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

luxated structure

I CLOSE MY EYES TO IT

One of the things Facebook really did right is the notion of unsubscribing vs. unfriending. “I do not wish to cause drama, but I simply cannot continue to view your Jesus/Tim Tebow/kombucha/pro-spanking/homeopathy baloney anymore. Not to mention the incessant Flaming Lips videos.”

(Those Facebook sins are not all from the same person.)

(That would be one heck of a person.)

(And what if homeopathy-believers were also spanking believers? Homeopathic spanking! Get over here and drink this water that I slapped!)

There should also be an option to unsubscribe to anything that even faintly smells of politics. I can handle talking about issues. I cannot handle talking about politics. To quote David Foster Wallace:

…it’s almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp’s line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that the other camps are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

Multiply that times one million billion when it comes to Facebook soundbites. Liberal, conservative, or in-between: it is all simplistic, shouty, and stupid.

Plus, I have next to no faith in the sort of person who would ever want to become President. I will vote for whoever most closely lines up with my views, but I am under no illusion that the things fucking over this planet will be solved by the person who manages to raise enough money and kiss enough ass to get elected.

Well that was cheerful! I could have saved you all a lot of time and bile just by letting this cat have the last word on Facebook, politics, and people who choose taking sides over taking a position:

SHE IS NOT QUITE LIKE US

At the water park, Nora (re)discovered her love of terrifying thrills. I went down the water slide with her several times because it was the kind where you ride on a tube and do not get very wet. Still terrifying because of the sheer speed, but without near-drowning added to the mix. LT consented to do it only once, said NEVER AGAIN, and went to go recover in the hot tub.

A summary of Nora’s weekend getaway: hours and hours of swimming, hours and hours of terrifying water slide, some anti-nutrition from a “kids menu” at a Wisconsin diner, some Skee-Ball at an arcade, more swimming, and then five minutes of flopping about grumpily on the hotel bed, insisting that she will never be able to sleeeeeeeeeeepzzzzzzzzzz.

I think the chlorine may have gone to her brain, though. We got home, unpacked, did laundry, and had LT’s birthday cake with my family. (Yes, both of us are now entering a decrepit new decade of life. We are celebrating by adding one new kink or vice a year, until retirement age, when we should have enough.) When I finally got Nora into bed that night, we had the following exchange:

Nora [showing me a small hole on one of her stuffed animals]: Can Dad sew this?

Me: Maybe, but not now, dude. Bedtime.

Nora: Well, it’s really small. It’s not a huge problem.

Me: No, it’s not.

Nora: Unless the hole is really… [spooky voice] A PORTAL.

Me: … [WTF]

Maybe the chlorine also went to the brains of the water park management, for they displayed a very strange sign (I should have taken a picture but it slipped my mind, what with being all damp/terrified). The sign told water park patrons not to be alarmed if they saw a baby floating face-down in the pool, as periodically the head lifeguard tosses a baby-sized mannequin in there to keep the other lifeguards on their toes. I’m sorry, what? I absolutely will become “alarmed” at the sight of a floating dead baby, and you can’t make me stop.

Also, do we want to be purposely desensitizing people to the sight of a baby face-down in the pool? *puffs cigarette* Ahhh, fuck it. Probably a doll. I saw a sign about it once. Let’s go get nachos.

—-mimi smartypants mmmmm, nachos.