Blogspot doesn’t know how love potions work

When you’re making a Blogspot profile, you get to answer some random question that Blogspot uses to pretend they’re extremely quirky. This backfires with me because I am snarky. Actually, I’m not being snarky. They’re just using really unclear questions.

Blogspot: The love potion you made tastes terrible. How will you drink it?

Me: Wait, why would I drink a love potion that I made? Shouldn't I give the love potion to someone else so that they'll fall in love with me? I thought that was how love potions worked.

I realized that it was my responsibility to come up with some questions that people actually need to know the answers to. Questions that provoke deep thought. I even included some of my own sample answers. You’re welcome, Blogspot.

Which fruit do you think is the most sensual?

Passion fruit. I mean, come on, it’s in the name. Also there’s that whole Garden of Eden/Adam and Eve/creationism/and-then-they-realized-they-were-naked connection.

Wait. That was a pomegranate. Or an apple, depending on whether you believe the Fertile Crescent was the Garden of Eden. Actually that could be any fruit depending on where you’re from and what your priests told you. Huh. Now I’m not sure. I guess pomegranate. I don’t even know what passion fruit tastes like but maybe it really isn’t that sexy.

If you were making a school, what would your colors and mascot be?

Purple and silver. Because people just don’t wear enough purple. And I already have a ton of clothing/items that are purple. I would look extremely spirited by just wearing my normal clothes. It’d be awesome because I care very little about displaying school spirit, but everyone would think that I cared, and then I would win.

Mascot is harder than I thought. Here are some of my top choices:

• Secretary bird. They stomp and/or kick prey to death. And their prey can include snakes. And they do this on foot because flying isn’t very sportsmanlike. It would be like cheating, and neither my school nor the secretary bird is okay with that. Also our theme song could be “A Secretary Is Not A Toy”.

They look like they’re wearing shorts, so it’s totally PG to not put some kind of funny outfit on our mascot.

• Hedgehog. They’re covered in pointy death but they are still adorable. There is no way to lose with this mascot. The mascot uniform would be a weapon in itself.
• Cthulu. Do I really need to explain this? H.P. Lovecraft said that it’s like if an octopus and a dragon had a baby. Any team my school is competing against will immediately defecate themselves and shuffle shamefully away from the field/court/arena.
• Zombie. Holy crapmuffins, people. What if your school team was “the Fighting Zombies” or “the Ferocious Zombies”? That would be two hundred percent amazing.

Which apocalypse scenario is your favorite?

Rapture, I guess. Because the people who get raptured win because they go to heaven to chill with Jesus, and the people who don’t get raptured win because everything is the same but with fewer televangelists.

Until the plagues part, anyway. I guess I only like this scenario if I get raptured (unlikely) or predecease the plagues. In that case I guess I change my mind to meteor. Because as awesome a mascot as they’d be, zombies in an apocalypse smell bad.

Choose your celebrity parents.

That’s not really a question. More like a command. I pick Thomas Gibson and Tina Fey, though. Because Thomas Gibson is kind of serious and Tina Fey is hilarious, so I’d be completely well-rounded. And also that would make Aaron Hotchner my father.

Daddy!

If you could get one formula tattooed on your body, what would it be? (And it has to be, like, a real, established equation. You can’t do something like integral of e to the x equals function of u to the n. That doesn’t count.)

I had to do some research for this, but probably the entropy equation ΔS = Q/T. Partially because my first initial is actually S, and Q/T is like “cutie”, so then it’s basically calling me adorable. Also because entropy is associated with chaos and stuff, and that’s kind of exactly like me. Or it seems kind of edgy, at least. So that’s cool.

Which grammar rule is your favorite?

Oh, that’s an easy one. I’m kind of obsessed with the difference between “less” (uncountable amount, like, “there is less butterbeer in my glass than in your glass”) and “fewer” (countable amount, like “there are fewer molecules of butterbeer in my glass than in your glass”).

What is the best idea you’ve ever had that turned out to be the worst idea you’ve ever had?

When I was ten, my best friend Jeannie and I decided to make sandwiches. Not just any sandwiches… the best sandwiches that had ever been made. So we took slices of white bread and filled them with things that were two hundred percent delicious:

• Peanut butter
• Chocolate syrup
• Marshmallow fluff
• Marshmallows
• Chocolate chips
• Sprinkles
• Whipped cream
• M&Ms

I call this the Glory Sandwich.

We were geniuses. We had created sandwiches that people would base religions around. They would eat our sacred sandwiches on the high holy days. These were sandwich gods.

Then we tried to eat these hyperglycemic monstrocities with glasses of chocolate milk that had a chocolate molarity of over nine thousand. We made it about halfway through before collapsing on my couch, sweetly frothing at the mouth (probably just marshmallows and whipped cream) and vowing that we would never do that again as long as we lived. To my knowledge, neither of us has ever gone back.

What is your favorite relatively-PG expression of annoyance and/or disaster?

Crapmuffins.

Where is the worst place to be trapped with a sombrero?

The Texas side of the Mexican border.

If you were a saint, what would you be the patron saint of?

Body-focused repetitive disorders and not believing in moose.

Nope. It’s a hoax.

Are you as funny as you think you are?

Probably not.

It's all Greek to me

When I was signing up for classes this semester, I decided, “Hey, I know what I’ll do. I’ll take Greek and Roman mythology! I love that stuff and I already know tons about it.”

It’s something like this, right? But more incest.

But then, like all desirable classes, it was full and I had to find something else using our lousy registration website, Banner (warning: not PG. And probably not as funny if you’ve never used Banner). I ended up picking Greek Archaeology and Art because even though the course title is synonymous with “pretty old Greek stuff that was buried for a few hundred years”, it filled two of my eleven General Education Requirements, which means I won’t have to take Intro to British Literature or something like that. Because liberal arts educations mean that you need to know stuff about Shakespeare even if you’re a neuroscience major.

The only problem so far is the teacher. He seems like a totally nice human being who is genuinely passionate about what he does. But he also kind of reminds me of the Catholic priest from my hometown—you know, the one who caused me to invent a holy drinking game. He just talks and talks and talks in monotone, while useless slides flip quickly by in the background.

By “useless”, I’ll give him credit that he kind of knows how to use Powerpoint. The slides are semi-organized and he doesn’t have trouble trying to change between them. On the other hand, he doesn’t ever put any text on the slides, so lessons tend to go like this:

Estimated elapsed time: 20 seconds.

This is kind of a problem for everyone who writes at the speed at which most humans are able to write. Because we have to figure out how to remember which art piece he is talking about, and simultanouesly write down everything he’s saying because there isn’t really a hard copy of the notes he’s giving us.

Also, the book is next to useless. I bought mine used because the used copy was only $22 and twenty-two is my lucky number. I clearly didn’t anticipate what “used” would mean, because I definitely wasn’t expecting Chapter Four, part of Chapter Six, and pages 29 through 132 to fall out.

Clockwise from upper left: pages 29 to 132, Chapter 6, Chapter 4, the rest of the book. Not pictured: disappointment.

My other used textbook, which is for Physiological Psychology, is pristine apart from a little bit of highlighting. I’m especially cool with this because I think that biopsych is the most interesting topic in the world. My book agrees with me, apparently, because it even says “Biological psychology is the most interesting topic in the world” in the first chapter. No joke. It’s even all italicized. And then it goes on to say that other people who say similar things about their areas of study are wrong.

Anyway, my method for remembering what my Archaeology professor was saying is now drawing. I write down whatever he says and then I draw the art on whatever it was that he said it about, because sometimes “boar fighting a lion!” isn’t really enough of a description for me to match it to a specific piece. I’m definitely not a trained artist but I have to say that it might be time for me to abandon neuroscience and start a path of becoming an art restoration expert.

Recently we have started learning about statues, which I believe is going quite excellently.

Smithsonian Institute. Call me.