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Why the Things we do Make Sense
The Teleski family had lived in the mansion on top of the hill ever since the hill was built in the late 1740s. Of course, it hadn’t always been a mansion. It had started out as a one room shed that really wasn’t supposed to hold humans, but Really Old Mr. Teleski had insisted on having his family there, as it still afforded a wonderful view. He had spent all his money building the hill, and it wasn’t until four generations later, well after Really Old Mr. Teleski had died, that Young Mr. Teleski was able to build up the house to something that could be considered a mansion. Of course, he didn’t stop there. He continued to build onto the mansion, both up and out, for the rest of his life, and after he died his children did the same. By the sixth generation it was a labyrinthian structure with a roof too high to be rained on and roots too deep to be dug up. Over the generations the family had also had to build on to the hill, as the house had begun to spill over the side a few times, so that it now resembled a large, grassy plateau.
By the seventh generation, where our story starts, the house was dreadfully crowded. You see, although the mansion was passed down to one child only, and the other siblings moved out upon marriage, somehow they and their families always ended up back in the mansion. You can imagine how much space a large family with husbands, wives, and children added on would take up, but now imagine this was a particularly rowdy family, and let us not forget the dead. Most people, when they die, have the decency to stay out of the world of the living, but when Really Old Mr. Teleski died, he was still so attached to the little shed he had built that he came back and haunted it. His son soon grew tired of constantly having his father around, so he built onto it, but Really Old Mr. Teleski had started a tradition, and every Teleski who died thereafter, wether related by blood or by marriage, ended up returning to the Teleski mansion after death whether they wanted to or not. Of course, you must know that a houseful of ghosts will undoubtedly attract other creatures of like nature, and soon the Teleski mansion was haunted not only by Teleski ghosts, but also by the ghosts of strangers, whispy skeletons, ghouls, poltergeists, specters, and every other kind of debatably physical creature you can imagine.
The living Teleski family wouldn’t have minded, but the dead always wanted to return to the rooms they had inhabited when they were alive, so every generation had to build their own living area. The dead didn’t even have the decency to stay put! No, they wanted to be all chummy with everyone and drifted about the house willy nilly, having loud conversations at every hour. Ghosts, of course, do not need sleep.
The living wouldn’t have minded, but it was impossible to have a private conversation. Some ghost or specter always overheard you and spread the news around to the other debatably physical beings, who inevitably discussed it in loud voices until the entire house knew about it. Secrecy wasn’t an option in the Teleski family.
The living wouldn’t have minded, but it made having friends over the house complicated. Everyone in Town knew about the Teleski tradition, but sometimes the kids brought home friends from college, or a business partner wanted to meet with the Current Mr. Teleski at his mansion. It always threw guests for a violent loop the first time a pair of shouting ghosts bursted through a wall, or a poltergeist zoomed through the window squawking and throwing tiny pebbles about.
The living wouldn’t have minded, but the debatably physical beings thought it was funny to startle them, and they started planning elaborate schemes together to prank the living. At first it was scary, then it was funny, then it was annoying, and when our story happens it was just a part of life.
The living never knew when a coffee table, suddenly visible, would zoom through the air aimed at someone’s head, or a skeleton with glowing red eyes would creak open a bedroom door and stand screaming at the foot of the bed. Soon, they all developed Jedi-like reflexes (or else were killed by way of a coffee table to the head) and the ability to sleep through anything. The skills were exceedingly useful at home.
At college, however, they created some awkward situations. When Current Liza-Jane Teleski moved into her dorm, her roommate fell asleep with a cigarette in her mouth and lit the building on fire. Though the alarm went off and all of the other students escaped unharmed, Current Liza-Jane slept on, and found herself back in the mansion the following morning. When a representative from the college came to the mansion with the charred remains of Recently-Passed Liza-Jane’s body to deliver the bad news to the family, he was greeted at the door by a child in a frock-coat (someone had to open the door), two skeletons debating the proper pronunciation of “pretzel” (they were babysitting), and the ghost of Recently-Passed Liza-Jane, who did the talking. When Recently-Passed Liza-Jane asked how she could help him, the man simply stared for a moment before dashing off the porch and down the street. He was so eager to get away he left without the car holding the body. Earn the Teleskis saw what it was, Recently-Passed Liza-Jane said “it isn’t as if we didn’t already know I was dead”, and they left it there in the driveway.
When Current Josiah (who’s nickname was CJ) visited his friend one town over, he leaped in one smooth motion from the kitchen floor to the top of the fridge on the other side of the room when the dog surprised him with a wet nose on his ankle. The fridge collapsed a moment later (most houses weren’t as over-built as the Teleski mansion), and the friendship ended there.
Chances of making new friends weren’t much helped when the family started driving around the hurst the college representative had left in the driveway, but what else were they supposed to do with a perfectly good car? And why should they remove Recently-Passed Liza-Jane’s remains? It was because of her that they had gotten the vehicle, after all.
New people were always asking why they had “Current” in front of their name, and that made for awkward explanations when dealing with people who didn’t believe in ghosts.
People were always asking the living all sorts of questions about why they did what they did. They were especially puzzled by the Teleskis’ surprise at how thing all the doors and walls were, and their desire to know all about the building materials. Eventually, the Teleskis learned that these structures weren’t made from any different materials, they just weren’t inhabited by hordes of debatably physical creatures. Most people, however, didn’t know about the Teleski tradition, and insisted that the things they did made no sense.
THE END
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Leaf Blowing
I have never understood the leaf-blowing and raking frenzy that captures Americans in October and refuses to release them until November.
If you are unfamiliar with this tradition, it roughly goes as follows:
A single leaf: *falls*
Every respectable home in the area: BREAK OUT THE LEAF BLOWERS AND THE RAKES WE CANNOT HAVE A SINGLE LEAF IN SIGHT IT WOULD BE DISGRACEFUL
Every person you ask about fall: Oh, I love it when the leaves fall, they look so pretty 🙂
I don’t understand it either.
The way I see it, leaves are nature’s confetti, and who doesn’t love a good party? You don’t even have to clean it up! The leaves will biodegrade all by themselves and by spring there will be no evidence left. There probably won’t really be evidence in winter either, but winter comes with snow and that, my friends, is its own rant. For the first part of fall the leaves are still brightly colored, and if anything make lawns infinitely more interesting than a monoculture slab of green. In the latter part the leaves do turn brown and a little less flashy, but that’s when they start getting crunchy! And crunchy leaves are perfect for stepping on. It’s one of my favorite autumn activities.
People can keep their lawns however they like, and if they want nary a leaf in sight they have every right to prefer that aesthetic, and I suppose in some cases there might be the concern of a slipping hazard, but to me it always seemed like such a waste of time and energy. In a world where there is always so much to do and never enough time, I am always eager to cut out unnecessary tasks, especially when those tasks aren’t fun. Walking around a yard with your head bent and headphones on so you don’t damage your hearing whilst carrying a large, noisy machine on your back never sounded like a fun time to me. Maybe I’m just weird, maybe that’s exactly what most people dream of doing it their spare time. I somehow doubt it.
Anyway, keep your lawn and your leaves however you like. I might judge you for it a little, but in the grand scheme of your life, how much does the passing judgement of a faceless internet stranger really matter?
Be free,
Nah
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An Ode to Tripods
Teen Angel
A stop-motion charcoal animation I made for one of my classes.
Y’all. I have never been so acutely aware of the convenience, nay, necessity, of a tripod.
Like most people, I am not a professional videographer or photographer, and most of the pictures I take look more like an accidental freeze-frame than an intentionally captured moment. I’ve heard that a maker is only as good as their tools, and while my phone’s camera isn’t stellar, I think much of the roughness can still be attributed to user error. With needs like this, I never invested in a tripod. When this assignment was…assigned, my professor suggested we all get tripods, but I, being the broke and frugal (incidentally, this word makes me think of “fungal”, which has never struck me as particularly frugal, but I digress) person that I am I figured “I have a steady enough hand, and I can always use that fancy onion-skin feature to line up my pictures, I’ll be fine! I don’t need to spend money!”
Well, I passed the class. And I did save about $20. I also made a video so choppy it’s hard to watch, but I suppose that’s how we learn.
Moral of this story: get a tripod.
Be free,
Nah
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Hand Sewing and Sewing Machines
Greetings internet; I have come to rant about something that is nobody’s fault.
Hand-stitching.
It looks like it should be so fun, so satisfying, so dignified, so dainty. That lasts for about three stitches, and then it rapidly deteriorates into pricked fingers, stiff necks, puckered stitches, and other horrors.
And then there’s the time.
45 minutes at a sewing machine is enough to give me a finished simple garment; assuming all my pattern pieces have already been measured, cut, and pinned. 45 minutes hand-sewing will give me far less progress (maybe 7ish feet, but starting and tying off both take extra time) and far more minorly inconvenient injuries, which, as we all know, are the worst kind of injury. They don’t look impressive, you can barely find them, but especially when they’re on your hands they’re remarkably incapacitating.
Why am I so preoccupied with this, you ask? Well, I love sewing and making, but my sewing machine has been out of order for about…..a year and a half now. Why don’t I fix it, you ask? Well, she was working fine until we oiled her, and now she shrieks when used. I don’t understand it either, by all logical means it makes no sense. I suppose this is another manifestation of the alternate dimension that is sewing.
Anyway, that’s my rant.
Be free,
Nah
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Recipe Blogs
I know this is an overused topic.
But come on.
I don’t need your whole life story before you tell me how to make the stir-fry. AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON “SKIP TO RECIPE” BUTTONS THAT DON’T WORK. Don’t get me wrong, I love to chat with strangers and feel like I’m connected to some random person hundreds of miles away connected to me only via the whims and waves of the interwebs and stand in front of a hot stove surrounded by chopped vegetables while I scroll through my phone as much as the next person, but it ain’t 2020 anymore. I’ve got places to go, things to do, people to see!
Not a lot, but still.
Be free,
Nah
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Dragon Wings
As I peruse Ye Olde Interwebs in search of inspiration, artwork, cat videos, etc. I often come across images of that most celebrated of mythical beasts, the dragon. They come in all colors and sizes, they breathe fire, they fly. It’s that last topic that captures my attention. Specifically the wings.
Dragons are generally depicted with wings far too small to support their massive bulk in flight. Why? The wings are perhaps the most dramatic, flashy part of the dragon, and an easy way to make them look larger and more intimidating without getting in trouble with the square cube rule (for all us lay people, if you make something too big it will become unable to support its own weight and will collapse). And yet they are undersized.
Now, to be fair wing-sizing can be confusing if you’re basing proportions off of birds. Birds, having hollow bones (and being much, much, much smaller than most dragons), are able to be supported by proportionally smaller wings than say, a human might need. The average adult male would require a 6.7 meter wingspan to fly (that’s about 7 YARDS for all us Americans), so imagine scaling that up to a full-sized DRAGON. I’d do that math for you, but dragon size and density are too variable. And I’m not good at numbers.
But putting those aside, I do also find it curious that dragon wings (and indeed entire dragons) are usually so…plain. Humans are not notorious for hoarding treasure, yet almost every culture bedecks themselves with *something*. Why not dragons? Presumably each has a hoard; perhaps bedecking would be a method of showing off. Wings offer an enormous expanse of flesh (…I don’t like that phrase, I apologize) to be decorated.
I can see the desire to keep wings from getting too heavy with gold, jewels, etc., but that still leaves the entire rest of the dragon! Necklaces, armbands, rings; depending on how advanced the dragon culture is there could be dragon jewelers. Though if I had only claws and no opposable thumbs, I might find jewelry tiresome too.
So in conclusion, go forth into the wide world of dragons, art, and the internet, and draw big wings. And maybe make them shiny.
Be free,
Nah
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