anything you can do i can do better

Watch closely as PM attempts the highest difficulty trick in his repertoire--the post-feminist intellectual deadpan:

PM: the subjugation of women by men might be man's greatest achievement, since it allowed us to invent all the really cool things
PM: we're crafty!
mikaydee: thank you, for summing up the entirety of radical feminism, albeit in a perverse, mysogynistic way

10!

there ought to be tableaux

My siblings and I, through rigorous hypothesizing, game theorizing, and quantitative and qualitative testing, have come up with the four major motivations for eating. They are: (1) hunger, (2) boredom, (3) principle*, and (4) spite. As an example of the last, I present the following:

MP: omg are you home?? i'm totally making you take me to the airport. i'll take you to chipotle!!
mikaydee: haha, no. i'm at work!
mikaydee: [RM] could take you to the airport
MP: fine i don't know how you can pass up an offer like chipotle
mikaydee: i'm at work!
mikaydee: and can get chipotle on the way home
mikaydee: which i will now
mikaydee: just to spite you
MP: >:-o
mikaydee: a spite burrito!
mikaydee: mmmm, the most delicious kind....

*Often accompanied by observations such as "wasting food is a sin," or "there are starving children in [generically poor developing nation]"

valley of the historically accurate dolls (yet another experiment in excessive footnoting***)

Happy St. Lucia's Day!

When I was around 9 or 10 I was heavily into American Girl books* and I used to wish I was Swedish so we could celebrate St. Lucia's Day just like Kirsten's family. The celebration seemed to combine the joys of hair-centric ethno-religious pageantry, pyromania (candles on your head!), and every child's innate desire to eat cookies for breakfast.

*Say what you want about the American Girl franchise, but before it morphed into a creepy fetishization of upper-middle-class faux-erudite girlhood, a sure sign that your parents are going to get slammed by the Alternative Minimum Tax in April, in the beginning there were books. And the books were short. And the books were unapologetically formulaic. And while they didn't tell the most compelling or original stories ("Gee, being a girl was really hard back then, unless you were SPUNKY, in which case it ROCKED!") they were jam packed with neat little historical details, which, while stagnant from a narrative standpoint, completely fascinated me in and of themselves (Felicity had to scrape her sugar from a loaf! Butter was a rationed commodity during WWII!). If seven seasons of Star Trek: TNG have taught me anything, it is that I can enjoy even the most prosaic story if set in a well-drawn world with weird costumes and unfamiliar foodways**. Excuse me while I go get some mincemeat and apple butter from the replicator....

**My new favorite hippy-dippy-earthy-granola social science word, having recently surpassed "menstrual narratives."

***And excessive parentheticals! Behold the dizzying post-modernism of my grammar, and TREMBLE!

neither social utility nor socialist utopia

Rejected Facebook "How They Know Each Other" Details:

- They exchange strained pleasantries at the water cooler.
- They dated the same guy and now loathe him for similar reasons.
- People drunkenly mistake them for each other because they are of the same sex and non-white race/ethnicity.
- They exchange money and drugs.
- They exchange money and sex.
- They exchange sex and drugs.
- They see each other every day but are separated by an invisible yet impenetrable class barrier.
- They were set up by a well-meaning but misguided friend, and the approval of this detail will likely be the last communication that passes between them.