culturalizing

An illustration of the state of my brain right now:

I'm sitting at my kitchen table, waiting on a skype call, looking for a specific verse, when I decide I'd like some hot chocolate. Not too many better ways to spend a morning. So I put a little pot on to boil like usual and go back to the table. What feels like about ten minutes goes by and while I can hear the stove, I still haven't heard the water start to boil. So I get up and peak around the divider wall thing and see that the water's still not boiling and then sit back down to wait some more. At some point I notice that it smells funny. Three or so minutes go by and when I see it hasn't changed at all, I walk up to the stove and realize, heyo! I've managed to put the pot on the left eye while always use the right one.

Set it on the right eye, sit down shaking my head at how frazzled my brain is with all the packing and getting ready to leave. Then the skype call starts, and I'm all, haha I'm doing crazy people things! Let me tell you this story about how absentminded my last half hour has been. So I begin to tell the story and as I explain about having smelled something, my brain's thinking about why I'd smell something this time when I don't normally. And mid-sentence--

I haven't even lit the eye! The pot's just sitting on it while the gas is wide open. I run over, grab the lighter to light it, and finally, twenty minutes after this story began my brain activates, I put the lighter down and open the window.

In the end I got my hot chocolate. No explosions, no getting gassed.

What's great too is that just a week ago I saw a hysterical Romanian film and one of the (supposedly true) stories in it is about this greedy policeman who gets a pig for Christmas. He lives in Bucuresti, it's during Communism, and I got the impression that it was illegal to cut a pig in the city. But not wanting to get caught or share it with his neighbors, he and his brother wrap it up in a blanket and carry it upstairs, all the while it's squalling.

The family can't figure out how to kill it without waking up the whole bloc and the boy suggests they gas it. They tape up all the windows, unplug the fuse and lock it in the kitchen with the gas wide open. When it's finally dead, in order to cut it up, they've got to get rid of all its hair. So the greedy policeman pulls out his handy blowtorch and as he goes to burn its hair off... yep, exploding pig.

So it seems I'm culturalizing well.