Month: January 2006

As seen at Angry Pregnant Lawyer

You are the Starving Artist! You are more intuitive than logical, and are primarily guided by your heart and emotions. You are also very introverted and gentle. Of course, this does not mean that you do not have an ego. In fact, you are surprisingly arrogant for someone so emotional and gentle. This is why you are best described as a starving artist. You are very introspective and quite sure of yourself, as any accomplished artist is, yet your views are impractical, guided by feelings, and overly gentle. You probably find math, logic, and similar intellectual pursuits offensive to your artistic sensibilities, and you prefer the open-endedness of artistry because then you know you can never truly have a wrong answer. So really you have no reason to be arrogant, you big doofus, because the skills you value (emotion, spirit, art, etc.) in yourself are valuable only on a subjective level, meaning your arrogance is purely masturbatory. In short, your personality is defective because you are arrogant, introverted, introspective, gentle, and thoroughly irrational…posessing most of the traits needed to be a starving–and useless–artist. So get out there, write a few short stories that are allegories for the spirit, and starve!

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more INTUITIVE than rational.
2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.

3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.
4. You are more ARROGANT than humble.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Capitalist Pig.

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Haughty Intellectual, the Televangelist, and the Emo Kid.

If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well.

The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

When I stepped out of the shower this morning, Beloved was still dozing and I could hear Tristan talking to Simon. I poked Beloved and reminded him that if he left Simon in his crib too long, Simon might take it into his head to crawl out of it – something we have thus far avoided.

I am in denial over the fact that Simon might some day move from his crib to a bed. In fact, I dread the day. We turfed Tristan from his crib when he was 20 months old, entirely because we needed the crib for Simon’s impending arrival. At the time, he seemed plenty old enough, and he made the transition without complaint. He loved his big boy bed.

Except he wouldn’t stay in it. I was 11 months pregnant (or so it seemed), still working, it was Christmas, and Tristan would be running around the house every night from midnight until 3 am. It was, in a word, horrendous. It got so bad, and I was so desperate for sleep, that a few times I made sure everything was safe, checked the baby gate at the top of the stairs, and locked my door. I’d find him asleep on the floor outside my door when guilt woke me up a few hours later. Bad mommy memories.

I am therefore endlessly grateful that although Simon is a monkey in almost every way, and manages to find trouble other kids couldn’t conceive in their wildest dreams, it hasn’t yet occured to him that he might be able to escape his crib.

All this flashed through my head in a heartbeat this morning as I wandered down the hallway, following the sounds of Tristan and Simon’s laughter. Tristan had turned on the light in Simon’s room, and I nudged open the door to see both of them, plus an assortment of Thomas trains, in Simon’s crib. Together.

Trying very hard not to shriek, I explained to Tristan how climbing into Simon’s crib was a very very very bad idea. “But Mommy,” he said, his blue eyes wounded, “I was just trying to make Simon happy.”

Sigh.

Maybe it won’t occur to Simon that the ingress is an egress too?

What happened to my baby?

Tristan’s new favourite hobby is to go into his room, shut his door, turn on his CD player and listen to music at eardrum-piercing levels. He’s not even FOUR YEARS OLD, fercrissake. At least he isn’t listening to Fiddy. The CD he is blaring is (quelle surprise) Thomas the Tank Engine.

Hmm, maybe Fiddy would be better…

Lake Superior State University in Michigan has released its annual list of banned words and phrases. This year chose 17 of the more than 2000 nominations they received. Phew, none of them seem to form a part of my regular vernacular. Here’s the list:

• Surreal
• Hunker down
• Person of interest
• Community of learners
• Up-or-down vote (I’m not sure I even know what this means)
• Breaking news
• Designer breed
• FEMA (notable quote: “If they don’t do anything, we don’t need their acronym.”
• First-time caller (notable quote: “I am serious in asking: who in any universe gives a care?”)
• Pass the savings on to you!
• 97 per cent fat-free
• An accident that didn’t have to happen
• Junk science
• Git-r-done (again, I think I missed something on this one)
• Dawg
• Talking points (I may be out of a job if this one gets banned)
• Holiday tree (I say a big ‘hallellujah’ to this one!)

It’s fun (in the geekiest definition of the word) to flip through their archives and see the banished words of years past (they’ve been at this since 1976). 1990’s list included fax and messenger as verbs (“Could you fax me that?”), so I don’t think the banishment ‘took’!

What words or phrases would you banish? I’m thinking “whatever” has definitely had more than its 15 minutes of fame, and we’ve had more than our share of “(insert trend here) is the new black”. I’m sure there are more, but I have two preschoolers crawling on me and I haven’t had my first coffee yet. I’m amazed I can still type in sentences!