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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


2003-09-02 ... 3:41 p.m.

"Did you ever wonder how Jellyfish reproduce with that squishy like body? Well now you're going to find out." There is something really great about this kid's rhetorical style.

Bus vs. house photo.

If it takes didgeridoo to be healed, I might just opt for the disease. I hate the sound of that thing. As far as I am concerned it's a didgeriDON'T. (Rimshot, please.)

(Side note: LT and I have a little private joke where we pretend that I am terminally ill [Oh ho ho! It's funny already!] and the only treatment left is "kayak therapy," where I would be floated down a river in a kayak and then participate in a drum circle. We have an agreement that no such heroic measures will be taken should I ever end up in a bad way.)

"super-short mop"

"new 'do"

"mop-haired star"

"curly locks"

"teenybop, angst-ridden image"

"help for her lovesick heart in an unconventional way and ends up trapped with her friends in a strange black and white world."

(I found this story during one of my Google playtime sessions, and please: Bow your heads along with me right now and give thanks that you are not a writer for the E! Entertainment Network's Online "News.")

My whole lunchtime was spent thinking about this, and there was also some speculation on a sandwich-shaped universe (cheddar, mustard, sprouts, and cucumber on multi-grain bread) but I will spare you that.

Hey Joe, why so yellow and waxy? Go get a facial or something. Also: blah blah crank crank. Besides the Nader debacle, this guy was Al Gore's biggest liability in 2000, if you ask me. Which you didn't.

Back to work and I do not like it. When I walked into my office, stuff was piled practically to the ceiling, and how exactly did that happen? Did people come in over the weekend just to create work for me? Also, it's almost the end of the year (well, only for those of us who work for monthly publications) and everyone is scrambling to use up their page budgets, which means BIG HONKING ISSUES. Normally, five times a month I sit down to read and review a stack of about 130 pages---now the average stack is more like 150.

Those long days of issue review (sitting and reading and correcting) have been made much more pleasant with iPod, though. I have yet to make a single playlist but instead am more about the Mimi Radio. I set the thing to "shuffle" and let iPod do the driving. Today a lot of classical seems to be spiraling up into my ears, and it is a pleasant surprise when, right after a Bartok quartet (No. 1), something goofy and retro like the Humpty Dance starts to play. There are a lot of good moments in that song but I think my favorite has to be the shout-out to Samoans. Poor Samoa deserves a lot more shout-outs than it gets. They have no army and they kill themselves a lot. Why are those Girl Scout cookies called Samoas? Is it the tropical coconut flavor or do they have a secret backwards message telling you to commit suicide?

I think I mentioned before that I have a lot of urges to do things that would almost certainly lead to my death or injury, and that these urges are not in any way connected to suicidal ideas or despair. This is hard to explain, but on the edges of buildings I feel like I might just spontaneously hurl myself over, and when I used to drive I had to fight the urge to slip into the oncoming traffic and cause a head-on collision. Let me reiterate: I am not looking for self-annihilation. In fact, it is not even so much that I want to do these things as that I don't know for sure that I won't do them. Some of the urges I have to squash down are not quite as lethal. For instance, I find my fingers itching to pull down the baggy pants of some of these hip-hop-style kids, just because I could. Or to grab the ass of a total stranger on a packed subway car. Or, in the mornings as I walk to the bus stop all nice and clean in my work clothes, to drop my briefcase and run screaming commando toward the deep muddy pit that Chicago sewer crews have recently dug in the street,* or else to leap upon the bucket of the earth mover operating there and let it take me for a ride, because the city has not cordoned off the site in any way and I cannot believe they have done such a poor job of protecting me from myself.

It sounds so simplistically Freudian, but maybe that is the other side of the rigid and organized OCD me. The growling-Id me. The me who feels an overwhelming attraction toward senseless do-something-stupid actions like jumping over city bridges into the river, de-pantsing gangbangers, walking on the El tracks. These things all flash in my mind's eye like a little movie, mere moments before I don't do them.

*The signs all around my street claim that this project was** finished on August 1, by the way. But the hole just keeps getting deeper and muddier.

**Or, since it obviously wasn't, "willen have on-been" finished?

I will try to limit my psycho spontaneous episodes to nice, non-injurious things like spontaneous dancing, spontaneous makeout, or spontaneous bringing you a piece of pie. So far, so good.

On the train this girl was standing near the door, making all these weird little birdlike head movements, and smiling periodically. It took me a minute, but I soon realized that she was using the darkened in-the-subway-tunnel window as a mirror, and was sort of checking herself out and flirting with her reflection. Is this not in poor taste? I think everyone has had their moments of trying out poses and facial expressions in the mirror, but you should save those for private bathroom time. And she really bugged me because I could just tell she was thinking "my, I look fabulous," and she was practicing all kinds of irritating, stereotypically feminine, coy looks, and I just thought OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO FAKE. (And OH MY GOD I SUCK for making value judgments about total strangers on the El. But you love me anyway, right?)

Of course I have mirror habits of my own, but they mostly involve making a monster face as my last act before leaving the bathroom. Wash hands, maybe poke at my hair a little, make sure no food items are smeared across teeth or around mouth, make monster face, then leave. When LT is in the bathroom brushing or flossing, I also like to hide behind him and then pop up in the mirror while making said monster face. Because nothing is funnier than people appearing and disappearing behind things. This is why puppet shows are some of the greatest entertainment known to mankind.

(Thus I spake.)

---mimi smartypants wishes that, just once, she would get to engage in a literary catfight with Martin Amis.

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