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

divide and dissolve

CREAM (GET ON TOP)

1. There is a container of heavy cream in my refrigerator, waiting patiently to be used in an eight-million-calorie Thanksgiving dish that I will take to my in-laws’ house. I may be spending the holiday in what qualifies to my provincial city-girl mind as “downstate.” I may be picking my way up a country driveway, stepping around piles of horseshit and menaced by huge smelly dogs. But by god I will also be full of wine and saturated fat.

2. The copy on the back of the cream package: “Ask any cow for our secret recipe!”

3. That sounds like a useless exercise.

4. Not so secret if all the cows know it, eh? EH?

IT’S SO DAMN SEXY UP IN HERE

Last night LT was at the office until 10:30 at night because his company is “going gold” or “releasing product” or “giving birth to twin eagles” or something else that I do not understand because I am just a dumb publishing person. I was semi-peacefully asleep at that hour. When he came home and got into bed suddenly I itched all over. It was like he had brought shards of fiberglass into bed with him.

Me: Ahhh! Itchy!

LT: Would my boner help?

Me: Not unless you coat it with Benadryl.

LT: Willing to do that.

True meaning of marriage, right there.

HEEEEEEY HOMEWORK GUY

1. I am being driven slightly batshit by some parents at school, who fret publicly in an email-list way about how we have to study for some test or other and what sections does it cover and blah blah.

2. The “we.” Oh! You’re taking the test too? Personally I have to work, so I thought I’d just send the kid.

3. I hate to break it to you, but my 4th-grader does not study for shit. She seems to be doing well, judging by the corrected homework I see and the grades she got this quarter.

4. At this stage, aren’t homework and tests all about progression and habits? If everyone has done his or her work (teacher = teaching, student = paying attention and doing the work), the test should be no big deal. (Assuming a well-designed test, which you cannot always assume, especially in college-level Shakespeare classes OH DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED! PTSD FLASHBACK!)  The point of homework is focus and organization, and often about doing the best you can in the time allowed (a lesson which becomes GOLDEN in your adult working life, mark my words).

5. Or: am I too slack about this? Should I be instilling more OMG TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY school-gravitas in my kid? I do not think so, but the at times the atmosphere in this school is so different from the weather in my head that I start to feel like I am Doing It Wrong.

FOUND POEM

This was the graffiti on the train yesterday. In Sharpie, the bard inscribed:

D. Da Shoota Meat King Booch Gangbang  -N- Carry Pole

NO REST FOR THE ITCHY

I am home today, and ideally I would laze around with trashy true-crime books and tea, maybe taking a nap since the contact dermatitis and Benadryl boner made for a restless night, but instead I am doing laundry and messing around with puff pastry and heavy cream and going for a run. I will try not to be boring about the running but Nora and I both had a personal record at last weekend’s 5K, and I looked back and noticed that I have gotten faster with every single race. Of course that cannot continue, I am bound to have a crummy 5K at some point, but right now it is downright inspiring and I feel like the motherfucking Eye Of The Tiger every time I lace up my shoes.

—mimi smartypants: hanging tough, staying hungry.