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

you shouldn’t hide but you always do

EVERYBODY PIPE DOWN

I want to get serious for a second (but only for a second) about my (and possibly your) freaky brain. I was thinking recently that my anxiety shit is so much better, and then I realized that the anxiety itself has not lessened one iota, but my relationship with it as a thing (anxiety qua anxiety! The Concept of Dread! Hello Kierkegaard, so nice to see you again!) has changed a lot.

Because basically, my brain is just as anxious and doom-obsessed as it ever was, but I no longer care. The hamster wheel will start and I just feel affectionately dismissive, like “Oh you!” Because anxiety is a separate thing, see? A separate, ridiculous thing, like a crazy rubber duck (on fire) floating down an otherwise-peaceful stream. You don’t get mad at the stream, and say “GODDAMNIT STREAM, WHY DO YOU ALLOW FLAMING RUBBER DUCKS TO FLOAT ON YOU?” You just point and laugh. Holy shit, look at that.

Should I credit the medication for this newfound Zen? Maybe. I go see my brittle little rat-faced psychiatrist next month for a “med check,” and perhaps I shall try and find a non-flaming-rubber-duck metaphor to explain to her what’s new and different. I also need to remember to ask for more of the chillout pills, to be used only in case of emergencies. Like the really HUGE flaming rubber ducks that keep you up all night.  

PEOPLE GOT PROBLEMS

In the spirit of not caring, and letting this freak flag fly, I have been making more of an effort to spend quality drinking time with people I don’t know all that well. Like hanging out with neighbors, and going to work happy hours, and making plans with cool-seeming friends of friends so that maybe someday we could ALL be friends, etc. (The struggle to find female hangout pals is REAL, y’all. I don’t want it to be a WHOLE BIG THING. I just want to EAT SOME TACOS WITH A LADYPAL.)

Sometimes this hanging out goes well, sometimes it goes…less well. Sometimes someone who seems supercool has a weird weak spot, and then you unluckily hit on their weak-spot topic, and you are all whoa, WTF. You feel me? Sometimes it can be okay as long as you avoid that person’s weak spot FOREVERMORE, but that can be difficult if the weak spot is large.

There is a neighbor of mine who I really do like, in a general way, but then certain parenting topics will arise, or sex-and-adolescents topics, and random bizarre discourses ensue, such as how letting a female teen take hip-hop dance classes will lead to that teen becoming sexually active, gays being totally great as long as they don’t “shove” it in your face (shove what? I want to ask. SHOVE WHAT?), tiresome heteronormative jokes like the dad “waiting with a shotgun” when this teen’s dates come to the door, blah blah blah, and I’m like Girl. I don’t even know where to start with the sexual-political education I would like to bestow upon you. But it’s cool, I guess. It’s friendly. But it’s probably not a friend.

Then there are the people who really are friends and their weak spot is more amusing, like how I recently discovered that a person who has been married nearly as long as I have gets furious if her spouse or children use “her” towel, and that her household towels are ruthlessly segregated, with all the family members drying their clean wet bodies with super-personal terrycloth. I get it, I guess, and lord knows I have my weird rules too, but towels are not in that category. If a guest took a shower in my house, I would give that guest a brand-new towel. But for my immediate family? I have cleaned up all manner of bodily fluids from the one and regularly fondle the genitals of the other, so as far as I’m concerned we can share towels.

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD

Yesterday at dinner I said, “Oh! Nora, remind me to show you the dead mouse on the way to school tomorrow.” Because there is a dead mouse on my block, and I saw it on the way home from work, and I wanted Nora to see it too. She was like, “oh cool,” and asked me some questions about it, which I answered, and finished her dinner and cleared her plates and stuff to the kitchen. A minute later she went running to the front foyer holding a post-it note. Later I went out there and saw the “REMEMBER: DEAD MOUSE” note stuck to the inside of the front door and I was like awwwww. Shared interests bring parents and kids closer together, and looking at dead animals is one of ours. I LOVE MY CREEPY BABY.

(Mouse was gawked at this morning. It’s just…dead, not very squashed or anything, although I think there is a small puncture hole in its side. Nora used a stick to transfer it to a more obvious place in the neighbor’s landscaping, for easier viewing and possible disposal, and then we jammed that stick in the ground as a gravemarker/flag.)

—mimi smartypants claims this dead mouse in the name of the king!