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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Things That Actually Happened

(I’m not saying this isn’t a round-up of notable events of 2012. I’m saying that if it is, it’s not a very good round-up or my 2012 was rather lackluster.)

That time my dad ordered “menudo soup” at the Mexican restaurant where we’ve eaten since I was a little kid, only to declare that “this noodle soup isn’t good,” and then he went on to say that the waitress had said “noodle soup” and not “menudo soup” and also who knows what menudo is, anyway, because no one has ever heard of it ever?

That time I was wearing my bathrobe while holding the smaller of my parent’s two dogs and it dove beneath one flap of the robe and then “swam” around my mid-section, above where the robe was cinched, and then popped his head out the other side, and I felt weird and violated about it, and I wondered if pregnant ladies maybe have dreams about this kind of stuff happening.

That time I was in line at the grocery store in my hometown and the two Latina girls ahead of me where arguing about whether Brandy Norwood is Snoop Dogg’s first cousin — she is, by the way, and for some reason people tend not to know that — and so I stepped in and agreed with the Latina wearing the hat, “No, she’s actually right. They are first cousins,” and they both glared at me without speaking, and then I thought about whether my Caucasian heritage meant that I shouldn’t know about the interrelatedness of black musical sensations.

That time Django Unchained hit theaters and the person I wanted to see it with more than anyone else was my Southern lit professor from college, because she would tie everything back to William Faulkner, I’m sure.

That time I helped my grandmother play solitaire, and yes I realize that the card name is by nature a one-person effort, but she needs the help, honestly, and I’d literally never seen anyone so delighted to have unlock all four of the suits.

The time I found out there’s a song called “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” and it’s sung by a girl named Gayla Peavey, who for some reason didn’t become a household name but who did, in the end, kind of get a hippopotamus.

The time in 1987 when I hand-selected this coffee mug as a worthy representation of my love for my father, and now drinking out of it magically transports you back to a time when rainbow bears didn’t mean gay, and also I don’t hate the design in spite of its datedness.


That time they made the movie Congo and they were all, “We need to make this as Jurassic Park-y as possible so it will make a boatload of money, so we’re taking a Michael Crichton book about adventures in a lush, green place populated by intelligent and dangerous animals, and now we need someone really Laura Dern-y to play an intrepid lead scientist lady,” and then they saw that Laura Linney has the same first name as Laura Dern and that they kind of look alike if you squint, and they gave her the role for those reasons and now this lady from Congo is the one who reminds you that you’re watching Downton Abbey, even though you probably know.

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