Tag: Halloween candy

Wicked Smart

I’m a bit of a brainiac. Learning has always been my jam, enough so that summer began to bore me once I got into my adolescence. There was just so much stuff I didn’t know but wanted to. What were stars made of? What happened to the dinosaurs? How does this work? How does that work? What is the other thing made of? How do you use a microscope? A telescope? Paint? Who lived before me? What did people used to do, and why did they do it? Yes, I could learn through reading, but I wanted to be able to ask questions. I wanted people to show me things. I wanted to see and hear and experience. I loved school so much that back in college I would be in the library or lab the very first week of class. My roommates would come and retrieve me with a promise of pizza and beer because “it’s only the first week and we’re going out.”

Thirty-six years later, I still love learning, only now I’m into The Great Courses. I get it for about $150 a year through Roku and it’s much more entertaining than walking around a university campus reading the faculty’s minds. (It’s also much cheaper than paying anywhere from $39 to $239 per course.) Whatever you’re into, they’ve got a course on it. Last spring and summer I learned a lot about the Roman Empire, World Heritage Sites, and stolen masterpieces, and I’m currently halfway through a series about the castles of Europe. The courses in my queue range from Norse mythology to Stoic philosophy to exoplanets to ancient writing and the history of the alphabet, and of course, bird-watching. It’s all quite fascinating and wonderful.

Yet the series that drew me to The Great Courses in the first place is The Real History of Dracula. Roku ran ad about it on the home screen and I just couldn’t resist. There are two professors and they kind of play off one another with one, Brittany Warman, Ph.D., more prone to subtle and intellectual jokes and puns and the other, Sara Cleto, Ph.D., a little more serious. Throughout 10 lectures they cover a lot of ground, including the origins of vampire lore, how Dracula tapped into the xenophobia of the time (oh, those pesky foreigners from Eastern Europe with their old ways of doing things), the parallels between vampire stories and different versions of “Bluebeard” and “Snow White”—all kinds of good stuff. I was glued.

Another fabulous course is Secrets of the Occult, with Richard B. Spence, Ph.D. The next time someone comes at you with accusations of the occult being evil, remind them that occult only means “supernatural, mystical, or magical beliefs, practices, or phenomena.” To that end, the very belief in a deity and the rituals people engage in to try to connect with said deity are all occultism, including prayer, blessings, and sacraments, not least of which is the Roman Catholic sacrament of Holy Communion in which the faithful believe that bread and wine transmogrify into the very body and blood of Christ, and then they consume that body and blood. (And they call us blood-sucking fiends? At least we don’t eat the flesh.) Indeed, it’s pure occultism to believe that a spirit impregnated a virgin who then gave birth to a baby who grew into a man who walked on water and later rose from the dead and ascended into a different realm we can’t see. God is nothing if not supernatural, so there ya go. Occultism is not all astrology, Tarot, and Aleister Crowley. (Speaking of Crowley, Spence talks about him again in another terrific course, The Real History of Secret Societies. Templars and Cathars and Masons, oh my!)

Point is, I’m glad for things like The Great Courses and other ways of learning. My knowledge quest is one reason I’ve long lamented the brevity of the human lifespan. There just isn’t enough time to learn all there is to learn, which is why I decided to let someone else give me all the time I need. You know who you are.

And now for today’s candy, which could only be wax fangs.

Frankly, I find these to be grossly speciesist and inappropriate, but whatever. It’s not the children’s fault, so I direct my ire toward the grown-ups who propel this mockery forward. Unfortunately, the ignorant ones never taste good.

*Hat-tip to Good Will Hunting for the title of this entry. I absolutely agree with the premise. I do have a degree, but there is something to be said for $1.50 in late charges at the public libary and no student debt.

Eye Candy

I’ve long put off doing something with my home office. All I have in a 9’5 x 11′ room is an L-desk, a file cabinet, and a salvaged printer table.

When the exterminator came by today for routine maintenance, one of the ladies in the rental office glanced in and I felt shame, so MUCH Libra shame. So I did what any good Libra would do and rationalize a little shopping spree by noting that it’s a three-paycheck month. Now I have a dark red and black traditional Oriental rug and a 55-inch black console table coming. I’ll get artwork after the rug arrives to see what colors will work best. I keep my office dimly lit, with warm light bulbs, so probably something in fall colors.

I didn’t stop there, though. I bought artwork for over my bed and a four-piece set of birdie artwork for somewhere in the living room. They’re 12-inch square so while they are long enough to take up the necessary space with three inches between them to fill the two-thirds rule of how wide artwork should be over a sofa, they might not be tall enough. If so, I will hang them in a square in the dining area.

Yes, I’ve been living without artwork in my apartment for about nine years now. Why? Because I got rid of all of the stuff I had when I moved back to Virginia in 2015 as it was all given to me by people I didn’t want to be reminded of in my new life. I also hate clutter, as my ex-husband was a slob (one of the reasons for the divorce—nope, signed up to be a wife, not a maid) and my ex-boyfriend was somewhere between a level 1 and a level 2 hoarder (living in the same zip code was enough for me).

A couple of years ago I started going to galleries and looking for paintings, but as much as I wanted to and could finally afford it, I just couldn’t bring myself to plunk down $2,000 or $3,000 on a piece of art for fear of getting it home and then finding that it wasn’t a good size or it just didn’t work with my furniture, color scheme, or light.

So hello canvas prints from small businesses on Amazon! If they work, great! If they don’t, no harm, no foul. I’m only out a couple hundred bucks and I can offer them to friends who might like them. I do know the bird art will work, because bird art will ALWAYS work in my home, but not sure about the abstract I bought for over the bed.

I also figured out where I’m going to hang artwork given to me in recent years by people I do want in my life, as well as smaller pieces I’ve picked up over the years and just never hung, like this beauty, “A Study of Riddles,” by Apollo the Crow at Diva Crows:

I don’t believe Apollo has been painting lately, or, if he has, Diva Crows has stopped selling his artwork, so I’m super glad I got one of his last commissions. He’s still alive and well as far as I know, though.

Another great thing about this painting is the fabric Diva Crows used to wrap it:

Yes, those are eyeballs in the roses. What lovely mix of romance and Hitchcockian terror! Fortunately, I’m on the good side of the Crows who live on the property, having kept them in peanuts for a couple of years now.

And now for today’s candy: Gummy Eyeballs! Fortunately, these were not around when I was a kid or I might very well have turned out even more warped than I did.

Clink, Clink

I’m kind of not feeling this project this year. It’s likely because we’ve been short-staffed at work for the better part of the last eight months, largely because a prior director had no business managing other people or their workflows, and I’m hella burned out so I don’t feel like writing yet more at the end of the day.

That may or may not change as I have two three-day weekends in a row, but I wonder what the point of all of this is as I get so few hits and almost comments. I’m thinking ProseBox should have been the place to do this.

In keeping with my current mood of “blah,” here is the thing I most disliked getting for Halloween when I was a kid: Pennies.

Like, what was a seven-year-old going to do with that in 1973? I wasn’t old enough to go somewhere on my bike and spend it, and the candy you could get for a penny or two back then was more tease than satisfaction, like one mini Tootsie Roll from a bunch that the guy at the mom-and-pop grocery store sold loose in an old baseball-card box because one of the bags in his candy shipment was open. I hope no one still gives out pennies. That’s just plain trolling little kids at this point.