I love fireworks. It looks like you're blowing things up, but nothing actually gets destroyed... The smell of sulfur lingers in the air for hours afterwards... There's a lot of loud booms...

My only problem with fireworks is the way people describe them. All you hear about are the "saturns". Nevermind that only one in every ten is a so-called "saturn", but there are so many better descriptions. So here are some of the ones that I came up with while watching this evening.

1. Flashbulbs. For those that don't know what a flashbulb is, it's that giant light that you always see old-time photographers holding over their heads in old movies and pictures. We had some form of that tonight where they shot something up and it was like a hundred flashbulbs all going off at once. Tres cool.

2. Weeping Willow. I've actually never seen this one before, so that was awesome. They lit it off and after it exploded, the lights from it trailed down and just kinda hung in the air like the branches of a weeping willow--it took almost a full minute for them to fade.

3. Sunflowers. Pretty self-explanatory. The had wide leafs and green and red middles.

4. Dreadlocks. These were pretty thick and a little swirly through the thickness as they fell.

5. The Violet Beauregarde. For those that don't get the reference, she's the avid gum chewer from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. When she turns into a blueberry, she gets all found and her belt is all tight around her waist, it's almost like an inverted Saturn. The ring, instead of being wider than the ball in the middle, just barely went around the ball.

6. The pinwheel. These were cool. They shot up into the air and then twisted out in opposite directions, giving a little swirl before dispersing.

7. The Rain Stick. Remember when you were a kid and they had you bring a paper towel tube to school and then you poked a ton of toothpicks through it and sealed on end, then poured a bunch of rice in, then sealed the other end, and it would make that cool tinkling sound (like rain) when you turned it upside down? These fireworks sounded just like that, and they way they fizzled in the sky made me think of the way the rice must fall as it hits the toothpicks.

8. The Plantains. Plantains are a type of banana. They're thick and green and really good fried. These fireworks looked like a bunch of plantains branching out from a white tree trunk.

9. The Uterus. This isn't as disturbing as it sounds. These fireworks were like this giant oval, and in the middle of the oval was a weird shape that sometimes looked like a fetus all curled up on itself.

10. The Bludgers. Harry Potter fans rejoice! These fireworks, after exploding, darted off in weird angles that forcibly reminded me of a bludger changing direction to slam into a quidditch (I think I might have spelled that wrong...) player.

11. The Exploding Star. Formerly known as the Saturn. For some odd reason, every time I picture a star exploding, I picture a ring of onlookers all around it to watch it die (like in the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe---that's a Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" reference, for those who didn't know).

12. The Mushroom Cloud. This is all those tiny fireworks that they shoot off to announce the beginning of the end. They're pretty low-flying and they end up making this column with a wide, rounded top.

And that's all I can remember right now. So, come on, people, no more talk about Saturns. There are so many different kinds! Let's be creative here!

Okay, before I get flamed for the title alone, let me just say that I do not play with dead fetuses. Now, whether that is because I would really not want to or because I just don't have access to them, well, that's neither here nor there, because I don't have access to them. That being said, and me being me, this is what happened:

One of the hostesses came back to the kitchen bitching and moaning that she wasn't "allowed" to work Saturdays, but she did anyway. When we called her on that she changed it to "supposed to". Her reasoning for this is because she has a class. She's taking biology this summer and so then she starts bitching and moaning about how hard biology is. So, naturally, I wanted to make her feel like an ass.

Rather than telling her that I was an english major (which I am), I told her that I was a genetic engineering major. I was going to go with rocket science, since that's supposedly the hardest thing you can do, but I figured that'd be too obvious a lie (I'm a terrible liar as it is), so I went for the next hardest thing I could think of, which is genetic engineering.

So, this girl is actually a fashion major, and as soon as she heard genetic engineering, her eyes got all big and scared and she asked me what they do. I have absolutely no idea what genetic engineers really DO, so I started talking out my ass about the Human Genome project and figuring out what goes wrong on a molecular level to cause autism and stuff and how to cure it (the way I described it was really cool, if half that stuff were true, I might consider actually studying it).

After telling her all that (it was really slow this afternoon, so we were all just standing around shooting the shit), she asked me what inspired me to go into that. I'm sure she was thinking that I had a close relative with autism or something equally horrible and I was doing a noble thing trying to cure them... instead, because I'm an asshole, I told her that I got into it so that I could play with dead babies.

I wish I had a picture of her face. It was fucking priceless. She told me, "I am appalled! That's horrible!" So I told her about how genetic engineers, since Obama got elected and lifted the ban on stem-cell research, now get to play with aborted babies to harvest their cells. And now she's freaking out and every single person that walks into the kitchen she's telling that I like to play with dead fetuses. The other line cook and I are in tears, we're laughing so hard (I'm not sure if he knows what my actual major is or not...), the kitchen manager comes up and this girl is screaming about how I like playing with dead babies and he gives me this really weird look before she bursts out with "that's why he's going into genetic engineering!" And my manager gives a little nod and goes, "Oh." And she's wailing about being appalled...

And that was the highlight of my week. It was awesome, but now the whole restaurant thinks I'm a genetic engineer playing with fetuses in my basement.