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.

caught red-handed shaving Schroedinger's cat

Political Scientists Introduce Theory of Quantum Politics

by mikaydee, additional research by PM

Political Scientists have recently developed a revolutionary new theory explaining the behavior of political bodies. Known as "Quantum Politics," the theory was developed after political scientists made several puzzling observations.

"It started with a study published by some colleagues at the USC Center for International Studies," explains Dr. Nina Lavinskaya, credited with the first formulation of the theory. "They couldn't quite figure out whether Taiwan was a country or not. Sometimes they would look at it, and it seemed just like a country, with a flag and a government and missiles and everything. And then, they would look at it again in a different light, and see a province of China. It just didn't make any sense." The same was true when Taiwan interacted with the countries around it. "If you tested for diplomatic relations, you'd find a province of China. If you tested for trade, you'd find a separate country."

Lavinskaya was struck by the similarities to her work on Pakistan. "One minute, I see an ally in the War on Terror, and the next, I observe the declaration of martial law and the jailing of dissidents. That's not how an ally is supposed to behave."

At the same time, researchers at Northwestern University began charting the position of a body known as "Mitt Romney," and found that he constantly changed depending on who was looking at him. The same was found to be true of similar bodies known as "Rudy Giuliani" and "Hillary Clinton," prompting the observation by Dr. Lavinskaya that "you can never tell where they stand until you look at them, and by looking at them, you change them." This soon became known as the Reuters Uncertainty Principle, a cornerstone of Quantum Politics. "All we can know for sure about them at any given moment is that they exist, and are negative," says Lavinskaya.

Quantum Politics promises to shed light on a number of puzzling phenomena that have baffled political scientists for years. For example, experts have long argued over whether illegal immigrants behave more like a dangerously volatile wave or an individual hard-working nanny or gardener. Equally confusing was why they didn't seem to exist until they ran up against barriers. Lavinskaya is confident. "With the tools of Quantum Politics, we will now be able to effectively analyze behavior that has heretofore seemed to transgress all basic rules of both logic and decency."

in which i roll 1d6 against a +4 social construct, to no avail

Sometimes I wonder when or if ever I will be able to do adult things and have them just be "things" without the telling modifier. Like going to tea or brunch at some expensive place without feeling like an undercover, voyeuristic interloper, all well-mannered and please-and-thank-you and do-pass-the-bellini, while my internal monologue is going "OMG, don't let on that you are still hungover from your night of Bud Light, Jello shots, Nintendo, and Dungeons & Dragons, or the maitre d' will make you wear a dunce cap and put you at the plastic kiddie table in the corner." I still refer to my big work purse as my "mom purse" because it is big enough to hold things like a hairbrush and handiwipes and extra shoes, and smells like leather (because it IS leather), and I realize, MY GOD, at the age of twenty-blah with two graduate degrees, I still associate the smell of a big leather purse with the place from which I used to retrieve my baggie of Cheerios during the boring, non-singing part of church (aka the sermon).

Then, my inner graduate student* takes hold of my insecure, adultlescent yuppie shoulders and shakes me like you're not supposed to shake a baby, declaring self-righteously, "listen, square, the childhood/adulthood dichotomy is, like, this bourgeois invention for, like, selling Barbies and breeding Organization Men," and then she slaps me across the face and I am about to shiv her because I have been empowered by years of watching Buffy and Alias, but then I say "eff it" and we do a mental Jello shot.

*Some people have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. I have an intellectually indignant, antinomian, armchair revolutionary on one shoulder and a frugal, civicly engaged, easily shamed, midwestern schoolmarm on the other. Sometimes they cuddle while listening to NPR. It's hot.

Speaking of civic engagement and transgressing maturity paradigms....

RM and I use our respective talents and interests to enrich the spiritual life of the community:

RM: i made us a cyber santa to protect the house
mikaydee: i don't know what that means, but i really like the sound of it
mikaydee: oh!
mikaydee: lego cyber santa?
RM: yes
mikaydee: yay!
RM: he has a glock
mikaydee: i will build him an altar
mikaydee: we will have a party for him on december 6
RM: and now he has a dagger
mikaydee: blood sacrifice to saint nicolas!

a series of unrelated lists, because prose is so two weeks ago

I. Actual news headlines that sound like Onion headlines, but aren’t, and so are that much scarier:
(1) Former Press Secretary’s New Tell-All Has No Comment
(2) Army Adds “Fix Army” To Petraeus’ To-Do List
(3) I Was Homeless Once

II. Fun with grammar, inspired by my new TV obsession and a vat of chocolate pudding:
(1) "Eat shit and die!" - An enraged yet wistful imperative, paradoxically evocative of either menacing, godlike omnipotence ("You'll do as I say, worm!"), or whiny, ineffectual weakness (because gods may rely on people punishing themselves, but sissies must).
(2) "Eat, shit, and die." - A Sisyphan, almost Nihilistic musing on the futile transience of the physical life, on par with Hamlet ("To be or not to be?") and the Bible ("'All is vanity!' sayeth Koheleth.").
(3) "Eat; shit and DIE!" - Terrifying. And not in that good old-fashioned, paranoid 1950s, the-amorphous-Other-is-coming-to-eat-your-girlfriend way, but in that millenial, painfully self-aware, you-may-think-it's-me-killing-you-but-it's-really-you/society-killing-you way.

III. Highlights from mikaydee’s family Thanksgiving:
(1) “My brothers cut their own goddamn mangoes!”
(2) “Well, the subject came up while we were thinking of funny things to write on the baby’s forehead.”
"Ah, okay."
(3) “Spreading holiday cheer is a lot more fun with someone who takes it as seriously as I do.”
(4) "It never hurts to be too careful."
"Yes, it does! That's what the 'too' signifies!"
(5) “We’ve both been trying to make mom’s noodles from the recipe she gave us, but it never turns out the same. He thinks the missing ingredient is love.”
“…I was gonna say criticism.”
“…Does mom know the difference?”
"I dunno. Do you?"
"Nope."
(6) “Sage and garlic do NOT count as vegetables.”
(7) “Do you think the baby would get mad if we dressed her up as Kuato from TOTAL RECALL?”