Killian's Blog/Website/Whatever

Ok, so I have an amazing idea. Is it insane? Maybe. Is it brilliant? Yes. And there are a lot of researchers who agree with me. The pitch: There are many states that have become shriveled little (or big) raisins. All these states still have at least a few little areas of soggy green, and this is crucial--if all the soggy green areas are gone, the state will have to wait for a neighboring state to get the ball rolling for them. Ok, so let's say you've got some good, green sog going in one area. How on earth do you spread that water around in such a way as to keep the ground lush and firmly rooted, thus less prone to flooding when it does rain, and make everything a bit more fireproof, to boot? I'll tell you how.  Beavers. The answer is beavers.  I'm not sure how many beavers would be required here--I think it's in the millions just for California, and the current North American* beaver population is (according to the WWF) somewhere between 10 and 15 million. (Aside...

A week ago, Meta sent me an email informing me that they'd deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts for some violation of their Terms & Agreements. We all know that I am not the type to violate a term and/or agreement, but they decided to auto-review their decision (what?) of said deletion and then officially, irrevocably deleted me. All before 5am on a Wednesday! Some people seem to have solved this problem (which happens to your average, law-abiding person on occasion) by getting a new username and registering for a paid account (for like $17/month) and then submitting a request for help. Yes, that's right--they will only consider considering your request if you are paying them. A subtle reminder that we are the product and not the customer. Fortunately, the dog and cat still have their account, so I was able to notify the good friends of mine who follow my animals (the sign of a true friend) that I did not delete all my socials in a fit of pique. That post only reache...

Everything is awful. We can all agree on this. If you don't think everything is awful, you are probably a well-loved pet or a healthy plant, and I am happy for you. Below is the recipe for my famous Cozy Magic Simmer Pot. It will lift your spirits for perhaps a brief (but certainly a lovely) moment. It can be made with fresh or dried citrus and apples, but I recommend that the rosemary--or whatever your desired evergreenery--be fresh (that said, if dried is all you got, dried will do fine!). ALSO: the simmer pots give as gifts are all organic, BUT! a person (including myself) can't always spring for the fancy stuff. So... -If the produce isn't organic, make sure you scrub the heck out of the fruit before boiling (because the rinds and peels are the most important element here ). You should wash the fruit either way, but you really don't want pesticides floating around your house.  -You can use leftover rinds and cores from the apples and oranges you were already enjoyin...

Apparently no one is discussing the fact that Kingpin--in the new Daredevil: Born Again tv series--absolutely listens to Ezra Klein. This man craves Abundance. He loves New York. He hates red tape. His favorite mayor is La Guardia*. A lot of the early episodes are spent on the writers of the show using Kingpin to point out the bonkers nonsense of city planning bureaucracy. Episode 4 (it's literally titled "Sic Semper Systema") features an extended scene of Kingpin standing in the rubble of an industrialized area excitedly describing--with the help of a model mock-up--a revitalized area: beautiful, bustling, a demonstration of dedication to the growth of the city he loves more than anything (aside from his wife)! There is then a discussion between him and his political-insider assistant where she has to explain to him how, um, actually you can't just start making nice things. You have to do X first. "Let's do that!" he says. Ooof, well, actually, you can...

Like a gazillion other people in the northern hemisphere, I'm in "spring cleaning" mode. One teetering step from it, more accurately. While many are purging their closets and junk drawers and pantries, I am reading articles and blog posts, hoping they can push me over the edge of my painful limbo of procrastination and into their world of sparkling fulfillment. Ten Weird Tricks to Give Away All of Your Dead Grandmother's China and Not Feel Even a Little Sad About It! Decluttering Is *Actually* As Fun As Disneyland! Make Your Japandi Dreams Come True By Creating a Capsule Wardrobe! Just Throw Things Into the Trash, Coward. Please, O People who Professionally Organize, I want my living room to feel cozy, my kitchen to be organized, my bathroom to be clean, my laundry to blah blah yard blah basement blahhhhh, etc! I want to enter any room in my house and feel relaxed and/or rejuvenated! And, oh, how my hands yearn to pick things up and put them down again--possibly back...

Has anyone written a thesis/monograph/treatise/very good blog post on the relationships of fathers and sons in good television? Because it seems like there are very few exceptions--especially when the show is from the POV of the son--to the Dysfunctional Relationship rule. Doesn't matter if it's a comedy or a drama. It's the Year of Our Lord 2025, guys! It's not just Boomers and Xers making TV! Millennials, are we ok?? And will Zedders, too, fall victim to the Is It Even Possible for Adult Sons to Have Good Relationships With Their Fathers problem? Or will they break the cycle?! And are father/son relationships actually usually very complicated?? Or do complicated relationships just happen to Venn diagram real well with guys who end up in writers rooms? I don't know, as I am not a son, nor have I ever been in a tv writers room. For the sake of equality, when will moms get the chance to be villains?*   Fathers & daughters is also interesting, because--unless th...

I had to squish two spiders today. They were the very scary kind, and they were hanging out in very inconvenient, non-cup-coverable places, but I hate killing spiders.  I wasn't afraid of them when I was a kid. One of my great aunts was a teacher and had many animals at her house--these most memorably including a small horse and a tarantula. You can bet your butt that I held that strangely delicate eight-legged chonk.* No fear. I remember thinking it was pretty cool, and strange that anyone would find it scary. Around this age (nine, I think?) I regularly read the stories and histories of a ton of different mythologies, including (as was popular in the 90's, I think) plenty of Greek myths.** The story of Arachne stuck in my tender, impressionable, little kid heart--I was sad for Arachne, and disappointed by my previously favorite Greek goddess, Athena.*** So for my whole childhood, I was dedicated to the scoop-and-release method of dealing with spiders, because I knew...

My (arguably) most sympathetic pedantic annoyance is the use of a country's name instead of country's government. China can't spy on you. The Chinese government* can, or can pay private businesses to do it for them, but neither the geography nor the entire population is responsible for the government's choices. Remember how sad we liberals got when people said "Americans" during the Bush years?**  It's the Government! we cried. It's less than half of the country , we promise! We're not villains!*** Sometimes even: Oh! No, I'm Canadian. A country is neither a hero nor a villain. A country is full of individuals, as we USAers know very well. A government gets to make these consequential choices. If we're lucky, we get to vote for the people who make up the government that makes these choices (even then, things can be dicey, see *** again). Not every group of people in a specific geographic area is so fortunate. Some people can'...

Picture yourself entering a small indoor pool. The light from a few high windows mixes with the fluorescent overheads and color of the water to give the whole space a green glow. Your fellow swimmers are three octogenarians chatting and treading water in one lane and a middle-aged man swimming breast stroke with a snorkel in the other. A lifeguard in her early 20s sits opposite from all, looking small in her safety gear. Empty bleachers, save for a single woman in a red swimsuit and blue cap, hoping someone will leave early so she can take her turn. Now imagine this scene, but subtract the classic public-pool-aquarobics pop music coming through the speakers. Replace it with the Twin Peaks theme. This is a true story. The lifeguard played the whole Twin Peaks soundtrack while we were swimming. It was the best pool day of my adult life.

The common practice of eating lamb for Easter dinner (which we did only once during my childhood, fortunately) has always made me a little squeamish. Setting aside the eating of a baby animal, which I very much do not enjoy, it's like getting both mouthfuls of the Eucharist at once. You barely need to transubstantiate a lamb. Blegh. Actually, continuing the supper thoughts, eating Easter ham is pretty weird, too. Given the practiced religion of our good boy Jesus, it is probably the least Christ-approved of the mammalian dinner meats. I propose a change to loaves and fishes, because it is referential without being horrifying, can be enjoyed by a majority of diets, and is great for your cholesterol.

 I drew this a few months ago (obviously based on a dream I had last October) and submitted it to one online journal, but they didn’t take it, and I don’t have the patience nor the desire to go shopping it around places. Why do that when I have a blog? Publishing in lit mags has always been such a thing that it’s easy to forget: it’s unnecessary.  A lit mag is just a group of people with a ~*fancy*~ blog (sometimes a blog printed  on paper !) who find things they like to read and share them with those of a like mind. It’s cool! It’s fun to read a curated list of stories and comics! It feels pretty great to get published by tastemakers! But if I were trying to write/do art for the money, I would be doing an embarrassingly poor job of it. Self-publishing is as old as wheat receipts on clay tablets, and I have the ability to blast pamphlets like Thomas Paine. That’s maybe a bit of a forced metaphor, but I enjoy the sound of the sentence, and—as this is my blog—I do not hav...

Most recently, I've had the pleasure of developing pityriasis rosea. It's a rash of unknown origin that lasts at least six weeks. It looks like the type of rash you'd draw on yourself as a kid to get out of school: big, red, round/oval spots all over. You can't get rid of it. You just have to ride the wave. Despite splotching up my neck real good, it has, thank sweet baby jesus, avoided my face. At least it happened in the winter; I'd pass out if I tried rocking these turtlenecks in August.  Sometimes a health issue is so wild that it's comical. I could pitch a whole show about the medical magic and mysteries that befall all of my family members. I mean, how many people under the age of 100 do you know who've had scarlet fever? Because my brother, Matthew, has. That's right--we've got that  Oregon Trail  shit. And we've got Daniel, too, who married me for some reason and has nothing wrong with him! It's the perfect set-up.  The world has seen...

My local pool, Columbia, was officially closed-- condemned --in 2022. I still haven't gotten over it. As a person who suffers from a chronically bad case of nostalgia, I don't know if I'll ever get over it.  I spent my very early childhood going to swim lessons there, spent afternoons at open swim with my mom and siblings when we were being homeschooled (middle-school), spent a few high-school mornings trying to swim a mile before having to sit my butt down in a chair for seven hours*, and spent my summers on the city's youth swim team from age eleven (if not earlier) to seventeen, repping Columbia every year but the last**. I got really, really good at swimming there. I was basically raised in that pool. The main place of my childhood joy, and the only place I ever did sports. The only place where my body has ever exceeded expectations. I'm much, much older now (nearly twenty years, jeezus). College was busy (and there was no swim team), I moved away for a while, ...

Just watched (five times) an excellent video by a microbiologist ( @tardibabe ) who posts all kinds of amazing stuff. This particular video was focused on a tray with lil dot of human blood.  I am awestruck every time I can look closely at our bodies—everything is in constant motion (at least ideally), sticking together, bouncing off of each other, flowing down rivers between slow, red glaciers; white blood cells moving alone, pushing against the current with wide open mouths.  We're made of so many living (and dying) pieces. Despite all of the ways we can break down and fall apart, I think you could call us truly, literally marvelous.

 We found a praying mantis in our backyard last night, and it was still against the house in the morning--until the dog started freaking out (understandably) and then tried to play with it (an odd choice). So Daniel and I embarked on a rescue mission.  It went well. I briefly flirted with the idea of nudging it onto the paper with my finger, but when one of those  "raptorial legs"  got its grabbers on said-finger with great speed and strength, I backtracked* and we got an additional piece of nudging paper. I made sure it got to take the blade of dead grass it seemed very attached to (literally, and perhaps emotionally). The relocation progressed uneventfully from there, and we gingerly placed it in a protected area. I've never seen one of these guys in real life, let alone touched one. Did you know they have FIVE EYES? I did not find this out until after the encounter, so no photo evidence, but scientists have told me this is the case.  It's difficult to go...

While poking around JSTOR this afternoon, I came upon a paper titled "Rhetoric of Myth, Magic, and Conversion: A Prolegomena to Ancient Irish Rhetoric" . Obviously I read it. On page four, there was a quote (footnoted--although the footnote doesn't actually match the resource), and the poetry of it was almost painfully beautiful. So I tracked it down, found the full story online. Here's a larger excerpt than that used in the journal paper. Prepare yourself: Brigit ceased to sing, and there was silence for a little space in Tir-na-Moe. Then Angus said: "Strange are the words of your song, and strange the music: it swept me down steeps of air--down--down--always further down. Tir-na-Moe was like a dream half-remembered. I felt the breath of strange worlds on my face, and always your song grew louder and louder, but you were not singing it. Who was singing it?" "The Earth was singing it." "The Earth!" said the Dagda. "Is not the Earth ...

I started this blog in (*checks timeline*) 2010. I was a borderline child (I don't know if you've met many 20-21 year-olds, but they are still pupae. I'm not sure a person can be described as fully-formed until the age of 27...if ever). Looking back at old posts--which I just unarchived--I am a little embarrassed. I don't know what I've written in the ~200 posts prior to 2022. Am I somewhat worried about people scouring my shit for absolutely stupid things I've written? Yes. Because people can be really mean. But I've never been a really mean person, so I don't imagine I've said many mean things (at least not targeted at groups of people that aren't conglomerated into The Government of Any Particular Country). Still, the fear remains. I'm hoping you are all kind to me and my past self.  Past-self didn't know a lot about me. She didn't really know that she was sick--she had ideas, inklings, but not the clinical words to put to it.  I ...

An easy, few-hour plan to distract yourself from greater world events: 1. Spend over an hour on public transportation to get a blood test 2. Stand in line for the lab test for 15 minutes 3. Go outside before you sign in because there's a fire drill (in a hospital building) 4. Get a latte at a nearby coffee shop to get out of the wind while you wait for the fire drill to end 5. Don't drink your latte, because you want to be warm inside and you can't take your mask off 6. Fire drill over, stand in line again 7. Wait 8. Relinquish some body juice 9. Slam latte before it gets cold 10. Take another 1.5 hours of buses back home 11. Get a little grumpy at the amount of pointless construction in your neighborhood 11. Worry about test results 12. Get test results 13. Be thankful that the results look great, because you don't have a dysfunctional organ 14. Feel a wee bit frustrated, though, because you still don't know what your body is doing 15. Eat a bagel Congratulations! ...

1. I wish I loved baseball. Some people get a lot out of baseball. 2.  It is, by all accounts, a beautiful day today. Cloudless sky, ~66°F, my ideal nice day (t-shirts! light sweatshirts in the shade! no overheating!). Flan happened to need more dry food, so I walked to the pet store. I took a new route, going up an additional few blocks before turning to the side. It felt very strange. The farther you get from the main road/the closer you get to the river, the houses, block-to-block, get nicer. Sure, that's nothing new. I grew up on a dividing line street, and I live on one now. But the street I ended up walking down today didn't used to be quite so fancy, I think. I suppose I temporarily forgot that everything is fancier these days. I've been back for six years, but there are still pockets of childhood places that I haven't seen for a decade, which I've preserved in my memory as being A Certain Way. It was unsettling. I took my usual route home.  I'm a bit di...

"4:28 PM"   A SCREENPLAY INTERIOR: Scene opens on woman checking email in her home office She clicks on the email from sender "MyChart" We look at the screen:  "Hello, you have a new statement-- Amount due: $302.71" Zoom out to view woman from front, laptop in front of her, typing quickly. WOMAN: This can't be right. Back to looking at her screen. On MyChart login page. She clicks "login", then scrolls to "Billing." We see an itemized bill revealing that her insurance only covered 1/2 of her blood tests, despite being an in-network provider. View changes to lawn OUTSIDE We see a laptop crashing through a fifth floor window, sailing through the air like a beautiful bird. It explodes before hitting the ground.