Lord of the Rings Thoughts

1. Sadly I have never read the books. I really don't feel that bad about this. My dad has been trying to make me for the last 22 years, without success. Maybe because once I said to him, "Man, it's pretty cool that Tolkien made up a whole language for the elves!" and he said, "He didn't make it up" and I said, "Huh? Well then where did he get it?" and he said, "From the elves." Okay.

2. You know when Elrond is all, "Hey Arwen, you have to choose: either you come with us to the undying lands, or you stay with Aragorn and watch him die and then linger in shadow and in doubt forever." Except doesn't she just become mortal? Isn't that the highly preferable third choice? I guess you didn't think of that, HUH ELROND. Elves suck.

3. My boyfriend says, "I love the part where theoden is like. So much hate! What can one do against such hate? And aragorn is like ride w me. Cuz gandalf is coming with a horse army. Except he doesn't mention the horse army part so theoden just assumes he's suiciding. But he's still like, ok whatev." He should work for SparkNotes. Theoden should work for effing ... Badasses Incorporated.

4. Theoden and Gandalf riding out to Nelly's Ride With Me. Has it been done. If not, why not

Experiences I Have Had With Trivia

1. When I was seven, I was in a town-wide trivia contest in England. I tried so hard to get all the questions right, and when they announced the winners, I lost because I didn't get the colors of the rainbow right. The answer was, "Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, pink, and purple." Always graceful in defeat, I stood up in this silent crowd of people and scream-sobbed, "PINK AND PURPLE ARE NOT COLORS OF THE RAINBOW!!!" My parents had to escort me out. Seriously though, what the fuck. G Biv is probably still turning over in his grave.

2. Fact: every Fields family game of trivial pursuit ends in tears. 90% also end with the phrase, "GOD WHY DO YOU RUIN EVERYTHING."

I just got the following review on my documentation for the upcoming deadline: "The following URL was in the middle of the document: http:// www.theonion.com/video/scientists-successfully-teach-gorilla-it-will-die,17165/. Definitely delete this." Jesus.

April is National Poetry Month! WHO IS EXCITED?! If you are thinking, "Probably no one", then your life sucks and I feel sorry for you. You know who didn't like poetry? Hitler. Probably. Not. GOD I love poetry. My college advisor might have been a sarcastic b sometimes, but I can never thank him enough for bringing this source of absolute joy into my life.

Here is a nice poem for you to read!


Old Lilacs
by Ted Kooser

Through early April cold,
these thin gray horses
have come near the house
as to a fence, and lean there
hungry for summer,
nodding their heads
with a nickering of twigs.

Their long legs are dusty
from standing for months
in winter’s stall, and their eyes
are like a cloudy sky
seen through bare branches.

They are waiting for May
to come up from the barn
with her overalls pockets
stuffed from the fodder
of green. In a month
they will be slow and heavy,
their little snorts so sweet
you’ll want to stand
among them, breathing.

My sophomore year of college, when I was the student advisor on my floor, I had a fantastic first meeting with the very sweet female custodian on our floor. It was a few days before the semester started and I was hanging up posters in my room, listening to Peaches.

Music: SUCKIN' ON MY TITTIES LIKE YOU WANTED ME CALLIN' ME -
Woman: (knocks on open door)
Rachel: (obliviously dances on bed)
Music: FUCK THE PAIN AWAY.
Woman: Hello? Um ... hello?
Music: FUCK THE PAIN AWAY.
Rachel: (gyrates)
Woman: Excuse me! Excuse me!
Rachel: FUCK THE PAIN AWAY
Music: FUCK THE PAIN AWAY.
Woman: Hello? Hello?
Rachel: (turns around)
Rachel: Oh good God.
Music: FUCK THE PAIN AWAY.

Today at lunch, I asked a friend if he would eat my body, if I specifically asked for it in my will. "Would you be raw?" he asked. "No," I said, "you could cook me." "Hmm," he said. "Could I use sauces? A marinade? Could I bury you in a pit with hot coals and slow-cook you? Are you well-marbled? Give me your arm." Now I am hiding out in a conference room and he is probably waiting in my office with a knife and fork.

So my entire life I have listened to people talk about how good In n' Out Burger is. This is an annoying thing to hear if you've never had it. You try to involve yourself in the discussion by saying, "Well, I like Wendy's", only to be cut off by contemptuous laughter. "OH WENDY'S," they say, in the same voice that Thomas Edison probably used to talk to cavemen. "I thought that shack would be out of business by now!" Then they walk away together, still laughing. "Wendy's! Can you imagine!" Yeah, ugh. So anyway, today I am in Reno for work and I am going to eat at In n' Out Burger. I really don't want to like it, but it's probably going to be like the time I decided I didn't like The Notebook before I saw it. I wouldn't be surprised if this experience ended with me sobbing in the fetal position too.

Edit: Meh, it's okay. No Wendy's though.

Today I walked into the pregnancy clinic that I'm supporting this week, and the receptionist looked at me and said, "Are you here for your ultrasound?" Hahaha goddammit. Though I kind of wish I had said yes and gone along with it until she had informed me that there was no sign of a baby, and I had said, "What baby?"

I would like to open a diner called the Bad Night Diner. It'll be a diner for people who had a bad night the night before, and we'll have daily contests to determine who had the worst night. The winner gets a free meal. My friend Colin doesn't think we should have a bracket, but that's why he'll sadly be caught in the mysterious fire that forces me to collect on the diner insurance.

I think hipsters annoy me because when I was in sixth grade, I wore flannel unironically all the time. It won me no favors. Once I wore a flannel shirt to a middle school dance. I was skulking around near the boy I liked for about an hour, when finally his friend approached me. This is it! I thought. The road to prom queen begins here! He looked at me pityingly and said, "Steve says he'll pay you five dollars not to dance with him." CURSE YOU, FLANNEL, I thought. NEVER AGAIN.

Me: Oh my God, I have a line from something stuck in my head.
Me: "This time, the monsters are real."
Me: It's from a horror movie or book or something. Look it up, look it up.
Friend: Okay, I got it. It's from ...
Friend: ... Scooby Doo on Zombie Island.

Evidence That I Might Be A God

I was reading the pets section on Craigslist, and I clicked on an ad for several birds that apparently "have some talk to them." Whatever. "Sick, I hate birds," I thought. "I would bite the heads off those birds before I would adopt them." About a minute later, a bird plummeted straight down in front of my window. Terrifying! I have not decided how to use this new-found power, but be aware that Jason Segel is safe and the jury is still out on you.

Last weekend, I showed my boyfriend my 7th grade yearbook, which I signed twice pretending to be other people. I didn't remember it being that embarrassing. Turns out one of the signatures said, "Hey babe, u rock! Luv always, Mooski." I kind of remember thinking that I should come up with an adorable and believable nickname, but having never had an actual friend, I wasn't sure what they would call each other. Desgog? Varshank? Mooski? Yeah, Mooski, I think that sounds right. Next to it I also wrote, "Who is this?", just in case anyone reading my yearbook thought, "Gosh, this Mooski writes with the same pen and handwriting as Rachel ... but it says, 'Who is this?', so I guess Rachel just has so many admirers that she can't keep track of them all. Mystery solved."

Chip: My friend Dani reminds me of you so much.
Me: Hooray, why?
Chip: Well, this one time she hooked up with a 43-year-old man, and then a few weeks later she hooked up with a 16-year-old.

What.

Manatee and matinee are spelled too similarly. When you say you're going to see a matinee, I get my hopes up.

Why are those prove-you're-not-a-robot text boxes so difficult to read? I just had to go through about five of them to find one that wasn't completely illegible. Have we invented robots that can sort of read, but not that well? Like robots with a third grade reading level? That's some scary shit. You know it's only a matter of time until they can decipher those blurry letters too, and then before you know it, you'll show up to your Craigslist missed connection reunion to find an iPhone waiting for you, holding a single rose. I hope the prove-you're-a-human tests become increasingly complex, like an elaborate survey about TV shows from your pre-adolescence. "Twenty years old, eh? On a scale from one to ten, how much would you say Clarissa explained? Like, thirty percent? Half? ACCESS DENIED MOTHERFUCKER."

Games Invented By Me At Age Nine That You Should Use At Parties, Part Two

Racially Problematic Sexual Tension, The Game

Requires: two people, a weird power dynamic
Instructions: Identify the person in your life who is nine-year-old Rachel Fields. She is the one who tries to coerce you into doing things that make you uncomfortable. Get into her bed. Listen while she tells you that she is your Indian chief and you are her Indian squaw. Hug. When your mother asks you what you were doing upstairs, say, "We were hugging - ", only to be cut off by Rachel saying, "WE WERE PLAYING WITH DOLLS WE WERE DOING NOTHING."

Games Invented By Me At Age Nine That You Should Use At Parties, Part One

Parrots Under A Rug

Requires: between four and seven people, one rug
Instructions: Identify the person at your party who is nine-year-old Rachel Fields. She is the one who is dressed like a zebra and is awful to be around. Wonder why you came to this party. Well, you're stuck here now, so suck it up. Send this person out of the room and pick a random number of people to lay under the rug. Make them smush together really close even if it's hot and uncomfortable and the bottom of the rug is scratchy. Make everyone else hide so that it isn't clear how many people are under the rug. Invite Rachel back in and make her guess the number of "parrots under the rug." When she gets it wrong, let her guess again. Have a feeling it will be years before you remember that this happened, which won't make the recollection any less terrifying.

A woman once interrupted our (already nine-hour) application class to ask me, "Do you know what barium is?" I nodded. "I think it's an earth metal," I said, "I had to drink a whole milkshake of it once." She paused. "No, it's a joke," she said. "The answer is 'what you do after someone dies.'"

"Huh," I said. "How often do people say that they know what barium is and ruin the joke?" She gave me a look of resignment. "All the time."

Man, that's perseverance. Get this woman a cancer research lab, she's clearly in the wrong line of work.

A few months ago, my roommate Lindsay was contacted by a recruiter from our company, to see if she'd like to interview for her current position. She politely told them that they should have checked the staff directory first. Man, I really wish she'd gone along with it. I wonder how far she could have gone in the interview process before anyone realized she already works there. She could have been hired again and secretly worked in the same role as two different people! Two offices! Two paychecks! Though if Mrs. Doubtfire taught us anything, it's that eventually she would have scheduled two dinners in the same restaurant and her misguided plan to kill Pierce Brosnan would have blown her cover.

I have a co-worker who's seriously a real-life version of She's All That's Laney Boggs, as in secretly beautiful but wears glasses, flannel, and a braid, thus rendering her HIDEOUS. I spend most meetings staring at her and thinking about making her over. It's sort of sick. Unfortunately she also sucks, but that's suggesting that I care at all about her personality, which I don't. "Uh, Rachel," you might say, "are you really qualified to give fashion advice to anyone? Didn't you once wear a denim button-down every day and pretend that you had two of them to excuse the fact that you never changed your shirt?" One, I think you forgot about my diploma from the School of Watching A Lot Of What Not To Wear, Just Not Taking Any Of It To Heart. And two, I rocked that shirt. I mean ... shirts.

If I only give my children one piece of advice, it will be, "Never play leapfrog when you are 22 years old, drunk, and on a cement path." They would ask why, but looking at my scarred and twisted features will be explanation enough.

When I was eight, I went to Barcelona with my family, and we stayed at a Eurocamp campsite with a pool. On the second day, I was walking with my dad beside the pool when I looked down and spotted some poop on the ground. "Look, Daddy," I said. "A dog pooped here." He looked at the poop and shook his head. "That's not dog poop," he said gravely. "That's human."

***

Later in the same trip, we went to a waterpark. Hooray! Unfortunately, my bathing suit was made of some awful fabric that stuck to the slides, so I kept getting stuck halfway down and needing the lifeguards to come and retrieve me. Not to worry, my mom stumbled onto the perfect solution: to make me wear one of my brother's speedos. And nothing else. For five hours, I wandered around the park, humiliated, while kids shouted, "PUT A SHIRT ON!" at me. It would be years before I developed breasts, but still. Eight. Too old.

Rachel Fields: Dog Whisperer

Part 3.

When I was in middle school, there was a kids advice column in the Chicago Tribune called Ask Spot. Spot was a dalmation, and kids would write in and ask him stuff about nature or the human body or whatever else. Obviously I was old enough to know that Spot was not a real dog, and I became obsessed with revealing his true identity. I fantasized about writing letters to him that asked, "Spot, are you a real dog?" and him not being able to answer while the world looked on. 'Come on, Spot,' they'd say, in my mind. 'If you're a real dog, just say so. Just tell us the truth.' As if 1) the rest of the world was under the impression that he was real and 2) anyone would congratulate me for ruining the harmless pretend of a thousand Chicagoland children.

Rachel Fields: Dog Whisperer

Part 2.

When I was in fourth grade in England, my classmates and I got really into having imaginary dogs. We would pretend to play with them and walk them and whatnot. It was pretty weird, but everyone was doing it, so it became strangely acceptable. My dog was called Spanner and he was a cocker spaniel. Unfortunately, after a few weeks, everyone else decided that the imaginary dog trend was weird and lame, so they all stopped doing it. Of course nobody told me this, so I was faithfully walking Spanner up and down the playground for a few weeks before I realized. Then I tried to sneakily cover my tracks. "Yeah, Spanner killed himself," I told them, trying to seem devil-may-care and nonchalant. "He jumped out of a window." They looked at me with a combination of pity and scorn. "Yeah, right," the meanest one said. "He's right over there, isn't he?" ... Dammit, he was.

Rachel Fields: Dog Whisperer

Part 1.

After college, in order to escape the terrible boredom that was Lemont, IL summer, I took a job as my neighbor's dog-watcher. I've never had a dog, but this seemed like a pretty simple task, and it paid improbably well. The thing is, this dog has been alive since I moved into the neighborhood, which was 13 years ago, and it wasn't a puppy then. I don't know how long dogs live, but I think this one must be on its last legs, because it has a few health problems. And by "a few", I mean "a lot of" and by health problems I mean "incontinence."

When my neighbor left for vacation, she warned me about this issue. Not to worry, she said. There are cleaning supplies in the closet, in a bucket marked "Accidents." If your dog is having accidents so often that you actually need to designate a separate bucket for the occasion, it might be time to not leave it alone for long stretches of time. But whatever, I thought. What's the worst that could happen?

What indeed. So last night, I went over to take Shadow (alias: Boo-Boo) out. As soon as I opened the door, I knew something was wrong. There were a couple of clues that tipped me off, the first being that it smelled like what hell must smell like. The second being that everything (and I mean everything) was covered in feces. There were even feces on a wall hanging five feet off the ground. Either Boo-Boo can fly, or - well, I dont' want to think about the alternative.

It was about the worst thing ever, but I was at least grateful that my neighbor had told me about the "Accidents" bucket. I went to the closet, and sure enough, there it was. But for some reason, the only things inside were a duck-shaped nail brush and a tiny little scooper that one might use to pick up pistachios. Really, I thought. Okay.

I spent about fifteen minutes feeling very upset and sorry for myself, hoping that someone might burst in and say, "Aren't you a college graduate? You do not deserve this! Here, have a muffin and a beer while I fix this." But alas. Everyone else was asleep, so I spent about two hours cleaning up this ridiculously awful mess and trying not to vomit on myself. This morning I called my neighbor to inform her of the situation, and I told her that the "Accidents" bucket was empty and none-too-helpful.

"Oh, you got the wrong bucket," she said, as if I was a little slow. "You should have looked behind the door."

OH I SEE. So I went back to the closet, and sure enough, behind the door was another bucket labeled "Accidents," this one full of cleaning supplies that would actually work. I told her that having a decoy bucket and hiding the true bucket behind a door are possibly not the best ideas, but she just laughed as if this was a hilarious inside joke that we came up with together.

So on my list of the Worst Nights Ever, I think beat out most seventh grade dances for a top ten spot. A decoy bucket. I am still speechless.

Man, I really need to get better at games. It wouldn't be so bad if I were one of those calm, winning-isn't-everything people who's just in it for the good times with friends or whatever. I don't give a shit about my friends. I want to win. I should make embroider a pillow that says, "Friendship isn't everything", that would really throw people for a loop. Anyway, like I've said before, I'm hyper competitive and I suck at almost everything. Trivia, video games, word games, sports, you name it. Once a little girl looked at me pityingly and said, "You're really bad at Candyland." Fact about Candyland: it is literally impossible to be bad at it. It is all luck. I just looked back at her and said, "Well, you're not very good at going through puberty." Stupid seven-year-olds.

This fact occurred to me again last night, when I was playing MarioKart (though Wii, not Double Dash, which is pretty much like ... why bother). I got a little too excited, and Evan had to give me some juice and a time out. I guess playing with my friends convinced me that it's okay to say, "I WILL LITERALLY RIP THE FLESH OFF YOUR PARENTS SKULLS' AND USE IT AS A MOISTURIZING FACE CLOTH" to a group of people you just met. Whatever. I think speed dating should all be centered around one MarioKart race, because I think you can tell a lot about a person from what happens in that time. For instance, with me, you could tell that you don't want to be around me ever again, and that I am awesome at sliding.

Maybe I should start making up my own games again. If I learned anything from being nine years old, it is: no one can beat you if they don't know the rules. Because you keep changing them.

The other week my coworker told me about a meeting she attended where the icebreaker was, "If you could be on any reality show, which one would you be on?" The answers were pretty standard: American Idol, The Amazing Race, etc. Halfway through the group, one guy said, "Well, I don't watch a lot of reality TV. But if I had to pick, I guess I'd say Lost."

Ahahaha.

I hate museums that have those displays that say, "Open this door to see a picture of the WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL!" and then it's just a goddamn mirror. Good one, museum! You got me! I thought it was going to be something sweet like a hippo riding a shark with a gorilla head, but it's so much better to be reminded that I didn't brush my hair today.

Me: Whenever I use the disabled stall and someone comes in, I worry it's a serial killer who kills people who use the disabled stall when they don't need to. Like, his mother was disabled and he was crazily attached to her, so he kills people to revenge her.
Friend: When I use the disabled stall and someone comes in, I worry it's a disabled person.
Me: ... That makes more sense.