mimi smartypants
Seriously, though: what's with the penguins?

got drops (got coupes) got trucks (got jeeps)

HOW I MIGHT DIE

There’s a huge dog with a big scary bark that startles me on my walks, but I think the dog is probably lonely and so I get slightly bummed about it. One of these days I’ll probably approach the fence and get my throat ripped out for wrongly interpreting animal emotions. 

HOW I REALLY COULD HAVE DIED

So I get up early even on the weekends, because I have a demanding cat and also my body is insane. (Not insane like “ooh girl your body is insane” but insane like old and haywire.) I got some tea and went in my office for morning email inbox maintenance and podcast-listening, and noticed my little JBL clip speaker (for the podcasts) was crying in its red-light-blinky way for a charge, so I plugged it in. Then I moved to the family-room couch to read. 

After a while I heard a small “clack,” like a plastic thing falling over. I wondered what it was, but when you live in an old creaky house and have a cat, there are often noises from other rooms. (I don’t want to admit how hard I tried to stretch for an “Other Voices, Other Rooms” joke here.)

However, Murphy was right there in the room with me. That’s ultimately what made me get up and go investigate. 

WHICH IS HOW I FOUND MY OFFICE FILLED WITH SMOKE. The “clack” was the faceplate of the speaker falling off, and the smoke was from the motherfucking smoke pouring out of it. I unplugged and unhooked said speaker and threw it outside into the snow. There may have been a little scream. Everything smelled terrible (but only in the office, the smell had not made it to the room where I was reading, yet). The smoke alarms never went off (to comfort myself I like to think they would have, if the smoke had continued). 

What the fuck, right? I could have plugged in the speaker and left it charging overnight! I could have plugged in the speaker and gone to the gym, leaving my cat and sleeping husband in a house filling with smoke! Our consumer electronics should not be catching on fire when they are being charged with an ordinary (and functioning) charging cord! (There was zero damage to the cord, this was 100% the speaker’s fault.)

I start an online chat with the people at JBL, or more likely whatever poorly-paid people JBL subcontracts with to do customer support on the weekends. The agent (“Jessica”) said she needed to transfer me to the “Reported Events Department.” This delighted me and made sense, because I was certainly reporting an event! This was indeed an event, Jessica! 

After I Reported my Event, I had to send the old speaker back (free shipping, NATURALLY) and then JBL sent me a new speaker. They shared very minimal information about what could have happened; other than the usual blah blah about how they take customer safety and satisfaction very seriously etc there was not much concern expressed for my situation; and I guess I will trust that my new little clippy bluetooth speaker will not burst into smoke + flames, but I am still not going to charge it unattended ever. 

LET’S PLAY A GAME (she said, non-menancingly)

Skin Care Product In My Medicine Cabinet Or Tori Amos Song Title? 

¡ǝɹɐɔuıʞs ןןɐ ǝɹ,ʎǝɥʇ :noʎ pǝʞɔıɹʇ

FEELM

Last week I watched two movies: Anatomy of a Fall and Force Majeure. They both had great acting, they both had stuff to say about marriage and being a person, and they both had snow.

My post-movie-watching tradition is to find a single irrelevant detail to get mad at. In AOAF it was that the family made the decision to move to a rickety, unfinished, extremely-steep-stairs chalet with a vision-impaired child. For FM it was that there is too much peeing in this movie. Of the main characters, only the daughter gets away without an on-screen peeing scene. 

I did not rewatch The Devil Wears Prada and I probably never will, but I recently saw the “cerulean” clip and am obsessed with the way Meryl Streep says, “Why is no one reaaaaady.” I need this as a ringtone, or maybe just as a sound I can use to start Zoom meetings.

Meryl Streep being relatable (The Devil Wears Prada clip)

OTHER BULLETPOINTED JUNK  

According to Juvan, the movement from universal to particular theories relocated universal intertextuality “from its poststructuralist matrix” to specific analytical frameworks investigating the functioning of language, such as structuralism, reader response theories, discourse analysis, Freudian analysis, or New Historicism.  

—mimi smartypants relocated universal intertextuality and you’ll lie down and take it.