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

nowhere to hide

THANKS FOR NOTHING, LUMPNECK

I did indeed go to the doctor about the lump in my neck noticed by the dentist, and the doctor was like huh that’s a lump all right. But (continued the doctor), I know nothing and will say nothing, reassuring or otherwise. Go get an ultrasound appointment! It will take a week to schedule and in the meantime you can entertain alarming visions of dying of cancer at a very critical point in your kid’s growing-up process.

I did as I was told and a nice ultrasound lady put lube all over my neck and rolled a high-tech version of one of those nonsense “jade rollers” on me while looking at squiggles on a screen. It took forever and she was very exuberant and carefree in her application of neck lube, which meant some got in my hair. Just search for the “radiology technician” tag on Pornhub, you’ll probably find the video.

Long story short, my lump is a lump of nothing, just a slightly enlarged lymph node. Maybe it is a lump of Miller High Life, and I need to drink more Millers High Life to push it on through. Maybe it is a lump of ennui. Something fun that happened, though, was that OTHER stuff showed up on the scan, namely some “thyroid nodules.” Isn’t a “nodule” in your body basically a tumor? But “nodule” sounds nicer. My doctor pretty much told me that the nodules ain’t no thing, particularly if I’m not having thyroid symptoms (I’m not). She said, “By the age of 60, more than half of women will have thyroid nodules.” EXCUSE ME, I’m not 60 but whatever. If you’re going to be blase about nodules (pssst: tumors), so shall I.

SUBBACULTCHA

My family went to the symphony for some very dull and BLATBLATBLAT horn-filled 20th-century piece (it really was not enjoyable—and I say that as a modern-composers FAN) and also what everyone had really bought the tickets for, the Mozart Requiem. I only cried a little bit. It’s a weird piece really, because the first part is the most amazing orgasm-in-your-pants piece of music in human history, and the rest is only really good Mozart (which of course means “better than 99% of anything ever”). That’s what you get for dying before you finish stuff!

More music! I am a bad playlist-maker, but I like trying new things, so I tend to just randomly add anything that looks good or that Spotify recommends to me, and then I play my giant playlist on shuffle. If I’m like Christ What Is This Shit when something unfamiliar comes on I go back and delete the song from the list. The last three times I did that, all the CWITS songs were by CHVRCHES. Sorry, CHVRCHES, I guess I just don’t like you although Spotify’s algorithms REALLY think I should. Also, that is a very popular method of naming bands or artists for the past five years. You change a letter to another letter or add superfluous letters (Wavves, Alvvays) you go all uppercase or all lowercase (mxmtoon, dodie, R.LUM.R, pronoun, FIDLAR). Or both, as in the aforementioned. If modern life is going to be baffling and make you feel like everyone else got the memo and you didn’t, then it is very fitting that we can’t pronounce the names of any of the bands we like.

A SHORT LIST OF THINGS I MISS

  1. Hallucinogens. There should be some kind of adults-only retreat with a multi-acre meadow and small, widely spaced, very clean cabins with excellent showers, and you receive 4 grams of mushrooms and a finger puppet upon arrival. I realize that most people they accomplish this via “camping,” but that just involves so many variables and I have never been. (I SAY I’ve been camping, from the time that LT and I spent the night in a tent on the edge of the desert in India, but it was a luxury “tent” that had furniture and Persian rugs and a “boy” that brought tea or beer if you stood outside the tent and clapped twice [which as an American I was fundamentally unable to do], so I don’t think that really counts.
  2. Zines. Extremely amateur YouTube videos. Web pages that have no self-branding or monetary value whatsoever. I remember a page where a girl threw some hot dogs into her neighbor’s yard and updated the progress of their (non)decomposition. Way too much internet now is a Serious Undertaking with a business plan.
  3. The Al Gore Has Been Replaced With A Replica guy. He’s probably dead. (The sandwich board guy, not Al Gore. Although that’s not a bad conspiracy theory in and of itself.)
  4. The green Skittles being lime and not stupid sour apple.
  5. Being able to use the same brand of deodorant for more than six months at a time. I need to switch things up on the regular because that’s about how long until my body chemistry finds a way to beat the system. Is that an old-lady hormonal thing? What, pray tell, the fuck?
  6. The time before people mentioned carbohydrates SO OFTEN.

HOW DARK IS THIS MACHINE

Vote tomorrow, Chicago! Yeah I know, all of you have been telling me smugly for like a month how you voted already. I just can’t get behind early voting, it takes the fun out of it somehow. So I’ll be there in the booth bright and early, even though I don’t particularly want any of these assholes to become mayor and my alderman’s race is a “who will do the least damage” situation. There are ballot proposals too, and I figured out I’m voting yes on all of them. Those things usually infuriate me because they are always written so poorly and have the most misleading titles. The Efficiency And Safety Everything Is Great Initiative With No Proposals As To Paying For It! The Fairness And Happiness Completely Toothless Constitutional Amendment! Do you not want a thing to not not happen? Check YES or NO.

—mimi smartypants just died in your arms tonight.