Syllabus #37

I had a dream that I stole a tube of CBD hand cream from a stall at a farmer's market.  I rubbed it all over my body and felt like I was ensconced in a pillowy marshmallow, floating in a mug of hot chocolate.  It sounds sticky but really it was glorious.  Why did I steal it?  Probably so I could justify slathering it all over. 

In real life, even if I was somehow persuaded that a CBD-infused product contained a high enough concentration to do anything at all, I would probably still convince myself not to spend the money.  And if I experienced a momentary lapse in cheapskatery, I would definitely ration that $30 tube of artisanal snake oil to make it last until the day marijuana is removed from the federal list of Schedule 1 drugs and everyone incarcerated for non-violent marijuana charges is exonerated and given some form of reparations, which is to say, probably decades from now, if ever.  I would be in a nursing home at age 113, rubbing that shiz on my gnarled, arthritic knuckles.

All I see is TOILET.  "Early to bed, early to rise, make's a man's colon healthy inside."  That's how it goes, no?

Speaking of living forever, here's this week's food for thought.  Full of fiber for efficient processing of waste, as usual:

Just another reason I'm going to live forever.

Have you read all of these?  Have you borrowed them from a library?

This saddens me.  I definitely wasn't the kind of kid who printed out the full length Monty Python and the Holy Grail script and carried it in my backpack for the entire duration of middle school and at one point could quote it line by line.  A kid like that never had any hope of being cool.  In fact, over 20 years later, she's still a pretty embarrassing human to be around.  But perhaps the joke's on us.   Could it be that he's not dead yet?

Sometimes I feel like we're all wearing Doomsday wristwatches.  This is a perfect either/or question for a dating app profile:  If you were a perpetual clock, would you be a Doomsday Clock or a Clock of the Long Now?

Proof that the world is ending (so maybe I won't make it to 113):  Grownups drinking milkies in the most serious of settings.  To be fair, Liz Warren might be staving off the osteoporosh, and Sally Field with her Boniva is probably not allowed on the Senate floor.  Can they request goat or non-dairy milks?  Would they have to pause the impeachment proceedings to hold a debate on what constitutes a true milk, and whether something has to have mammary glands to be able to produce milk?  I might down a glass of milk laced with arsenic if I had to listen to Ted Cruz orate on the nipple-less nature of oats, soy, and almonds.

If you want to stave off the end of the world and get the lurid image of adult milk chuggers out of the forefront of your mind, take this quiz to help you make an informed decision about which reasonable grownup to support in the coming primaries.  I wasn't surprised by who ended up at the top of my ideological matches, but I was surprised by who fell to the bottom.

Do you stan for Goodnight Moon, or are you on Team Ann Carroll Moore?  Maybe she enjoyed a little too much control and didn't always use her powers for good, but if it weren't for Notorious ACM, we might not even have children's libraries.  Maybe my very job wouldn't even exist.  Despite that, the most compelling part of this article was the merely parenthetical anecdote describing how Margaret Wise Brown died:  "Recovering from surgery for an ovarian cyst in a hospital in France, she playfully kicked her leg up, cancan-style, to show a nurse how well she was feeling; the action dislodged an embolism from a vein in her leg, which traveled to her brain, killing her nearly instantly."  Jee-zus.

Analog Reading:

I'm starting off strong this year.  So far I've finished 6 books and will likely finish a 7th today.  This week I read:

The Heap by Sean Adams - This was a fun read.  Bleak, absurdist humor in the vein of Catch 22.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead - Read this book.  Don't hesitate.  Go to your library right now.  If it's closed, break in, but just like, use self checkout or leave a note, because librarians are pretty protective of our book babies' whereabouts.  If an independent book shop is closer, go there and buy it.  There's a reason this book was on every smart person's Favorite Books of 2019 list, including Obama.  The story itself is powerful and important and wrenching, but the writing.  Sweet baby Jesus, the writing was masterful.  There was one moment towards the end where I had to put the book down for a few minutes and say "Whoa" out loud to no one.  I mean, Charlie heard me but he has about a 6-word vocabulary so it probably didn't register.  I am truly in awe and would recommend this book as shining, glittering example of the "show, don't tell" writing convention.

Now I'm about 2/3 finished with Normal People by Sally Rooney and plan to finish it today.  As well written as it is, at first I was annoyed that I found myself enjoying it because it seemed like a 2010s Irish rehashing of a 90s American teen movie where the ugly outcast girl and the hot popular guy hook up and that suddenly validates her existence.  You know, minus anyone putting pubes on a slice of pizza.  But the book is so much more than that, and at the very least we see a more 3-dimensional portrait of the inner lives of both characters.  However, if you haven't read this book yet, I'm sorry you won't be able to picture the main characters as anyone other than Rachael Leigh Cook and Freddie Prinze Jr. now.