please don't ever wink again

The other day my friend said I had parmesan cheese in my hair and I wasn't sure which was worse: the fact that it was probably actually dandruff, or the fact that I eat so much pizza she automatically assumed it was cheese.

I have never shaved my head

Because I like to imagine that on the back of my head, where no one can see, there’s a really horrible, hideous birthmark, just the worst no one has ever seen, possibly even shaped like a swear word or my butt, and I like to think how lucky it is that this birthmark could be on my right hand or my ankle or in the middle of my face but instead it’s completely hidden under pounds of hair where it never bothers me.

And whenever something bad happens that’s small I think, well “I was due for some bad luck,” since I already really lucked out with the ultimate secret placement of this birthmark.

The other reason I have never shaved my head is because once I told my cousin I was so sick of my hair that I was going to shave it and she said “not many people can pull off a shaved head.” And I said “Halle Berry can” because I don’t look exactly like Halle Berry but I definitely do exude, if not exceed her sexiness. And my cousin didn’t agree with that statement at all.

But I was due for some bad news like that, since I already lucked out with the ultimate secret placement of this birthmark.



Look at all these photos from the Hubble Telescope. Breaking news, you saw it right here.
 

he sees you when you're sleeping

On my flight home last weekend I sat next to a French scientist carrying a textbook titled Comment utilizer votre nouvelle iPad. She wasn’t interested in talking about France or Marseille, which was too bad. She was interested in talking about Grenoble being the birthplace of white coal, which was complicated and involved the evaporation of charcoal. She said she was in Portland for a “science meeting.” I asked her how it went.

“Oh, you know how science meetings are."

(I don’t.)

“Isn’t it unusual," she continued, "how you travel to the other side of the world for a science meeting, but you’re with the same people from Australia that you met while studying whales in Antarctica last summer?”

(Yes, a lot of things about that are unusual.)

After trying to get information about whales out of her for a while, we came back to seeing friends on her trip. I suggested that the world was small, and as a scientist she confirmed it.

“Yes, the world is small. But we are all so spread out.”

This last bit was especially true because she had unfolded her flight blanket out so far it covered one of my knees. I didn’t mind at all, actually I loved it, because the plane was freezing.

save the planet