Live Blogging Bones Episode "Prisoner in the Pipes"

This post will probably be interesting to no one but me, unless you watch the crime drama Bones. This is about an episode that came out four months ago, and was also written four months ago...But I have nothing else to post right now, so here you go.
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Guys. I am in distress. Bones, which used to be a favorite show of mine, is becoming crummy in its later seasons. I know, this is the usual trend, but this is awful. Just awful.

Daisy isn't respecting Sweet's boundaries both professionally and in their relationship. (I have never really like Daisy, though, so it isn't so distressing that she's being an idiot).

Booth asks Brennan (Bones) to compromise about having her baby in a hospital. Brennan makes the perfectly rational decision to have a home birth, as she is a low-risk pregnancy and the environment is more sterile. However, because Booth refuses to concede on his desire for a hospital birth, she decides to compromise on something that I think is intellectually troubling and ethically questionable. Instead of agreeing to have the baby in a hospital, like Booth wants, Bones instead compromises on something else. She agrees to have their daughter baptized. Bones is an atheist, by the way, and Booth is Catholic. While I could see conceding to do this in the name of familial harmony, Bones proceeds to explain that "mythology is an excellent way to make sense of the world."
AGHHHH. While I am pleased that she acknowledged that his faith is mythology, look at what she's saying. Mythology is not an excellent way to make sense of the world. It is inherently false and oftentimes screwed up. Rationalism is a perfectly functional and, well, reasonable way to make sense of the world. Accepting the world as it is instead of convincing yourself that it is things that it is not, is an excellent way to make sense of the world. Instead of denying reality, rationalism states that one should embrace it and not comfort oneself with falsehoods.
Furthermore, I am trying to interpret - Is Bones saying she's going to let her daughter grow up Catholic? Bones should know better than most people, as an anthropologist, that when one is indoctrinated into belief systems in impressionable childhood years, one generally retains those belief systems for one's entire life. Surely Bones, as an atheist, values reality? So why is she willing to let her daughter grow up in an oppressively patriarchal belief system that is based on an inherently false premise? Furthermore, even if the child does escape her societal brainwashing, there is a distinct possibility for emotional trauma, clashes with her father, or at the very least a period of existential angst (which isn't much fun, really). Bones is an intelligent woman, and though she may be removed from the workings of human minds, she can surely figure out the above?

Booth is overprotective and it is irritating. Bones is an extremely independent woman, and he's ruining this. He's making any excuse to protect her from going out into the field. Cut it out. Cut it out right now. How many times does Bones have to prove that she's extremely capable before you stop shielding her?

What? The victim was dissolved in acetic acid? ...That's vinegar. Wait, googling. ...Okay, so vinegar is dilute acetic acid. And apparently concentrated acetic acid is corrosive...Really, though, how long is it going to take to dissolve someone in an acid with a pH of ~5? The stomach is around pH 2, and even a vat of hydrochloric acid is going to take a few hours at least to get someone down to a size necessary to shove down a drain. In a prison, where is someone going to find the time to dissolve someone in this manner? I feel that someone will notice this guy dissolving in a vat in the kitchen. This seems highly improbable.

Good job, Bones. You managed to start a full-on prison riot. Nice going.

What. I hate everything. I - This is the worst thing. Ever. I hate everything.
Bones is having her baby in a barn. After being turned away from the inn. Because there wasn't enough room. AH. What the hell is with the blatant Jesus symbolism?! And the only other person present is her boyfriend, who is not medically trained. Neither of them are medically trained. And Bones' big concern was that having a baby in the hospital was not sanitary. A BARN IS NOT BETTER THAN A HOSPITAL. THERE WAS A HOSPITAL 10! MINUTES! DOWN! THE! ROAD! AHGH! This is the stupidest metaphor ever. And believe me, Bones is not a virgin. Are they trying to make her into some kind of Mary figure? This. is. idiotic.
O HOLY CATS THEY NAMED HER DAUGHTER CHRISTINE. CHRISTINE. CAN YOU GET ANY MORE BLOODY BLATANT!? CAN YOU GET MORE BLATANT OR OBVIOUS?! WHY NOT JUST NAME HER JESUSINA FOR HELL'S SAKE AND GET IT OVER WITH!

"Why can't you just admit there's a mystery to life, Bones?" Shut up, Booth. Why can't you just admit that life can be explained by physical and chemical processes, Booth? Do you need to take an introductory level biology course or something? For hell's sake! You're foisting all this theology on Bones. It makes me think the writers never intended for Bones to be a rational character at all,  but merely a Straw Vulcan. "Oh, the lonely, hyperrationalist atheist meets a religious man and realizes that magic and God and voodoo are all real and special and a vital part of a happy life and/or a healthy diet. Because obviously it's impossible to be a good, happy person without an imaginary best friend or invisible sky fairy that watches everything you do."
What. The. Hell.

I stuck 100 sewing pins into a stuffed turtle.

Why? Because it's awesome. I need another reason?

Cake

This is the graduation cake I got from 83 and Company. It is the most beautiful thing. It was red velvet, with buttercream frosting, and red fondant on top. On the top there was a white lace-arabesque pattern, and fresh raspberries with chocolate drizzled over them.
AH. LOVE.

CAKE. Not always a lie.

Valediction

     We hate endings.

     As a people, as individuals, we all hate endings. We mourn a little when the movie is over and we have to come back to the world. At the end of dinner, we reach for the last bite of cake but it's already gone. As children, we hate going to bed. As adults, we loathe waking up. Endings are all around us, and we never get used to them. We never come to grips with the fact that things can leave. Things can go, and they will never come back.

     I've noticed we're especially bad at coping with losing time. Things will come and go. We lose phones, money, friends, but when we lose eras of our lives, that's when it hits us the worst. When we think back to childhood, we get teary eyed. We lament the end of a bus ride where we spoke to a friend about life and death and love, and we wish we could stay in the uncomfortable grey seats just to keep that time in our minds. When the end of a time is so plainly marked, like with graduation, the loss hits us all at once like the death of a loved one. We realize that this time is over. It's at an end, and we can never come back. Linear as we are, we can only move forward in time. We can look in the rear view mirror, but we can never turn around.

     I've been thinking about astronauts a lot lately. Songs about flying and leaving got stuck in my head like butterflies in a screen door, and I haven't been able to get them out. I've been dreaming about the future, and what we're all leaving to do. We're flying in the name of knowledge, and glory, and science. We're dispersing; we're going to far moons and high stars and though we all want to come back some day, we know that we can't. We'll never come back to this time. We'll be flying near the speed of light and we'll feel like we're staying the same and time is passing normally, but then we'll come back to Houston and generations will have passed and our siblings will be old and the walls will be repainted. And it will hit us just how long we've been gone, and how far we've traveled. We'll have gone to Andromeda and back and nothing, nothing will be the same.

     So, now, astronauts, now we say farewell to Houston. We've loved this time we've had with you; we've hated this time we've had with you, but it has been our time, and we always, always, mourn the loss of a time. The water stained ceilings, the risible podium wars, the obscene amounts of chicken for lunch in the past three months, the essays we had to write on our last weekend here, the dead fish in the lawn, the field trips, the flowers and integrals and green felt soccer balls. Noticing as the benches got too small and the days got shorter and people left us. We realized we could touch the ceiling if we jumped and when we jumped we were told to keep our feet on the ground and stop being taller than everyone else. Weirdly enough, in the end, we felt a strange camaraderie. Whatever we thought all throughout this time, as we got ready to part forever, we suddenly felt close. We'd been together all along but had never really noticed. Whatever we say, we'll miss this time. We may not want to return, but we will miss it, because we always mourn the passing of time. We will always mourn endings.

     We may mourn endings, but we celebrate beginnings, and I tell you that we can never have a beginning without an end. Without destruction, we could never have creation. They're inseparable. Destroy a star, a new one forms from the dust. Cut down the trees to build a house. Burn down the house to grow a forest. End time to start the world anew.

     So when we mourn the end of time, let us always remember that time keeps going, never steady but always present. We will keep the memory, but we have to go and we have to start a new time, so we will have something to celebrate. If we were all scared of heights, we would never get to the stars. If we are all scared of the unknown, it will never be known. So, time must end...but time must always begin.

     Let's fly. 

Cat Deals With Heat Wave

Alternate title: Glory poses like Mr. Tibbs.

Senior Spotlight

At our school, it's traditional to give two seniors per month a little blurb in the school paper. The seniors fill out a little survey about them and their interests and it's printed in the paper. It was my impression that they usually try to grant all of the top ten a Senior Spotlight, as the article is cheesily and alliteratively named, but for some reason they skipped over me, the third in the class. I'm not sure why. It was probably a clerical error or simple oversight. Maybe since I'm not the valedictorian or salutatorian, I don't matter or something. (Hahaha).
 It's also possible that they realized that my senior spotlight would be something weird and satirical, sort of like the following. Actually, come to think of it, that's probably why.

Anyway, since I was gypped on a senior spotlight, here's mine now.

Madeleine

What are three adjectives that describe you?
Intelligent - People use the word "intelligent" to mean a lot of different things. I AM ALL OF THEM.
Dedicated - No matter what I set my mind to, I always commit to give it at least a halfhearted attempt!
Competitive - I once punched a baby in the face to get the last free lollipop.

Tell us about your family.
Mom is an Assistant Director of Leadership Annual Giving. She moonlights as a world class flautist.
Dad is a Senior Marketing Director. He moonlights as a carpenter and pizza chef.
My sister plays a lot of sports and has yet to get a serious brain injury.
There are also two cats that are smarter than some other cats but are really kind of stupid most of the time. Sometimes the black and white one coughs up hairballs on my pillows at 5 AM.

What is your proudest moment in high school so far?
It's a toss up between getting into Cornell University, and realizing that there was nothing stopping me from cutting up old t-shirts and making an ugly cat from them but my own inhibitions.

What do you hope to achieve by the time you are 30 years old?
I would like to have worked in a science field, made a stunning ball gown, published a major piece of writing, constructed a wind chime from silverware, made someone seriously question why they act so normally, and own a cat named Irwin and/or Scruples and/or Nietzsche. I would also like to not be homeless.

What is your ideal vacation destination and why?
Middle Earth. Tolkein always made it sound so scenic.

Who is your hero and why?
Tim Minchin. He writes incredibly witty, intelligent songs about social issues, philosophy and other things with catchy piano accompaniment. He also cusses copiously, blasphemes freely, and makes controversial jokes that are in no way indicative of intellectual paucity.

If you could invite 2-3 people to dinner, who would you invite?
The Poe Toaster - The enigmatic Poe enthusiastic would be an absolutely fascinating person to meet. He could keep his hat on, if he liked, and I wouldn't invite any photographers.
Neil Gaiman and/or Amanda Palmer - Neil Gaiman writes the best books ever. Amanda Palmer writes the best songs ever. Ergo, they are pretty much the most epic spouses ever. Also, since they're married, I totally get to include them as one person even though they're wildly different people.
Leonardo da Vinci - I don't actually find him that fascinating, nor do I speak 15th century Italian, but I think it would be really cool to show him helicopters. I really think he'd get a kick out of that.

Dream: The Horror Movie Edition, sans Panic

I have really weird dreams. I'm going to repeat that again. I have really weird dreams. Oftentimes they wouldn't make any sense if I weren't in them, actively trying to make sense of them upon waking. However, sometimes my dreams come with a fully formed plot, and in them, I act eerily logically. You know how in dreams, you often do things that seem really weird, or things make sense in dreams that are completely illogical elsewhere? I have those dreams, but I also have dreams that make too much sense. For instance, I once had a coherent argument defending the evidence for evolution in a dream, in which I acted and talked like myself.
Honestly, I was kind of impressed with myself for that one.

Anyway, last night I had a dream that would typically be very terrifying, and yet it wasn't a nightmare. For some reason, lately my dreams have been very devoid of emotion and I haven't been having nightmares even maybe when I should be. Last night, I had a dream about a creepy possessed doll that some how found its way into my house. There was some exposition about how I acquired it that I don't remember, but I'd been gradually gathering that it was possessed by a spirit or demon or something. Things would move around, the doll would follow me, and it was bad. I'd been gradually sharing these suspicions, too. One day, I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth or something, and I looked in the mirror and there was the doll, sitting on the back of the toilet. When I looked away for a second, things were moving around, like the picture on the wall was now on the floor.
I knew this was the beginning of something really bad, so I called for Mom.
"Did you put this picture on the floor?" she asked when she got up.
"Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about," I said. "The doll did it. It's possessed."
Mom, who had been experiencing phenomena too, mostly believed me but was weirdly not fazed by it. I explained to her that the doll's eyes changed color from dark blue green to baby blue, depending on whether it was activated or not.
"We should probably do something about this," I said.
Then Mom left, and though I called after her, not wanting to be stuck in the room with the possessed doll, she didn't come back.
So I was alone with the doll.
"Great. I'm alone with a possessed doll. Great. Thanks, possessed doll," I said, trying to stave off panic. "Do you want something, or are you just trying to drive me insane? Because that's really annoying and I don't like it."
The doll just stared, but it suddenly acquired a book, and the pages were flipping on their own and it opened up to a page that was the transcript of an entire conversation between me and it, in which a bunch of my questions were answered, as if it had predicted our entire conversation.
"Alright then," I said, "What if I just smashed you right now?"
The pages of the book started flipping really wildly and it seemed like the doll was angry, and I said, "Uh. Never mind. I won't do that."
Then it became apparent to me that it was going to try to make me switch places with it, or become the possessed doll so whatever was possessing it could be free. I was obviously a little iffy on this idea, and I tried to bargain with it.
"Um. I'm not so interested in that right now. Maybe when I'm really old and near death, I'd be interesting in prolonging my life span as a telekinetic doll, but not right now. But what if I help you out in the mean time? I can see if I can find someone willing to switch with you, or I could study magic and see if I can't break this curse. See? I'll help you out, and you can not use your telekinetic powers to kill me or my loved ones. Okay?"
Then it flipped to a page with a picture of a black tree on it, and some red numbers seeped up through the page.
"Are those coordinates?" I asked, but the doll was unresponsive.

Then I woke up and never found out if we made an agreement or if it just decided to kill me.

And there is your daily dose of my bizarre subconscious. :D

God v. Cthulhu

I made a chart that compares God to Cthulhu, and my analysis concludes that they are quite similar.

Cthulhu:
-big scary octopus
-impregnates his daughter with himself
-eats people

God:
-big scary amorphous thing
-impregnates a random virgin with himself
-people eat him

Both:
-super powerful
-has creepy followers
-capable of destroying the world
-is reincarnated as himself
-speaks cryptically
-likes fish

Of course, if I were going to make this into a contest, which I am because I like arbitrary contests where I'm the judge, then I'd have to say Cthulhu wins because he's a giant f***ing octopus and God's just this amorphous bearded guy in the sky. Because, seriously, think about it. Octopi always win.

Ravenclaw Scarf

Took me long enough to finish this.

It's a simple straight stitch knit, but I think it looks fine. Of course, I won't be able to wear it for another 5 months, but that's all right.
In other news, this is the bulkiest scarf ever.

Journal

Midway through the last period of the day, it started to rain. As school let out, it came down in torrents, soaking everything absolutely. I pulled out my umbrella, but it was no use. By the time I ran to the bus, my skirt was soaked and my shoes were filled with water. Inside the bus, everyone was drenched and the windows were shut.We were crammed 2 to a seat, and it was moist and humid and smelled like ninth grade boys with ineffective deodorant. The windows were fogged and rain-struck, so we were all trapped in a rank, windowless box, breathing water vapor and sweat. H sat with me, and we rolled our eyes at the kids in the back, and spoke of hay lofts in summer rain.