I love hippopotamuses.  I love them in an unconditional, unfounded sort of way.  My love for the hippo is a spontaneous love, one that has sprung, like so many loves, with nary a rhyme nor reason.  I have very seldom seen a hippo, and I know next to nothing about them.  I do not actively pursue my love; I don’t go out of my way to view hippos, nor do I collect hippo paraphernalia.*  I just know in the core of my being that hippos + Kiki = tru luv 4ever.

I think the first time I ever considered the hippo, and I mean truly considered it as an object of my affection, was after my RA interview.  In college I applied to become a Resident Advisor** in the dorm, and during the group interview, we were asked that abominable question in an interviewer’s arsenal:

If you were an animal, what kind would you be?

This question is obnoxious on many levels.  I mean, how do you answer it?  How do you sum yourself up as an animal?  Despite its seemingly open-ended nature, there are definite right and wrong answers to this question.  Electric eel, aardvark, or komodo dragon, I’m thinking, are not going to give you any bonus points.  Is this question really supposed to reveal things about your personality?  The thing that bothered me the most, however, was the way people started falling all over themselves to pick animals that purportedly embodied the traits that they thought they needed to get the job.  The group interview quickly devolved into a suck-up fest.

“I would be a lion [see also: tiger], because it’s brave and strong.  It’s the king of the jungle, and like me, it’s a leader.”

“I’d be an eagle, because it soars above the rest.”

“I’d be a dog, because I’m hopelessly loyal and will even fetch your slippers if you give me this job oh please oh please.” 

Blah blah blah.  For the record, I picked monkey.  Afterwards, I wondered what I should have said.  What animal are people least likely to emulate?  The answer, I realized, was the hippo.

Hippos are not pretty animals.  Pleasant is pushing it.  Hippos are big, ugly, and somewhat warty.  Not only are hippos ugly, they also have bad personalities.  Rumor has it, the hippo is a nasty, mean-spirited sort of animal, and those big chompers they’ve got will not hesitate to bite off your arm.  Hippos are not even particularly energetic.  They wallow around all day, and are so lazy that birds will even perch on them.  They don’t seem all that bright, either.  The hippo seemingly has very few redeeming qualities.

       

However, these so-called flaws are also the hippo’s greatest assets.  Hippos are big, stupid, mean, ugly creatures, and you know what?  They don’t care!  They’ll be just as big, stupid, mean, and ugly as they want to be, and they don’t care what you think.  They’ve got a thick skin (literally), and in that respect, they’ve got everything going for them!  Think how great it would be to be big, stupid, mean, AND ugly!  How liberating!  When you’ve got all that going for you, you can pretty much do whatever you want.

If I ever get another opportunity to answer that question, I hope that I have the cojones  to answer truthfully.  Hippos are where it’s at.

P.S.  I do kind of think hippos are cute, though, in that ugly-cute kind of way.

       

It’s the same appeal that attracted me to the original Hummer.  You just don’t mess with those, you know?  Instead, I got one of these, the complete antithesis to the Humvee:

VS.

Speaking of hippos, last year’s story about a displaced, orphaned baby hippo who took on a tortoise as its surrogate mother totally melted my heart.

       

The hippo.  I love it.

        

In other news, my baby sister turns TWENTY ONE in a bit more than a week.  It boggles my mind.  HIPPO BIRTHDAY TO EWE, CUPCAKE!

       

* Although, I do own a hippo t-shirt.  It even says ‘hip’ on it.  Please forgive me.  I was 17.  Truth be told, however, I cannot unilaterally rule out further hippo acquisitions.

** Don’t worry.  I wasn’t the bust-you-for-playing-your-music-too-loud kind of RA.  I was more the let’s-throw-a-pizza-party kind.  In fact, I loathed the law&order component of the job, and pretty much averted my eyes whenever I witnessed any hijinks.

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d offer this helpful advice:

“The quickest way to a man’s heart is with Chuck Norris’s fist.”

 I have become completely enchanted with chucknorrisfacts dot com.  The other night, I was singing its praises to cupCAKE, and summed it up thusly:

KIKI: chuck norris is the awesomest ever even though i don’t know if i’ve ever seen a single movie of his

BOY WAS I IN FOR A TREAT!  Tonight a Chuck Norris flick from ‘85 was on TV, and I sat, mesmerized by the awesome.  I only caught the last half hour, so if you want to be surprised and not find out that he SAVES THE DAY AND ALSO THE GIRL, you should probably stop reading here.

When I first started watching, Chuck enters a dark, seedy bar.  Dozens of thuggish biker-types cease their swaggering and put down their cue sticks to glower at him.  A propos of nothing, Chuck totally punches some dude in the face, and the dude goes down.  Another guy starts to hassle him, and Chuck effortlessly kicks his boo-tay, all without breaking stride.  I began to feel a bit disappointed that Chuck only bloodied two men, but Chuck does not disappoint.

 Chuck enters a private room upstairs, where another thug is snorting a line of coke.  Chuck has some vague reason for being here, probably to get information, but it isn’t long until Chuck is smashing the guy’s face against his coke mirror, his face becoming increasingly powdered and bloodied.

 Then the pièce de résistance!  Chuck tries to leave the bar, but the biker dudes have him cornered.  Before you can say PAIN Chuck has taken half of the men out of commission.  The really great thing is the 80s fight choreography; the punching sounds are really loud and somewhat metallic, and you can totally tell Chuck’s fists are punching the air several feet away from their recipients.  Plus, the fist punching + reaction shots are delayed by half a second, so half a moment after being punched, thugs suddenly wince.

 Next, Chuck steals a semi truck.  He journeys to the shipyard where the real bad guys are hiding, and drops off the truck’s freight.  Suddenly, the freight doors open, and lo and behold!  A remote-controlled tank rolls out!

 Chuck infiltrates the warehouse, his tank providing back-up.  With his mad skillz, Chuck takes out all of the brigands, with his RC tank occasionally blowing people up.  At one point, the tank shoots a rocket at a guy, who momentarily disappears from the screen.  Was he vaporized?  All of a sudden, the guy reappears, and flies FORWARD, off a roof and into the harbor.  Them’s some fancy rockets!

Combine this with a cheesy 80s soundtrack and unapologetically low-budget special effects, and you’ve got one kickass movie!  Just remember, Chuck Norris cannot love.  He can only not kill.

• I put everything in the recycling bin, including the naughty, naughty #6 plastics. Although the recycling guidelines clearly instruct me to recycle plastics labeled no higher than #2, I secretly hope that my #5 Burger King cups and #6 Yoplait yogurt tubs will magically find their way to recycling nirvana. At very least, I hope they’ll be reincarnated as shopping bags.*
• Whenever I’m forced to use styrofoam, or whenever I see a family member using styrofoam, I always say, “Sorry, dinosaurs.” In addition, whenever I find a way to evade the evil clutches of styrofoam, I announce that I’m saving the dinosaurs.**
• Despite being vegetarian, I like to make jokes about vegetarians and attempt to convince them to eat meat.
• Hemp and patchouli irk me. In no particular order. However, Birkenstocks, tie dye, and granola do not.Â
• Despite aforementioned tree-hugging qualities, I’m an unrepentant water waster. With multiple bodies of fresh water nearby, I feel like I’m in a unique position to take long showers and rinse the bejeezus out of dishes. When the last lake dries up, you can probably blame me.

* After eating some delicious Noodles take-out in my sister’s dorm, we gamely rinsed our (#5!) plastic plates and attempted to send them to their maker. As we were lifting the lid of the recycling bin, a girl in the dorm (the Recycling Police, apparently) admonished us for our recklessness. “If it’s not #2, they’re not going to take it,” she smirked. “Sorry to burst your bubble.” This seemed not only unnecessarily cruel, but smug.

** To me, the connection between styrofoam and dinosaurs seems very obvious. On planet Earth, however, no one ever knows what the hell I’m talking about. Allow me to explain. Styrofoam is made of petroleum, petroleum is made of fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are made of dinosaurs, right? So in other words, every time you eat Ramen noodles, the cup you’re holding is made of stegosauruses. Doesn’t that just make so much sense?  Or maybe it’s one of those things to file in the crazy folder.

Life is just a bit more surreal when you’ve got the song Rawhide stuck in your head. I find certain lines very profound, like:

Don’t try to understand them
Just rope, throw, and brand ‘em.

I also like:

Though the streams are swollen
Keep them doggies rolling
Rawhide!

I’ve been taking pictures of everything, so instead of writing, I’ll do show and tell.

This afternoon The Kitten (who you’d think would have a name by now… we found her in AUGUST) was fixated on a jar in the kitchen. She kept futiley sticking her paw in the jar, but was unable to pull anything out. It turns out that her snake was in there. One day she confiscated someone’s stuffed snake and left a trail of sand across the house as the poor snake’s guts poured out of the puncture holes. Since she shouldn’t really be destroying it, someone ingeniously hid it in a jar and put a second jar on top of it, sealing it off from her inquiring paws.

So close, and yet so far away.

All I could think was SNAKE IN A JAR! I’ve been antsy waiting for August 18th, when the impossibly awesome Samuel L. Jackson film, Snakes on a Plane!, debuts. Samuel L. Jackson really hit the nail on the head when he declared, “You either want to see that, or you don’t.” I do.

In other news, the stack of overdue library books on my nightstand makes the baby Jesus cry.

Until my RAYNOX DCR-250 SUPER MACRO FILTER!!! arrives, I’ve been contenting myself with my regular old built-in super macro. I’d hate to see what I take pictures of once I get the filter, because while I wait, I’ve been taking pictures of sequins and onions.

Sequins and onions! We need a macro filter in here, STAT!

Move ’em on (head ’em up!)
Head ’em up (move ’em on!)
Move ’em on (head ’em up!)
Rawhiiiiiide….

After reading camera reviews for DAYS, I finally bought a camera. It’s amazing how impassioned people get about their $500-1500 pieces of plastic. I’d click on forum threads with titles like “which camera should i buy?????,” and it was awesome to see how quickly and inevitably they’d devolve into flame wars.

“OMG you bought a rebel xt???? How could you be so STUPiD? D70 FOREVER!!!!!!!1″
“Do yourself a favor and throw that Lumix away and buy a disposable camera instead. The image quality is better. HAHAHAHA!”
“D50 SUCKS, unless you need a doorstop! EOS 20D kicks yo’ bootie! And yo’ Mama’s bootie, too!”
“Forget you posers, I’m going to go take some REAL photos with my DiMAGE. Don’t bother posting again until you get yourself a real camera.”

The two times I went to Ritz Camera to ask about a Canon, the salesclerks would plug their ears and say, “NIKON NIKON NIKON!”
“But I’m mostly interested in the Canon,” I’d explain.
“Lalala! We can’t hear you! Nikonnikonnikon!”

Nikon must be giving Ritz some sweet kickbacks for encouraging people to buy less expensive cameras.

Anyway, I decided to get the Canon PowerShot S2 IS, which is NOT a digital SLR camera. The depressing thing about digital SLRs, I learned, is that the camera is actually the cheap part. To use it, you have to buy fancy lenses, and according to lens connoisseurs, any lens that costs less than $1,000 is basically a piece of garbage. Since I don’t currently have $3,000 of disposable income kicking around, I bought a training camera instead.

The S2 may not be a digital SLR, but it’s one of the highest rated consumer cameras on the market. It has a 12x optical zoom, so I’ve been zooming in on distant birds and relatives’ nosehairs. It not only does macro, it also does SUPER MACRO! I think this is the equivalent of turning the volume up to 11. It also lets me take panoramics and swap colors, so I can turn my broccoli orange.

Now that my camera cost half what I was expecting to pay, I’ve been greedily shopping for accessories. I’m most excited about the Raynox macro filter I ordered, which will magnify wee things ten times! I’ve seen some awesome pictures of bugs taken with this setup, so I’m pumped about slithering around on my stomach and getting up close and personal with the creepy crawlies.

You can take your 3 extra megapixels and shove them, suckas! S2 is da SHIGGITY! Shiggity shiggty shwa!