A sign of lustiness.
Or, why I love my friends dearly.

*Receptionist's desk, mid-afternoon. The phone rings*

VBG:  *unrecognizably polite phone voice*  Velocibadgergirl's workplace.

B81:  *similarly unrecognizably polite phone voice*  May I speak to VBG?

VBG:  *phone voice*  This is she.

B81:  Oh, hey. This is the bibliophile. So, if you're at the front desk, you must have some free time.

VBG:  Sort of. I'm giving the receptionist a quick break.

B81:  I'm at work and it's really slow, so I have a question you might be able to answer. We were wondering what would happen if you moved the planets around.

VBG:  ... Where do you want to move them?

B81:  I'm not really sure. What would be the consequences of something like that?

VBG:  Well, it depends. I mean, what if you move Jupiter? That's a lot of gravity. If you put that next to the Earth, it's not really going to go well for us.

B81:  Coworker Guy was thinking he could use Wonder Woman's lasso.

VBG:  You'd need a big lasso.

B81:  Yeah. He was thinking he could move Pluto, since it's not really a planet anymore, but I was wondering what the ramifications of that would be.

VBG:  I still say it would depend on where you moved it to...What if you weren't paying attention to the orbits of the other planets and you left it in another planet's path? So it's just sitting there and Venus comes along and WHAM.

B81:  That's a good point. Well, I think we have a real call coming in, so I'd better go.

VBG:  Okay, bye.


Now, imagine you've just got my side of the conversation. I have to wonder what the coworker who wandered by while I was talking thought about all of this. To his credit, he kept a straight face.




*Later, same day. Velocibadgergirl's desk. Gmail chat*

Tamsyn:  (this is a dork game of mine - what era should people have been born in to be considered utterly gorgeous?)

VBG:  LOL What about us?

Tamsyn:  Oh, fortunately, I am in the right era. This is the only era where it is okay for a woman to be very tall and broad-shouldered. It's a late twentieth-century weird thing.

VBG:  Maybe I fit, too, then. I'm not overly tall, but I'm definitely broad.

Tamsyn:  Ah, but the Victorians thought that girls needed good shoulders

VBG:  aha

Tamsyn:  to hold up those broad necked dresses

VBG:  heh...I'm not sad I missed those damn dresses.

Tamsyn:  Your problem is more the red hair--considered unfashionable / sign of lustiness in most centuries.

VBG:  BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA! That's awesome.

Tamsyn:  Middle Ages would've thought you were up to no good. You would have been briefly fashionable during the Renaissance, unfashionable again by the Victorian period. Lemon juice to lighten it, I'm afraid.




Reading: Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie


Playing: (yes, still) Begin to Hope by Regina Spektor