Death by Run DMC

The other day I was showering, listening to tunes, when a third of the way into my Roid Monkeys II playlist, Run DMC's "It's Like That" came on.
Having recently decided that despite the stark paleness of my skin I had a glimmering of "the beat inside", songs with the rhythm of 80's hip hop creates an urge in me to start boogying.

See how ballin' I so obviously am:



I would like to say that this was 100% halloween costume but the truth is I wear each and every one of those items on a regular basis. Okay. Maybe not the gold boombox chain. But I really should.

Howevery, I hadn't quite calculated involuntary dance movements + bathtub out when showering and as soon as I heard the first few lines my head started bobbing. Next, I found my knees bending a little as the rest of my body followed suit and all of a sudden I unleashed the dual arm throw-out, commonly seen in dance-offs that indicates rivalry and gangsta-ness. Unfortunately, this was no dance studio or club floor or even paved school yard, and the glossy surface of the ceramic bathtub failed to hold me as I started giving it my all.

This was probably #2 on my near-death life experiences, a close runner-up to the time I visited Vietnam and tried to cross the street. As a result, I will attempt to avoid Roid Monkeys II when I shower, and instead choose to listen to the more soothing and less dance-off inducing Chill The Eff Out playlist, unless my body thinks it can stop and lock to Jack Johnson's songs from the Curious George soundtrack. If you don't hear from me next week, at least you'll know why. And probably listen to "Upside Down" a little less often. I guess it's like that, and that's the way it is.

Finding myself, or some other equally pathetic title

Yesterday I was confronted with a horrible realization, and today yet another.

The first of these was what started out as a harmless height measuring game. The rules consist of standing on a wall labeled metrically and getting someone else to find out how tall you are. And yes, it's a game. If you had asked Rockefeller if Monopoly was a game he'd have given you the same answer. Point is, my whole life since 15, which is really only roughly half my life, I thought I was 6 foot 1. But YESTERDAY I was proven wrong. So very, very wrong. In fact, I am 6 foot TWO. I don't even know what to do about this.
Then today, I was volunteering at a casino (which shall remain nameless but one should note the high concentration of asians around 60 years of age which makes it incredibly difficult to remember anything distinctive about a person should a foul plot be found afoot), doing my bit to support the arts, when a fellow volunteer mentioned my red hair.

...........................................................................

What effing red hair. WHAT extra inch. WHO AM I!?!?!?!?????

This is getting a little absurd. At the very most my natural hair colour, which is, as so eloquently put by a dear friend, "that brown colour", could perhaps be described more fully as having reddish hanks, but in no case could I ever be mistaken for a ginger. Which reminds me, another dear friend called me up the other day, having thought of me whilst watching a documentary on redwood trees. Now I know for a fact it's because we both have that same luscious luster of bark, but it's eery what other similarities these stories share.

Back to the casino. James, the other cashier, was pointing out the fact that the last guy I had been giving money to for his chips had been checking me out (who was not asian but also in the 60 range therefore completely cut from my radar) and maybe it was because of the red hair. Gee thanks James, but maybe it was the speed and seductiveness with which I counted twenty dollar bills? This guy had won himself 75 whole bucks, so in addition to the 3 extremely sexy 20 dollar bills I handed him I included the elusive 10 and the more common and less appealing 5. I was also disappointed that it was 75 dollar man who had been checking me out and not $3100 man, who I had cashed out before that.

Anyways, now I'm going to have to spend another 10 years finding myself and going through more yet less understandable periods of rebellion. Everybody's okay with pine and spruce, but when it comes to redwoods, we really get the short end of the branch. As David Attenborough would say, "Conifers dominate the land."