Canada and Professional Bookwear.

I saw Niagara Falls today. It is big. It is wet. It would be better with a jumbotron.
Also, here's a service I'm offering: Professional (a misrepresentation) Bookwear Service.

For fifty dollars per hundred pages, plus the price of the book if it is not already owned, the Professional Bookwear Service will brutalize spines into shapeless paper-like submission, the first of many indicators that a book has been read not just once but two, three, four times at least. Hardback books will have they're corners rounded down. The cardboard will show through the clothette. When lending books, your borrowers will know that you carry your books around often, on their own, possibly along with other books, so many books you can hardly keep a handle on them.
All books will have one in one hundred pages torn, ever so subtly at the corner. For an extra five dollars, the tear will come at particularly well-paced paragraphs, capturing your keenness to the illusion the author has endevoured to create.
Pages will also come dog-earred, underlined, and filled with near-legible notes, your reactions to the text.
An additional twenty-five dollar offer is available entirely according to preference. As is, the dog-ears, notes, and underlinings are random and it will be up to you to make sense of them should someone ask your reasoning behind your various annotations. There's some appeal to that, I feel, but Elliot's Annotations can be applied to any book, along with a primer which will serve as a summary of the book. Deconstructionist, Orientalist, and historical criticism reads available on demand, free of charge. Sliding scale for other readings.
All books will be mailed anywhere in the United States free of charge. I will inform you of international prices as I figure them out.

Also, I went on the Maid of the Mist. I got wet. Otherwise an entirely positive experience.

Strange Homonid/What you did

So I'm sitting in this lady's office and she has three degrees on the wall while she tells me that I can't get either of the two I'm due.* You see, it's really important that you tell the advisor scheduling office (it has a real name, but I don't know it) that you want to meet with your advisor not an advisor and what a fool I am for meeting with, like, every advisor in the advising office. (probably also has a real official name that I don't know) My perspective on the matter is shouldn't one of the six advisors I met with suggested this?** Or suggested that there was something wonky with my language requirement before I was auditing my degree? That sounds fair to me. Regardless, now I have to contact two advisors and make sure they have e-mails from five months ago because I don't have them anymore.***

*My new advisor hoards an Associates and a Bachelors in the Arts, and a Masters in Education.

**Aside from this one, who is telling me so far along it may as well be hind-sight.

***Of course I should still have them. But I don't. I am so happy with this situation.

In other news, I have the beginnings of a story. It seems like this is the best place to post it's origin:

My handle for everything but antiquing forums is "Strange Hominid." I started using it for a blog on the human body, innovation, and presentation. When I started writing I was entirely focused on unfortunate design features and workarounds. Angie had been living with varicose veins for three years and was trying everything short of invasive surgery to make them go away along with pain relievers (pleasantly and with no fuss) went to get for her.

She found this cream that was reducing the swelling. When she raved to a doctor friend about how effective it was he said she could just take more aspirin or use Iceyhot. Her legs were abusing her veins, and the aspirin and Iceyhot-like cream were reducing the swelling, albeit temporarily, that her legs were inducing to compensate for gravity's effect on a relatively new design.

I started researching every other punishment visited upon humans in return for their defiance of gravity and form: hernias, hemorrhoids, slipped discs, and pretty much everything else that can happen to a spine that doesn't involve an automobile or a shower. Over five million year ago, our pelvis flared out and our femurs bent in to put all our weight on our knees and shins. What a fool I'd been to get excited about Angie's wide hips and round ass. I was just dooming our child to shin splints. Catholic guilt, you have a new friend.

In order to avoid a spiral of self-loathing, I started looking into other human innovations.

Culture as a tool. While sexual dimorphism was comparatively minimal, sexual difashionization was wildly divergent. The flow chart for a man's morning dress routine was simple. I drew it up in a night without referencing a single history book, cultural anthropology journal, or issue of Vogue. Then I started the women's chart.

I thought of a woman I had seen walking in a simple green dress. Perhaps the wind was very high or it was too hot to wear a slip, but her skirt was catching right in her crotch. I had no idea what she was doing wrong. I realized then I was on the cusp of an investigation that I was completely unprepared for, and would take me deep into a dark silken heart that I could not return from as myself. I thought of that, looked at my chart for men,* and scrapped "fashion as a iteration of culture" project.

*The chart was very direct. It's first question was whether or not it was hot. If it wasn't it asked if you preferred boxers or boxer-briefs, then referred you to the question asked if it was hot: what pants are appropriate for the days activities? jeans or dress pants? I couldn't break down women's underwear choices into binaries. It was maddening. Angie suggested "Are you worried about pantie lines?"