exactly what
1. I was walking near my office and there was a dead bird on the sidewalk, the mysterious kind of dead songbird that is dead for no discernible reason, but before I could even notice it properly a huge crow swooped down, grabbed the dead bird in its beak, and flew away. LUNCH!
2. If you can’t get enough of dead things, you should come to the corner of Argyle and Kimball, where there is an enormous dead possum! It’s not even very squished or decomposed, and it is quite interesting to look at. Hurry, supplies are limited!
3. As long as you don’t count the seemingly-interminable “8000 Unfunny Jokes and Riddles With Which To Torture Your Parents” phase (who publishes those books? they should be killed), Nora has always had a well-developed sense of humor. Examples include this joke and this joke, and especially the joke at the beginning of this otherwise-tedious (unless you’re her parent) video:
Not even two and a half and she was making song parodies! Love that kid.
Recently we had another great leap forward in being hilarious. (Those are two phrases that you will rarely see together. Why did Mao Zedong cross the road? To kill 40 million people! Ha ha ha ha okay comrade time for your self-criticism.) We were walking to school and there was debris in our path, and I said, “What’s that? Oh…it’s a corn husk. And a piece of newspaper.” (Which it was.) Nora stopped walking, rolled her eyes heavenward, and dramatically intoned, “OH GOD! AN OMEN! WHAT COULD IT MEAN?” Okay, maybe you had to be there.
(I am sure it was just littering happenstance, but I do like to imagine a guy walking along eating a tamale and reading the paper, coming across a surprising story, and dropping both corn husk and entertainment section in shock.)
4. If you have access to HBO, you have to find this documentary called “Trophy Kids,” about bad sports parents. It is amazingly cringeworthy. I wanted to punch Golf Dad in the throat, in particular. (None of the profiled parents are great, but he was the worst. I have never seen anyone so relentlessly negative in all my life.)
5. You’re…not serious, right? (I think they are.)
6. Look at my shameless self-promotion!
There are funny people reading. I will not be nearly as funny, but I try hard and you should come by and pat me on the head and lie about how it was totally fine. And then we can have a beer.
7. I was scooping out one of the litterboxes and trying to get as many clumps as possible onto the scooper thing, because really, who wants to spend more time doing this than necessary, and as I was going into a corner for just…one…more…clump the balance shifted and I lost half the biosolids I had already scooped. And the thought that immediately flashed through my brain was, “Whoops, I got greedy.” Thanks for the pointless morality tale, brain! Thanks for getting all Aesop’s fables up in there. The Girl, The Scoop, and The Cat Shit.
—mimi smartypants, slow but not steady.