I'm kinda jazzed about the prospect of working at an erotic entertainment guide a couple miles from my house. It's dangerous to get hopeful, but hey, whatcha gonna do.
It'd be nice to be employed so I can get back to my regularly scheduled emotionally-lightweight and possibly self-destructive but financially-supported lifestyle. I think it'd be more fun that way to work on the self-destructive bits.
I'd like to revisit my curiosity about the dessert fork, if that's all right with you. Doesn't it bother you? Look at a dessert fork. Analytically, I mean. Something with such a uniform design across so many decades and manufacturers has some reasoning behind it--look at how different forks and knives are, an endless variety of blade shapes, tine lengths and spacing. But the design and proportions of the dessert fork are constant, relative to the variations in other utensils. My confusion is thus: I understand the short tines. In a well-controlled experiment, I took two equal-sized pieces of the same cake, put them on identical plates, and ate one with a dessert fork and one with a dinner fork. The short tines are in fact easier to work with, probably owing to the cake's lack of cohesion: the long tines of the dinner fork leaves you with a piece of cake too large to support its own weight. Result: bite of cake falls off the fork. And if you do manage to balance a bite on the fork, the added length leaves you with a real lack of control in maneuvering it. So, short tines are good.
The dessert fork's remaining distinction is the single tine which is both widened and has a notch in the tip. We can theorize that the widened tine may strengthen the fork for cutting through the thick crusts found in some desserts; why the notch at the end, I have no idea. The Internet has no answers for any of this; this is precisely the sort of thing that history students write theses and dissertations on, but I'm not sure where to look. So if you know of any research into the history of eating utensils since, say, the 1600s, drop me a line. Drop me a line even if you don't--I love getting mail and I'm always curious to know who reads this.
People find this site through the strangest Google searches. And when I go to the Google page where they ostensibly found the link, pandatoast.org is never there. Like "reasons passing understanding", or "chicken tikka masala addiction", or "kenmore bread". All of which are phrases that occur in my journal entries, but my journal is usually ranked about #955 out of 1000 search results.
I feel decisions coming on. I'm not real happy with them, particularly, but the fog of uncertainty is starting to solidify a bit, and I'm starting to feel what I want to do and what I have to do, and where they differ. It's a lesson in priorities--what do I want? What is really and truly meaningful and important? What do I want, what am I capable of handling maturely, what am I willing to work for? What effort is anything worth?
On Saturday in class we did a little bit of bokken practice (bokken == wooden sword)...we did this one exercise with a partner, where the first person would take a short step forward and do a strike down the other person's center line (don't hit them, you can kill somebody with these things), and the second person would step off to the side a little bit and do a strike down the first person's center, ending with the point of the bokken pointing at the first person's gut, maybe four inches below the sternum. And you can feel when you get it right: something about the configuration of the two bodies and the two swords locks into your awareness...you can tell when something is aimed to kill you.