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

pack your bags, gang: we're going up my mom's ass!

I highly recommend these mp3s of a 1940s Christian sex education record.

Here's one reason why I am not on the Howard Dean bandwagon. Besides the fact that I tend to eschew most bandwagons.

ALL FIZZY AND READY TO EXPLODE

1. Yesterday, step off the bus on my street, waiting for the light to change, looking forward to my short garbagey walk up the alley, LT kissing me on the head, freeing myself of my accursed brassiere. (For some of you I realize the melon support is invaluable, but for me and my more modest ta-tas, it is but a concession we make to thin summer blouses and air conditioning.) A man is loitering by the payphone, and he calls out in a Russian accent: “Hey! Girl! Date?”

“July 22,” I say, and immediately feel like a moron, because even as the first syllable leaves my mouth I realize what he was trying to express.

“No! You go on date with me! I like your shoes!”

To this I say nothing as the light turns green and I take off, but it makes me smile. Particularly as I was wearing black Chuck Taylor sneakers. Were the two things related? “I like your shoes, please go out with me?” I can honestly say I have never been attracted by someone's shoes. (Although I did once have to tactfully find a way to tell a former boyfriend that he should not wear velcro-closure sneakers, because it makes people wonder if you are “special” or “differently abled.”) (Which he was, kind of. In that math-genius sense.)

I AM GOING TO GET SO FLAMED FOR THIS

Speaking of the Special. LT and I have noticed something when doing our semi-weekly “Big Shop” at Dominick's for the things, like veggie burgers and my beloved garlic Triscuits, that cannot be bought at our local Indian or Palestinian grocery stores. The thing we have noticed is that Dominick's baggers are mostly mentally retarded. No, scratch that “mostly.” They are all mentally retarded. And I am not using that as some sort of dancing-on-the-edge-of-PC shorthand for “slow” or “inefficient.” Every single bagger at our local Dominick's has a cognitive disability. On the one hand, how great that they have hired these folks. On the other, I have to say that it adds a slightly surrealistic touch to the grocery shopping, when you realize how uniform the bagger hiring policy seems to be. On a third hand, where do they all come from? There must be an agency or halfway house or something, right? You can't just put an ad in the paper specifying “retarded only, please.” Is this discrimination?

CORRESPONDENCE I MAILED TODAY, THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY! WITH A STAMP!

Dear Nordstrom,

Hi. I work across the street from you. Did you know that? We could be pals. I like to shop at Nordstrom, and I often had lunch in your cafÉ. Oh no! “Had”? Why the past tense?

Because, Nordstrom, you took away my favorite salad. I understand the need for menu rotation, but THERE ARE LIMITS, MAN. Because the spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, and goat cheese salad was the best salad on the planet. It was worthy of capitalization: The Salad. It filled my soul to the brim with pleasurable feelings of spinachification, goat-cheese-osity, and sun-dried tomatoliciousness.

And where is this Salad, Nordstrom? Where oh where? It has been replaced. By some dumb “southwestern shrimp” thing. When was the last time you saw a prawn hanging around the Grand Canyon, anyway?

I humbly entreat you to return the spinach, goat cheese, and sun-dried tomato salad to the Nordstrom cafÉ menu forthwith. As the kids today say, it was the shiznit.

Yours truly,

Mimi Smartypants

ps: And don't go changing the recipe or anything. Like Billy Joel, I love the salad just the way it is (was).

ps again: In no other way am I like Billy Joel. Thank goodness.

WHAT ELSE DID I DO TODAY, THAT TOTAL STRANGERS ARE LIKELY TO SEND ME MEAN E-MAIL ABOUT?

I canceled my Greenpeace pledge. Yeah, I hate whales. (Just kidding, whales. Don't eat me! Don't strain me through your baleen!) I had been regretting being roped into a Greepeace pledge in the first place, and it only happened because I was hungry that day and the girl with the clipboard who earnestly approached me on State Street was so darn cute. But after a few months I started gritting my teeth every time I saw the credit card statement with that twenty bucks showing up each month. I can afford twenty bucks, and I have nothing against Greenpeace: they do good stuff. But since my budget for charity is limited, I started to resent the fact that while my some of my super-favorite orgs (NARAL, my local Planned Parenthood, and the National Low-Income Housing Coalition) got sporadic donations from me, Greenpeace, which I last thought about seriously as a pre-teen when their stickers adorned my Trapper Keeper, was sucking up twenty dollars a month. So I called. And I canceled. And I was all prepared to give them a spiel about economic constraints, realizing that they need the help but we have to pick and choose our discretionary philanthropy these days, but “Andre” at the phone bank merely took my name and ZIP code and let me know the pledge was canceled. So then I felt bad because they were so nice about it, and gave them a ONE-TIME twenty dollars. All the suckers in the house raise your hands! (Mimi has both way up in the air! Waving them like she really, really cares!)

BOTHERING MY BRAIN IN OBSCURE WAYS

I saw this movie Minority Report the other night. I had been told that it was not just another action movie but it really is just another action movie, albeit one with not as much jumping around and kicking people in the head as others. Two things: (1) Why did the pre-cogs spit out the names of murder victims on highly polished wooden balls? Talk about your gross inefficiencies. In the very digitalized future, we are still monkeying around with engraving/stamping on highly polished wooden balls, instead of just having the names come up on a screen? I bet the governor's son owns a large manufacturer of highly polished wooden balls, and there are a whole lot of kickbacks going on. (2) Why would Tom Cruise's dislodged eyeballs still work to gain security access, way after the police start hunting for him? Call me kooky, but if your boss is revealed to be a murderer and goes on the lam, one of the first thing you do is revoke his security clearance, take away his key card, make sure that he is not getting back into that building. Hell, they even do that if you are fired for boinking the secretary or selling company secrets, much less for (pre-)murder and kidnapping a floaty psychic bald girl.

Also, today I saw a woman wearing a skirt that had a design of hats printed all over it and now I feel unsettled. I know paper towels and such often have weird things printed on them, like ducks or picnic baskets, but the skirt and hats seem a little too close together somehow. A likely analogy would be if paper towels had rolls of toilet paper printed on them. Arrggh, leave me alone, I have to think about this one.

—mimi smartypants tried it once but did not inhale.