Baudelaire and children's parties

Yesterday, my little cousin celebrated her sixth birthday party. She's the youngest of three, and I brought her a Frozen necklace as a present. I also brought Flowers of Evil, which wasn't for her but for me, so I could read it conspicuously and potentially garner reactions. While I genuinely do like the poems in it, I sort of also use it as a prop because I like the idea of Being The Person Who Reads Baudelaire In Public Places. Or at least places where there's other people. You understand.

The eldest of my little cousins (who is nine and likes science) asked me what I was reading, and I held up the cover (he originally misread the title as Flowers of the Devil, and I corrected him). He said something to the effect of, "That's cool", and then when his friend came by, he went off with him and said, "Guess what book my cousin's reading..." (I didn't hear the end of that conversation.)

The wife of one of my adult cousins (who is in her forties and likes Doctor Who - I refer to the wife, not the cousin to whom she is married) saw me reading, asked what it was, and I said, "Flowers of Evil. Baudelaire." And she kind of laughed because she knew what it was, and she didn't find it funny per se, it was more like "so this is what you're reading now, oh my gosh". So I added, "I'm happy like this." Like reading Baudelaire is or indicative of some questionable life decisions.

I just like getting caught reading books with titles like Flowers of Evil and I like people's reactions to it.

Bad chocolate

Last Christmas, my dad (who's a music teacher) received a lot of chocolates due to a combination "Merry Christmas, here have a present" and "thank you for teaching me music this year". Some of the chocolate was good, and some of it was not-so-good. Needless to say, we all ate the good ones first, and last night, when my sister and I were home, he broached the subject of some of the not-so-good ones.

When my dad got them out, my sister asked if they were "like Easter Egg chocolates". His response was, "Eh, they're probably not as bad as Easter Egg chocolates," to which she responded, "Like Christmas chocolates?"

"Yeah, somewhere along those lines," my dad said. (I made some remark about how this judgment was the obvious one, given that these were in fact chocolates given us for Christmas.)

Imagine a bunch of pecans indiscriminately crammed into a ball of caramel, and then imagine that caramel being coated in chocolate. Now imagine a box of, what, twelve of these, and you'll have our box of chocolates. It wasn't even a typical Box Of Chocolates, where they're all different flavors and you have to consult the guide at the back of the box (or, in the absence of such a guide, either cut them all in half or else choose one and hope for the best).

The weird thing is, they were kind of good. They weren't good good, naturally, but they were okay. I have consumed things - overly-hot peppers, cheap pie, whiskey - where my response to putting them in my mouth was, "I immediately regret this decision". This was not one of those things. My response to putting this in my mouth was something more like, "Huh, I don't immediately regret this decision. That's interesting. If I were to eat another of these, I wouldn't immediately regret that decision, either."

My dad asked if we wanted another, and I said yes. Just as I'd suspected, I had no regrets about eating it.

There was this kind of sense of amazement afterwards. I had eaten bad chocolate, and I had enjoyed it. And this amazement was something I'd never get from eating good chocolate. With good chocolate, you expect it to be good, and it is. You don't go, "wow, I actually enjoyed this", because you expect to enjoy it. With bad chocolate, it's another story. If you enjoy it, then not only do you enjoy it, you enjoy the fact that you enjoyed it. There's two layers of enjoyment going on there.

In other words, I may have discovered that bad chocolate makes you happier than good chocolate. Good chocolate is better quality, obviously - I mean, it's in the description (good vs. bad) - but does good chocolate make you have not one but two positive reactions to it? Most of the time, no. There was that time I had good chocolate that was shaped in different-colored spheres and they kind of looked like planets to me, but with the exception of chocolates that look like celestial bodies, good chocolate makes you have one and only one reaction: "hey, this is good!" Bad chocolate, when it is at least passable, makes you have two: "hey, this is kind of okay!" and "I'm amazed that I was able to enjoy this!"

The good things in life are just uncomplicatedly good but the bad things, when they're still kind of good, have that goodness on numerous levels and that's kind of incredible.

Is random humor even random?

I was thinking of "random humor" - the sort of thing that hinges upon unexpected juxtapositions or non sequiturs or the like, examples of which range from surrealist comedy to teenagers on the internet saying "lol taco pancake" - and I was thinking about what it truly means for something to be "random". I mean, I hear people talk about "random" things all the time as though "random" really did just mean "unexpected" or "unusual".  But then I also hear people talking about whether or not something was intentional or "truly a random coincidence" or anything like that. And it made me wonder whether or not "random humor" is genuinely random.

I mean, it's produced by a person, right? With a few exceptions (I'm thinking about online Twitter accounts purportedly run by spambots and the like), this so-called "random humor" is produced by people. People do things with intention. Even if they don't think they're doing things intentionally, there is still some part of their brain that's actively trying to do something. (Barring extreme cases in which one really doesn't have any control over what one's doing, of course, but I don't think those cases are really associated with the production of humorous material.) 

So is this stuff truly random, then? I guess it depends on how we're defining "random". Words take on new meanings over time, and sometimes they don't change meanings so much as just get an additional one to the original. Or maybe it's random in a figurative sense - not actually created with no sense of order or reason behind it, but it sure looks like it was, hence the description. Honestly I'm amazed that a certain kind of humor (much of which isn't even considered particularly "good") can have this much effect on the English language. Or maybe I'm overthinking it. Rubbish. There's no such thing as overthinking.

Twenty-two days

It's twenty-two days into 2015 and I don't have a whole lot to say for the year thus far other than that I've started actively submitting writing and working on lengthy projects again. (I had to take a break from much of the business of writing - this blog included - due to a number of major life events, including mental health issues, some of which I'm still going through right now.)

I don't have an awful lot to say other than that I apologize for not posting on this blog again until now.