Dance to the beat of the living dead!

thatnoise is torturing me with his guitar. He's doing something very, very horrible to "Folsom Prison Blues," and now...oh my god, is that the dying shrieks of "Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory"? Off in the distance, I can vaguely hear "White Summer" throwing up. Oh, poor dear songs. Don't worry, if you behave, he'll let you off soon. Just grit your teeth and bear it.
Oh, now he's doing "Brain Eaters." This is vaguely more bearable, since "Brain Eaters" is the easiest song on the planet. Everybody, sing it with me!
We eat brains for lunch
Brains for breakfast, brains for brunch
We eat brains at every meal
Why can't we have some GUTS?!
Ladies and gentlemen, the immortal lyrical poetry of Glenn Danzig!

So I was reading last night. Alternating between "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered The World," by Thomas Disch, and "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung," by Lester Bangs. I have come to the conclusion that science fiction and rock 'n' roll are the exact same thing, only not. Science fiction is literary rock. Rock is science fiction for the illiterate. They're genres that couldn't have happened any time else except in the 20th century. They're about youth, sense of wonder, experimentation, the gee-golly-gosh-holy-fuck feeling you get when you read Ray Bradbury or listen to Iggy and the Stooges and wonder just how the hell can they throw around words and noise like that and make it so fucking good? The top-of-the-world feeling you get when you can finally hold a pen or a guitar and say, "Hey, I can do that just as well." The best science fiction writers are the ones that are just big kids in adult skins, and the best rock 'n' rollers are the ones that are permanently immature brats.
Expect an extended essay/rant on this later.

Something else I did last night: Mom has a little M&Ms dish that is full of holiday M&Ms. There are red, dark green, and light green. Brian and I discovered that there were 5 light green ones left, 40 dark green ones, and 90 red ones. We had a short discussion over who was to blame for this disparity, then ate all the light green ones and 10 of the red ones. Now, we have pledged than when we take M&Ms, we will take them in threes, with two red ones and one dark green each time. It can be no other way.
"This is such an OCD thing to do," Brian said, after we were done.
"Not really," I said. "Would you want a bunch of extra red ones sitting alone by themselves when we were done? It's not fair to just eat out all the red ones or the green ones unless you're doing it in a pattern." Wait, Rachel, I said. That's dumb. They're just colored chocolate. There's no rule that says you have to take the same amount of colors in every time.
Then I carefully took two red M&Ms and a green M&M and ate them, and I felt better.
Brian thinks we both might have OCD. We both like doing things in fours, and sometimes will just have to touch something to feel it. You know, like when two of your fingers brush against something with a specific texture, and then the rest of your fingers start tingling and you have to go back and touch it to balance everything out? Or turning around, then having to turn around the other way to "unwind," otherwise it just feels strange and you walk a little wobbly for a while. Or...the aforementioned doing things in fours. I like multiples of four. This used to drive Mom crazy--she'd give me three things on a plate, cookies or whatever, and I wouldn't be able to eat them unless I had a fourth one, or I broke them and divided the pieces up in bits of four. I'm not so obvious about it anymore, but I still do it sometimes. I've also learned to compensate when I count words or sounds--I double back, or imagine the "missing" sound in my head.
Brian also says he likes to imagine things dividing in half in his head. I do this too, except it's geometric shapes being sliced into halves by two-dimensional planes. Kind of a soothing thing, like internal stimming. When I get agitated or bored, the shapes get stuck. Or an aetherical membrane being pierced by points in patterns.
The thing is, this doesn't seem like OCD to me. I mean, the human brain is wired to like symmetry and patterns, right? And it's obvious that when symmetry is a little off, you're going to want to provide it.

Anyway, so I'm going to Ben's house for a New Year's party in about an hour, and we're having a sleepover. Dan is picking me up. I'm considering whether to wear pajamas or not. I have this really nice set that's blue velvet with sparkly moons and stars pasted onto it that I got from a garage sale. It almost makes me look like an acrobat.
Probably not. I'm not sure that it fits.