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

civil disobedience

11 July 2009

Eventually: talking to kids about why mommy is defacing a bus shelter. Also: baseball tourists and how much I hate them. But first some lists!

UNSEXY THINGS I MAY HAVE ALLEGEDY SAID DURING SEXY TIMES

1. Don’t lick my face, I just smeared it in fruit acid.
2. This won’t take long because I’m really horny.
3. Pretend I’m a sexy spider.
4. Ow, my neck.
5. How about the usual?

THINGS I WILL ALWAYS WATCH, NO MATTER HOW CHEESY OR POORLY CRAFTED THE MEDIA

1. Footage of child beauty pageants and the crazy parents involved.
2. Movies or true-crime TV shows detailing murder-for-hire plots.
3. Anything about heroin addiction.
4. Anything featuring the most beautiful woman in the world (aka Juliette Binoche). I am so gay for her.
5. Puppets!
6. Prehistoric beasts. Not dinosaurs but megafauna.
7. Live footage of early punk bands.

THINGS I AM AN OLD-SKOOL HUMORLESS FEMINIST ABOUT

1. The shibboleth that “it costs money to work” or “daycare would use up my whole salary.” First of all: if you don’t want to get a job outside the home, then don’t. No excuse necessary. Second, people who like to say this also like to wildly inflate their “costs” of working by including all this weird shit like dry cleaning, clothes, lunches, which is all very minor in the scheme of things. The major expense of full-time work is daycare, period.
2. Burlesque. You’re taking off your clothes in front of people because it gives you a thrill. Not creating a theater of parody and resistance that problematizes feminist critiques of pornography blah blah blah.
3. The supposed innate tendencies of boys and girls (“boys will make a gun out of anything!”) I know there’s been research on gender biology, some good and some suspect, but I will always be a somewhat troubled by it because kids are not raised (a) in a vacuum or (b) by un-gendered parents.
4. Single-sex education. I have no problems with it at the high-school or college level—kids that age are old enough to understand what they’re choosing. I cringe a little at single-sex elementary schools, though. Little kids should be exposed to as wide a range of humans as possible.

WHAT I SAY TO THE CATS WHEN WE’RE ALL ALONE

1. “Lola Lola, she infects you with Ebola!” (She hasn’t, so far.)
2. “Don’t be a dick.” (To Rocko.)
3. “Who’s a kitty? You are! You both are! Kitty kitty meow meow!” (I’m as embarrassed as you are.)
4. [sung hard-rock style, sort of a KISS vibe] “Cats! Cats! Doing cat stuff! Thinking cat thoughts!”

SNOOTFUL

I am in receipt of a letter about my college homecoming weekend from the director of the creative writing program there. As a “former editor and/or contributor” to the college literary magazine, he invites me to a reunion of all editors/contributors. He promises, and I quote, “a snootful of rollicking fun.” Has he had a stroke? Or is this a subtle hint that cocaine will be provided?

MESSIAH MY BUTT

Nora and I were at a bus shelter and she asked me, “Who’s that guy?” Someone had put stuck a bumper sticker of the famous (in my neighborhood) dead guy Schneerson right on the bus shelter’s Plexiglas. The bumper sticker said MOSHIACH IS COMING SOON. I could not resist pulling out my Sharpie and adding NOT BLOODY LIKELY. I wrote on the bumper sticker itself and not on the bus shelter, because as a non-religious person I refrain from defacing public property. Nora wanted to know why it was okay to write on the sign, so we had to have a super-involved discussion about why it was not okay to put the bumper sticker there, touching on (among other things) separation of church and state, messiah traditions in various religions, how dead people stay dead, freedom of speech vs. civic responsibility, and oh man in some ways it was easier when she just sat in the stroller and didn’t read.

BASEBALL IS TERRIBLE

At work we get a few “summer half-days” where you can work for a while and then fuck off in the afternoon and for various reasons I took Nora with me when I cashed one in. She read books and played computer games, we had lunch, and then we headed down to the subway, where I was confronted by a huge line of people.

Whenever there is a Cubs game against a relatively-nearby opponent (St. Louis in this case), the streets are clogged with clueless newbies and public transit is a nightmare. But WTF, why are all these people standing in LINE? There is no line. Pay and walk through the turnstile, dumbass. They were all bunched up looking at maps and trying to buy transit cards and stopping because other people were stopped and also because they had no idea what they were doing. And they were all in big groups, trying to use the same transit card for fifteen people and yelling, “Stay together, stay together,” and of course all members of their party must go through the SAME turnstile, despite the fact that there are MULTIPLE turnstiles, and it was a huge mess.

Frankly I had no patience for this. I ignored their ad hoc “line” and walked Nora right up to the turnstiles, where I used my pass to breeze on through. AS ONE DOES. This woman gave me a dirty look and said, “Oh, is that the way it is. You just get to go first.” Yes, I do get to go first. You are standing in front of the turnstile DOING NOTHING. Also, and I can’t stress this enough, YOU HAVE A TEMPORARY TATTOO OF A CARDINAL ON YOUR FACE.

—mimi smartypants is your tax dollars at work.

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