You’re Australia!
You’re easy-going, relaxed, and yet somewhat tough and hardy all at the same time. You can appreciate culture, scuba diving, and even safaris. This makes you pretty interesting and intriguing to others, though also really unpredictable and even wild. Your knowledge of nature is unthinkable to most of those around you, even though your respect for it is sometimes less than perfect. People really like your accent.
Take the Country Quiz
Hmm. Sounds just like me. They forgot “You’re a badass!”, though.
* * *
While we watched
Cold Mountain last night – while I watched
Cold Mountain, I should say, and Fred yammered through the entire fucking movie until right before the sex scene I turned to him and said “Are you planning on ever shutting up SO I CAN HEAR THE FUCKING MOVIE??” and then he quieted for a few minutes before resuming his smartass comments – I had to, at various times, turn away. Usually it was when I saw a knife or sword and knew it was about to be used. I am, if I’ve never mentioned it, squeamish as a prissy little girl. I guess I should more accurately say that I’m selectively squeamish.
Things like cleaning out the litter box or cleaning up a line of barf left as a present by one or more of the cats are things I can deal with without much batting an eye (unless the barf is still warm and it soaks through the paper towel, and then all bets are off). Poopy diapers don’t much bother me – well, that’s a lie, they’d probably bother me nowadays, but back in the day when I was dealing with the spud’s atomic neck-to-knee shits I just considered them something to be dealt with and didn’t make a big deal over it.
Which is not to say that I didn’t foist diaper changes on whoever else was standing around whenever humanly possible. Just because they didn’t bother me doesn’t mean I went out of my way to come face-to-face with shitty diapers.
But I digress. It’s mostly the blood-and-guts stuff that makes my toes curl and want to squeal and run away. When we watch
Nip/ Tuck, those fuckers always show at least one surgery in loving detail and I have to turn my head and tell Fred to let me know when it’s over. He sits and gazes with shiny eyes at the screen, getting so caught up that oftentimes he forgets to let me know it’s over.
When we were watching
Cold Mountain and someone got stabbed in the gut with a knife or sword, it made me cringe. I’ve never in my entire life been stabbed in the gut – or anywhere else, for that matter – but I have enough of an imagination that I could swear I know just what it feels like to have cold steel stabbing past your skin and into your intestines and whateverthehell other organs are laying in the path of the knife or sword.
(Ooh! Ooh! Digression! For some reason, I’m reminded of the time years and years ago that I read a novel. In the novel, a bad guy was kidnapping and killing young boys. Near the end of the novel, he had kidnapped yet another young boy, who made a break for it and ended up in the basement, where there was a huge pile of garbage bags. The boy runs through the garbage bags and some of them break open to reveal the decomposing bodies of the boys the bad guy has killed. The author goes into some detail about the smell, and later after I’d put the book down for the night (or maybe finished it), I was laying in bed thinking about the fact that I was dead certain that I knew exactly what it smelled like in that basement. Which made me start wondering how the holy fuck I knew what a decomposing body smelled like. What the hell? Had I once smelled (been RESPONSIBLE FOR) a decomposing body and repressed the memory? Had I, in fact, ONCE KILLED SOMEONE and the memory was trying to break free into my conscious mind? I swear to god, people, this bothered me so much that I couldn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t until the middle of the next day that I realized that the smell I was recalling was the smell of the rotting garbage in the garbage bin when I worked at McDonald’s. It might not have contained any decomposing bodies, but if you spend a little time in a small building that contains nothing but a dumpster filled with week-old McDonald’s garbage, I can almost guarantee you that you know what decomposing bodies smell like. Gag.)
(Digression #2: I once had an extremely realistic dream that I was leaving a bar late at night, got into an argument with a stranger over what kind of car I was driving (it wasn’t American-made, which pissed him off). I got into my car, backed out, and hit him (an accident, I swear!). When I got out to see if he was okay, I was pretty sure he was dead, though I didn’t, y’know, check for a PULSE or anything. I picked him up, stuffed him in my trunk, and drove up 95N toward home. It being late at night, there wasn’t much traffic, so I pulled over and opened my trunk to toss him over the side of a ravine (conveniently located right next to the highway). When I started to pull him out of the trunk, he began flailing and moaning, and I freaked out and pushed him over the side of the ravine. He landed at the bottom (and it was a deep ravine) and I could still hear him moaning and there was this bloody, gurgling sound underlying the moan. I shut the trunk and took off, feeling incredibly guilty, but also as if I had no choice, and woke with my heart in my mouth. I had to actually sit and wonder if it was something that had really happened that I had – sound familiar? – repressed and was trying to fight it’s way back to my conscious mind. Can you tell that I was really big into the idea of repressed memories when I was younger?)
(Also, Stephen King once said that when he was young, he thought that sanity was something very fragile – like you could be walking down the street, one moment sane, the next insane – something I thought as well. I also thought that you could flip back and forth from sanity to insanity like flipping a switch (though involuntarily), and also that if you were insane, you knew it. Thus, I’d every once in a while check in with my sanity. “Am I crazy?” “Nope, not today.” “‘k, just checking!”)
I can watch someone get shot and it doesn’t bother me too terribly much – maybe because I haven’t read a detailed description of what it’s like to be shot – but watching a stabbing or strangling or someone having their throat slit is something I have a really hard time watching.
Either I’m too empathetic, or I’m just a big baby.
Still a badass, though. A cringing, whiny, “Oh, I can’t watch the fake operation, it’s too groooooooss” badass, but a badass just the same.
* * *
For the record, say what you will about
Cold Mountain, I loved it. In fact, I put it on my wish list. Fred thought it moved too slowly, but I didn’t think it did at all. I’m not a big Renee Zellweger fan, but I thought she was amazing in the part of Ruby.
Hm. I loved her as Bridget Jones, too. Maybe I’m more of a fan than I thought I was…
* * *
Five minutes ago, I was packing a box of books to send to my sister. Once I’d gotten the box packed, I wasn’t sure whether to send it to my parents’ house – my sister is house- and dog-sitting while my parents are in Hawaii – or to my sister’s apartment.
::beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep:: (I dialed my parents’ phone number) Behind me, Fred was listening to music.
Me: Can you turn that down a little?
Fred: ::turns it down a very little::
Spud (answering the phone): Hello?
Me: Hey.
Fred: (sounding annoyed) Hey.
Me: What are you doing?
Spud: I just (rest of sentence drowned out by:)
Fred: (sounding even more annoyed) Reading
Dooce, like you told me to!
Me: I’m ON THE PHONE!
Fred: Oh.
Maybe you just had to be there.
* * *
Bath time!
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