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Evil broccoli

I planted some broccoli this year, and everything started out fine enough. First came the leaves, then the stalks, after a few weeks I had these dime-sized broccoli heads starting to peak out from the center. But then one night, they all just jumped up, the heads sprouted on these thin little stalks and turned into flowers. It was over. The broccoli skipped the broccoli part of being broccoli and went straight to being an annoying weed.

Broccoli flowers aren’t even nice to look at, the whole plant looks like it’s trying to claw its way out of the earth. I don’t know what happened, because I did broccoli last year and it turned out great. The dime-sized head just continued to get bigger, until it was the size of a regular broccoli, the kind that you see in the supermarket.

I looked up some stuff on the Internet, but there weren’t any definitive answers, mostly just guesses about what causes broccoli to “bolt,” that’s the term, I found it out online, broccoli eventually bolts and turns into a flower and it’s inedible.

But amidst all of the rumors and conjecture I found a suggestion. It told me to pick off the tops, the flowers, all of it, just leave the stalks and the leaves, and maybe some new heads would sprout from the sides.

And yeah, that did happen. But they were all weird looking, all of them much smaller than the original dime-sized florets. These were no bigger than an M&M, and not even a regular M&M, I’m talking a mini M&M, remember the ones that came in a tube? They looked more like warts than vegetables, and whereas pre-bolted broccoli only had one head per plant, these things were popping up four, five to a stalk, it was like a gross broccoli pox.

Worse, these guys started doing the same bolting that their older brothers and sisters had pulled off two weeks before. I found myself this week, looking at my once proud-looking raised bed vegetable garden. Now, I stare at these plants, they don’t remind me of anything like broccoli at all. It’s more like a whitish pale-green virus, jutting awkwardly, almost sinisterly from the earth, taunting me, daring me to try meddling any further.

I’ve got to do something. These aberrations can’t be allowed to grow any further, to suck any more of the nutrients that I laced the soil with at the beginning of the season. They’re no more than weeds now, just very carefully spaced apart weeds. But what do I do? I have to go out and uproot them all? Are they going to take big chunks of the dirt with them?

And then what? Usually with weeds I just throw them to the side, but I have this weird fear that wherever I throw them, they’re just going to make new roots, they’ll be fine, they’ll start multiplying, becoming a weird perennial mutant broccoli, choking off the grass, eventually making its way over to my tomatoes.

My strawberries died immediately, by the way. I planted them, they grew like six inches outward, and then they started rotting from the inside out. It’s crazy to think that the broccoli’s somehow responsible, right? I mean, that’s impossible, tell me it’s not possible.

Note to self:

Note to self: Buy more milk. Make sure it’s fresh. Make sure that, when you check the date on the milk cartons, reach for the ones in the back, although you’ve never had the experience of finding newer milk toward the back of the refrigerated milk section, if there’s going to be newer milk, that’s where you’ll find it. If some grocery store guy gets in your face about taking all of those cartons of milk out to check for ultra-fresh milk potentially hidden in the back, don’t forget that you’re a paying customer, that you’re allowed to do whatever you want.

Note to self: It’s trash day tomorrow, so don’t forget to separate all of the cardboard from all of the plastics and cans. Even if you only have one pizza box. Remember that time last week? When you only had one pizza box? And you thought to yourself, well, it’s just one, I don’t have to waste a whole separate plastic recycling bag for just one pizza box? Yeah, well, don’t forget, that was against the rules, and you got a twenty-five dollar citation from the recycling guy. They don’t mess around.

Note to self: Just pay the twenty-five dollar citation. Seriously, just swallow it, get it out of your head, don’t make them send you second and third notices, all of those late fees that get tacked on. You forget it and all of the sudden you’re trying to get some other city service, a dog license, they’re like, “Hmm, it seems you have some outstanding citations.” Just consider yourself lucky, that it was only recycling, not a traffic ticket. You know what it costs if you mess around with alternate side? It’s like a hundred, a hundred fifty.

Note to self: Stop being such a baby about the plastic recycling bags. Yes, it’s a complete waste to use a whole bag for one pizza box, but you’ve got to let it go. It’s pennies per bag, all right? You get the bulk plastic bags at Costco, they’ll last you all year. Go ahead and use them, they get recycled along with the garbage, so you’re good, just stop being a baby.

Note to self: Just don’t engage with the sanitation people when they come to pick up the trash next week. All right, because sure, it’s harmless enough, fantasizing about how you’re going to get up really early next Wednesday, how you’ll wait until they come by your house. You’ll walk outside and start giving them the business about rules and citations. Do you want these guys messing around with your trash? Because that’s a good way to have your garbage all screwed up. And you don’t want it, for real, problems with the garbage crew, that’s just not nice. Don’t you want to be a nice person?

Note to self: Just apologize. You’re only human. Tell them you were off your medication. Make it seem like your life is totally unmanageable. Keeping swatting at imaginary flies the whole time that you’re making your case. And remember, no, you shouldn’t have kept that bag of live crabs outside on the curb for so long. What did you think would happen, that they’d attack the garbage people? What if they got pinched? What did we talk about before, remember that whole thing about being a nice person?

Note to self: Doesn’t that twenty-five dollar citation seem like not a huge deal anymore? I don’t know how you’re going to get out of this one. Is there some sort of a bankruptcy procedure but for civil infractions? Can you claim yourself as morally bankrupt? Because that’s what you are, man, what the hell’s wrong with you?

Note to self: Buy more milk. Just buy the half-gallon. You always buy the whole gallon, and it always spoils before you get to the end. Yeah, you might run out, but isn’t that better than wasting all of that milk? And you know you’re supposed to rinse it out before you put in out for recycling, right? Because it gets all gross and crusty. And maybe they’d let it pass, but not anymore, no, they’re going through your recycling every week, scrutinizing, they’re looking for something, anything. Just buy the half-gallon. Just stop being such a dick.

If you could pick one superpower …

Whenever they hire a new employee at the restaurant, the managers always ask whoever it is on his or her first day to do a little introduction. It’s always in the morning, when all of the staff gets together right before opening, “OK, tell us where you’re from, what’s your sign, your favorite color, and if you could choose one superpower, what would it be?”

And I get it, you’re not really expecting that superhero question, it’s supposed to be a fun little icebreaker, like, yeah, you have to come here to work every day, so that kind of sucks, but look on the bright side, we’re giving you this neat game to play on the spot in front of all of these people that you just met, and already you’ve forgotten everybody’s names, but don’t think about that right now, don’t be nervous, just come up with a superpower.

Almost everybody says they’d love to fly. “I guess … I’d pick flying powers?” they kind of throw it back to the manger, like is this OK? Flying powers? Is that what you were looking for? And I’m always standing on the sidelines here, I mean, this isn’t my moment in the spotlight, but I always have to fight the urge to get involved.

Because one, you might as well just say pass, because you’re not even trying. And I can kind of get the thought process here. Like I said before, the question is so out of left field, you quickly think about superheroes, maybe you’re not into superheroes, whatever, that’s fine, Superman probably comes to mind first, and he can fly, so flying powers, bingo.

It’s the wording of the question that gets people trapped up. By invoking the term superhero, I think what you’re doing is saying comic books, and it’s like Star Trek, even if you watch Star Trek, even if you’re a huge comic book fan, most people don’t start off an introduction, let alone a mass hello to a group of potential coworkers with an admission that, yes, I like comic books, I know way too much about superpowers.

But maybe if you could make the question not so loaded, like forget about costumes and capes, pretend you don’t know anything about comic books. If you could get your body to do one special thing that nobody else’s bodies could, what would it be? Would it really be the power to fly? Because I don’t think it would be.

And not to get too technical here, but flying by itself wouldn’t be much of a power. You’d need super strength to go along with it here, to be able to sustain that flight for any extended period of time. But even if it’s everything that you thought it would be, I’m still calling bullshit on the flying powers. It’s lazy.

What about ice powers? At least it’s something interesting. And isn’t that the whole point of the superpower icebreaker? Nobody knows who you are, and like or not, this question is the quickest way that we’re all going to be able to make a snap judgment of who you are as a person. Give me something like rocket hands. Don’t even explain what that means, just say, “Rocket hands!” and wait for someone to say, “What’s that mean? Rocket hands?”

And then make something up, because now you’ve got everybody’s attention, which is what everybody wants, it’s the reason we’re doing this icebreaker in the first place, we’re all looking at you, please, give us something, anything to break up the monotony of the workday, come on, don’t say flying powers, please.

And then you say flying powers and everybody’s kind of just like, oh well, looks like this person isn’t going to be too much in the way of making anybody’s lives a little bit more interesting. Of course that’s harsh. I’m just being a jerk now. I think I said flying powers when I first got the job too. And it was only because I seriously had no time to think on my feet like that. I wish they’d given me even five minutes advance notice, to come up with something clever.

It’s been a constant “jerk-store” experience ever since that day two years ago. I’ve thought of what I could have said, or should have said, like rocket hands, I just made that up now, but that would have been great.

Or another one that I thought of a while ago, I’d say, “I’d wish for the power to bring my dead relatives back from the grave,” and then get all sad and quiet. That would be really dark, but still kind of funny, just in the fact that nobody would have seen that coming, like talk about shaking up the nine-to-five, in retrospect something like that would have been hilarious.

#killingit

Status update: 6/4/14

Man, I just got home from work, and I am beat! Maybe I’ll hit the gym before I figure out what I’m doing for dinner! Anyone down to go out? Maybe see a movie?

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Where do Mystique’s clothes go when she shape-shifts?

I just saw X-Men: Days of Future Past last night, and I can’t stop thinking about Mystique. Spoiler alert: there are no spoilers for the movie in this blog post. The spoiler alert was in regards to this actual blog post. In reading this paragraph, I’m basically giving it all away, what I’m about to talk about. Mystique.

She’s the naked blue mutant that can shape-shift into whatever she wants. Cool, right? Yeah, but it gets even cooler. Because there’s one scene where she jumps out of a window, and everybody around is like, “Oh my God! A naked blue mutant!” and she needs to make discreet exit. So she kind of loses herself in the calamity and transforms into a regular looking woman wearing a really poofy fur coat.

But get this. She didn’t do a good job of disappearing into the crowd, because somebody finds her, again, I’m not going to reveal too much about the movie, because I don’t want to spoil anything. But what happens is, she takes off the big poofy fur coat, and she transforms back into her naked blue form.

And the coat is just lying on the ground, without any explanation as to how it exists independently of Mystique’s body. You know what I’m saying? Because she’s naked, and she does her crazy shape-shifting thing and she’s not naked anymore, she’s wearing clothes now. If she wants to change into an army guy, her army clothes appear from her body.

So how does she take off that coat? Isn’t that a part of her body? Do her powers include the ability to generate an infinite amount of disposable clothing? Or after a certain number of articles of clothing discarded onto the floor, does she get weak? Like does she need to eat a really big meal to replenish whatever it was that she lost when she just threw the coat on the floor? Or, even worse, is this how Mystique maybe goes to the bathroom? She just transforms all of her excretion into fashion?

That’s disgusting. But how are we to make sense of any of it? Let’s go back to her being naked. And then she transforms into a guy wearing a suit. Is that suit technically a layer of her skin? Or is it dead, like hair? Like, if someone walks up to her and says, “Wow, that’s a really nice jacket,” and starts feeling the fabric, maybe giving it an aggressive pinch to get a sense of how durable the material is, would she react? Would it hurt?

Or maybe her power is just truly super, even in comparison with her already super shape-shifting abilities. Maybe she can just come up with an infinite amount of clothing, and it doesn’t matter, take it off, whatever, she can just whip up some new threads instantly. In that case, wouldn’t it be cool to have Mystique as a friend? You could have her transform into you, but wearing some really nice clothes, and then she could take them off and give them to you. And you could have her do this every time you wanted to wear something brand new.

I just wish they thought it through a little further before cementing this scene in place. Because what, you didn’t think anybody would notice, right? Well I noticed. And if you read this, and you go see the movie, now you’ll notice it too. And it cannot be unseen. She just takes the jacket off and throws it on the ground.