quotes of the day

Twelve year-old Iris uber Alles is stoked to go on a Service Learning expedition to a senior citizen home.  "I don't care if those old people like it; I'm gonna win at bingo!  They get to play bingo all year, and I only play every six months!"

As Iris wandered out of the room,  continuing to mutter about her desire to trounce each and every aged resident at bingo, I urged the Sober Husband to come look at our cats, Frowst and Henry, who were curled up on adjoining pillows.  "Look!  Look!"

"I'm looking," he said in a monotone, without looking up from his iPad.  "Look-how-cute."

"I see you, and you are not looking!  Look!  Look!"

Finally he glanced at the cats and said, "We should take pictures and put them on the internet!"

"Now you're being sarcastic."

"I'm not being sarcastic; I'm being condescending."

sending him off in style

There's a new season of "RuPaul's Drag Race," and the children and I are enthralled.  The Sober Husband has only ever watched one episode, and that was when he was sucking up to me after a spat.  But even by leaving the room when it is screened, he can't escape the impact of this oddly absorbing game show.  Today, when he left, I bade him farewell with a jaunty, "You bettah werq!"  Nonplussed, he looked to little Lola.

"Lola," I instructed her, "Say goodbye to your father with something RuPaul says.  From now on, we say goodbye to him like RuPaul."

"Doesn't RuPaul ever say 'have a nice day?'" said the uncooperative Sober Husband.

Eventually a yawning little Lola let out a "don't eff it up", and the Sober Husband headed off to the more sensible environs of Silicon Valley.

advances in education

When I studied French, we memorized a horrible poem about an ant and a grasshopper and phrases like, "Mom, please bring me a bowl of coffee" (according to our textbook, French teenagers were served coffee in bed by the bowlful by their doting French mothers).  Never did we learn any phrases that seemed realistic.  When I studied Russian in college, my favorite serving suggestion phrase which we memorized was "Since I was a child, I dreamed of working on a collective farm."  One of this blog's readers enchantingly remembered that she'd had to memorize that same phrase as a budding Russian student.  Fun as it was to say, that sentence didn't seem to have any potential for helpfulness.

I'm happy to report to all of you that at Iris uber Alles's progressive private school, the first year  Japanese curriculum is much more practical.  Glancing over a page of Iris's work, I saw that she had been assigned to translate  the phrase, "My ex-husband is an attorney."  "Now there's a useful phrase," I thought.  Many of Iris's classmates will be able to use that, assuming they move to Japan after their divorces.