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

and if my skull is empty

I will take a break from drinking wine and continuous-repeat listening to that Eels werewolf song to type a thing. It is not a thing you need, but it might be a thing you want! Honestly, how the fuck would I know.

MY COMPASSIONATE SIDE IS SORT OF WEIRD AND THERE IS A REASON I KEEP IT HIDDEN

I am not great with strong emotion. At funerals I pretty much cry quietly and steadily, which oddly doesn’t seem to be dependent on how much I loved the person—the sight of other people sad makes me sad, period. However, at funerals I will probably also be simultaneously glib and stoic and refuse to talk with you about the reason we are both there. I can be SAD, but I cannot DISCUSS MY SADNESS, because that will make me EVEN SADDER. See why I never did very well in therapy?

Here is a weird list of things for which I have felt empathy recently.

  1. Goalies, when they lose in a shootout. All those good saves you made earlier? No one cares now.
  2. Items that rarely get used. Sometimes when getting a plate out of our dish cupboard I will purposely grab one from the middle or bottom of the stack, because it’s not fair otherwise. Those bottom ones need a chance to be useful! They need a trip to the dishwasher once in a while!
  3. “The other guy” in duos where one half gets more famous than the other. Like the other guy in Wham! Or the other guy in Bosom Buddies. Not Art Garfunkel though: he seems like kind of a dick.
  4. Stay with me here: but I even sometimes feel a tiny shred of empathy for truly awful people like Trump. I just imagine his disappointed internal monologue as endless variations on, “Man, this sucks” and how winning was nothing like he thought it would be. (This is assuming he has an internal anything, monologue or otherwise, rather than a howling barren void containing only hideous malformed abortions of human thoughts and feelings.)
  5. Female dancers in hip-hop videos, the kind that do crazy fast athletic moves in booty shorts and kneepads. Apparently in order to telegraph “sexy” you have to have long hair and leave it down, which is super-impractical when you’re dancing and whipping your head all over the place, and I imagine they must get tired of being temporarily blinded in the middle of a routine and also of having hair stuck to their lipgloss.

THE CENSORSHIP SHIP HAS SAILED

I am not really involved in Nora’s media selection any more. She is 14 years old and makes good decisions, no desire to watch gory torture-porn horror movies or anything like that. So go nuts, young culture warrior, with your fan fiction and your Supergirl and whatnot. The other day she asked me about Orange Is The New Black, which I sort of watched but don’t recall in any great detail, and I said, sure—there’s nothing automatically inappropriate about prison lesbians, but let me check a few things out online. Then I read the funniest review ever that complained about “lesbian sex literally every five minutes.” If I ever get done laughing I will warn N, just for teen-awkwardness reasons rather than content reasons. On the other hand she knows how to work the stop button on the remote, so whatever.

SOME THINGS FOR YOU TO LEARN AND KNOW

The Oak Park-ians who waited and waited for the aliens to come. 

The Cherry Sisters. No one liked them. At all.

Submarine at the bottom of the Chicago River. 

IT’S HELL GETTING OLD

Old lady problem: random chin hairs.

Technology-related silver lining: light-up tweezers! Get some! You’ll find so many surprises on your face!

OLP: What was once a set-your-clock Ladytime Cycle has of late become rather playfully surprising. 26 days! 28 days! 34 days, why the hell not!

T-RSL: I live in an urban area and have more money than I have time or planning ability. So when I got a dumb surprise right before an important all-day meeting I used Amazon Now and a driver named Latoya brought tampons to my office lobby. I suppose the Devil-Wears-Prada-style lady executive of old would have sent an assistant to CVS, but welcome to the new economy.

OLP: I sleep like crap.

T-RSL: Fitbit explains it to me in detail!

No upside to this latest betrayal of the body: Sometimes I get gaggy for no reason. No puking, no nausea, no coughing, nothing disgusting in the vicinity (unless you count the state of American democracy). I’ve never gagged while doing anything important (HELLOOOOOO!)—it just happens every so often with no warning. Would you go to the doctor? Would a doctor give me that this-bitch-be-crazy look? Psychosomatic anxiety symptom or deadly cancer? DIAGNOSE ME.

—mimi smartypants stood and delivered.