Observations of the weird things that don't matter

—Neatly layered rice cakes in a dog bowl (for the dog to eat) made me wonder, “Is this cruel? Or is this healthy?” At least it was Zen-like and ordered, unlike the slop of horsemeat that comes out of a can. The dog ate some rice cakes and buried the remainder. I thought for a second that I might have stumbled on some new form of environmental art, but then I realized I was being stupid.

—While picking up wood for my wood-burning stove, I found sparkling criss-crossing tracks of slug slime that were frozen on the underside of the loosened bark. The slugs in summertime at my place are HUGE and I had a random thought, “Does slug slime freeze at a lower or higher temperature? They die when you pour salt on them, so obviously they don’t have a high slimy salinity measure, and therefore the creatures would probably turn to popsicles before anything else.” I’m still looking for evidence.

—I was looking down at all of the pink and blue chalk signs outside of the English building, but I didn’t really stop to see what they said until I saw Spanish swear words, and I thought the Spanish words for penis and vagina were in the correct corresponding colors of blue for penis (boy), and pink for vagina (girl). “These people are more clever than I thought,” I thought.

—Somebody carved out the word “sex” in a mirror pattern in one of their sneaker soles. I know this because there were tracks in the soft dirt after the last rain, and one of the two sneaker treads had a crude “sex” raised up in the mud every second step. I thought it was juvenile but cool. And then I thought that the person who did this was probably the only one who liked walking in firm mud. So if you see someone deliberately not walking on the concrete paths after a rain, check the right shoe by saying something clever like, “Hey, I think your right shoe just stepped in some gum. Let me look.”

—All of the cigarette butts surrounding the ash tray outside one of the campus buildings looks like a scatter chart in statistics; one that would probably be used to plot laziness and idiocy.

—There is a girl in my creative nonfiction class that wears mismatched shoes. Today she had little cheap deck shoes. One was black with Technicolor flowers; the other was also black and had white cats with long curling tails. She never speaks, but sometimes I think her shoes say more than any words that I speak in class.

—There are these weird little boxes inside the men’s restrooms around campus (like in the English building, and at Burrill Hall). They look like those single-serve boxes of ready-made Jell-o that kids in junior high eat. I always wondered why the BSWs (janitors) never threw them away. Today I realized that they’re scent boxes with a gelatin that disappears after time as it dissipates some industrial fragrance into the air to cover whatever horrible smells that come from men with bad diets. What an irresponsible design!

—Although my truck is almost never parked under trees (I ride the bus and bike, and there are no large trees looming where it sits), I constantly find bird crap on my windows. Like today. I won’t describe the crap, which was pretty foul, even for a bird, and there was no pretty pattern or cosmic golden ratio. All I could think about is how my windows kept getting soiled even though about 2% of their mass is visible from above, and the entire roof of my pickup cab was clean. I mean this bird nailed my driver’s side window, which is next to a tall fence, which meant the bird has better aim than a smart bomb. Note to self: keep windows rolled up, even when there is no chance for rain.

—The previous owner of the house I live in used to think his backyard was some sort of dumping ground. And he had some big dogs that would chew to shreds anything they were given. Given that background, I was walking through the yard today, looking to pick the last of my habaneros and bell peppers before the cold killed them, and something became stuck in my shoe like a pebble when it gets lodged in the neato sport patterns that companies like Nike and Reebok make (note: they don’t put “sex” in their treads, I looked that one up). I stopped to check my shoe, and there was an arm of a GI Joe figure stuck laterally across the middle of my sole. It looked like it was saluting. If I were drunk, I would have probably saluted back.

—While I was looking up some politicians on the news server for a political segment some peers were putting together, I noticed something really interesting: the past presidents of the United States, as well as the current contenders McCain/Palin, and Obama/Biden have hair that stays exactly the same. Every day. All day. McCain never seems to say “I think I’ll part my gray whispys this way today.” Palin must take valuable time tending to her bulbous bouffant—time that could be used to learn the names of important people. Biden’s hair is plaster. Obama’s hair hasn’t changed a micron since he started politics. Why is this? Why did I never notice this before? If George W. Bush buzzed his head, would the world’s economies change on account that they think he’s in mourning, or perhaps they think he finally lost it? Or is the buzzed head image a prelude to a militaristic and fatalistic line of thinking? Why does presidential hair matter so much that the style never changes?