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the latest waddle:

good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03

elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01

building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19

ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09

my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04


2003-03-07 ... 5:27 p.m.

THINGS THAT CONSISTENTLY MAKE ME LAUGH

1. The part in the Simpsons opening credits when Marge pulls into the driveway and Homer screams and runs into the garage. How many times have I seen this now? The Simpsons has been on for more than ten years? It's still funny.

2. Sometimes LT and I are lying in bed talking before we go to sleep and I haven't done my bathroom stuff yet, so I'll say, "I have to go brush my teeth and take my birth-control pill" and he will get this I Am A Stud porn-star look on his face and say, "Better take two, baby."

3. Another LT thing that cracks me up: If I am reading in bed and have both bed pillows behind me, and he comes in to join me, he will make an elaborate show of getting undressed and sighing and stretching and saying things like "oh it will be so nice to rest my weary head on a nice soft pillow" and then lying back and going "Doh!" when there is no pillow there.

4. I am easily amused, aren't I?

5. There is this Sifl and Olly bit on Songs From Season 1 where they start doing a bit about some circus act called "Dante's Shaved Tigers," and Liam starts laughing so hard he can't continue but tape keeps rolling, and his laugh is so funny and infectious and goes on so long that I lose it every time.

THINGS THAT CONSISTENTLY MAKE ME SMILE

1. Seeing dogs playing in the dog park. Seeing cats looking out apartment windows.

2. The cat weblog. I have linked it before. It bears repeating.

3. Pinwheels. Actually watching anything spin (fans, gyroscopes) makes me smile.

4. Getting under my quilt for a Saturday-afternoon nap.

5. Tulips. My favorite.

THINGS THAT CONSISTENTLY MAKE ME SET MY MOUTH IN A THIN UNHAPPY LINE AND FEEL ALL DEAD INSIDE

1. The fact that there apparently the hot or not website thingy has been made into a television show. I saw part of this while drinking at Goldstar, thankfully with the sound off, and my mind gibbered, reeled, boggled. Everything a mind can do when confronted with the ineffable, my mind did it. I brooded about this sign of the television apocalypse on and off for the rest of that drinking session, and even woke up LT when I got home to tell him about it, although he seemed rather unconcerned about it at that post-midnight time.

2. Googling something else and finding this. Hey, I am all tolerant of everyone's God stuff. But there are some "are-you-serious?"-type discussions on this bulletin board, including one on whether or not women should be allowed to post on matters of theology.

3. Being on the bus and watching this woman just groove along to her headphones while her four- or five-year-old son kept saying, "Mommy? Hey Mommy, look at this! Mommy, look at this!" as he tried to show her something in a book. She didn't even look at him. I wanted to shake her and say: SOMEONE IS TALKING TO YOU. HE MAY BE KIND OF SHORT, BUT THAT IS NO EXCUSE FOR BEING A RUDE BITCH. Regardless of any bad-parenting issues, it's just intolerably impolite to ignore the conversation of your traveling companion. I was sitting next to the kid so I looked at his book (which was something about big trucks) and told him it was very cool. I know, poor substitute. So sad.

4. Getting spam AT WORK. My work e-mail address barely exists in a Web sense: how did this happen?

5. Um, I am getting tired of this list. (Okay, make number five that I can't stick to any task, no matter how simple or non-essential like the making of lists in my silly journal, on a Friday afternoon.)

Today marks the fourth or possibly even fifth morning in the past month that I have taken these pants, these pants right here, these pants that are making my lower half law-abiding and non-arrestable in public (now that would be a good movie title: Pantsless in Chicago), out of the "to be dry cleaned" bag, Febreezed them, let them dry while I showered up, and put them back on. See, I have no morals or standards in the mornings. If you want me to rob a bank or sleep with your girlfriend, just ask me in the morning and you are probably good to go. I am sure that tonight there will be a re-run of the same old Crisis Of Conscience And Cleanliness and I will put these pants, these marvelous pants, my favorite pants ever, back in the dry cleaning bag to await a proper chemical cleansing. Flash-forward now to me standing in the watery morning half-light with my finger on the Febreeze trigger, ah the cycle of life, what a wonderful thing.

MORE ON MY DISHEVELED STATE

Why do people not let you know when you have food on your face or your tag sticking out or some other fixable cosmetic problem? There are limits to this mini-social-contract of course, the main one being the "fixable" part. If a friend says "Does my hair look stupid?" or "Are these pants okay?" I will probably automatically say "no" and "yes," respectively, unless we are talking about a devil lock or buttless chaps (again, respectively). But basic stuff like lipstick on the teeth? PLEASE SAY SOMETHING. Otherwise you will end up like me, and sit through an entire meeting not knowing that you have a large swath of purple ink on your cheek, from your earlier too-emphatic gesturing with an uncapped pen. I wonder if people just thought I had finally gone nuts and was getting all commando with the office warpaint. But wait, it gets worse. I am in the bathroom after the meeting, noticing my purple face-streak and crabby that no one mentioned anything all day, when I notice also that I have a section of hair, left side front, that has a big glob of white toothpaste-spit dried on, because apparently after lunch I was all not paying attention and brushed messy. So add that to the dazed expression I tend to acquire during stupid business meetings and I LOOK LIKE A STREET CRAZY. The pen is bad enough, but what kind of spaz spits toothpaste on her own hair? I am going to have to start wearing a ponytail holder on my wrist, to get rid of the hair for things like toothbrushing and blowjobs (hello! good morning, readers! are you awake now?) OH GOD. Saying that makes me think of another reason why my colleagues may have been reluctant/embarrassed/shy about mentioning my hair issue. NO. NEVER MIND. LET'S NOT GO THERE.

Hey Chicago! Do you know The Bad Plus? I will make this simple for you: The Bad Plus are great. And The Bad Plus are playing at the Chicago Cultural Center on April 3, at 7 pm, and it is free, and it is probably on your way home or close to it. I have done all I can, now it's up to you.

Sometimes David Weinberger's cheerleading about the internet gets a little tiresome, but this struck me this morning:

But the Web is an unnatural world, one we have built for ourselves. The facts of nature drop out of the Web. And so we can see reflected in the Web just how much of our sociality is due not to the nature of the real world but to the nature of ourselves. The Web confronts us with a different sort of brute fact: we are creatures who care about ourselves and the world we share with others; we live within a context of meaning; the world is richer with meaning than we can imagine.

---from Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web

It struck me because I think I am somewhat through with "truth" arriving out of only one person's head. I want feedback, discussion, argument, dialogue, narrative. Truth not as a bland procession of verifiable facts but as a story being told. Told to somone. As H (paraphrasedly) said today, before I told him to lay off the rabbinical pronouncements, and told him that just because you are in rabbinical school doesn't mean you get to run around saying Deep Things all the time: We can be individuals only because we are members of groups, and each social interaction, if allowed for its duration to comprise the entire universe and to be taken only for itself, puts forth a self. A self that exists for only as long as the participants view it and agree to view it. A quantum physics of self. (Yeah, I know. I'll give you his e-mail and you can tell him to lay off the heavy stuff on Friday afternoons too.) Hey, who wants a beer? A quantum beer? A beer that is either drunk or not drunk depending on who is doing the drinking?

---mimi smartypants is petting Schrodinger's cat.

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