Saturday, September 19, 2009

I Love the Smell of Crazy in the Morning.


One good way to concentrate directionless anger inside you is to read Ann Coulter back to back until you've either kicked the computer screen in or unintentionally redirected the Slice in your mouth to your keyboard via your nose, thereby precluding the ability to scroll to read further.

She says good science and good religion are based on the same principles. She says these principles include the ability to be factually proved.

I'd say WTF, but I have come to the conclusion that quiet understatement is the only way to go here. 

In connection, I think some women are meant to talk and be heard and some women are meant to be quiet and look pretty. Ann Coulter looks like a skinny blond horse -  a fairly pretty horse, but a horse nonetheless - so I was momentarily perplexed as to what to do with her. I have come to the conclusion that she could be a potted palm.  Inoffensive, quiet and pretty in an anaemic, apologetic way. Hotel-doorway-ficus-plant. One would put Coulter's feet in the planter and fill up with good nutritious mud. Then one would stretch her arms out and fertilise them. Water regularly until green shoots are seen. 

If she remained quiet, people would pass her by without comment. If she began talking, little boys would pee in her and people would surreptitiously dump bad Paneer Butter Masala in her. I often wish that this could happen to her in real life.

I grew a plant when I was six, as part of a school assignment. It was a little kidney bean. I put it in a plastic cup (sorry, I didn't know of Al Gore.. Not that anything has changed now that I do.) and filled it with cotton and arranged my bean artistically in the centre. Then I watered it and watched it night and day like a hawk (Would I be that mum, the one giving her kindergartener kid advanced algebra lessons?). My bean cooperated commendably, textbook-fashion (shoots on day 1, lengthening on day 2) until the third morning  when I was to take it to school where it would sit on a shelf and compete in size, colour, positioning aesthetic, length of shoot, shotput, weightlifting and 100m sprint with all my classmates' beans. But when I picked it up and did the final rearrangement, the shoot broke off the bean. I was unfazed, reckless and not excessively  encumbered with scruples.

I stuck it back with fevikwik. 

What? 

I was discovered when it remained the exact same size for the next three days when the other beans in class continued to show off, pushing out fat little shoots of suspicious length in an obscenely enthusiastic manner with no consideration for the delicate sensibilities of their disabled brother. When confronted with an accusation of Sproutal Malpractice, I maintained at that time - and this continues to be my official position - that my bean was simply suffering from performance anxiety. 

Modern parenting is a fucking headache. 

It is an indicator of delicious weather that your first reaction to it is the barely controllable urge to tear off your clothes and run through the sprinklers in the football field. Or anywhere. Personally I prefer sprinkler-dampened football fields. Temporary insanity is uplifting, but hot asphalt will bring you down to earth, which would be ok if the earth weren't so skin-peelingly, nose-shrivellingly, hair-fryingly hot. In any case, I do not run (not dignified, and my limbs protest and jerk about stupidly in different directions. I look like a 1956 washing machine that's come to life without notice. The day I run in a cohesive fashion, I will run in public. This excuse may or may not be a poor cover up for my sudden and inexplicable desire to own Juicy Couture trackpants.)

Oh, and I do not go naked, because my jiggly bits are shy, unlike my talky bits.

When my throat gets very dry and I keep talking, I sound like Billie Holiday. (At this point, a friend wishes to record her rather offensively strong dissention; apparently I sound like an aging bullfrog. To my good friend I say my blog, my opinion. Go make your own blog. Gngngngngn)

Modern American biology textbooks are enjoyable for the reason that they're very, perhaps too approachable; they make complex discussions of mitochondrial function sound like something that can be learnt off a Magic School Bus episode. You're always left with the vague but persistent feeling that it's got to be more complicated than that! It is for the exact same reason that I dislike American Physics textbooks; they make me feel like an idiot for having whimpered miserably at the mere mention of Physics my entire life. IT WASN'T THAT EASY, OK?!

The world is slowly and inescapably moving towards anarchy. One good way to prepare your children for this is to teach them to hunt for their own food. Place a Milano biscuit packet across the room and have your child stealthily stalk it with silent grace until the perfect moment where he (or she) may attack and be sure to succeed. Then take the packet from them and eat all the biscuits in front of their eyes. What? You're bigger, it's the law of the jungle. 

Sleep appears to be a good idea, but I won't really know for sure until tomorrow morning, will I? Unless there are larger, more distant repercussions unknown to me now, which I will be sure to record here for your benefit in the  last few moments of my life. 

Bye.