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

box me in oxen

Places I have been, grouped in a way that makes sense to me:

London, Brighton, Bath, Cardiff, Dorking and various other towns in Surrey

Seattle, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cancun, Chichen Itza, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Vancouver

Minneapolis, Chicago (duh), Galesburg and Bloomington-Normal and just about every other city in Illinois with a college in it, Merrillville (Indiana) and Gary (also Indiana), Iowa City, Madison, Milwaukee, Detroit, too many smaller places in Michigan to list, wherever in Ohio Oberlin is

Ft Lauderdale, Ft Meyers, Orlando, Miami, Atlanta, Norfolk, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, NYC, Boston, Cambridge, a decent number of Cape Cod towns, Westport (Connecticut), Montreal, Baltimore

Beijing, Chongqing, Fuling, Guangzhou, Hong Kong

Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Bikaner

Johannesburg, Cape Town, Cairo, Luxor, Aswan

Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaimah, all the other uninteresting Emirates, look them up yourself

Lisbon, Paris, Frankfurt, Munich (just the airport for Munich, to be honest)

Places I really want to go, in no particular order, although really I’ll go just about anywhere:

Budapest, Glacier National Park, Rome, the big sequoia and redwood tree parks, Jakarta, Mongolia, The Hebrides, the aquarium in Okinawa, Zion National Park, Doyden Castle, a ridiculous over-the-top luxury place in Tahiti or someplace like that (not picky), Greece, Alaska, Jordan, Montenegro, Berlin, Iceland, the poison gardens in Alnwick (UK), the frog museum in Switzerland.

Places I don’t care too much about, don’t be mad if they’re your favorites:

Australia (if I fly 12 hours they better not be speaking English when I get there), most of South America (I know, the Amazon, but…eh), New Orleans (I feel like I should be hyped about this but it’s still on the “someday, not really a priority” list), Hawaii (waterfalls are cool but again, eh).

MY NOPE-OUT WORDS AND PHRASES

a novel in verse

dazzling

comedic romp

folk-inspired

set against the backdrop of [insert a war here]

“journey” used for anything not involving passports and steamer trunks

peplum

quilted

Dutch blues-rock guitarist

THE “STARS” OF THE TWO REAL HOUSEWIVES FRANCHISES THAT I SHAMEFULLY RECORD AND WATCH (NEW YORK AND ORANGE COUNTY) RANKED IN ORDER OF WHETHER I COULD BEAR TO SPEND AN AFTERNOON WITH HER (FOR EXAMPLE: LUNCH, DRINKS, SHOPPING)

NO NO NO NO DEAR GOD NO I WOULD RATHER EAT HANDFULS OF SAND: Ramona, Vicki, Luann, that weird Kelly person

MAYBE, BUT MY SMACKING HAND WOULD ITCH A WHOLE LOT: Tamra, Meghan, Bethenny (I had to look up how to spell that and I still don’t understand it), Shannon, Jules

WOULD PROBABLY BE NOT 100% TORMENT: Carole (her face is anthropologically fascinating, and at least she’s traveled and shit), Heather (another scary face, but good manners and probably relatively kind), Dorinda (more good manners, and I bet she has cocaine in her purse).

THE SAME CRITERIA AND RANKING, ONLY WITH 21st-CENTURY WRITERS

NO THANK YOU: David Sedaris, Nicholson Baker, Dave Eggers, Cormac Mccarthy

MAYBE: Meg Wolitzer, Stephen King, Jonathan Safran Foer (but I would have to make fun of him for the Natalie Portman thing). Extremely Awkward and Incredibly Poor (Judgment)!

YEAH, SURE: Marilynne Robinson, Colson Whitehead, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel

THINKING ABOUT LISTS, MORE GENERALLY

I have a document on my Google Drive called “dinner” that I use for meal planning. It’s basically a list of the 65 different things that we eat for dinner, a tally that might sound impressive until you realize that it’s literally EVERYTHING we could possibly eat for dinner, a list that includes entries like “takeout” and “tuna sandwiches + popcorn.” It also includes a handful of things that I haven’t tried yet, complete with the URLs of the recipes—once I try them they either get added to the list for real or deleted with EXTREME PREJUDICE (I have been known to get up from the table to grab my phone and delete a disappointing recipe).

When LT’s mom died, we inherited a rubber-banded bundle of family recipes—index cards copied from friends, a few things torn out of magazines, etc. She seemed to have been an efficient but fairly indifferent cook, so they aren’t useful as recipes, but one could consider it interesting as a snapshot of 1980s family dinners. But is it? It’s really interesting as a bundle of discrete objects in her handwriting, and as a curated collection—why this casserole? Why that cake? Her recipe bundle falls into that category of things that I do not want but can never get rid of.

My dinnertime Google doc will interest no descendants (but neither will it burden them, I guess). In some ways it’s more useless, since even for dinners for which I include recipe URLs there are all sorts of unwritten annotations: I don’t bother with the chives, I use more potatoes (who ever heard of a soup with one potato?), etc.

I have no idea what point I am trying to make except that maybe we can’t privilege the physical over the digital, or maybe we can, and the things we leave behind are not at all the things our loved ones will remember, and I’m really damn good at meal planning, so drop your Blue Apron bullshit and hire me to tell you what to cook.

—mimi smartypants is full strength like a cyclops’ eyedrops.