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

exaggerated gestures

BUT FIRST, THE NEWS

Notifylist.com is having some issues, or throwing a tantrum, or just generally giving you and me and everyone else on the Smartypants Notify Planet the silent treatment. Notifylist.com is not doing its job. I type and I type and I send out a pithy little message via notifylist, and no one gets it, not even me. Notifylist is keeping us apart! Notifylist is the bad roommate, who does not tell you that I called! But I did call! I did! I did! I just sent a gentle “hey, your very useful site suddenly does not work” message to the Notifylist people, so maybe it will get fixed. In the meantime you will just have to promise to visit often, because I am not insane enough to send non-automated notifications to all the people on the list. Sorry.

OPERATION ENDURING THEIR FREEDOM

Spam in my in-box: FREE HORNY SLUTS! Yes. They suffer so under the yoke of opression.

HABITS I WISH I COULD BREAK

1. Cuticle-chewing. God, I'm gross.

2. Every time I wear lipstick I have to wear the “next” lipstick, that is, alphabetically by its color name. The ones I own at the moment go in this order: Amorous, Catwalk, Grape, Lovechild, Plum, Roach, Sensation, Vamp, and Vixen. Damn. I did not know I had so many lipsticks. Is this normal? Go home and count up your lipsticks and we will try to get a sample going, since Google has not yet coughed up any statistics on this sort of thing.

3. Being so cynical. Although not for the reason you might think: I have no desire to become a brighter shinier sparklier girl, necessarily. However, isn’t cynicism a mask for idealism, in a way? Cynics are crabby because the world behaves in a different fashion from their idealistic vision of the way the world ought to behave, and my goal is to be neither scowlingly cynical nor doe-eyed idealistic, but rather to just drink in the world exactly the way it is. I mean, stuff will still suck, don't get me wrong, but I am tired of having my perceptions ruined by my moods, it makes everything turn into one big pathetic fallacy.

4. Exclaiming “KITTY!” in a breathy Boo-Boo Kitty Shirley voice whenever I encounter a cat. Yes, I love them so, but I shouldn't tell them so quickly, it's very promiscuous of me.

5. Having dual-consciousness in dreams. For instance, last night I fell quickly asleep at around ten-thirty after drinking a bunch of wine with dinner and then snuggling under a blanket with LT while we watched some of those Discovery Channel forensic shows, the ones that teach you NEVER EVER TO KILL ANYBODY because one lousy hair or fragment of skull will send you to jail forever. I like these programs because they are all science-worshipping, which is sexy, and there is one that is narrated by the Frontline guy, which is sexier. If I was married to that guy I'd make him read the paper to me every night. Anyway, I soon got sleepy and we went to bed, and my brain, lulled into snuggly domesticity by the dinner and the wine and the television, started to dream this dream where I was tidying up our bookshelves. The bookshelves had a lot more than just books on them, there were hairbrushes and toys and old plates of leftover cookies and candy from Christmas. I was tidying them up in preparation for a houseguest, who was a space alien. “Wait a minute,” I told myself (still dreaming). “You cannot just randomly throw in a space alien whenever you think your dream is getting too cozy and boring.” Then (still dreaming), I told myself to butt out, I wasn't just randomly throwing it in there, this dream would have continuity soon enough, just give me a chance to tie all the loose ends together. This is not the first time my dreams have featured a whole fuckload of narrative interruption and a postmodern undermining of authorial intention, and I worry that if this keeps up I will never have action-packed narrative dreams again but instead all my dreams will feature a bunch of irritating fragments of “self” sitting around and arguing about the literary merit of the dream. Help me.

6. Looking through every single page of a page-a-day calendar whenever I receive one. Well, this isn't so bad but here is the stupid part: I feel guilty about it. Like I am ruining the surprise, which is, big whoop, another cartoon or vocabulary word. My family was very big on Not Ruining The Surprise, my mom used to use separate, hidden wrapping paper for the “gifts from Santa” and everything, and when I found out the truth about the whole Christmas thing* I kept it quiet for like an entire year because I didn't want her to be upset.

*Which I do not recall as being some big dramatic revelation but just a very slow and unpainful realization that there is pretty much no way this Santa thing could work. Um. Sorry if I said too much. There is definitely an Easter Bunny though, and most certainly there is a Labor Day Lobster Creature (he brings you kelp, which symbolizes worker solidarity…DON'T ASK QUESTIONS JUST ENJOY YOUR KELP REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO JIMMY HOFFA), so I hope I did not shatter all your holiday illusions today.

Too many spirals! I'm dizzy with feelings of non-enthusiasm! Yawn! Yawn! Yawn! Graphic designers, take note!

I had someone call me a “grammar Nazi” for insisting on the serial comma the other day, which really made me mad, because the serial comma is not some picky little quibbling outdated point, like complaining about starting a sentence with “hopefully” (get over it) or that old shibboleth about never splitting infinitives (you can if you want). It also made me mad because the real Nazis systematically murdered six million men, women, and children, while I merely insist on a punctuation mark that does a lot of good in the world, and that clears up a lot of ambiguity when you are making a list. Which I guess makes me a stickler-for-accuracy Nazi. Seriously, though, I am tired of the lazy “Nazi” equivalency to describe people you feel are overly authoritative, or “disgruntled” to describe people who show up at an office with an AK-47, and although I know to some extent it's just slang, I do get a slight chilly feeling when I hear someone say “that is so not true” or “not good” instead of finding the correct appropriate word to describe something, call me paranoid but it smacks of Newspeak. The loss of words is the loss of power, so please, say something is “horrible” or “a load of steaming horseshit” and don't throw the word “Nazi” around any more, as a favor to me, thanks.

I actually have sore spots on my fingers from typing too much, and a bruise on my wrist from where it rests on the keyboard tray.

Now I am going to post a picture of a hamburger.

Now I am going to post a picture of me going smashy, even though that is kind of against my policy, because I am only semi-identifiable here: short, dark, glasses, fond of tying my cardigan sweaters around my waist in order to get more arm swing, yeah big deal you knew those things already. I think it makes it better if you do not know the exact context of this photo, but I will let you know that I made most of the hole in the wall with a hammer and a prybar. The baseball bat was just for a change of pace. SMASHY!

—mimi smartypants knows the nervous walking.