Carolina Glauster’s blog

The smell of gasoline: Love it or hate?

People love the smell of gasoline?  Seriously?

If you could pick between the superpowers of flight or invisibility, which would you choose?
Submitted by aynge.

Totally flight.  I love being high in the air, like climbing trees or swinging high on swings.  Also, it would be convenient for transportation purposes.

I would want it to be the kind of flight that defies the laws of physics.  The kind of totally precise hovering, any change in speed you want, stuff like that, not like things with wings, where you have to take off, and be moving forward and so on. That was I could do stuff like be swimming underwater and shoot up out of the water.  That would be fun.

If you had to be named after one of the 50 states, which would it be?

Hmm...this is a funny question, because people already assume I am named after two of them.  Yeah, I'd be named after the Carolinas, because then there would be no name change paperwork to fill out.  Top notch!

If you had to invite five friends or celebrities (or a combination of both) to a slumber party at your house tonight, who would you include and what movies would you rent?

Dude!  What are the chances??  I *just had* a totally great sleepover on Thursday night.  Yeah.  I would invite those same people (you know who you are) and do the same things (watch The Emperor's New Groove, make pizza and eat it, bake bread and share it (along with wine) to remember the Last Supper, play Truth or Truth (we were too lazy to do dares, which would require getting up, of course), and generally hang out together with good friends).

Yeah, that sleepover rocked.

Do you believe that ignorance is bliss?

No.  I get the point of the saying, but does anyone really think it is literally true?  Not that many people.  It is not intended to be taken literally or generally or as a life creed for crying out loud--it is a figure of speech that highlights a certain facet of life that crops up in certain kinds of situations: sometimes there are things we find out, perhaps need to know, that we would have been happier not knowing.  I believe that.  I sure wish I hadn't known about this QotD, which I confess I find a tad aggravating.

What one thing, without fail, puts you in a bad mood?

When my computer acts up in funny ways.  It always takes forever to fiddle with, and then doesn't work anyway, and I am very very sad.  Like for the last two days, when my browser has been constantly and inexplicably crashing.  Aaargh.  I do not know what is wrong--it is totally unpredictable and inscrutable.

(this is why my daily QotD efforts have been late, by the by)

Probably the second grumpy-making-est thing is when someone else uses my computer without asking, because I am afraid that they are going to make something in the computer act up in a funny way and then I will be upset with them, probably much more upset than is rational.  If something is going to go wrong with my computer, better for everyone that it should be on my watch and not someone else's. 

Man, I never used to get it when emily ann used to be so protective of her computer, but now that I have a Mac too, I am right there with her.  Seriously.

Have you ever walked out of a movie?
Submitted by Jack Yan.

Huh.  That is a pretty good one.  I was going to say no, but then I realized the answer is kind of yes.  I am pretty sure I have never walked out of a movie in a theatre, but I did once--no, twice--walk out of movies I was watching with my peers.

In the first instance, I was in the second grade (although of course it was in Canada so it was called grade two) and there was some sort of Halloween party and everyone was watching a movie that was maybe called Witches? Witches of Eastwick?  Or something?  Anyway, a film that was surely rated G (or else why were they showing it to grade twos?) but I still found way too scary.  I felt all uncomfortable that I was going to be made to watch this movie that seemed like it might scare me, but I guess I found a teacher and talked to her about it and she let me go to the library and just read the whole time.  Ahhh...much better.

The other one equally makes me look less than cool--early in highschool I was over at a friends house and everyone decided to watch The Beach for funsies.  At that time, I only watched R-rated movies if I knew them to have some redeeming quality, since thrillers or violent films or creepy things or dystopian fantasies tended to give me nightmares. This movie seemed to be going down that creepypants nightmare-inducing road, and didn't seem anywhere near good enough to risk it over, so after a bit I just hung out in another room for the rest of the movie.

Various recent events have inspired me to make an effort to post more here (it's a kind of do-unto-others-as-you-would-have-them sort of thing), and I though I'd try to do so via an effort to answer either the QotD or the Vox Hunt every day for ten consecutive days.  Here is hoping they are at least vaguely fruitful questions, because man oh man sometimes those questions are just straught up inane.  Good luck, me.

So, the question for today:

Today is "No Housework Day." Tell us: What's your least favorite chore around the house?

Hmm, I am trying to think of a chore that my wife always does, since that would be because I don't like to do it, right?  I guess I like them all when I am in the mood and none of them when I am not in the mood, so that is not very helpful.  My least favourite is probably either laundry or dishes when they have piled up to where more of the dishes/laundry we own is dirty than is clean.  That is discouraging.  Oh, I also do not like dealing with situations in which the cat has peed on something.  Yuck.

The (unasked, for some reason) corollary to this is I guess what chore I love.  Which would be, let's see, sorting socks (or anything--I love sorting and alphabetizing and the like), organizing the storage closet (same kind of thing, plus includes another favourite, spatial reasoning) and also almost any sort of yardwork type work.  Unfortunately we do not have a yard, but when we did, I liked to work in it.  And get my hands/knees/etc dirty.  That was good times.  Someday perhaps we will have a yard again.

From Daddy Dialectic via Here Goes Everything (both fabulous blogs, btw), a quiz meant to discover how much of a certain kind of empathy you possess.  I think it is part of a wider project on men and women and something else, but I truthfully didn't read much about it--I just liked doing the quiz and learning how empathetic I am.  In the quiz, which is fun, you look at pictures of people's eyes and try to guess how they are thinking or feeling on the basis of the expressions you see in them.

I am, by the way, apparently 34 units of empathetic.  The normal range is supposed to be 22-30, so I am significantly empathetic-er than the average person.  At least with respect to looking at eyes and guessing moods.

So...how empathetic are you?

Is Sarah Haskins.

Brilliant.  And hilarious.