we be log jammin’
DO OR DO NOT
Yo. I am a little slow today, as I spent the hours after Nora’s bedtime drinking a large glass of wine and watching videos of epic football tackles on YouTube. This is how I relax. I feel like there should be more epic football tackle videos out there, where is all the footage? Is the NFL really that stingy with their highlights? (Yes.) And whatever happened to that JACKED UP! Segment on Monday Night Football? I loved that shit. Wikipedia says people complained that it glorified football violence. HELL YES THAT’S WHY I LIKED IT.
The reason I needed to relax is that I spent a long time talking down my crazy crying hyperventilating daughter. She does not have school crap or interpersonal crap, she has self-induced pressure crap. I was sympathetic, and I dispensed the hugs and the cuddles and the pep talks, and possibly even the hard-won wisdom. I will admit to growing quite weary of the whole thing, however. Nora is supposed to test on Saturday for her next karate belt, and she doesn’t feel READY and sometimes she FORGETS STUFF and what if she FAILS. I don’t know, they take you out back of the dojo and shoot you if you fail? Or more likely, you go out to dinner with your parents if you fail, just like you will if you pass, and you spend another two months at your same rank and no one really cares? Or even MORE likely, the super-nurturing child development experts at the hippie karate place would not even suggest the test if they did not think you would pass?
On the one hand, I understand because I was the same way. I never liked to try anything unless I was sure I could do it. On the other, you have to get over it. Honestly, I probably could have used a little more failure in my early life. (And! She’s not even going to fail! I am reasonably sure of it!)
LET US NEVER MICROWAVE OUT OF FEAR
I was heating up my lentil soup at work and three minutes is a long time, y’all. So I pulled out my book while the radiation was doing its thing, and the guy at the microwave next to mine said, “You’re a lot like John F. Kennedy.” In the seconds after his utterance, with my glassy eyes and bland smile, I tried to ascertain how, exactly, I was like John F. Kennedy, and what this had to do with soup-microwaving. We both pledged to put a man on the moon before the decade was out? We both have fantastic speechwriters? We both come from dysfunctional Irish families? We both are compulsive horndogs with bad backs? No, no, no, and no. (My back is fine.) Then he said, “You both read every spare minute!” Ah, okay. I actually did not know that about Kennedy, and fat lot of good it did him (bang! pow! Oliver Stone movie!), but okay.
Later that same day someone else compared me to Daffy Duck. That’s a bit of a comedown, no?
DUNG DA VINCI
There is a high-rise building I pass on my way to work, and the people who live there are terribly cavalier about letting their little purse dogs poop on the sidewalk. Yesterday several of the poop piles had been turned into poop smears, either with unfortunate feet or with a hose or something, and here’s the weirdest part—there were definite designs etched in some of them, the way a barista might make a little design in your latte foam. I apologize if you are drinking coffee right now.
I thought about taking a cell-phone picture, and if I were a better Web 2.0 citizen I would have. But I kind of decided on the fly that I didn’t want to take a picture of dog poop, no matter how repurposed and artistic that dog poop might be. I also didn’t want to be the kind of person who takes a picture of dog poop. And I didn’t want to spend the first few minutes of my workday uploading and resizing a picture of dog poop. I think we all have internal barriers that we just will not cross, and I have found one.
INCORRECTO
Posters for ROCK EN ESPAÑOL shows are pretty common around certain Chicago neighborhoods. The one I see most often is making me feel stabby (STABULOSO!), since it advertises a band called LOS PLAYER’S. Yes, the apostrophe is criminal, but I am sort of used to that. Don’t get me wrong, seeing the unnecessary apostrophe still hurts my grammarian heart, and I will never stop correcting this error, but my eyes have become dull to the punctuation atrocities committed every single day. What kills me is the export of one of these atrocities to another language, one that DOES NOT EVEN HAVE APOSTROPHES. Hey bilingual people: take the best stuff from English, okay? Take all the fun slang, take the jokes and insults, take the new cool technology words. Don’t take our ignorant spelling errors. Thanks.
—mimi smartypants has a leg for an arm and an arm for a leg.