Back to Diaryland 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	2005-03-30 ... 2:37 p.m. IT WAS CONTENT VS. LINKS AND LINKS KICKED CONTENT'S ASS Have some rotting fish! Say it three times fast: promote goat meat. Best messageboard thread in the history of the world. Oh great, now I have laboratory-created black holes to worry about. Aw, animal friends. More, please. Ham snack. Underwear linguistics. Bitch PhD is a new favorite. Lots of good stuff in her link sidebar too. Strangely non-light-hearted Chicago bus website, complete with audio files of the recorded announcements. 1. I had a bad porn dream the other night---not just a sex-dream but one with the entire plot of a cheesy porn film, with a genie that offered to grant me three wishes, as long as every one of the wishes ended up with me being reamed. It was totally clich� and lame, and I was embarrassed for my brain when I woke up. 2. Similarly, last week I was lying in bed drifting in and out of consciousness and had a semi-dream where S. and I went to the diner for our weekly breakfast, and I ordered pie from the rotating dessert case. When the pie came, I pointed to it and sang the line from the Jeffersons theme song. You know, the one about finally getting a piece of the pie. Once again, when I came to full wakefulness I was very grateful that I had not actually done this. 3. And in case those first two True Tales Of Dorkitude were not enough, on Good Friday I had a couple of beers and then totally blanked on the name of the holiday. I was stuttering out something about "Today is...today is...um..." and ultimately resorted to holding my arms straight out all cruciform and making a "gguughhhh" noise. If anything could serve to further demote my spiritual status from "raised Catholic" to "irreverent heathen," it is probably that little mime of the death of Jesus. I honestly was not trying to mock Good Friday, however, I just had a serious memory lapse. 4. Speaking of, I am getting mighty tired of some of the e-mail that came my way after I linked a speech by Natalie Angier about raising kids without religion. Enough with the frothing and with the putting words in my mouth. I don't plan to tell Nora that Christians (or any other religious folk) are stupid or na�ve; I don't think of myself as an atheist (since that would involve stating definitively that there is no god, and I have no clue if there is or not); I think that learning about all the world's religions is a good idea for every kid, even if I happen to believe that no particular one is Correct and True; and I think that if everyone behaved the way Jesus suggested, the world would probably be a nicer place. My only point was that ethics and morals can indeed be taught to a child without a religious framework, despite much conventional Christian opinion to the contrary, and that I plan to give a scientific or humanistic explanation rather than a faith-based one to every single "why?" question about the world that my kid will ever ask. That is all I meant. Are we square now? 5. Overheard public-transit conversations: a. Two very cute old men bemoaning the disappearance of canned chop suey. (Gack! Good riddance, says I!) b. A couple of thugs on the Peterson bus discussing the karma involved in owning a gun---one guy felt strongly that it was a good idea to be able to "pop" anyone who might want to pop you, while the other said that when "his time is up" he will go (violently) into that good night, so to speak, and implied that carrying a gun was too much like saying fuck you to fate. It was a fascinating philosophical discussion, made even better by the gangsta dialect involved. c. Some alterna-kids discussing who was ugly in their social circle, and giving lots of details about said ugliness. I am going to sound like a sad-ass oldster when I say this, but it depressed me to hear such shallow bullshit spewed from the mouths of teenagers with multicolored hair and punk-slogan lapel buttons. I certainly did not constantly stand on Moral High Ground at that age either---I remember my friends and I making fun of people we considered too "normal" or "popular," and I had oddly snobby ideas about clothing during that time in my life (if it did not come from a thrift store or was not actually pulled out of a dumpster, it was fit only for capitalist monkey Gap clone tools). But even in high school my friends and I stood far enough outside the Beauty Myth to not sit around gossiping about people being ugly. How can that be considered "alternative"? (I know, I know, punk is dead, I should get over it, it always was more about fashion than ideals anyway, and I persist in believing otherwise only because of anarchy-colored Aging Punk Nostalgia Glasses. There. I have made fun of myself and now you don't have to. Mimi Smartypants: The Full-Service Diary.) d. This was not a conversation, but it happened on public transit and it was awesome: The North Avenue bus I was on hit one of those city-owned metal garbage cans and sheared it off its base, and we practically did a Dukes Of Hazzard maneuver as we motored up and over it, and then it got stuck under the wheels and there were all sorts of terrific grinding noises until it finally came loose, and outside the bus window one could actually see motherfucking sparks as we dragged it along. I felt like cheering. Oh happy day. 6. Yesterday Nora and I were taking advantage of the warmer weather and hanging out on the front stoop (although with a sippy cup of soy milk rather than 40-ouncers of malt liquor), when she noticed a plastic bag caught in a tree. This led to a protracted discussion wherein my little environmentalist, who clearly gives a hoot and doesn't pollute, said, "No no! Plastic bag not go in tree! Plastic bag go in RECYCLING!" Then Nora suggested we get a ladder and retrieve it (no freaking way), and I had to promise that some "workers"* would do exactly that "tomorrow morning" in order to get her to drop the topic, and since city-provided plastic bag removal is extremely unlikely I now am going to have to hurry her past that tree until the damn thing blows away. Or else just hope she forgets all about it, which she probably will because 2-year-olds are all HEY! LOOK OVER THERE! with the naturally short attention spans. *I probably should not have used this word. Because what comes after self-righteous toddler environmentalism? With my luck, it will be self-righteous toddler socialism. 7. Remember "Nora poop potty next week?" We all had a good laugh about that one at my house. How cute, blah blah etc. Except. Starting the following weekend and continuing up until the present moment, Nora has not deposited her productions anywhere but the toilet. She has recently started to ask to pee there too, and stays dry for remarkably long stretches, and of course the "next week" comment was just a weird coincidence but I am a little freaked out nonetheless. (Does Nora have a secret day planner?) So now I am spending entirely too much of the Kid Supplies budget on Elmo-themed Pull-Ups. And ordering a folding toilet-seat gadget to take with me when we are out and about, after nearly losing tiny Ms. Nora in the cavernous bowl of a restaurant toilet last night. I guess this thing is really happening. A coworker of mine inquired about Nora, and upon hearing the Toileting News asked, "Does it make you sad? Because it means she's not a baby anymore?" Huh? That would be a big, fat, dry-diapered NO. ---mimi smartypants became all polymath love's androgynous advocate. back/forward