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

shrink! those! testicles!

READING IS FUN-DAMENTAL

I am a very half-hearted football watcher so far this season, but I sometimes hit up the subreddits or the non-terrible sports blogs to see what’s up, and I was briefly flummoxed while skimming a discussion about a player’s worthiness that kept using the term “pro bowler.” Pre-caffeine and without spoken inflection to guide me I was like, huh that’s interesting where would Jordan Howard find time to bowl so much.

In a similar state I was dreamily editing a medical article at work and started to edit out the all-too-informal and not-very-specific (IMO) “on the one hand/on the other hand” construction before I realized the paper was literally about hands and the skin on them, with patients serving as their own control (medicine on one hand, placebo cream on the other hand). Oh my brain is so tired. I would get such a dismal SAT score if you tested me right now.

HAPPY BELATED

It’s been 19 years of blog and the number-lover in me wants to make it to 20. I will accept any comment on that, from “Please No, Leave Us Alone” to “Sure, Why Not.” I have been keeping a diary for a long time, and I’m not going to be disingenuous and say I don’t care at all about having an audience—I do have this online after all, and not in a Snoopy-themed diary with a tiny lock (grade school), in a black blank book with the cover decorated in silver nail polish (high school), floppy disks (1990s), or Google Drive (present-day stuff I don’t “publish”). Me writing down shit is sort of like water running downhill. It just happens! And if you (by the way: you are a raccoon in this scenario) come by and wash your food, have a drink, or go for a swim: that makes me happy! But if you don’t that’s okay too.

Recently some non-raccoons, in the form of Bulgarian hackers, came to pee in that stream! But they were not very good at it and were quickly shut down by my alert webhost and banished by my helpful spouse (I sat on his lap and chirped HELP ME COMPUTER MAN I AM JUST A DUMB SEXY DIARY LADY, gave him some passwords, and he did a fix.) Why would Bulgarians bother to hack me? Why would they be so bad at it? Maciej once told me that the Bulgarian language has a single word that means something like “pretending to be very stupid so people will stop asking you to do things.” He may have made that up but I believe everything Maciej says.

PEOPLE WHO WERE RUDE

Rude person #1: My kid and I went to the Soccer Mommy show (thank you Lincoln Hall for your dedication to all-ages indie rock) and a hipster goatee guy shushed me BETWEEN SONGS. Never too early for a teenager to learn that there are assholes at shows! I guess he is such a superfan that he can’t be distracted for one second from Sophie tuning and talking about the greatness of Chicago. That is surely more important than other fans relaxing and enjoying themselves.

I was in no mood so he got a silent middle finger from me. After the show we were in the crowd moving toward exits and he was semi-desperately trying to make eye contact with me—to apologize? or (more likely), to further explain why he was in the right?—but I refused to look in his direction. No second chances!

Rude person #2: Weekday morning, three people in the work elevator—me, 20-something African American woman listening to headphones, and white lady about my age. Headphone music is audible; whatever. Music woman gets off at her floor and the white woman immediately says to me, complete with air quotes: “Well, that ‘music’ was awfully loud!”

Unfortunately, one cannot (yet) reply to real-life humans with memes (come on, Black Mirror future! let’s go!), otherwise I would have made a hologram of this appear:

As it was I just kind of gave her the Ice Cube face.

What was that “music” comment? And why would you assume I agreed with you? And why can’t you recognize an OG when you see one? I am so offended.

Last rude person, I promise: the woman in the locker room who said, “Wow you’re really red!” when I was gathering my stuff after a workout. Who comments on someone else’s face? I should have punched her. Wow you’re really bleeding.

—mimi smartypants is prepared from a starch-based batter that may contain eggs, milk, and butter.