a single word made the sentence slightly more ridiculous. How exactly does an octopus go about becoming jeans? But let's go more subtle: "The octopus decided to become genes today." Okay, now there's a homonym taking the place of the word jeans. Obviously the octopus itself cannot become genes, but that's not important. Now how about we make this sentence absolutely wild. "Genes decided to become an octopus today."

We very quickly went from an octopus deciding to put on a pair of jeans to start the day, to genetic information creating an octopus. It went from a cephalapod wearing textile, to evolution. But how can we segue more sentences into odd things? Lets look at a common sentence in the English language: "I had no idea." You know what this sentence means. Now lets make it different. "I had idea." That sentence seems kind of odd to say, although it isn't grammatically incorrect. Let's change it some more. "I am Idea." That one doesn't make much sense to say, besides the fact that it sounds rather Russian. Now we'll add to it. "I am an idea." Now you yourself are not an idea. People aren't ideas, that much is obvious. Now lets make it different. "I am an idea maker." This sentence is very true, even though you may not think of it like that.

Now why don't we really make it strange. Let's add the octopus sentence after the idea maker one. "I am an idea maker. The octopus decided to wear jeans today." Now let's scramble that around. "I am an octopus. The idea maker decided to wear jeans today." Now the octopus is telling a story about an idea maker. That's pretty neat considering that Octopuses can't actually speak human language. Now let's figuratively slam it against a wall. "I am an octopus idea maker, who decided to wear jeans today." Okay. Now we have a fully sentient octopus. Maybe this is how Octo-dad came to be. Now let's remove this even farther from our figurative wall. "I am the idea maker who decided to wear an octopus as jeans today." Oh no. That is a terrible idea, but our idea maker did come up with it. You can decide whether or not you're proud of them. This could be a new fashion innovation. We'll call it octopants. Our idea maker can see the marketers flowing in already. That means it's time for a new sentence.

The new sentence will be, "A plucked chicken is a man." That's already quite the sentence. Considering Diogenes as we would consider the coconut, let's make it different. "A plucked chicken is Diogenes." That sentence, apart from being a bit rude, is quite inaccurate, as well as being grammatically incorrect so lets fix it. "Diogenes is a plucked chicken." That sounds almost like an insult. Let's make a final revision. "Diogenes is a plucked chicken with broad, flat nails." He is truly a man in this regard.

How about this sentence, "I won't let go." Let's change it into, "I'll never let go." Now this is a sentence addressing a person, so let's explicitly state that. "I'll never let you go." That could be romantic, but in this context it's not. How do we know that? Because I told you.
Now let's change it to be more personal. "I'm never going to let you go." That one is romantic. Let's simplify something first. We can combine "Going" and "To". "I'm never gonna let you go." That's a bit more like something a midwesterner would say. In some cases we can say that letting go is giving up. so let's change that as well. Let's also remove the word, "I'm," because at this point, it is unnecessary.  "Never gonna give you up NEVER GONNA LET YOU DOWN
NEVER GONNA RUN AROUND AND DESERT YOU."
You just got Rick-Rolled