No spoilers please

Things I think about when I’m washing my hands in a coffee shop bathroom and notice a $1,000,000 bill sitting next to the sink:

I bet it’s an ad for something.

Once at a street fair someone scattered ads shaped like $100 bills. They looked so realistic that I put four in my pockets. I'm not sure what I was planning on doing with them, but when I dropped one later a stranger ran through four lanes of busy traffic to return it. I pretended to be as happy as I would be if someone handed me $100 I'd dropped on the ground, instead of as happy as I would be if someone handed me an ad I'd dropped on the ground. I did a great job.

This bill looks way more realistic.

Is that what a million dollar bill really looks like?

If million dollar bills really existed, people wouldn’t carry suitcases full of money. Why would you carry a suitcase full of money when you could fold a million dollar bill into your wallet with your ice cream scoops punch card?

Maybe they carry suitcases full of money because there aren’t many million dollar bills in circulation.

I’m not touching it.

Maybe I should touch it. Just with a paper towel.

Maybe God left it here for me. Because I've been so good lately. It seems like a weird thing to do, but it seems like the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who invented scabs, bananas, sex, and those fish that just look like bummed-out piles of fat.

Or maybe it’s some sort of promotion the coffee shop is running, where if I turn it in to the front desk they’ll give me a year's supply of coffee and all the internet I want. What a strange promotion, and what a strange choice of bill to use. A twenty would have made a lot more sense.

Maybe a million dollar bill is normal. Maybe most people who come to this coffee shop are super rich, obscenely rich. Maybe they had this in their pocket to buy a Mazarati for the ride home. If they did they would have more than a suitcase worth of money left over.

I have been washing my hands for a really long time.

Here are pictures of a few things. A blobfish, a very strange photo of the cast of Ocean's 11 at an air base in Turkey, and the treehouse I would build if I had picked up the money. I'm not looking up if a million dollar bill exists because I want to it to stay a surprise.

These pirates are criminals

girls LOVE soup

I was talking with someone who hates Zooey Deschanel the other day. She mentioned her latest iPhone commercial and made a good point. The one where she looks out the window and asks “Is that RAIN?” and it’s obviously pouring, and here is the point: Zooey Deschanel is dumb. Maybe not in real life, but her persona is extremely dumb. She hides it with vintage dresses and a shield of bangs and my friend says she makes girls look bad. Here is the commercial in case you're wondering what the weather's like and you love pajamas:




But, I don’t think this is such a bad thing for girls. Does every portrayal of girls need to be good? Do we need to relate to every single girl character? I don’t think boys relate to every boy character. I've never heard a boy complaining that the Pillsbury Dough Boy makes all men look pasty and obsessed with shortbread.



An M&M has eyelashes and suddenly it’s a girl and I need to question its motives and wonder if it reads those tedious intellectual parts of the New Yorker no one reads or just the comics and is it a good portrayal of girls. Non-eyelash M&Ms can run the gamut of personalities and I don’t hear boys freaking out about it. Just a thought. Another thought: maybe if there were more “girl” M&Ms there wouldn’t be so much pressure for them to all be good role models. Also, why eyelashes? Boys have eyelashes too. I’d like to see an M&M in a Justin Bieber t-shirt. Now I want some M&Ms. Is that RAIN?

concentrate and ask again

At the risk of being vague, I'm going to start out by saying that yesterday I was chosen for something after a requirement was given that the selected person needed to be female.

It reminded me of George Clooney (as things often do), what he said the last time he won People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive - that he's usually only nominated for "Sexiest Man Alive who has Played both a Doctor and Batman." Only he was joking and I'm not.

You probably remember this from the papers, but I'll refresh your memory. In 7th grade I won the gold medal in Music Olympics, a local music theory competition done in the style of worldwide sports in a last-ditch effort to make kids care about key changes. And I didn't win gold in the "White Kid" division or the "Kids with a Speech Impediment" bracket. I straight up won gold in Music Olympics. And when the other kids were like how did you do that, I was like, let's just say I know a thing or two about chord progressions. And this trophy matches my braces. Check it.

Not that yesterday was on par with Music Olympics. Please. Not that anything ever will be. And not that I'm looking to ever receive that kind of recognition again. I definitely racked up more than a life's worth that day. But from now on, will I only succeed in things when we're looking for a successful girl? Does three quarters of the group need to be ignored in order for me to be even somewhat interesting?

 

I went home. I ate my daily bag of cheap American candy (how I've missed you.) I read all George Clooney interview's from in 1997. And then I remembered : this is why I came to LA. To shoot up the idea that I need special paramaters, and to cover that idea's corpse in raccoon urine, set it on fire, and walk off into the sunset while the embers are burning and "The Final Countdown" is playing.

Or to work in the advertising. I keep getting the two mixed up.