On the New Blog

As of today until the autumn of next year I will be updating only the following blog:

http://molsenmissionblog.blogspot.com/

Feel free to follow that one as well. I may return to this (hopefully with a new resolve) after my return from Louisiana, but until then I implore that you take care! Have many adventures! Defeat much evil!

On Trixie

I have the tendency of minding my own business and looking for privacy in very public places. No, I don’t really think about these things, but I expect that most people have the sense to not approach me, because I’m a very avoidable kind of person. I couldn’t tell you why. Most people say I look angry all the time. This is probably true, but it is false impression. If you ever happen upon me with my brow knit in an arrow pointing directly down to the point of my nose, don’t jump to this conclusion else you find yourself making a gross misjudgment. I am rarely angry, but often deep in thought. Or not. If I’m not deep in thought, then I’m probably just lost and could use a few pointers in the right direction. Please be kind and draw my attention back to reality!

So this unfortunate habit of mine, naturally, gets me into trouble far more often than I would like. People like to ask what’s wrong or they feel the need to cheer me up. I was just fine, thanks. Really, why would anything be up? Why would anything be wrong? I’m here, I’m in good health, and I have a job. I’m set. People don’t usually get this, and rarely do they believe it when I try to explain it to them. In living sometimes with people who don’t understand that I’m honestly not the kind of person who feels any sort of overbearing emotion other than apathy, I’ve come to scare some of them off. This is never my intention. The only person I’ve ever wanted to scare off was Trixie.

If you’ve ever read my blog before, you might remember that I had the intention of writing on my adventures with Trixie. Luckily this didn’t come to fruition, because Trixie was only here for three months. They were torturous, and by the end of them I had thrown a temper tantrum in a Target and threatened her life. Yes, I did just say I was not an overly emotional person, but it got to be that bad. To be honest, it was such a horrific ordeal, that I really don’t even remember her real name. I try not to.

I do have some fond memories of Trixie. There was that one time we tried to hang out and watch a movie and I bought a couple of movies with more dramatic themes than comical. She’d never heard of the movies I was buying, and I hadn’t seen any of the comedies she was waving in my face. I’m fairly certain that one of those ‘OMG this movie is sooooo good!’ specimens was ‘The Hottie and the Nottie’.

Then there was that other time where I was so stressed from living with her that I spent the night crying in my room, which she heard and took to be her cue to console me. Oh what beautiful irony!

The best story I have of that tumultuous period, however, comes from when I was still naïve to her idiosyncrasies.

I was sitting on the couch in my lovely spot, reading a book and relaxing as the setting sun shone through the blinds. It was quiet. Tonks rested on the floor with her bone. The only sounds were the pages of my book turning and my occasional comments to Tonks. I don’t know where she came from, but suddenly my impossibly plastic roommate was in the room. She plopped down on the couch next to me with a can of mixed nuts and started to munch.

I honestly couldn’t tell you why she’d bothered to sit next to me. I was wondering why she didn’t immediately turn on the TV. She didn’t even say hi. After considering this for a nano second, I decided that she must, as a social person, just be craving a close proximity with someone of her own species. Hey look at that, I’m human after all. I returned to my book and said nothing.

“Do you want some nuts?” she suddenly asked, interrupting my journey into the unknown of ancient Assyria. I politely feigned an interest in accepting her offer. I noted the label on the can. An enticing photograph of several variations of nuts indicated to me that I did not want some nuts.

“Nah, I don’t want to risk the cashews,” I said. I was not lying. I don’t like cashews. I also don’t like macadamia nuts, which is tragic because I do like white chocolate chips in cookies. I suppose I could make cookies with white chocolate chips and just not call them macadamia nut cookies, but that would require me to bake. I’m not fond of baking. I digress.

My eyes turned back towards my book, Trixie shook the can of nuts and looked in at the contents. She then uttered a question I never thought I would ever hear from an Earth-born human over the age of five.

“What’s a cashew?”

It came out seeping with obstinance, as though this were a perfectly reasonable question asked by a perfectly reasonable person, and I was the fool for knowing. That or her intonation was meant to disclose her disgust, as though she spontaneously decided that she should be as put off by cashews as I was.

In any case, it claimed my full attention. I dropped my book and my jaw. I was nonplussed. What’s a cashew? For a moment I found myself wondering the same thing. Not that I don’t know what a cashew is, I just never thought I’d have to explain cashews. To anyone. How do you explain cashews? They’re round-ish and beige-ish and cashew-ish!

“They’re… the… cashew-shaped… ones?” Yes, I could have said ‘crescent-shaped’ or ‘smiley-shaped’, what have you, but at this point I wasn’t exactly sure what this girl was capable of defining. Besides, ‘cashew-shaped’ is the metaphor you would be looking for to describe something else before having to use ‘smiley-shaped’, right? I also couldn’t think of any better way to describe such a basic food that lists pretty high in the ‘Most Important Basic Foods That Everyone and Their Dog Knows’ category.

She continued to shake the can searching for this mystery nut that, unless she knew what it was, would not be found with her keen detective skills. She pulled one out anyway; a clear stab in the dark.

“Is this a cashew?”

The round little nut stared me in the face. The shape betrayed a tiny expression of perplexity that would have earned me thousands of dollars had it been the likeness of Jesus rather than of Curly of the Three Stooges.

“No. That’s a… uh… hazelnut.”

Trixie looked at me as if to read me for lies. Really, I don’t know how she could possibly doubt me at this point. If I had called it a cabbage, I’m pretty sure she would have bought it. She looked at the nut and rolled it around in inspection before uttering that companion of Stupid Questions, the Mother of All Ignorant Statements:

“Oh. I thought that was a pecan.” I peed my pants in astonishment. She tossed the confused little hazelnut back in the can and shook it again, “What’s a pecan?”

Are you KIDDING ME?! Trixie is at least twenty years old. She lives on her own. She shops for her own food, and she doesn’t know what nuts are what? How can she blindly trust that someone isn’t slipping fatal nut-like things in her Planters can? What will happen when she has to rely on her survival skills and she doesn’t know which berries are safe? I wanted to slap her for being so blissfully satisfied in her potentially DEADLY ignorance!

I blinked a few times and twitched to check that my nerves were alert and I wasn’t sleeping, “Pecans are the ones shaped like brains.” Easier than cashews, pecans always remind me of brains. Metaphor nailed.

“Oh, well I think I ate all of those. OH! Are cashews those long curvey ones?” The look in her eyes indicated to me that she was quite excited at having used deductive logic to figure out on her own what a cashew was. I meekly nodded my head, my jaw still hanging and my eyes wide and fixed on her in amazement.

She shook the can one more time, but in my face, “I ate all those, you sure you don’t want some?”

I shook my head in response, “No. That’s okay… uh… thanks anyway…”

I lifted my book to my nose, praying that it would consume me whole and save me from this Empress of Blockheads. She left me to my peace a few seconds later, but I wasn’t able to keep reading. Not after that. In retrospect, I do believe that that may be the only memory I have of Trixie. It may be one of the clearest memories I have of anything. It’s certainly a memory I won’t ever forget.