Podcast Pickiness

I have a strange relationship with music. One day, we're BFF. Singing, dancing... it's a great bond. Other days - most days - I can't listen to any song for more than ten seconds. Seems kind of silly for a girl like me to have an iPod, you might say. Shut up, I'll do what I want, I say in an immature reply. Enter podcasts. Talking on just about every topic under the sun, free for the downloading. I have a roster that keeps me sane on the public transportation here and I'm always trying to add new podcast friends to my playlists. To encourage me to keep posting here, I've decided to write about a podcast a week. I'll start with the ones I know I like and then perhaps venture out into new and different podcasts. Suggestions are welcome, so fellow podcast junkies, feel free to let me know who's chatting it up on your mp3 player of choice. Here we go!

Slate Explainer Podcast

In theory, this podcast is a fantastic idea; in practice, it's been a bumpy road. This podcast is a great exmaple of the importance of the narrator. I love this column on the Slate website, so when I found there was a podcast I literally squee'd with joy. (Squee: verb. To squeal girlishly, usually in conjunction with a positive emotion.) When I started listening, June Thomas was the speaker. She was all right aside from her bizarre accent. It sounded like a typical Scottish accent with the occasional word that would come flying out of her mouth and bitchslap me with the absolute ridiculousness of her pronunciation. Soon, I stopped enjoying the podcast. I began listening on edge, waiting for the next retarded word to arrive. Before long she was replaced, and her replacement made me long for the days of stupid pronunciations.

Michelle Tsai is the bane of my iPod's existence. Supposedly she's a writer for Slate, and she should stick to a medium that doesn't require me or anyone else with any hearing ability to listen to her voice. She speaks with the affected sing-song voice of a braindead Valley girl who would be booted from The Hills for being too ditzy and annoying. In Tsai-talk, every statement is a question, and every question is coquettishly overacted. I picture her flouncing into the studio to record each week and it infuriates me. Occaasionally some other guy reads the Explainer. Yeah, those are the good weeks. I was forced to give up listening to this podcast because I was going to have to feed my iPod into a wood chipper if if I heard that she was "Michelle Tsai and this is the Explainer podcast for Thursday, March thirtinkth" one more time. Thirtinkth is not a typo, it's an attempt to capture the spine-crinkling annoyingness of her voice. Thirtinkth. That's actually how she says it. Grr. Hang on, I've got to go punch something.

A few months ago, I would have only recommended this podcast to you if you had either a huge tolerance for Valley girl or a deafening love of trivia. Even then I would have pointed you to the web column instead. However, there has recently been a long-awaited changing of the guard. Other listeners must have felt the same way because Tsai has gone the way of the dodo. There's a new female narrator, which means that my boycott of the Explainer podcast is over! New girl has a minor problem with over-enunciation here and there, but for now I'm chalking that up to excitement about her new job. Time will tell, but I don't think she'll take the Tsai-path to eardrum distruction. She had better not, anyway. We saw what happened to Tsai. Well, technically I guess we didn't. But I have my theories...

Blast from the Past: First Rotation

Look at this! Look at all these entries! Look at me go! Whee! Here's some embarrassingly old stuff I wrote but never typed up. Let's go back... way back to the first week of my very first rotation. February something. Let's set the stage for this situation. I live in Lakeview, north of my classes downtown. My first rotation was at the University of Chicago. A couple of inches on the map, if that. Keep that in mind.

On the first day, I caught the bus with two fellow 1st years who are on their lab rotation at U of C. According to the CTA website, the best buses to take were the #147 and the #4. Not that that probably means anything to you, but just know that it's not a problematic route... on paper. After we boarded the #4, it came to our attention that this. Bus. Is. Exceedingly. Painstakingly. Ridiculously. Slow. Like, stops every block as we descended into the ghetto. For over an hour.

We finally arrived at U of C and headed to our separate rotations. That first day I observed a few cases, met a world-renowned cancer doctor and then headed back home. Unfortunately I left a few minutes later than the other two and had to write the lovely #4 alone. Well, I wasn't alone, but trust me. I was alone. I managed to score a seat right away, turned up the tunes and tried to breathe out of my mouth. Seriously, this bus was nas-McAssty. And as I'm sitting there, trying to remember what stop I needed for my transfer, I see a lady sitting ahead of me. No, maybe it was a gentleman. I'm not sure. I'm sorry, sir/ma'am. Perhaps you should consider at least one article of gender specific clothing? Some lip gloss? I dunno. Just a thought if you want a bitchy blogger to be able to identify your gender when she writes about you without your permission on the Internet. Anyway.

(S)he was sitting in front of me in one of the side-facing seats behind the driver. I'm innocently looking forward to any point on the oh-so-distant horizon that is NOT in the ghetto when what do I see in my peripheral vision? The ambiguous individual burying his/her/its head in a tattered backpack and inhaling very deeply and loudly through his/her/its nose. I'd use the word "snorted," but that's a pretty judgement-laden word, and I have no way of verifying what substance, controlled or otherwise, was given an express ticket to his sinus cavity. The flu is going around, maybe it was some Vicks Vap-o-Rub. You know, to clear the sinuses. For when he/she/it snorted coke later. See, we just don't know and it's really not fair to judge.

He/She/It disembarked quickly at the next stop, so I guess I'll never know what it was. I'm no drug-scent expert, but I do know that I didn't smell any mentholated, sinus-clearing vapor wafting my way. Just unidentifiable repulsive body-related odors. I remained a mouth-breather until we re-entered civilization, where I promptly got off the bus at the wrong stop and had to walk many, many blocks to find a bus that would take me back home.

So yeah, I had the best "first day" story that night at happy hour.

As an apology...

for not posting last week, I offer this pink building. I had a packed week, but I've got stuff to post this week. Plenty of stories.

Whoops...

...maybe I just have a general problem keeping living things upright.

My Greenish Thumb

This title makes me wonder if Tara still reads this and if she'll bring up The Cactus Incident. I guess we'll just have to see.

One elusive spring day (before the temperatures plunged back into the thirties and we were issued a winter storm watch) I went to Home Depot with a friend to check out paint samples for a semi-illicit painting project we've got planned. More on that later, depending on how illicit it turns out to be. Anyway, Home Depot. I friggin' love this store. The smell, the ridiculous size, the aisles and aisles of stuff I have no use but an inexplicable desire for- it's great. We headed right to paint and attempted to determine what colors of paint were most conducive to study and concentration. And also what colors were the prettiest. I have a few seasons of Trading Spaces watching under my belt so I'm essentially an expert. We grabbed samples of some possible colors (gray with purple accent walls, we are nothing if not full of school spirit) and some light bulbs for me. I tried to find a fuse for a beloved and recently incapacitated desk lamp to no avail. I demand that you care about my mundane day-to-day illumination activities.

And then, an astounding discovery - a display of water lilies that can be grown in containers! That's not even the best part! They were all labeled with the flower's expected color. I began looking through them to see what was available when what should I see but the most wonderful word possible when dealing with colors: changeable. Changeable! Changeable color flowers! Truly, we are living in the strange and glorious future with flowers that float in bowls of water and magically change color.

After purchasing an equally exciting teal hurricane vase from Target, I gathered my supplies on a garbage bag on the floor of my apartment. To begin the process, I immediately fumbled the bag the water lily came in, tumbling it end over end to the floor in a spectacular firework-esque spray of dirt and twine. Shit. Now I had a 50/50 shot of plunking this net bag in right side up. I decided the top was the side that appeared to have some sort of brainy growth beginning to sprout out of it. After all, most people have brainy cranial growths. And yes, I'm aware of the fact that plants sprout various appendages from both ends, and that the disgusting brain growth did look a lot more like roots now that I think about it, dammit, but what's done is done. It needs full sun so it steals some of Sasha's recently recovered sunny window real estate, and I keep my fingers crossed that I didn't doom my new plant friend to an upside down watery grave.

Now I've got to prepare for my weekend guest, Bailey. If you're worried about her safety based on the previous story, you need not fear. I've spent more time with fauna than I have with flora. Besides, it's much easier to tell if a Labrador Retriever is right-side-up. I'm sure we'll be fine.

Update: Hooray! I think I picked the right side! Of the plant!