and still the boards did shrink
IT'S A SPECIAL DAY
Why? Because I now have beaten the computer in Scrabble (played on my PDA) five games in a row, without taking a single hint, on the computer's second-dumbest Scrabble level. And all this without having gotten my ass in gear and properly memorizing the two-letter words, as I keep saying I will. It may be time to move up a level, but it will be depressing to start losing again. The PDA Scrabble game seems to make huge leaps and bounds between skill levels: at Beginner it is spelling CAT and at Novice it is placing PHRENIC on a triple-word score and making several smaller words in the process.
Why else? It is well before noon (oh don't go up to the top of the page and look at the time, posting and typing are two different things) and I have already seen a picture of a eyeball worm. Eyeball worms seem to happen with disproportionate frequency to shepherds. At least that is what I notice from the medical literature. There is a lesson in here somewhere. Maybe you should drop Advanced Sheepherding Techniques 220 and rethink your choice of major, unless you want a wormy eyeball.
BUT NOT ACCORDING TO THE SUN-TIMES WEATHER WORDS
Yesterday was NIPPY BUT NICE, and today is SNAPPY. It seems lately these are getting a little lackluster. “Nice”? Break out the obscure adjectives again, please.
B.M.O.C.
Is it no longer uncool to wear your own school's merchandise while you are still enrolled in that school? When I was a snotty pretentious teenager, I would not have been caught dead in a high school jacket. And I held off on buying a college sweatshirt until at least five years after graduation, and then nostalgia overcame me one Homecoming (it's their fault for making the campus so damn pretty) and now I wear it on those wintertime read-in-bed-all-day weekends. However, most DePaul kids and nearly every Loyola kid I see is running around clad in official school merchandise. The death of a taboo, shifting fashion rules, a new generation of less-cripplingly self-conscious students. Or maybe since college degrees are somewhat less valuable than they once were, people think they might as well get a shirt out of the deal.
TEN NOT-SO-IMPRESSIVE SUPERHERO NAMES AND SUPERHERO POWERS
The Human Quesedilla
MechaToriAmos
WokBoy (he can stir-fry anything)
The Flaming Squirrel
NakedMan (with sidekick ScrotBoy)
Bitchygirl
Mr. Squeaky Shoes
Michiko Kakutani
Febreezer
Dr. Lawrence Mandelbaum
Flash Flood (super drooling powers)
SUPER-PUSSIFIED CONFRONTATIONS WITH OTHERS
1. I realized that I was out of tea at work, and work's cafeteria has vastly inferior tea, so I hiked east to treat myself to something fragrant and upscale. (Like crack soaked with a Calvin Klein fragrance.) (No, like tea. Just regular, overpriced tea.) In the shop was a bespectacled sideburned hipster with a laptop, who I glanced at several times in my married, abstract-scoping sort of way, thinking he was kind of cute. He had a large neck tattoo, which is not kind of cute but which impresses me on some level with its rageful commitment to being all kinds of hardcore with the body mods, and he was dressed in a rather preppified way in a shirt and tie, which was also cute, and he was doing something that involved sheet music and a laptop, which was the cutest of all. (And confusing. What, you get all dressed up for what looks like work, come down to a soulless downtown area, only to sit in a corporate coffeeshop and be artistic? Isn't there some not-quite-discovered dingy neighborhood place you can sit in? Or do you have a fetish for Ann Taylor 9-to-5 girls with secret neck tattoo admirations?) So I am waiting in line and glancing at him occasionally, and he's doing his laptop thing and glancing at me occasionally. Then I get my tea and turn to walk away, and he sticks out his tongue at me. Just BLAH with the tongue like a little kid. If it was meant to be flirtatious, even misguidedly, he should have followed it up with a smile or something, but no, this refugee hipster just sticks out the tongue and then goes back to his computer. I left bewildered and kind of strangely angry, but I got over it not two steps out the door because I am fickle like that, and I am used to the inscrutable ways of boys.
2. Last night I cooked dinner, and then LT and I are watching some Discovery Channel forensic programs and getting kind of amorous on the couch, because nothing gets our motors running like trace evidence and skull reconstruction. Gradually we become aware of a whole lot of teenagers talking right outside, and through the window I confirm that they are all congregating on our building's stoop. I guess this is not such a big deal if they are not doing anything destructive, but they were pretty loud, and they were having snacks and I knew that the trash would end up in our bushes, and I would rather not set a precedent that random kids from the neighborhood can just hang on our stoop. LT and I debated about what to do, and weighed the Asshole Dad (you kids get off my lawn!) option vs. the Putting Up With It Option (with the vague cranky feeling that goes with that), and wondering if, being young and hip ourselves, we could forge some sort of Third Way. Eventually LT went out there, asked if they were waiting for anyone from the building, and asked nicely if they could move on, and it was all “oh no problem man, it's cool, we're going,” and they started ambling down the street like the loosely-defined school of fish that teenage social groups are. It was the most minor of encounters, but it counts as victory, because inside the house I was indeed prepared for anything—from verbal insults to gunfire to LT knocking on the window and saying, “Hey Mimi get out here, these kids have some great weed.”
WHERE DOES THIS GO
Oh cool. Water going uphill.
Now it is time to go buy comic books and drink beer.
—mimi smartypants with malice aforethought.