mayor no more
Mayor Daley will not be running again and it has thrown Chicago into a bit of a tizzy. I have a theory that even people who didn’t agree with Mayor Daley voted for him anyway because he was the mayor. When you’re mayor for so long, you’re just the mayor. There might be other people on the ballot, but they are not the mayor! You can’t vote for those people! Mayor Daley is the mayor!
Richie Daley has been mayor for my entire adult life and I will kind of miss his hilarious ineptitude in the realm of public speaking. I love how he stammers and blushes and gets irrationally angry about nothing and puts his hands in his sportcoat pockets like a little kid. And who can resist quotes like this:
It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. It really is silly. It’s silly, silly, silly. It is just silly. Silliness. It is silly. Completely silly. Come on. It’s silly. You know me. That is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.
We’ll miss you Richie!
FOOD-RELATED BAND NAMES
Dead Milkmen
Melt-Banana
Smashing Pumpkins
Cream
Alice Donut
Gorilla Biscuits (maybe? kind of?)
Bread
Peaches
Blind Melon
Freezepop
Captain Beefheart
Cake
Government Cheese
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Strawberry Alarm Clock
Soup Dragons
Meat Puppets
Lemonheads
Bananarama
MAKING CONVERSATION
As I was leaving the gym yesterday, I saw a woman with two kids run into someone they obviously knew. There was a girl of about four and a toddler boy. The girl was all talkative and adorable about how she was taking swim lessons and starting preschool, and the adults were kind of fawning over her with high-pitched adult fawning voices. The boy was shifting from foot to foot and fidgeting with his snack (half a bagel in a plastic bag), clearly desperate to get in on the conversation and the fawning. At the next quiet moment he excitedly lifted his bagel up to the adult friend and said, “Bagel!”
This will be a good one to try the next time I am feeling shy at a lunch meeting. *gestures with fork* Salad!
MORE CONVERSATION: LITERARY COFFEETALK WITH NORA
Nora is currently reading all the Ramona books, and this morning at breakfast she remarked on how they are very “realistic.”
Me: I agree. Do you sometimes feel like Ramona does?
Nora: Sometimes. But my thoughts are better, because I’m real. Ramona is fiction.
Me: True. Those books are fiction.
Nora: It’s realistic fiction.
Me: Yup.
[pause]
Nora: Realistic fiction is kind of wasteful, really.
Me: Why?
Nora: Because you can make up ANYTHING YOU WANT, you can make up CRAZY THINGS, but you just make up a realistic kid?
Me: Well…[I flash on the David Foster Wallace quote, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” but decide against it]…well, that can be useful though. It can be fun and nice to read about what people are really like, right?
Nora: I guess. It would be hard to write, though.
Me: True. It’s REALLY hard to write.
Nora: And people who read it can get mad at you.
Me: What?
Nora: If they don’t agree that it’s realistic, the people will say, No! That is NOT what people are like! And if you’re an author, and you wrote the realistic thing but it wasn’t really realistic, people might come to your house and yell at you.
Me: Uh…yeah. That’s always a risk. So…if you don’t want angry people to come to your house, just write about dragons, I guess.
Nora: Or don’t write at all.
Me: Even better!
IT’S THE MOST ATONEMENT-FUL TIME OF THE YEAR
The synagogue next to my house just had their annual kapparot thing, and the parking lot is still full of feathers. The custom vaguely bothers me in an animal-cruelty sort of way, and in a “haven’t we moved beyond caveman notions of animal sacrifice by now” sort of way. As LT and I watched the chicken crates being unloaded on our walk home, he wondered why the people who wanted to participate couldn’t just all use the same chicken, which would at least minimize the chicken dizziness. I said, “At the end of the day that would be one VERY sinful chicken” and then LT somehow managed to impersonate a chicken doing heavy-metal devil horns with its wings, and I fell over laughing. I bet chickens would have really nihilistic tattoos. Born To Be Fried. BBQ Fuck You. Eat My Gizzard And I’ll See You In Hell.
TRUTH IN ADVERTISING
Although I have never tried, I think a cock and balls must be very easy to draw. The first time I saw a cock and balls, I was amazed at how much it looked like the graffiti.
—mimi smartypants: a fan of realism.