Trekkychick

Dear Readers,

Last year I attended the Third Annual AA Soiree. That’s right, this Academy Awards party is the hottest of the year! Located in one of the hottest venues in one of the most popular star-studded cities, it boasts expensive catering, a red carpet walk, and competition with esteemed peers for an extravagant prize. So as I entered my friends’ house in Hillsboro and walked over the red construction paper on the floor, waiting for the WinCo lasagna to come out of the oven, I knew that this was my night to shine. I was up for the most sought-after award of the night: The cheap plastic Dollar Tree trophy painted metallic gold (except where the paint had rubbed off).

How was I to win this elusive prize? By picking the night’s winners from the list of nominees. It’s hardly worth mentioning, but the prior two years I’d been thwarted by an unpleasant sort of competitor; the sort who picks more winners than you do and then rubs his cheap plastic gold-painted trophy in your face (getting gold paint on you in the process). You know the type. But last year there was to be no such competitor, for I had shipped him off to Chicago prior to the awards show. (You can come back now, Carlos, the show is over.) I was going to get mine.

It had been an immensely busy year, and I must admit that before last year’s awards show, I had not done my research. I hadn’t watched a single nominated movie, heard a single nominated song, or read a single original screenplay. And yet, the titles spoke for themselves; there was really no need to see the movies. The nominated films included Slumdog Millionnaire, which was obviously about former President George W. Bush, and Milk, which delved into the increased incidence of osteoporosis and its link to insufficient calcium intake. With my intuitive sense of the movies, I could almost taste the cheap gold-plated plastic in my mouth.

I’m not going to go into specifics here, but I’ll simply say that an unexpected turn of events during the evening resulted in a…well, “loss” is a harsh word, but we’ll just say it was a “not win” on my part.

Fast forward to tonight’s Fourth Annual AA Soiree, Readers. Tonight is my chance to redeem myself. Being well versed on the nominees (Hurt Locker? Seen it! District 9? Seen it. Avatar? Seen it—-twice!) as well as the politics of voting in favor of various contenders (CGI: showy and unimpressive to the Academy even when attached to a stellar film), I am certainly not in need of your suggestions in order to sweep tonight’s floor with my anticipated plastic trophy. However, I imagine you are eager to share your well-researched proposals, along with statistical probabilities of victory on each nominee, ASAP. I welcome, encourage, and demand your comments before 4:30pm PST.

–Troi out

Portland, OR
6:36pm PST

It’s no secret; cigarettes have a bum rap. Make that a “butt” rap. But no longer, according to new research published in Troi Vogue, Troi Weekly, and Troi Time magazine, that suggests a few cigarettes can do your body good!

Family physicians everywhere are touting the natural appetite suppressants found in cigarette tobacco to help you lose weight and feel great. They recommend a pack of cigarettes in the morning, another pack for lunch, and then a balanced dinner followed by a pack for dessert.

It is thought that nicotine, the addictive poison found in tobacco, reduces appetite as well as impacts eating behaviors, both of which result in reduced body weight, according to this website.

Dr. Kaforkian of Troi Health Associates in NE Portland recommends at least 5 packs of cigarettes a day for the first month to jumpstart your weight loss. He says that due to the number of tobacco-induced deaths, he was at one time skeptical of the 3 packs-a-day diet, but that the enthusiastic responses of his patients made him a believer.

“Just yesterday, I had a patient run a half-marathon, no wait, a half-mile to the nearby cigarette shop,” he shared during his exclusive interview with Troi, “And without the 50 lb weight loss made possible by cigarettes, she never could have achieved this goal!”

When asked for comment, his patient was unable to respond due to a laryngectomy that has left her unable to speak without the help of an Electrolarynx.

“Research used to indicate that the reduced appetite correlated with increased intake of nicotine was a purely psychological effect,” reports Dr. Kaforkian, “But I say, even if that’s true, you can’t exactly eat anything if you always have a cigarette in your mouth instead!”

But perhaps even more far-reaching than its effects on your love handles are its impact on world hunger, starting with your local community.

“People are literally just leaving their groceries on the streets when they realize they’re not hungry anymore,” raves a representative for Marlboring cigarettes who asked to remain anonymous and wore a paper bag over his head during his interview with Troi, “and people who can’t afford groceries are reaping the benefits.”

Local Portlander reaps windfall from friendly local smokers

Local SE Portlander and borderline poor person Adam Smithersmithsonian (pictured above) was fortunate to witness these benefits firsthand on a recent stroll through NE Portland on his way to the posh organic and vegan Blossoming Lotus cafe.

“I was so hungry, because I hadn’t eaten since lunch and it was almost 4:00pm” he says, “And then I just looked down and, next to a couple of hundred cigarette butts, a smoker had left two full boxes of delicious crackers on the ground!”

When asked why he hadn’t taken up smoking to curb his own appetite so that he, too, could begin donating his food surplus to other needy Portlanders, Adam justified his selfish behavior by pointing to research on the health hazards of smoking. The sources of this sketchy research were unconfirmed by Troi at the time of press release.

It remains to be seen if the cigarette diet becomes as big as the low-carb diet that swept the nation a few years back before its founder, Robert Atkins, suffered a heart attack. But one thing’s for certain: if there’s an easy, addictive, and ultimately unhealthy way to lose weight, Americans are sure to find it.

Written by Troi

Editor’s Note: The 3 packs-a-day diet is not recommended for anyone at risk for heart disease or who has high blood pressure or cholesterol. It is also not recommended for anybody who is or may become pregnant, or anybody who has a heart and lungs and wants to keep them.

Raw Banana Flax Bar: It’s what’s for dinner

Some of you may already be familiar with the raw food movement; a food philosophy that suggests the consumption of foods that are never cooked above 116 degrees farenheit are more nutritionally dense and retain enzymes that facilitate absorption of the nutrients in the food. Embraced by such esteemed public figures as Demi Moore and Alicia Silverstone, and rejected by such famed bloggers as Troi—-who prefers her nutrients in highly processed cocoa puffs fortified with vitamin B6 and riboflavin—-the raw food movement boasts results such as enhanced energy, weight loss, and reduced risk of heart disease.

And we all know that if people in Hollywood are doing it, it must be good.

So famed blogger Troi, whose huge* fan base relies on her expert knowledge of worldwide trends to dictate how they should dress, what they should eat, and where they should work (“Become a teacher!” she insisted last year, “Our society values the education of young people as its vital lifeforce and your job will always be secure!!” which coincided with an unexplained 90% decrease in Troi’s readership), set out to investigate the raw food movement.

*between 8 and 10 fans**

**fans: people I have begged, bribed, or blackmailed to subscribe to my blog. They may or may not ACTUALLY read it.

Famed blogger Troi is fully-informed in the principles of evidence-based research, with knowledge of statistical principles that spans z-scores, t-scores, the reliability and validity of testing tools, and variability among populations being tested. Troi can apply this methods-based knowledge to research regarding raw food and bring it to her readers, so that they understand the implications of such a diet and can make informed decisions about eating a raw food diet.

But that sounds BORING! So famed blogger Troi decided to disregard these principles and simply try a tasty*** raw food bar for herself.

***Tasty: What raw foodists tell themselves, to make it through the day

Troi perused the raw food section of the health food aisle in her local grocery store and decided upon a GORAW 100% Organic Banana “Bread” Flax Bar. After her purchase, she read the packaging.

“…..Being of the EARTH, this food may contain traces of the environments in which the ingredients were harvested (such as date pit pieces, very small rocks, etc.) that are impossible to remove completely.”

Wait, WHAT?? Why buy a bar that costs $3.69 when you can just munch on a few tablespoons of gravel from the nearby construction lot?

But Troi, who values the 8–10 readers who are counting on her, consumed the banana-gravel bar anyway. Sure enough, her last bite coincided with an almost instantaneous weight loss (after a run to the bathroom to lose the contents of the raw food bar), an increase in energy (as she suddenly felt compelled to run as fast as humanly possible away from the raw food aisle), and a reduced risk of heart disease (from the running—-exercise is good for your heart, right?)

And best of all, Troi looked in the mirror and looked decidedly more like Demi Moore and Alicia Silverstone than ever.

–Troi out

Dear Readers,

As a speech therapist who suffers from acute germ neurosis, I lather my hands in organic alcohol-based hand sanitizer every time I sense a nearby germ has escaped my students and entered my airspace, such as when I catch them exhaling. If their hands enter the general vicinity of their faces, I extend them the honor of using my hand sanitizer (or what I tell them is “magic soap”). I’m a real pusher of the stuff; we go through it in my classroom like candy, except that we don’t eat it. Except for that one time, when my back was turned for just an instant, and the student thought the soap was magical because it could be consumed. You just can’t pay for entertainment like that these days. And certainly, like any good germaphobic speech therapist, I take any opportunity to teach my students to say their sounds without the use of physical contact.

But sometimes when less tactile methods fail, I have to get physical and the gloves come on. My latex germ-repelling gloves. I glove up in these fashionable accessories when trying to make a good impression on a first date, but also when pressing on students’ lips and cheeks to eliminate or reduce the escape of air from the sides of the tongue during a lateral lisp. Which sounds like loads of fun, I know, but students typically dart for the door when they see the gloves. I’m not sure if it’s because they aren’t fond of this manner of therapy, or because I’ve taken to using the gloves as hand puppets instead of therapy tools.

Accompanying the gloves are the cherry tongue depressors, which enter students’ oral cavities and extend toward the palatoglossal arches (a little dangerously close to the gag reflex, if you ask me, or the students who gag and spit on me) to give a frame of reference by way of tactile stimulation to the points of contact for the tongue when it makes a consonantal or rhotic /r, ar/ sound. For students with tongue thrust, the tongue depressor supports positioning of the tongue behind the teeth. As with the gloves, students are similarly disappointed by the entrance of the cherry tongue depressors into the session, except for that one kid who thinks they taste great and keeps requesting more cherry tongue depressors every time he passes by my office. I have no proof for this, but I actually suspect he might be faking his /r/ problem just to get his daily cherry tongue depressor fix.

As a germaphobopathologist, I prefer to use hands–off, glove– and tongue depressor–free speech therapy whenever possible to reduce my perceived risk of transmission of germaphobopathologist-resistant germ strains. In an ideal world, I’d like to teach in a germ-proof space, such as a transparent protective bubble. But my district was hit hard by last year’s budget cuts, and my requests for protective bubble-wear have been repeatedly denied.

So for now, I guess I’ll Keep Sticking My Fingers in Other People’s Mouths for a Living.

Jealous?

–Troi out

Dear Readers,

It is an inevitable fact of life that as you split your time between family, friend groups, work, community activities, Star Trek conventions, and the like, you will generally lose touch with a few dear friends along the way. This is especially likely if, like me, you tend toward attempting to maintain not one but nearly ten friend groups, including but not limited to the Marrieds group; the Singles group; That Other, More Fun But a Bit Too Wild Singles group; the Church group of One Denomination; That Other Church Group of a Different Denomination (in the true spirit of faith, it’s very important these two groups don’t mix, or the world will certainly end); the Coworkers Who You Also Happen to Like As Friends group; and the Fellow Trekkies group (a bunch of nerds whose level of geekiness is so profound you don’t actually acknowledge them if you see them on the street while with any of the aforementioned friend groups). Despite my best intentions, I do occasionally fall victim to friend loss during busy times when I don’t respond to emails or return phone calls with the warp speed my true friendships deserve.

And so it was with pure delight that this morning I ran into a friend from graduate school with whom I had lost touch this past year, save for attending her awesome Sprockettes bicycle dance performance this past October at the Hopworks Biketobeer Fest. This friend is the rare gem who, upon receiving an email from you, responds with a thorough and thoughtful thesis of no less than 5000 words that splashes your thoughts and ideas onto the backdrop of her personal experience and wisdom and paints a resulting picture that never fails to offer insight into your dried-out palate of stuck suppositions and stagnant struggles. A friend whose very being is intelligence, humor, class, and the gracefulness that only a Sprockettes bike dancer can pull off.

It was unfortunate, then, to make this joyous re-acquaintance at a Spanish conversational group, at which speaking English was strictly forbidden. My Spanish-speaking skills—-rusty at best, nonexistent at worst—-made for a definite communication breakdown as I attempted valiently to fill my friend in on the past year of my life, drawing from a mental Spanish dictionary of under ten words. Our conversation went a little something like this:

Friend: (fluent string of complex multisyllabic Spanish words, conjugated into appropriate past and future tense forms)

Me: Hola!

Friend: (same as above, with raised intonation at the culmination of the phrase, in what I can only guess is a polite and probing question into the nature of my existence and activities this past year)

Me: Hola! (But very expressively. So that it conveys much more, I’m quite certain.)

Yet while our communication was fragmented, and my need to improve my Spanish skills was unmistaken, I was reminded today just how pequeno our mundo is. (See how much Spanish I learned today? I’m practically fluent!) And how our small world lends itself to renewing friendships that had begun to slip away, after all.

–Troi out