Credit where it be due

Two astounding incidents involving cyclists today:

Incident #1
I'm crossing the street. A southbound cyclist blows through the red light behind me Like they always do, I think, as I spot a northbound cyclist coming up in front of me. But this guy actually stops for the red light and stays stopped until it turns green even though there are no cars coming. I wanted to walk up to him and give him a fucking medal.

Incident #2
The bus pulls around a cyclist so it can pull over at the next stop. I sit back watching the windows, waiting for the cyclist to come shooting by--either on the street side or the sidewalk, since there's not enough room between the bus and the kerb. Moments pass (the bus is stopped at a light) and there's no sign of him. Could he have turned off? Could he have crossed the street mid-block and continued on in the oncoming lane?

Finally, I see him walking up the sidewalk carrying his bike. Again, I wish I had an award to give him.

Tomorrow, I'll be back to bitching about rude cyclists, I'm sure, but for right now, I'll just glow with admiration for a pair of riders bucking the citywide trend.

A-poll-ing

My apologies to those who were excluded from answering any of my recent polls because they have steadfastly resisted capitulating to peer pressure. I didn't realise the polls were for LJ members only (though I suppose it makes sense, since how else could one easily prevent ballot-stuffing? Note: Yes, computer people, I'm sure there are myriad ways, all of which you could explain in loving detail; just be nice and pretend this is a rhetorical question.)

So if this is the straw poll that broke the camel's back, e-mail me for a code and you, too, can join the dysfunctional addictive world of LJ!

P.S.: It's still not too late to vote in the Wilgame Romantic Subplot Survey and do a Dewey on Movie Man for declaring victory. bunj asked if spookyfruit voted in that survey, and he did. (Needless to say, he did not choose the munchkin response.)

Subject heading of the day

Greeting card verse--History and criticism.

Negative examples

I've always credited my father's family with improving my posture. In high school, I was teased for emulating my father's hunched gait. Around that time, my sister pointed out how all his female relatives had roundback, which she was determined not to end up with. I adopted this determination, too; I straightened my shoulders, fixed my gaze directly ahead, and never hunched back.

With any luck, my mom's family will have a similarly positive effect on my psyche. When my sister and BIL came up on Saturday, they brought with them a couple boxes from my mom's latest move that had my personal sigil on them. Now, I thought I'd gotten the last teensy bit of my crap out of her house when I helped her pack back in March, but I did remember her suggesting that I, if I packed a little box, she'd happily move it and send it up later. These must be that, right? So my siblings loaded the two boxes into my apartment between a trip to the zoo and a visit to Nuphy in the hospital.

Yesterday morning, I opened one of the boxes to find...my mom's files and photos. I opened the other to find...old kids books neither I nor anyone else had marked wanted. So when I called Mom that morning to ask about my older brother (who had ended up in the hospital Friday night--this has really been a banner month), I mentioned this to her. The files and such, I had my sister and BIL pick up on his way out of town. As for the ther box, "I'll just give the books away," I said. "Nobody wants them."
"Oh, and, of course, Grandma wouldn't want to have some children's books at her place for her grandchildren to look at when they visit," Mom replied.
"Mom! They're old crappy books! I'll buy you new books!"
"But don't you think it would be fun for your nephews to discover books that belonged to their uncles?"
"Did you ever have fun looking through your uncles' old books?"
"Well, no..."
"Honestly, Mom, sometimes you can be as impractical as [older brother]!...I'm not going to give you the books."
( And it doesn't end there! )

More mondegreens

Once you start looking for them, they're everywhere!

I always want to start off the famous Ramones' song with:
Twenty-four, twenty-four hours a day
I wanna be sedated!

But then I get to the next line and realise I've bolloxed the rhyme.

I thought of this last night talking to ottr4bear. I was telling him how, on my visit to Nuphy Saturday night, he got all obstreperous with the nurse. I knew that, once they took him off sedatives, all the tubes going in and out of him--particularly the ventilator tube--would start to irritate the hell out of him. I think if he could've raised his weak, stubby little arms to his chest, he might have attempted to pull it out. He already had a bite block in his mouth to keep him from biting through it.

The nurse spent ten or fifteen minutes trying to calm him down, explaining that fighting the ventilator would only bring suffering. e. could see I was growing increasingly upset and consoled me by pointing that Nuphy's feistiness was a sure sign he was feeling better. I remembered something Nemuci said when I mentioned how crabby and kvetchy the old man would be when he woke up: "I can take any amount of bitching just as long as he gets better."

But he's not to the bitching stage yet; he's too sick to be disconnected and too well to be kept unconscious. The nurse threatened him with this--"If you don't calm down and stop fighting the ventilator, we're going to have to sedate you"--little realising that that's what he wants. When he was admitted, he kept saying, "Just sedate me, let me sleep through it all." As much as it thrills me to finally have some interaction with him again--to have him recognise me, attempt to smile when I make a joke--I wonder if this wouldn't be the best thing.

SUBMIT!

So, I'm like this close to creating LJ accounts for some of people I mention frequently just so I can light up their names with LJ-user tags. Two of the people at the top of the list (Nibadi just caved!) are Monshu and e. Of course, "e." is not a suitable username so I checked out neska--and some Bolshie BEYATCH is already using it! What gives? I can understand owlet being taken, but who would think a Basque nickname would no longer be up for grabs? The interesting thing is that her circle of friends seems to write entirely in Russian. There's something refreshingly novel about seeing the same old LJ styles filled with Cyrillic characters--even if those exotic characters merely encode the very same survey results and my-parents-suck entries that make up 99.9% of LiveJournal.