Adventures in an igloo

Miraculous things happen on the bus. Well, they don't actually happen to me that much, but today I witnessed the cutest thing: geek love.

Young love is so cute, me thinks, and the young folks on the bus just touched a sentimental nerve in my ever so cold and old heart.

So, the guy had serious teenage problems skinwise, with what seemed like hundreds of shiny Rudolph-the-red-nose-raindeer pimples on his face and the girl had enormous braces on her teeth.

They were really ackward and didn't really look at each other that much- probably because they were both incredibly self-conscious and aware of the braces/pimples thing. But it was blatant by their body language that they were in the likey-stage.

In the end, after innocent teenage talks on teenage stuff, they left the bus seperately.

"Oh well" I thought to myself, "I hope they'll get over the shy teenage thingy at some point and declare their undying geek love to each other, have loads of geek babies and live happily ever after in a geek house with a geek dog."

As I giggled at their weak efforts in flirting, I undoubtedly went into some soul-searching of my own. Does the ackward and ineffective flirting stage ever end although braces and pimples vanish as age creeps upon us?

This thought brought me back to an incident not so long ago, erm, let's just say that I was way past being a teenager when this happened...

I was out on the town with a friend and wound up chatting with an acquaintance and I must say that I blatantly flirted with this person. Afterwards my friend commented: "Damn, that guy was totally flirting with you!" "Yeah" I said, "and I was totally flirting back!"

My friend's next comment was (in a terribly surprised tone, I must add): "That was you flirting?"

And, I thought I knew how to flirt, but apparently, my flirting technique came off as being sort of friendly, kind of distracted and simply not flirtish at all.

It has also happened that friends have accused me of flirting in a way too obvious manner to random individuals of the other sex. Seriously, in those instances it was the last thing on my mind.

The flirt wires are just all messed up in the mechanism I call Brain!

Wouldn't life be easier if you could just walk up to a guy you like and just say: "Hey, I think you're really cool and I would love to go out for some coffee with you, but am shit at flirting, so what do you say?"

I'm guessing that a direct approach like that would freak guys out and the Nutjob Stalker alarm would go off in their head big time.

Sigh, it sure is difficult living in a world where 50% of the population is a total enigma. On that note, I hope the geeks from the bus hook up and play D&D with their other geek friends...happily ever after ;)

"The hour grows dark" I thought to myself the other day when I heard it on the news- yes, the news, yet again- that a 10-30 year old skeleton of a woman or a teenager had been discovered in the countryside near Reykjavík.

I wondered what kind of place my rock was becoming as I followed the horrid accounts of these newfound human remains. Who had indeed murdered this innocent? Then I thought to myself: "Heck, my rock isn't that populated, I mean, we pretty much know everyone. How, can somebody just get away with killing another person and dispose of the body out in the open without anyone noticing for all these years?"

And the plot thickened even more... it soon became apparent that the skeleton was not an entire skeleton but the upper part of a skull. Again, I started thinking about the creep that had chucked a skull in the wilderness, what had he done with the rest of her? (Naturally, I decided the culprit was a man because men are more likely to kill than women...forgive me for being so sexist when it comes to crime.) So, where was the rest of the poor gal? Was the killer still keeping her in some hidden place?

Yes, I thought to myself, there sure is some nasty business going on.

The next thing I knew, the reporters had discovered that the skull came from a trailer that had been blown to kingdom come in a storm earlier this year and that the owner of the trailer had been using the skull as an ashtray for some time. However, the owner had believed that the wretched thing had been animal bones (which I still feel doesn't make it OK, you know, using such remains for a nasty habit such as smoking).

The Mother Unit was pretty upset about the whole thing, and being an Icelander and therefore extremely superstitious, she concocted a theory on the downfall of the trailer: The storm was caused by the angry spirit of the ashtray..erm excuse me, the deceased individual. So, a chain of heartfelt and angry speeches on how sick and disgusting people are was pretty much everything that the Mother Unit had to say that day.

Yes, we were utterly shocked by these sickos who have no respect for the dead and felt that they got what they deserved by losing their trailer to the storm conjured up by the pissed off ghost; a just punishment for being such filthy buggers.

Little did we know that the skull and it's origin were too close to home...

It turned out that the skull was indeed, not that of a woman or teen that died 10-30 years ago, but rather that of, as the Mother Unit has always put it, a "Danish imbecile" that my dear old grandpa had stayed up all night boiling in a pot back in the 1920's.

Way back then, gramps was a student of medicine in our then nation's capital, Copenhagen, Denmark. As the story goes he had apparently diligently dissected a pauper and when there was little left of the poor chap, he got permission to boil the meat off the head and keep the skull.

After that he brought poor old Mr. Skelington back home and used the skull for paperclips and such in his pharmacy. Skully, then wound up as a candy bowl at my uncle's house and then, through his son's unsuspecting mother in law, as an ashtray in a trailer.

If one believes in ghosts, then I guess it could be said that Mr. Skelington's spirit was pretty open-minded right till the end: "Cut me up, boil my head, use me as a container for paperclips and candy...but darn it, use me as a cigarette bud storage and I'll mess up your trailer."

After days of talking about the horrible culprit, it turned out that the primus motor in the whole fiasco was gramps...

The moral of the story is, I suppose, don't throw stones if you are living in a glass-house but just don't know it.