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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


2004-03-26 ... 2:16 p.m.

It's really not fair for me to post and edit down my own chat transcripts, because in this one it was actually T. who was saying most of the smart stuff, and I was merely being overcaffeinated and goofy and cracking myself up with my own one-liners. But hey. What is a personal web page for if you can't use it to make yourself look good?

smartypantsmimi: Narcissistic personality disorder in the hizzouse yo yo yo
smartypantsmimi: Which our society totally encourages with its weird Romantic emphasis on the individual soul being meaningful in and of itself yo yo yo
smartypantsmimi: I'm more into a relational soul. Or an oversoul! This flight on Transcendental Airlines has been oversouled!
smartypantsmimi: (I crack myself up.)
feedmewithyrkids: That is a good one.
feedmewithyrkids: That is a really really good one. There are many levels to that one.
smartypantsmimi: I wonder what an oversouled Transcendental Airlines flight would offer to give up your seat.

Pantyliner microclimate study.

These people probably got a grant to spend all day sticking stuff up in gerbils' business. I'm still not clear why it is desirable to ever induce pseudopregnancy in Mongolian gerbils, unless maybe you wanted to stage an episode of Mongolian Gerbil Jerry Springer or something.

WAYS OF RIDING THE EL

(GOOD MOOD)

A. Looking Out The Window

i. Get big-picture. Smile at this city and all the people sardine-canned into it. Look up at the sky and enjoy the way the trees and buildings poke up and intrude into it. A friendly meeting between form and emptiness, nothing like the scary gap between ground and sky encountered in the flat prairie town where you went to college. Think about how you're being pulled past the cityscape like film in a projector, and how the rectangle of El window is the gate and the lens that projects you outward (or is it the other way around? Is the filmstrip called Chicago From Twenty Feet In The Air being shown to you instead? Or how about the jerky abstract film made by wind and the shadows of trees? Who would pay six dollars [matinee] to see that? Me me me.) Imagine yourself flying along outside the train, gracefully swooping up and down to avoid obstacles. If you're feeling really happy and exuberant, and if you are me and happen to have a problem with hyperorality, you can imagine yourself taking a bite out of everything you pass. Although now that I think about it I am not sure if that is true hyperorality in the sexual sense or just my Godzilla complex.

ii. Or look for the small details. Feel love and affection for each streetlight and telephone wire, mentally cheer on each pedestrian crossing the street (you go, dude! Go on with your bad self!), check on that rusty paint can on top of the black tarred roof (yup, still there!) Feel slightly dizzy with the Miracle Of Being when you see a cat looking out of an apartment window. Feel the inevitable self-consciousness that your interior monologue is weird, faux-mystical, and creepily sincere, like some joyous peasant in a Tolstoy novel.

B. Inside The Train

i. Look at all these tiny screws and things! How we trust them to convey us along this pile of metal track! A bunch of linked metal tubes full of strangers, all going to different destinations, all temporarily sharing space and being conveyed!

ii. Speaking of, check out your fellow passengers. Pick out the ones you find attractive. Since you're all manic today, that will be just about EVERYONE! Imagine a big happy heap of naked people! Or for a G-rated version, get all Russian-mystic again and marvel at weird things like how everyone has a nose or each of these people managed to get born.

(BAD MOOD)

A. Looking Out The Window

i. Big picture: Imagine it all as rubble. Yearn for it, even. Let's go already, let's give this evil planet back to the cockroaches and rats. (Time out to chide yourself for unconsciously echoing Morrissey lyrics. Get even grumpier. Think about how depression so easily dissolves into bitter and unpleasant self-parody.)

ii. Detail view: Grow exhausted to the point of illogical near-weeping by the sight of all the stuff, all the metal and brick and HVAC and plumbing, that is contained in one city block.

iii. Go to (i).

B. Inside The Train

i. Notice the ugliness. Is there a reason the CTA decided to fashion train seats out of that nauseatingly beige metal? Were the rust-orange-and-brown seat covers necessary? All the gobs of spit and sunflower seed shells---what, are we on an overnight train to Siberia? Does no one ever clean these floors?

ii. Notice too the ugliness and despair of your fellow passengers. Use your bad mood to read total desperation, haughty condemnation, and even malice into the blank expressions of sleepy commuters. (WHAT IS THAT GUY LOOKING AT?) If yours is a sort of anxious and agitated bad mood, you can even read suicide bomber or crazy man with gun into those bland faces. Twirl your hair, chew your lip, mutter darkly, fidget. (Psst: now that guy is looking at you for real.)

(NEUTRAL MOOD: LIKE A NORMAL PERSON)

Sleep, do the crossword, read your book, or listen to the iPod.

ARISTOTLE ARISTOTLE WAS A BUGGER FOR THE BOTTLE

I would like that study about how "breastfed babies are smarter" to please be put in its proper context. I know this comes off as self-serving, since Nora was obviously raised on formula as an infant in China, and still gets a bottle at naptime and another at bedtime.* (See below for secondary rant.) I am not denying that breast milk is the best deal, all the evidence indeed does point in that direction. But here is a shout-out to those mommies who smile sadly when I mention anything relating to formula or bottles: Please quit acting like it is a fucking tragedy that I did not, in fact could not, breastfeed my daughter. Nora is strong and developmentally on-target. Nora is a genius. Nora has the immune system of the Goddess Of Health. And to the one particular person who nattered on about the closeness and bonding that results from (and in her opinion, only from) breastfeeding, and who then had the gall to say that it was fantastic that Nora was so "responsive" regardless of our sad lack of mouth-to-nipple mother-daughter action, you may want to back away from me because I am seriously getting the urge to shove a breast pad up your ass. "Responsive." Jesus, she's not a plant.

*That's the other thing. Nora is fourteen months and eats tons of solid food---her two bottles a day are more sleep-cues and calcium boosters than anything else. She never walks around with a bottle or has one anywhere other than in my lap, rocking in the rocking chair. (How�s that for "bonding," you crazy lactating ho?) And these days very few people blink an eye if a fourteen-month-old still breastfeeds occasionally. So why is the baby-advice industry so adamant that there should be no more bottles at this age? Patently unfair.

By the way, I was not breastfed either, and yet my IQ is at least sufficient to put me in the trainable and educable category. If we wanted to get fancy-Freudian we could blame my oral fixation on the bottlefed thing, but other than two years of heavy smoking and a lot of ruined pens no harm seems to have been done, and LT isn't complaining.

---mimi smartypants will be up for parole in 2006.

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