"You look like you could be Romanian."
"Hmm. Sorry, I'm mostly Welsh."
"Oh, okay. Do you want mayonnaise on your sandwich?"

The above conversation isn't the kind of thing I'm used to hearing inside of a Togo's store. But today it happened there, between a sandwich-makerperson and me. And it set me to thinking, as most mad things do. I once imagined that such oddball conversations would occur in far more picturesque places than, say, a commercialized sandwich factory. For example, I could see this sort of madness happening if I were speaking to a bespectacled and tea-swilling magic-shop clerk in New York City. I could even imagine this conversation occurring in some little picket-fence town, where a bookishly handsome postman with long sideburns would come riding by on a red bicycle in order to call out, "Say there miss, you're looking mighty Romanian today!" And I would tug at my grocery basket full of French bread and lavender pickings, and I'd call back, "Zut alors, Postman Claude, what the heck is that supposed to mean?" Because I think mad things are really at their best when they occur in equally mad contexts.

And ancestors or not, mad context is something I'm rather good at. Vanilla normalcy is highly overrated, my lovelies. It's also far boring-er than the occasional chocolate sprinkle of eccentricity.

A new conspiracy has surfaced. It involves cameras, and me, and how every photo I attempt to take these days seems inevitably doomed to turn out blurry. I don't know why this is. I am not a caffeine junkie. My hands do not shake any more than those of The Average Jane. (Unless, of course, I am asked to shake. And even then, there's certainly more of a chance that I will smack you than actually start to shake my sad and sorry groove thing.) Since I am unable to find an easy reason for the blurry faces in 90% of my pictures, I ever-so-sensibly blame the camera. Stupid camera. Stupid blurry camera. Stupid blurry camera conspiracy.

And there is also a couch conspiracy, although that one is definitely more dangerous. It goes like this: my new couch, of which I was once so proud, tried to kill me last night. For as I turned around and reached behind it to pick up something I dropped, the reclining seat suddenly slid back and pinned my upper right arm against the wall. Thus, because I have an extremely heavy couch and a extremely immovable wall, I was effectively stuck there for the better part of six or seven minutes, howling in pain and desperately trying to extricate myself all the while. And I'd most likely have remained there until my bloody arm had fallen off if my guardian angel -- I call him Mercutio, because he obviously has a strangely sick sense of humor -- came back from his coffee break and saved my sorry groove thing by giving me a super-human burst of strength, enabling me to heave my arm from its scary furniture prison. It sounds funny now, sure, but the size of the bruise on my arm is not. Really. I even asked it why the chicken crossed the road, and the unfunny bruise only said, "MUHA, ENJOY THE PAIN, O THOU OF THE UNSTEADY HAND!"

So in fact, just forget the camera conspiracy. That's just small potatoes in the eyes of a blurry woman who intends to remain sitting on the floor from now till kingdom come.

The single constant in this world must be The Business Guy. Everybody knows about The Business Guy, because everybody has seen him. He's everywhere, The Business Guy. He usually travels in packs of other Business Guys, and he's always wearing suit slacks with a belt and a relatively penguinish shirt from some department store. (And in London, I have now-very-old proof that they also carry umbrellas.) You see Business Guys going to lunch together a lot, talking about pie graphs and colour copies and correctly-aligned margins. They also appear to enjoy golfing, haircuts, and driving around in their Civics, their BMWs, or their sports utility vehicles that nobody can see around on the highway and that use up all the gasoline in the entire universe and that annoy the bloody hell out of normal car-driving people like me.

And that's The Business Guy story. Though I'm thinking of giving it the axe, because it doesn't maximize profits.

(And yes, my newly-renovated apartment and I are back together again, making sweet sweet studio livin' together. This time I even found the coolest couch ever, and even got it on the cheap because of clearance. It reclines, folks. High times, come on out.)

Saints preserve us! (Mostly Joan, since she was the awesome!)

My dear Ambientwhimsy, my very dearest ardent fans, has it really been so long? I beg you, despair not. It's not you, darlings. It's me. It's me, being forced to remove myself from my apartment while the complex undergoes renovations for the past quasi-month. It's me, living with my not-so-Oliver Twistian relatives who have no viable in-house internet connection. It's me, wandering the streets with a drawn and scribbleless face, wringing my hands, lamenting, "For the sweet sad love of Pete, once more give a modem unto my hands! My queendom for an open phone line!" It's me, often being so busy with classes starting up again that neither tide nor superpersons can attempt to jog my brain for ambient pith. How I've missed the helmety goodness of pith.

It's me, promising to swing in on the next available virtual vine after next weekend's move-in. It's me. Me who knows that nobody ever reads the ones that talk about "me." Because I know that the web doesn't want me. Heck, the web has mes. Too many mes, in fact. No, the web wants random acts of nonsense. And vines. So Mezan, away! Until a another, more next-weekend day!