Two plants I don't own but am interested in killing

This is just a warning.

1. LEAF TREE FIG PLANT

That's not it's real name but I don't like its real name so you can click through the photo to find out what it's really called. Look how beautiful it looks in this beautiful sunny expensive apartment and imagine how great it would look in my sometimes-clean not-at-all-expensive apartment! It is native to Western Africa and seems totally easy to take care of.

2. ZZ PLANT

Also not the real name but in this case it is a real, commonly-used abbreviation. And it also happens to be an off-color slang word in French! It would look so good for the few days it was alive and as a bonus it is super poisonous.

3. EVERY PLANT I HAVE EVER SEEN.

Portland safari

When I left work the other day there was a tour bus driving by - for some reason our street is a must-see if you want to spot Portland landmarks like rain, a handful of coffee shops, a grocery store, and

"...here is a place that makes advertisements you know about." a tour guide minutes away from boring herself to sleep said over a loudspeaker.



Growing up my siblings and I shared an obsession with animal facts and a morbid fascination with the zoo. We went as often as possible. Summer was zoo season and if you observed any animal in captivity in the Twin Cities between 1996 and 2006, we were there, and you heard us.

"In the wild a lion this size would cover 65 miles of the Sahara a day, chasing gazelles and wildebeest." we'd tell strangers watching a lion napping next to a bowl of hamburger patties in an enclosure the size of an office cubicle.

"Look at his fur, it would kill his mother to see him like this. Good thing he's never seen his family."

"Rhythmic swimming like that is the first sign of dementia."

"Let's get an ice cream and then look at that depressed giraffe with the curved neck."



The other day in Portland the tour bus passengers looked at me with the same expression: the way you look at a polar bear in the corner of a cement room, slowly chewing on his arm.

"In the wild a writer this size would get up to eight hours of sleep."

"See how she hunches like that? Another ten years and she'll be lucky if she can stand."

"What's that in her hand? Is that just a fistful of bread? I can't watch this anymore."

Dispatches from Aix en Provence

I don't really recognize myself lately.

Because the last couple days have been made up of really lazy activities. Like sitting at a cafe spending fifteen minutes slowing drinking a hot chocolate and fifteen minutes not drinking a room-temperature chocolate. And today I woke up from some sort of trance and I was in a lipstick store which is apparently a thing, trying on a third tube of red lipstick.

"Don't just dot it like that," said a saleswoman who looked like a very pretty clown. She waved the mirror closer at me. "Do big stripes, go all around.

"That's good but do another loop." said the only stranger whose face I would gladly wash.

"I don't even recognize you!" she finally said, I heard it minutes later because her voice had to travel through the deep layers of makeup that separated us, and the sound became more muffled as it crossed each barrier, making what should have been screams of terror sound like delighted praise.

a few of the things we want

Last week my friend Alanna and I went to see a singer-who-will-not-be-named. I was feeling like doing laundry and going to bed early, but we are party animals so we went. I brought an apple to eat while we waited for the concert to start. That sentence is both a fact AND a hint at who the concert was. I'm trying to eat five fruits and vegetables a day lately.

Fast-forward through the normal parts of a concert that involve singing and clapping to the part where someone in the audience yelled something not very nice, and everything immediately went off the rails. The guy doing lighting saw an opportunity and started shining spotlights on people yelling in the audience, and on the singer, who was yelling back. Pretty soon the only people who weren't yelling were me, Alanna, and the sweet older couple sitting next to us.

It was definitely the most uncomfortable I've been at a concert, and once at a concert in college the man next to me kept grabbing my butt because he thought it was his girlfriend's.

I wanted to leave and get started on my laundry and not have to deal with the spotlights and the fighting but we were worried someone would see us leaving and scream at us.

Finally the singer announced that she was too upset to sing anymore. It seemed like a weak excuse, the other day I did a conference call for two hours even though I had to go to the bathroom the entire time, which seems like a bigger deal than being upset. I guess that is one way I know I am not famous. That and the only people who recognize me consistently are a cashier at Whole Foods and the bus driver who saw me jaywalk once.

"So ___ all of you, this show is ___ing over I never wanted to do it anyway!" said the singer.

"Oh dear, now that's really a shame." said the sweet older lady next to me.

"You again." said the bus driver who saw me jaywalk once. I really need to start taking a different bus.

almost too healthy.

"We're so excited you're here today," my nurse said, while she strapped that horrible thing to your arm that tests how tightly they can squeeze you before your arm falls off, and also checks your blood pressure.

"Doctor Anderson told me you were coming in, and I asked what we were doing and he said we'd need some bloodwork and I said 'Oh no. This is going to be a disaster.'"

Can we take a minute, or thirty minutes because that's how long it takes to check blood pressure, to talk about how much I hate the word bloodwork? You're a nurse, not a construction crew. What are we working on? All you're doing is taking blood out of my body. Is showering dirtwork? Is nausea barfwork? Is a traffic accident safetywork? This metaphor has gone too far but you get the idea.

"This is going to be a complete disaster." she repeated. "I told everyone in the office and we've all been talking about it all day."

The fact that a nurse I only vaguely remembered was so familiar with my phobias was only mildly unsettling and it didn't make me feel any sicker than I already felt (which was definitely barfwork level). We walked around a corner and saw two more nurses who I promise I had never seen in my life.

"Brooke!" said one complete stranger.

"Our favorite fainter!" said another complete stranger.

They held up three different kinds of juice. For some reason I chose the one that stained the easiest.

Aside from their (friendly?) threats to punch me in the face if I moved and "laugh immediately and literally talk about it for months" if I passed out again, the nurses at my doctor's office are ok. I got bloodwork done and it was not the worst thing. And they gave me the dinosaur tape and they gave me a new piece when I accidentally ripped it off in a moment of panic.

And they were really nice when I spilled red juice all over the carpet.

I don't know why they have carpet in a hospital. If I start coming any more often I'm sure they'll be switching to linoleum soon.



Anyway the good news is I'm the healthiest!

fool me once

When I walked across Spain for a week I met a lot of people who had never heard of Portland, which at first I thought was fair. Not everyone needs to know about Portland. "Is it near New York City?" they always asked.

It's literally as far away from New York City as you can possibly get in the continental US.

"I really want to go to New York City." said everyone on earth.

Then three South African girls invited me to walk with them for the rest of my trip. Five days of walking with me means I slowly provide more and more facts about the city I live in, and the facts get stranger and stranger, less and less possible, until you realize the city must be imaginary, and I am most likely a compulsive liar, and I am probably going to murder you and your friends in the Spanish countryside.



Here are true but made-up-sounding things I will tell you about "Portland" as we walk:

Forests remind me of Portland! Cats remind me of Portland! So does sun. So do clouds, and mountains. My favorite thing in Portland is probably the ocean.

In Portland people don't eat meat, or anything from animals.

In Portland people ONLY eat meat, it's a diet inspired by cavemen.

In Portland I lived in a high-rise building full of professional basketball players. There are no street performers, only people selling a homelessness newspaper for a dollar. There are chickens everywhere. I get free shoes, yogurt costs a fortune. There's a giant birds' nest with bad air circulation. If you want breakfast you have to wait in lines three hours long. Most food is served in trucks. There are hazelnuts everywhere.



The more I told them true stories that sounded like poorly-crafted lies the more I realized how unbelievably great Portland is - we have the ocean and chickens and cereal-flavored ice cream and everyone needs to know about it. Because you can go to Spain or South Africa or outer space and there probably aren't very many cities as good. I will go, and I will look for them, and I will let you know.

In Portland my friend Boaz hosts a talk show attached to a bicycle and if you believe that then you are the most gullible person on earth, and you should sign this petition for it to be on the television show Portlandia.



And then visit Portland! After you go to New York City.

Super is the same in both languages.

Super old men in France will talk to anything slow enough, and when I'm waiting for something I'm slow enough. The other day I was waiting in a park and an old man wearing about four sweaters came and wanted to chat, about how great my nose is, and where I learned French, and if I have ever lived in a desert and what I think of souls.

"I'm going to be honest." he said. "If I had a time machine and could be a young man again, and if you lost some weight, I would ask you to marry me right now on the spot."

"That is super honest." I said.

This t-shirt scares my arms.

The best thing about being back in Marseille, besides the sea and the roofs (doesn't it seem like it should be rooves?), and the Deluxe Potatoes at McDonalds, is my immediate transformation back into Brughk, that awkward smiling girl who keeps saying things like "This song smells like a song I know" and "Is your family a boat?" What normal and stimulating conversation! Who wouldn't want to hang out with her for hours as she slowly and painfully explains jokes she's thought of that make no sense and complicated stories filled with nouns she can't remember?

People in Marseille are super patient but I've still resorted to mostly talking about feelings - because they only require the present tense and it just makes everything a lot easier. Especially feelings that involve fear, because it's easy to pronounce, or pretty things, because the word "pretty" is the same for both masculine and feminine words. My obvious go-to conversation is spiders, which are both pretty and scary. Marseille has heard a lot about spiders the last few days. And it smells like there are a few more spider feelings still to come.

I have a photo of a dolphin castle but it's not loading so take a minute to imagine it. The dolphins are pink.

DO NOT FEED HONEY TO INFANTS

Yogurt Review:

This yogurt tastes the way sunscreen smells.




If you want to taste summer but by "taste summer" you don't mean watermelon or lemonade or barbecue or anything you would normally eat in summer, you just mean you want your mouth full of the smell of sunscreen, with a few grainy bits maybe sand maybe rocks, that's what this is.

This seems legit but you have Oreos in your teeth.

The other day while I was wasting time getting my hair done I had these six ideas for how to waste less time.

Manicure fortune
You're already sitting there having a stranger touch your hands for half an hour, why not have them read your palms? As a bonus if you find out something horrible is going to happen at least your cuticles will look great.

Personal trainer doctor
In this one a doctor chases you for hours until he or she eventually catches you, annoys you, and charges you money. Unless the doctor can't catch you which means you're healthy.

ID and smile check
You're on your way into a party or bar or something and you want to look your best and this guy needs to look at your face anyway, now also he'll check if you have spinach in your teeth. It would take an additional zero seconds.

Treadmill Line
Why just stand in line for Iron Man 17 when you could be walking for hours? This would also help weed out people who weren't really serious about waiting.

Tanning concert
For shy rock musicians who don't want to perform in front of crowds of screaming fans, but instead want to perform for a room full of fans lying quietly in tanning beds. This is obviously also great for the fans, because they get tans.

Celebrity Dentist
No one likes the dentist + everyone likes celebrities = people are alright with celebrity dentists? The downside to this one is I imagine it would be incredibly expensive.

Activities to pass time in elevators

Do you have small metal cubes in your building that groups of people occasionally stand in together for what feels like an extremely tame version of seven minutes in heaven? At my building we do.

Very small talk

How was your weekend? It's Thursday. 

Study the floor or gaze into the air in front of you

Still looks like a regular floor and regular air. Interesting.

Distract yourself with your phone

If you hold it close enough to your eyes you can pretend you're somewhere else. People in the elevator might still be able to see you though, I'm not sure.

Ask if your elevator-mates if they've ever been in an elevator accident.

This is the unexpected Best Thing Ever. Everyone has been in one or knows someone who has. What better place to tell these stories than inside an elevator? Who better to tell them to than strangers?

I only discovered this technique yesterday and already I've heard two stories about an elevator dropping a floor, one story about someone losing a foot, and one story about a subway. Subways aren't even elevators, but they come up, that's how good this conversation starter is.

And if we all start telling more horrific elevator accident stories to each other, eventually we're all going to start taking the stairs more, which is going to save our lives, and the world.

And then if that doesn't work try this.

10 million things in Portland: night food

I like Portland. Some people have never been. Visit Portland! Here are 4 of 10 million reasons you should. If it's the middle of the night and you are hungry it is really lucky that you found this.


Some people will tell you the best thing about Luc Lac is that it’s open until 4 am. These people are not to be trusted. After midnight they have a limited menu with no curry and you’re either going to get pho but be too tired to maneuver eating it or the next morning you’re going to have a vague memory of eating eight crispy rolls. Or you might have a vivid memory and that’s a lot worse.



Get the kind with pineapple, I can’t be held responsible for anything else you get and I can’t be held legally responsible for the pineapple unless you print out this blog post and have me sign it.



I have never eaten Voodoo donuts but I have been near it many times and you don’t even need to be near it to smell it. I can smell it right now. If you take a deep enough breath so can you. If you can eat donuts you should probably go, because it’s a Portland thing, and they have vegan ones, because that’s a Portland thing, and the lines are hours long which is a Portland thing so you're really getting your money's worth here.



My life has become a quest to figure out the next time I will get to eat Sizzle Pie. The great thing about Sizzle Pie in the summer is there is no air conditioning or fans or windows just all black and pizza ovens and it's a great opportunity to eat pizza while feeling like you are a pizza. I can't recommend it enough. I don't know how late Sizzle Pie is open but it's open as late as I've ever felt like eating pizza which is always.

no cavities is a triple-word score

She was definitely only listening to me to be polite. "Have you seen The Cove?" I asked.

She hadn't. It would have been a great time to stop talking but I didn't.

"I watched it last night. In the cove where they slaughter the dolphins, there's so much blood that the water looks like paint - just red paint with boats full of dolphins in it. That's what it looked like when I brushed this morning. I just wanted to give you a heads up."

My dental hygienist's name starts with H and ends with a bad hand in Scrabble. She was so, so, so sorry that it was 7:30 in the morning but I didn't mind at all. The way I see it I have to be somewhere at 7:30 every day and really the dentist is at least in the top ten.

tep ten places to be at 7:30
1. running
2. at the coast and there are one hundred killer whales
3. just waking up from staying overnight at a planetarium
4. road trip with my dog
5. getting a haircut
6. at work being super productive
7. swimming pool of money
8. the dentist
9. the airport
10. in bed having nightmares about dolphins

Especially my dentist, where there are enough luxury options to make it almost seem like the worst spa ever. Heated neck pillow? Massage chair? Sunglasses? Bitter mouthwash that makes your gums numb for thirty minutes? Sure, I'll take all of it.

Hsqqmkji likes toothbrushes made of organic materials, and she likes anyone from Minnesota, and she loved that I forgot to take my glasses off before the 3D x-ray so I looked like some sort of happy robotic skeleton nerd. "Everyone is going to get such a kick out of this." said Hmjjqtfm. She let me made me take all the floss I wanted.

Now my teeth look great and my neck feels really really cold.

Why I have a scar on my ankle

When I went in to get my spider bite looked at the doctor was a retired military doctor who was not going to take any funny business from girls with spider bites and at one point she even said “You’ve got yourself some ‘splainin’ to do.” I have wanted my whole life for someone to say that to me.

She loaded me up with medicine (“If I got to make the rules you’d be getting a lot more than this but they get after you for stupid little things like that.”) and she drew a crooked circle around the spider bite with a sharpie and she told me “DON’T let it get outside this line” so seriously that all I could say back was “Yes ma’am.” I have wanted my whole life to say that to someone.

Mini is like small, but smaller.

I only hate five things.

I hate high tops.

Let's take the worst thing about shoes - how long it takes to tie and untie them, and make it twice as bad.

I hate when people ask how to spell my name.

I know that's a useful trick to ask someone their name if you can't remember it. But my name is hard to remember and very easy to spell. I sound crazy spelling my name to you and you're not fooling anyone.

I hate subtitles on movies.

Not because they're in another language but because I get so absorbed in reading that I might as well have a plane sky-write the script of the movie. It wouldn't be more convenient or cheaper, but I could be outside.

I hate creative sizes at restaurants.

Just because I'm buying sixteen ounces of ice cream at Cold Stone doesn't mean I've lost enough self-respect to say something like "I'd like a Gotta Have It, please."

I hate too-small hoods.

The only thing that beats having a nice warm dry back-of-the-head and a soaking wet face is everything else on earth.

I'm not crazy about this picture

But it has Marseille in it. Do you miss Marseille so, so much? I do too. Have you eaten Bouillabaisse? I hope not. It combines every gross food there is.

I do like the next picture, because it is so, so complicated and step 32 looks like an episode of Cooking Dares, a game my siblings and I invented that once resulted in all of us drinking peppermint extract with allspice, beef bouillon cubes, and red pepper flakes mixed in it.

Outer space tights and the not worst idea I've ever had

I signed up for another race a few weeks ago - the cheapest race I could find when I woke up in the middle of the night and started signing up for races and buying space-printed tights online.

I didn't get incredibly excited about the race until yesterday, when I got an email that detailed a ton of important information I skipped over, and a short reminder about weight categories. Weight categories?!

Every weight category is named after a different type of horse (obviously) and while my weight has zero benefits, the class just fifteen pounds above me gets a discounted race fee and a ton of free things. Possibly a free horse. I skipped over most of the email.

Challenge accepted, horse race. The race isn't for another week and fifteen pounds is nothing - that's like an especially large sandwich or two newborn babies.

In high school all my friends started a two-day steak-and-excessive-amounts-of-water diet to meet the minimum weight to participate in the blood drive and everyone swore it had absolutely nothing to do with an attractive and persuasive health teacher who smoked cigarettes through a Kleenex to show us how much tar was in them. This story ends with everyone dropping like thin vomiting pubescent flies in the halls so I'll skip over the middle parts.

The only possible downside is that if I gain fifteen pounds my new space tights might not fit anymore - I knew I should have bought more pairs. They're going to make me so good at jumping.

superpowers and super-diseases I'm interested in.

If I were in charge of designing heaven there would be a station where you could test out how each of these things feels. There would also be an arena where you could watch ancient Greek athletes compete in an arena versus modern Olympic athletes. Who would win? Aren't you curious? Now back to the superpowers and illnesses station:

Supertaster for one meal
The way food tastes to me depends more on my mood than what I'm eating. So I'm very interested in being a supertaster for one meal, and I would like the meal to have hot chocolate in it.

Face blindness for an hour
Are you a hypochondriac? I worry I might be. I also worry I might have face blindness, especially after I meet a dozen blonde girls or five bald middle-aged men with one-syllable names. I don't have face blindness though, and I am curious what it looks like.

Photographic memory for a week
Like Cam Jansen. Camera phones have made photographic memories obsolete and poor Cam Jansen probably owns thirty cats by now but I'm still mildly interested in this.


Mantis shrimp vision for one second
Mantis shrimp vision! What if you could see color through 16 cones instead of 3? What would seeing a thousand times more colors than we see now even look like? I have no idea and I wish I could see this for even just one second. More than a second would probably drive me insane.


Pigeon sense for a day
I wish I could traverse the earth using magnets. The way pigeons do, not the way people who have swallowed magnets do.

Super jumping for a lifetime, if you use it for good not evil
Humans don't ever have this ability, but I wish I could jump over buildings, the way a grasshopper can.  I would like to be able to use this skill forever, so I could perfect it and not smash through skyscraper windows or hit birds. I would jump to work and I would jump over rivers and I would jump in malls instead of using the escalator. Is this bad on your knees? Not in heaven. Not in the heaven I'm designing.

 

especially if the cheetah also had leather pants

What did you do this weekend? I ran a relay. It was 216 miles, plus some decimal.

I am not the best runner but the other people on my team were. One had their pelvis crushed by a truck but it somehow healed and they are still running marathons. The other runners were all equally impressive but did you read that part about the truck?

In a relay you all take turns so when you're not running, you're driving in a van full of runners to the next exchange so you can swap runners. While you're driving you can eat whatever snack foods you want. Here's how it went down:

When it was my turn to run (I was last) I ran six miles. Super fast because I was so excited!

Then, while the other half of our team was running, we drove to a high school gym where hundreds of us were taking 90-minute naps on cots in semi-darkness and I thought "I am in a dark room with hundreds of insane people" over and over and I hardly slept at all. 

Then we got back in the van and I ran another six miles in the dark with a flashlight and the stars were so beautiful there were veins of galaxies swirling around them. 

Then we drove to a campsite and while the other van was running I slept for 90 minutes in the front seat of the van sweating even though I was cold. 

We woke up and it was so beautiful and all of us were vomiting from exhaustion and we got back on the road.

When it was noon I ran another six miles, promising to myself that when this was done I would buy a Rascal and never move again. And then we were done and it was so amazing and I got a ton of free quercetin samples and I wish I could do a relay every weekend.

The roads we ran on were unmarked so there was no way to know if you'd run ten feet or ten miles. It felt like running in the middle of the ocean until you got to the "One Mile Left" sign at the end of every leg, and the "One Mile Left" sign was the Best Sign Ever. 

Because, as people on my team kept saying, "You can do anything for a mile." And that felt pretty true. Even if I were tired or wearing leather pants, I could probably run a mile from a cheetah. I could walk a mile barefoot to a pharmacy to get bandaids if I had cut my hand while slicing an apple again, because I always put my thumb under the apple and hope for the best. I could skateboard a mile, even though skateboarding is something I've never done but always assumed I'm a natural at. You can do anything for a mile.

But then my friends in the van started getting a bit more generous with what "you" can do. When one of us was feeling exhausted but had a 3-mile leg coming up things suddenly escalated to "You can do anything for three miles." And then later, completely unprovoked, I heard a "You can do anything for six miles." Stop right there.

There are only a few things I can do for six miles and running is barely one of them. I can't even look at Instagram on my phone on the bus for six miles. Six miles is a really long distance, and I ran that distance three times in two days on very little sleep. I love sleep. I did a crazy thing this weekend and it was the best weekend ever.

Things I can eat for 216 miles:
trail mix made entirely of seven different kinds of chocolate
chia bars
strange and delicious hummus that made us all sick
two thousand carrots
antioxidants dipped in chocolate
an island's worth of bananas with very fancy peanut butter
Greek yogurt chips
handfuls of turkey slices
more of that hummus

so unmusical

If you are looking for hobbies I recommend these:

Taking photos of other people's dogs.
Sometimes discreetly and sometimes not discreetly. These photos will be worth millions someday, when dogs are extinct.

Walking around the city early in the morning, eating food out of a bag.
Almond M&Ms, snap peas, dried coconut flakes, the type of food doesn't really matter as long as it can be transported in a bag.

Running in the middle of the night.
It's the perfect temperature and noise level and the sun never gets in your eyes. And after you fall a few dozen times because you can't see the ground, you hardly notice the falling anymore.



Talking to strangers.
I like finding out if they have interesting stories, and also I like their shoes or skateboard or hair or dog and I need to tell them immediately. The bus is the best place on earth.

Planning elaborate fitness regimes in Google Docs and never ever doing them.
Next week I'll run prime-number mile intervals on odd-numbered days and run my weight in roman numerals at the speed of the earth's rotation on even-numbered days. Let's title this one "new idea" and put it in a folder with the others.

Watching tv and practicing my cursive by transcribing every line with a paintbrush.

I think I'm a winter

It's been way too long since I did a fashion post. Here's what I wore today:

Highlighter-colored sweatshirt, Gap
Gap does it again! It's only 11 am and I'm already five compliments deep.

Spilled chocolate milkshake, coffee shop across the street
Chocolate milkshakes are a great mid-morning snack for young professionals who want to replenish their bodies with vital nutrients like sugar while simultaneously testing the effects of gravity on milkshake.

Soap water, 5th floor women's bathroom
When I finally finish my Yelp review of the 5th floor women's bathroom it will lose at least one star for the handsoap's inability to even somewhat fade a chocolate milkshake stain from a neon sweatshirt.

Paper towels, 5th floor women's bathroom
Tired of wet sweatshirt touching your skin? Try stuffing a few handfulls of paper towels under it! Looks like the 5th floor women's bathroom just earned back a star.

Black raincoat, my desk
Not only covers chocolate stains, wet sweatshirts, and paper towel stuffing, but gives you that awesome "Brooke are you going somewhere I didn't even realize it was raining" look.

Stay tuned for tomorrow when I maybe do laundry.

Pictures to break up the text!

At this point I'm just a bookcase away

So the other day I was watching a documentary on prisons, is how I'm going to start all blog posts from now on. They interviewed copious amounts of prison specialists and historians, which seems to be what you do when you make a documentary.

As a child I always assumed that I would most definitely be interviewed for a lot of documentaries when I was older and I never worried about what topic I would be a specialist on. How to make nachos? Pool sanitation? The mass-production of cole slaw? Giving birth on the moon? 



What is a filmmaker going to be researching that makes them say "Oh we most definitely need to interview Brooke or there's no point in even making this movie"? 

That was for Adult Brooke to sort out. It also seemed logical when I was younger that if for some reason I didn't end up as a historian in a documentary, I would be interviewed as a witness to a horrible crime.

I make the best nachos.

imaginary wishlist

Are you guys also trying to save up money for a brainbike - the kind you can ride and instead of burning calories or transporting you from one place to another, it powers your brain? 

Do you guys also think that, even though a brainbike is sort of expensive, and would take up quite a bit of space in your apartment, or at your desk, or really wherever you decide to put it there are so many options, that it would be so useful? 

It seems so nice, when your brain starts to sag and can't go on its own as far, when your brain energy seems used up, to put on you brainbiking outfit and ride for hours and hours until you're hopelessly sweaty and look at the pages of ideas you biked - ideas for work and ideas about love and ideas on how to build a shark toaster gun where the sharks won't get caught in the electric coils and slow their trajectory. That's what I'm saving my money for.

emojis and the other six wonders of the world

Reality tv is one of the seven wonders of my mom’s world, along with hashtags, gchatting, foursquare, mobile browsers, emojis, and one I won't say but it starts with sex and rhymes with texting. These are things she doesn't understand but calls me about every few weeks and says "Today is the day, Brooke. Explain this to me."



And they remain the seven wonders because I guess I never do a good enough job of explaining them, or they’re really nuanced subjects, or it’s hard to get a good grasp on them when they’re not as deeply rooted in your life as hashtags are in mine. It #scares me that one day I will have a child and one day the world will change so much that I will ask that child for an explanation of #conceptsbeyondmyunderstanding. I can't explain reality tv.

But after a few solid marathons of non-reality tv shows, it's hard to tell them all apart. How many quirky attractive characters in their 20s can there be? Why are you all wearing such colorful outfits? Why do all the male love interests have sweating problems? Why does bonding always have to happen near water?

Why does every episode of every scripted show have that joke where someone says "Is it good?" and the other person says "No." and everyone panics until the person continues "...it’s great!" When did humanity decide this was the best joke ever?



Reality tv is refreshing because it doesn’t have any of these things. The plot doesn’t bother me because, there’s no plot. Usually I just decide whose hairstyle I like the best and fast-forward to the parts with that person in them. You can ignore large chunks of dialogue while working on something else and I promise you won't miss anything at all. And they make me feel like America is doomed, which is the hallmark of any good reality tv show.

There is something really invigorating about feeling bad about America that I wish my mom could understand.



Coolest hair ever!

If the world is ever taken over by robots

And luckily someone invents a giant robot killing machine and all we need is a five-word sentence to attract every single robot and bring it to its death, and the world turns to me and says "Brooke, WHAT FIVE-WORD SENTENCE DO ROBOTS LIKE BEST, everyone is counting on you" don't worry, I already know what sentence we could use. 

And with that taken care of the rest of you can just be in charge of bringing snacks that we can eat while we watch all the robots come swarming in.