hoo boy. so, okay, a thing you might know about me is that i keep two giant metalwork ant statues in my front yard. i wanted to get a giant praying mantis statue to go with them but these are oddly enough hard to find and harder to get to one's house. however, once an idea has occurred to me, i cannot let it go. so any time i'm in my yard now, i think about that giant mantis statue that will one day go there. i think about a giant mantis so fucking often at this point that it was a really small leap from that to being stuck in a terribly boring meeting full of people i didn't like and you know the whole "imagine them in their underwear" thing? no fuck that. imagine them with a giant mantis in the room. hilarious. love it. it's giving ray harryhausen. it's giving stop motion monster flick. it made my day innumerably better every time. and it really was an even shorter leap from that into what i assume all the adults i know who rp warrior cats are doing where i imagine myself as an animal, but giant, and cool, and insectoid. since that moment it's been totally effortless to do anything annoying or boring that involves other people. i also find mantises have a sort of eerie elegance and stillness to them which i find admirable. good posture, intense gaze, etc. how would a giant praying mantis respond to this email? directly, i'm sure. politely, i hope. without fear of god or man? absolutely. this is what i aspire to. "as per my last email" i type without a shred of human emotion, adding exactly one strategic exclamation point afterward to soften the impact. "though i find the efficacy of the model questionable giving how much data they bootstrapped, i don't have any reason to believe it isn't accurate enough to be useful" i say out loud in a meeting as people stare on in horror. i quote decimal places. i snip snap my little jaws. i make direct eye contact with people in other cars on the road. i give a full presentation in perfect stillness while moving my gaze from person to person waiting until they look away before i move on. i am not trapped in room with them. they are trapped in a room, by the veneer of professional courtesy, with me, until i say i'm done. i am not stressed, annoyed, confused, frustrated, bored, or harried. the emotions i'm feeling are: i would like food, and: i will have food, soon, and: it's going to be delicious. nothing else gets through. this is the mantis mentality.
