Alright, so. I was going to just post this in the bool thread, but then I realized that there's such an incredibly high volume of truly WTF-worthy stuff that happens to me that I might as well just make my own thread and update it every time. I figure that it's good to have a record of things, so that when I eventually finish the very short road trip from my current mental state to insanity my psychiatrists will be able to see that it really wasn't my fault.

Like, today.

Today I found out that my hair is only blonde at the ends of the hairs themselves, which means that I have a genetic predisposition towards frosted tips, whether I want them or not. I've been told that this means that my hair is gay, which would certainly explain a lot of the childhood taunting I received.

The other WTF-worthy thing that happened today involved Rob's Personal Quest To Be A Better Person, which is really just a fancy way of saying that I realized that I am actually kind of a totally selfish person and decided to fix it.

So, today, I get out of my car and am heading into my university to teach myself to play "Only The Good Die Young" on the piano, (because if you're going to self-teach a musical instrument using the internet, you might as well start off with the advanced stuff, since everything after that will be easy), when I see a homeless man sitting on bike, looking like he is in extreme pain.

Well, never fear! Rob to the rescue!

I gallantly ask the guy if he's okay. He informs me that he is suffering from back pain, and would really like five dollars to get some painkillers - which he immediately admits is a euphemism for beer.

Sadly, I don't have five dollars. But I do have some Advil, which is great for back pain. I tell him this, and he accepts.

This man has obviously never had Advil in his life, or else has never taken drugs in pill form. He must also have been drunk out of his mind, because I cannot fathom any possible way that this could have happened otherwise.

He sticks the gel capsules into his mouth and chews them. Like they're gummy candy or something. I made the mistake of taking an Advil cap that had leaked at little, once. Only once. There is nothing on earth that tastes that bad, and this is coming from a man who once full-on licked the Lincoln Memorial and spent this summer accidentally eating scrapings from the underside of an industrial lawn mower. Heck, I'm getting a bad aftertaste in my mouth just thinking about it.

The homeless man, however, is completely unfazed, then proceeds to ask me if I like his new bike. I agree that it is, in fact, a nice bike. He asks me what I think it's worth. The heck if I know. I just shrug. He tells me he thinks it's worth $2,200 or so. Since men who can't afford $5 beer are incredibly unlikely to be able to afford $2,200 bicycles, I nod, suddenly realizing that I am, in fact, talking to a criminal while holding a backpack containing my laptop computer and standing next to my car (which is, mercifully, locked).

It is at this point that the homeless man decides to tell me that the pills taste "spicy." Not, "like someone's making me eat a pile of leaves," or "really fricking awful," but "spicy".

I now begin edging towards the door.

"WHY DO THEY MAKE THOSE PILLS SO @#$#@ING SPICY!?!?" the homeless guy demands.

At this point, I abandon all pretence and simply run away from the guy, who is standing there with blue spittle foaming from his mouth, screaming the word "spicy" over and over.

Suffice it to say, I imagine that Sainthood can't be too far off, at this point.

Yes, well, at least he died painlessly.

Besides, he was a criminal. Spider-Man would totally have my back on this one.

On a random whim, I decided to go give blood. It's a constant mystery to me why Canada Blood Services retains my number, since I had a yearlong feud with them back in 2009. (They required me to get a physical in order to become a regular donor. Their doctor refused to be in the office at any time that I might conceivably have been available, and as a result I had my donor appointments delayed for almost three months. They tell you when you go in that every donation saves three lives, so when they were cancelling my sixth straight appointment I told them that their doctor had killed eighteen people because of his unavailability, and I sure hoped he was proud of himself. When they finally did get me in to make a donation, I was rejected due to having had a toothache the previous week. I proceeded to laugh heartily and leave the office. They then called me a year later to ask for another appointment, which I showed up to with a fake blood pouch that I bought via the internet, and had filled with red juice. I drank it while I was sitting in the chair, and told them I was replenishing. They really hated that.)

The blood giving itself was entirely uneventful, except that the French nurse couldn't get over how perfect my veins were, and extolled their virtues for like two straight minutes. I'm apparently like the George Clooney of veins, or something.

However, after you give blood, you're supposed to completely avoid strenuous activity for like eight hours. I walked out of the building and into a massive hailstorm, to discover that my tire was flat. Luckily, I have four spare tires in the trunk. Of course, I have to haul all of them out to access the jack, then put three of them back in. Then I remember that I need the tire iron, and haul them all out again, get it, and put them all back in. Then I realize I'm missing the handle thingamajig for the jack. Repeat the tire hauling. With one usable arm. In the worst storm we've had in about six years.

Having successfully extricated the jack, I proceed to hoist the car and change the tire, which is incredibly fun, since the jack is one of those old ones you have to turn a crank with, and it wobbles dangerously and threatens to drop the car at any given moment while I'm trying to loosen the nuts. I actually almost passed out while doing this, and managed to figure out which side of the tire goes onto the axle in only two tries.

Anyway, the moral of this story is that it is apparently possible to change a tire with one arm immediately after losing a pint of blood, but it's incredibly difficult, and will make you feel like someone's beating you over the head with a sledgehammer.

Darth Lego @ 24/8/2012 13:15

BTW, when they say don't do any strenuous job they do really mean it. The lack of blood means less blood that goes to your brain (your heart pumps a bit faster because of the lose, and making a heavy job makes it pump harder and thus the headache). And you shouldn't be driving at all (in case you faint). That wasn't random crap, that was you not paying attention to the things they tell you not to do.

Well, I'm well aware that there are valid medical reasons for why you shouldn't do anything strenuous, and I did actually do the responsible thing and try to call a few other people to see if anybody could come change the tire for me, for that exact reason. It turns out everybody I know well enough to guilt into doing that kind of thing was busy all night, so my options were either to stay at the clinic overnight or just tough it out. The fact that I got screwed by fate to that degree qualifies as random crap, I'd say.

Also, they've never once told me not to drive after donating. That was something like my tenth donation, and I've driven just fine after all of them.

Today I made my logic professor swear at our class.

It all started when we were working on counterexample argument deconstruction. How it basically works is you get an argument like, "All meticulously constructed timepieces are true works of art, for all Swiss watches are true works of art and all Swiss watches are meticulously constructed timepieces." To disprove the argument, you substitute plainly-evident things for the things in the argument. So, you'd get, "All mammals can swim, because all whales are mammals, and all whales can swim."

At this point a guy named Mitch raised his hand and asked the professor if this was true. The professor then stopped, and had to think of whether or not all mammals can swim. I raised my hand, and said that sheep cannot swim.

Professor: "What, seriously?"
Rob: "Yes. They're too stupid to swim. They'll just stand there while the water rises around them, and drown. It's been documented."
Mitch: "That, or they'll just stand there looking up at the rain until their nostrils flood and they drown that way."

Since nobody could remember a sheep ever swimming, we accepted this as a reasonable disproof of the argument, and we moved on. About an hour later, we wind up with an argument of the following form:

"All dogs fall into either the category of Fish or the category of Animal. All dogs are animals. Thus, no dogs are fish."

At this point Mitch raises his hand again.

Mitch: "But, sir, there are dogfish. It's a kind of shark."
Professor: "Uh..." *rewrites argument so it now reads:*

"All cats fall into either the category of Fish or the category of Animal. All cats are animals. Thus, no cats are fish."

Rob: "There are catfish too, sir."
Professor: *says nothing, and replaces 'cat' with 'cow.'*
Rob: "There are also cowfish, sir."
Professor: *raises the chalk, stops, turns to the class* "Is there a wolf fish?"
Mitch: "I'm pretty sure there is, sir."
Professor: *long pause* "Is there a sheep fish?"
Rob: "No, sir. Sheep can't swim, remember?"

At which point the professor swore at us. It was totally worth it.

Today I was walking down a hallway to use the bathroom. One of the doors opens, and this big guy comes walking down the hallway towards me. I notice that he's completely avoiding my gaze, which I guess is socially understandable since he just came out of the bathroom.

Then I get to the door, see the sign, and realize that this dude just came out of the women's room. So I look back, kind of awkwardly, at this dude. I try the men's room door, and it's locked. So I decide to just stand there and wait for a bit, because for some reason it's just way creepier to be the second guy to use the women's restroom.

Then some girl comes up, notices me waiting, and, I kid you not, starts making fun of me for not using the women's room. Then she goes in and uses it. I had no idea what to do now. Presumably she was expecting me to wait around and then go in after she was done, and judging by the bizarre noises coming from the men's room, there was no way I was getting in there any time soon.

So I fled the scene. It seemed like the least awkward thing to do.

I dunno for sure. It definitely didn't sound like wiping, I know that much.

Today I took a psych test.

1. You are walking in the woods. Who are you walking with?
Rob: My fiancee, Robette.

2. You are walking in the woods. You see an animal. What kind of animal is it?
Rob: It's a dog.

3. What interaction takes place between you and the animal?
Rob: I kick it into the bushes.

4. You walk deeper into the woods. You enter a clearing and before you is your dream house. Describe its size.
Rob: It's Luigi's Mansion, from Luigi's Mansion. So it's pretty big, or at least it was when I tried to make a replica on The Sims.*

5. Is your dream house open, or surrounded by a fence?
Rob: There's no fence. Most haunted houses don't care if you go into them.

6. You enter the house. You walk to the dining area and see the dining room table. Describe what you see on and around the table.
Rob: There's a big fat ghost there eating all of the food, and a few candlesticks on the table, which is mostly laden with waste and dishes. There's a piece of cheese underneath one of the chairs.

7. You exit the house through the back door. Lying in the grass is a cup. What material is the cup made of (ceramic, glass, paper, etc.)?
Rob: Sure, it's ceramic.

8. What do you do with the cup?
Rob: I throw it away. I'm not very thirsty.

9. You walk to the edge of the property, where you find yourself standing at the edge of a body of water. What type of body of water is it ?
Rob: It's a massive lake. I suppose I should have brought the cup with me.

10. How will you cross the water?
Rob: I won't. I just found my dream house, so I'm gonna turn around and go back to it, thank you very much.

I received this analysis:

1. The person who you are walking with is the most important person in your life.

- Sure, fair enough. Robette is, after all, the co-star in the epic comedy that is The Life of Rob.

2. The size of the animal is representative of your perception of the size of your problems.

- It was a pretty small dog, I guess. Given that I'm getting married, have to finish grad school applications, am taking 18 credits and have two jobs, I must not pay very much attention to my problems. Either that or my antidepressants are phenomenal.

3. The severity of the interaction you have with the animal is representative of how you deal with your problems (passive, aggressive).

- I aggressively attack my problems, whether or not they've done anything to deserve it.

4. The size of your dream home is representative of the size of your ambition to resolve your problems.

- Given that I picked a massive house that was designed by someone else, you can take this to mean that I either have massive ambition to solve my problems, or that I have massive ambition for someone else to solve my problems. Apparently I don't care who solves my problems, just so long as they get solved eventually.

5. No fence is indicative of an open personality. People are welcome at all times. The presence of a fence is more indicative of a closed personality. You'd prefer people to not drop by unannounced.

- This is just flat wrong. People are welcome to come into my haunted mansion, but the ghosts will punch them in the face and turn them into paintings, so it's not like me being welcoming is a positive social trait.

6. If your answer did not include food, people, or flowers then you are generally unhappy.

- Well, okay. There was a lot of food, but someone else was eating it. There was also a person (well, three, if you count me and Robette standing there), but he was kind of undead. So the jury's kind of out on this one.

7. The durability of the material with which the cup is made is representative of the perceived durability of your relationship with the person from number 1. For example, Styrofoam, plastic, and paper are disposable; Styrofoam, paper, and glass (ceramics) are not durable; and metal and plastic are durable.

- Whoever wrote this test has never put a plastic cup in a very hot dishwasher, or watched one get run over by an SUV. I've owned a ceramic mug that's been around since before I was born. If that's not durable, I don't know what is.

8. Your disposition of the cup is representative of your attitude toward the person in number 1.

- Apparently I'm just going to throw Robette away when I'm not in the mood for her. That might make things awkward with the in-laws. Good thing this test warned me in advance.

9. The size of the body of water is representative of the size of your sexual desire.

- This test correctly identified that I am male. Well done, the internet.

10. How wet you get in crossing the water is indicative of the relative importance of your sex life.

- According to this test, there's this massive lake of sexual desire in my life that I apparently don't give half a crap about. Then again, I live in Canada, so even if I did cross the lake it'd be, y'know... because it's frozen, so I wouldn't be getting wet then. Apparently intelligence prevents you from having sex, which would certainly explain why it seems like everybody around me is getting dumber with every consecutive generation.

So, there you have it. The most important person in my life is someone to whom I have a breakable relationship, and I will impulsively pick her up and throw her away for being irrelevant, due to my complete ignorance of the massive sexual desire I'm housing. Meanwhile, someone else is eating my undead happiness, but it's only a minor problem, and I'll be able to kick it into the bushes thanks to my colossal ambitions.

Thank goodness for internet psychology.


*It didn't work at all. I finally managed to do a halfway decent replica in Sims 2, but the game refused to let me make children into ghosts like I wanted to. Overall, it was quite disappointing.

Don't feel too bad for Robette, folks. I had her take this test.

Her answers were:

1. Me.
2. A big bear
3. Run away from it
4. A really small house
5. Yes.
6. No people. Just dishes.
7. A disposable plastic cup
8. Throw it away because it's obviously garbage.
9. (I'm not allowed to say what she answered here)
10. (I'm not allowed to say what she answered here)

So, apparently she has massive problems that she'll run away from and will throw me away because I'm obviously garbage.

In other news, today I initiated a passive-aggressive attack against whoever it is that keeps stealing my freakin' table from the school hallway.

My university is one gigantic building. Every part of it except for the lobby shuts down at night. There is one section of the lobby that is perfectly nice and quiet, while the rest of it is filled with obnoxious athletes who pump music while talking about stuff nobody but an athlete could possibly care about. So, I have a table in the quiet area, where I sit and drink iced tea while studying until 2 or 3 in the morning. In fact, on more than one occasion I have sat in that chair literally from sunset to sunrise working on a paper. The table stayed in that spot for like an entire year, and all was well and good at Rob State University.

But for some freakin' reason, this term, people keep stealing my table. I think what happened is that I went away to Oxford, and people went, "Hey, what happened to that guy who always sits at that table? I think he's dead. Let's take his table." Those bastards. Anyway, for the entire term to date, I'd study there at night, then some jerk would take it the next morning, and it would show up at some other random location throughout the school. I kept dutifully moving it back, and whoever it was kept taking it. Then one day they put a sofa next to my table, which encouraged other people to sit there and annoy me while I was trying to work. The next day the table was gone again so I sat on the sofa. Because whoever is doing this has decided I'm not allowed to be happy, they proceeded to steal the sofa too. It is completely gone, and I have no idea where the hell they put it. I also can't find the table, and I actually think that the RSU janitorial staff actually put it in the locked storage room, because I took the time to go through every freakin' hallway in the building, and it is not there.

So today I stole another table from the athletes' section, then went to the library and printed off a note in massive font, which I laminated to the table with packing tape which I jacked from the drama department, because screw you, Rob State University, I'm not only gonna go passive-aggro on your butts, but I'm gonna use your own resources to do it.

It says:

"HEY, I JUST MET YOU
AND THIS IS CRAZY
BUT HERE'S MY TABLE
DON'T MOVE IT, MAYBE?"

I lay you ten to one it's gone tomorrow, and the facilities department leaves a note telling me that my taste in music sucks. I blame you, Jeffrey Fernandis.

So I'm sitting at my table, which has magically survived the night, and then some guy from my philosophy class comes up to me and asks if I put the sign on there. And, sure enough, the facilities manager picks that exact moment to walk by. Apparently the school keeps telling him to move the table, because for whatever reason they don't want it in that hallway. Since I've already used up my lifetime allotment of asking the school to let me do things for literally no other reason than I want to do them, I highly doubt that I'm going to be able to launch an appeal.

So now not only are my table privileges revoked, but now the facilities manager knows who I am, and has the ability to come yell at me if I move it again.

So, fun times. I'm what you'd call a method author: when I'm writing about something, if possible I like to try it out IRL to make sure that I'm giving an accurate account. In most cases, though, I just do research. (I do know how to make my own tear gas and nitroglycerine, thanks to getting access to reserve materials from a university I don't attend by dint of having asked for them on a day that their computers were down.)

So, I'm shortly going to be working on a story which involves a lot of lethal trap setting. Obviously there aren't a lot of those that I can actually try out, but with the access I have to Rob State University's drama department workshop, I can build a few of them so long as I don't get caught and dismantle them afterwards.

I've been going over schematics for a nail gun trap, where if you step on a board a nail gun beneath it will fire upwards at you. I'm pretty sure I worked out how to do it in a way that will realistically work.

Then today, while working on a completely separate nonviolent project, I managed to inadvertently shoot myself in the index finger with said nail gun. The really sad part is that I didn't so much go, "HOLY #@$)@# I JUST SHOT MYSELF WITH A NAIL GUN!" as "Hey, now I know how my victim will feel."

So, yeah. It's been a strange week.

The first-aid kit bandage fell off, so I used duct tape to make a new one.

It's not a Band-Aid. It's a MANdaid.

Another epic win for Rob State University.

We had a massive snowstorm yesterday. As in, when I went to bed, the world was full of green grass, and when I woke up there was six inches of snow. I said, "Screw it," and drove to school - doing the speed limit, mind you. Apparently I'm literally the only person in the entire country that understands that your car will not instantly crash and kill you the second you go above 40k while there's a single snowflake on the road. Everywhere else in the province, bus services were shutting down, and my hometown set the record for most collisions in a single day, with over 230. I then attended a few classes, drove Robette home, then went back to the school for even more classes.

I'm the shop foreman for my drama class, as I mentioned previously. That means that while the others are rehearsing, I'm in the shop loudly cursing the sawmills who keep giving me warped wood to build perfectly straight set pieces with.

Apparently, while I was in there, the university board decided that it could face litigation if it didn't let the professors go home before the weather got too bad. So they literally went around the entire school and kicked everybody in the building out, cancelled all of the day's classes, and sent the whole staff home.

What this means is that Robette's roommates all come home, tell her that the school is on lockdown and everybody's left. Robette assumes that this means that I'm not at the school, and since I'm not at her house, that means I've gone home. So she texts me to double check that everything's okay.

In fact, as it turns out RSU really doesn't care if I die, apparently, because even though there I was blasting Alexisonfire and using several noisy power tools, it doesn't occur to them that I should probably be evacuated along with everybody else, and nobody stops by to let me know about the lockdown.
Meanwhile, my parents try to phone me to tell me not to come home, on account of everybody everywhere getting into massive accidents.

This all would have been fine, if I hadn't accidentally left my phone in my discarded sweater, and decided to work late. The end result was that I emerged from the drama lab to find the school deserted, much like the first paintball episode of Community. I also discovered that Robette and my parents had phoned each other, and when it became apparent that I wasn't anywhere that I was supposed to be, they drew the seemingly obvious conclusion that I had quite possibly died somewhere, and were in the process of worrying themselves sick when I remembered that I didn't have my phone, and saw the really disproportionate number of missed calls that I'd received.

The end result of all of this is that I think that what probably happened is that the school took a peek into the drama lab, said, "Wait, that's the guy who kept moving that table. Let him die of weather conditions, he totally deserves it."

Well played, RSU. Well played.

While I was supposed to be writing an essay last night, I happened to stumble across a game called Alter Ego. If you'd like to try it, here's the link:

Alter Ego

What this basically is is a simulation of your entire life, presenting you with a really astronomical series of choices that will affect your future development as a person. (Since my essay was about the development of self, I decided that tooling around with this for a while would count as doing 'research'.)

For my maiden voyage, I decided to try and play as close to myself as possible, just to see what would happen.

I was pretty interested to see how the game would interpret my personality choices, since I routinely manage to bend personality tests into pretzel shapes without actually intending to do so. (No joke. When I was eighteen, I actually took a standardized personality test from a professional neuropsychologist. After about 150 questions, which I did answer completely seriously and to the best of my ability, what I got back was a sheet of paper telling me that the computer had analysed my answers and determined that I was lying. So apparently as far as standardized testing is concerned, I'm not a real person.)

With this in mind, I wanted to see how well this game could accommodate AlterRob.

AlterRob had an interesting life. At the beginning of the game, he was issued a personality test. Keeping the above anecdote in mind, AlterRob attempted to game the system, and openly admitted that he would not be taking the personality test seriously, then proceeded to lie on every single question after that. He refused to come out of the womb until he was forcibly removed, because, hey, it was warm and comfy, and free food. Following this, baby AlterRob basically developed randomly, as a result of the game not letting me choose mood/action combinations like, "Angrily fall asleep," "aggressively don't notice the dog" and "passively hit the other child in the face", forcing me to try other things. AlterRob was not what you'd call a prodigy, managing to master only the skills of manipulation and standing up, without ever apparently learning to crawl, figure out what a mirror was, or get over his fear of strangers. Though he totally had his parents wrapped around his chubby little finger, AlterRob wasn't always so successful. Other children stole his toys and abused his niceness, then his pet goldfish died and his mother stole his stuffed bunny and never gave it back. Oh, and then he was hospitalized for severe gastro-intestinal burns after drinking an entire bottle of cleaning solvent.

Luckily, AlterRob survived this particular adventure, and successfully transitioned into nursery school, where he was afraid of all of the other children and spent a lot of time crying. He was forced to help with household chores, despite his fervent wish to stay inside and watch cartoons. This development ultimately proved to be a mistake on the part of AlterDad, because while gathering sticks, AlterRob was kidnapped and tortured to death by a child molester.

Needless to say, this was a pretty disturbing result, and not just for the reasons you might think. See, as a three-year-old, I apparently went wandering downtown all by myself for a few hours, and was apparently completely unfazed when the police showed up. Apparently this just goes to show that I'm such an improbable person that all parallel-universe versions of me tend to die right out of the starting gate.

I'm going to take another run at it, as "Michelle," the name my parents were going to use if I had turned out as a girl. We'll see how FemRob turns out.