so today i was talking about this time my mom threw a massive party and like, took some doors off their hinges to create a ~walkthrough space~ from one side of the house to the other, and it reminded me of this time i hulked out as a youth. i don’t think i’ve told you guys this story yet but the world has been such a bummer lately that i figured maybe it was time we all laughed at me for a while.
growing up, for the most part, i really liked school and didn’t mind getting up in the morning to attend it. which is not to say that school really liked me, because i was actually…kind of a monster child in elementary school.
two of my siblings and i had the same fourth grade teacher and at the end of the year i asked her who her favorite was and she slow-blinked at me for a really, really long time before saying carefully, “well, you caused more havoc than both your brother and sister combined,” which i took to mean, “NOT YOU.”
anyway, for some reason i woke up one particular morning and just decided that i didn’t want to go. i don’t remember there being any particular reason for it, like a test or a pre-scheduled rumble in the schoolyard. i didn’t even bother coming up with an excuse, like being sick; i just straight up told my dad that i wasn’t going to go. my father, obviously, thought that was a stupid idea and kept insisting that i “had to go” because it “wasn’t optional” and “you’re eight, you don’t get to make these decisions.”
this logic did not sit well with me.
my sweet father, the Patron Saint of Leaving It To Beaver, tried first to explain calmly and reasonably that as a young woman in a global capitalist society the best thing i could do for myself was to invest in my education, and also my brain was too sharp to waste all its potential, and double also, i didn’t have a choice because school was mandatory. not just in our house but by united states law.
my dad is very I’m Not Mad I’m Just Disappointed Dad, and my mom is very Oh, No I Am Definitely Mad Mom and i fall somewhere around, “MY DISAPPOINTMENT ENRAGES ME AND NOW I’M CRYING.”
do you cry when you get mad, because i do, and then i get mad that i’m crying, which makes me cry harder, which makes me more mad, which–
“I’M NOT GETTING DRESSED, YOU CAN’T MAKE ME, I’LL RUN AWAY FIRST,” i shouted, very confidently for someone who had no savings, no life skills, and a very limited understanding of geography. i threatened to run away a lot in those days, and actually did one time, but almost immediately returned home to demand a sleeping bag, tent, and some petty cash for groceries.
what did they expect me to do, “fend” for “myself”??? survive on my own???
hahahaha. no.
hand over a hundy, dad. i have a lavish nine-year-old lifestyle of juice boxes and american girl dolls to maintain.
it should be noted here that at eight-ish, i was in that period of every child’s life where they’ve had their first growth spurt, but only in like…some parts of their body. growth does not happen uniformly, which is why some kids have weird torsos and others can scrape the ground with their knuckles when they walk. pretty much every child in a third-grade classroom looks a little like the product of an affair their mom had with jack skellington.
i was in my prime Heir to Halloween Town years, with freakishly long limbs but not great fine motor control, which meant i knew i had elbows but i couldn’t quite get a hang of where they would be at any given moment. my legs grew so fast that my knees are, to this day, what a real live medical professional once described as, “janky.” i ran into a lot of door frames.
okay. i still run into a lot of door frames. depth perception is not my strong suit. how about you let me live, Todd the Data Scientist?
in hindsight, you can’t really blame me for not wanting to go through the farce of disguising my badly proportioned pipe cleaner skeleton in order to learn simple division or counting without using your fingers or whatever kids learn in third-grade math.
“I’D RATHER DIE THAN GET DRESSED FOR SCHOOL!!!!”
haha remember when we were kids and we didn’t really know what death was and we weren’t constantly saying things like, “YOLO,” and “screw it, death comes for everybody,” in order to disguise our paralyzing terror of the reality that you and everyone you know is going to inevitably succumb to death’s cold embrace?
SO TAKE THAT VACATION, NANCY!!!
“neat,” said my father, cutting his losses on both the Logic and Reason fronts, “you don’t have to get dressed.” and with that, he scooped me up over his shoulder, nightgown and all, and began carrying me out of the room.
but ol’ Molly Long Arms wasn’t down for the count just yet. i shot my grubby grabbers out like a cowboy cracking a bullwhip and grabbed ahold of the nearest thing i could, which happened to be my closet door. now, the thing about this door is that it was one of those bi-fold shutter doors that open and close on a track, like indoor window shutters.
remember that weird moment in the late 1990s/early 2000s when all interior home decor was designed to look like the outside of a nantucket beach house?
my father kept walking toward the hallway, and i held onto slats on the door with the strength of a wet napkin but the grim determination of a spartan at the the battle of thermopylae.
it’s weird how the moment before Something Terrible happens time kind of stops. i know that sounds really dramatic for someone telling a story about a time they yelled at their dad and had weird arms, but it does. in the ten seconds before something terrible happens to you, it’s like everything slows way down and your brain has exactly enough time to go, “oh, no. ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh no,” but not enough to make any course adjustments whatsoever. it’s just the universe’s little way of saying, hey, you’re about to get slapped right across the face by my whimsy, just giving you a heads up.
“okay,” your brain says, “but what if, instead, we ….. DIDN’T ….. do that?”
“oh, no, sorry, did you think this was up for debate? haha, that’s my bad. it’s for sure gonna happen. i’m just letting you know so that, later, you can relive these events in your mind over and over and over and wonder if you could have avoided them.”
“neat. thanks, universe.”
“anytime, buddy.”
in my head, the universe looks exactly like hades from disney’s hercules. if you were wondering.
anyway, for those ten seconds we were evenly matched, my father and i. i wasn’t letting go of that door and he wasn’t putting me down. my people are a stubborn people. none of us want to be the first to give. my great-great-grandfather on my dad’s side joined the canadian air force, despite not being canadian, because the u.s. hadn’t entered the war yet and he was determined to prove to someone at work that the germans were the bad guys in world war i. that’s right, we’re so stubborn we’ll go to literal war to prove a point.
so what gave was the door.
with a cracking sound that can’t have been as loud as it seemed, the folds ripped off the track. my father, suddenly sans-resistance, stumbled forward, dragging the door behind us. i was too shocked to let go, so our momentum was only stopped when the door got wedged against the wall. the jerk back to a full stop was enough to jolt me into letting go of the door, which clattered to the ground.
my dad put me down.
we stared at the door together. i don’t think either one of us was processing fully what had just happened. this fight had just escalated like, four thousand percent more than either one of us had anticipated. it was like we asked someone to break a tie in an argument we were having and that friend, A Door, responded by launching itself off a roof.
too extreme, door!!!!!! wayyyyyy too extreme!! dial it back, like, 99%!!
i want your opinion with the same gentility that you’d handle glassware in your mom’s kitchen while she’s asleep in the room next door.
“well,” said my dad.
“well,” said i.
look, nobody wants to talk about how we got to this terrible place from the less terrible place we were at ten seconds ago. that’s a horrible conversation, always. if people were meant to handle their problems immediately and responsibly, evolution shouldn’t have given us the power of suppressing emotions.
“i’m just gonna … change into school clothes,” i said. “meet you at the car in ten minutes?”
“yep,” said my dad.
and we never talked about it again.
shout out to anne carson and @sashayed for really setting the tone for this story
honestly i believe that thorough studying of how this video managed to reach photorealistic-video-game-cutscene-uncanny-valley will bring us one huge step closer to making video games look like real life
knowing someone has frantically jerked it to this exact video has made my whole fucking night
And I know in the days following the vote I was a pretty sore winner, I know I tweeted and facebooked a lot of you like “they’re out now, deal with it” and “ha ha cry some more, now there are hornets.” I know I started an online business selling coffee mugs that said “The Hornets Will Sting You”.
But now that the hornets have pretty much blackened the entire sky – and are surrounding MY house as well, for reasons that are beyond me – I’m wondering if I really acted in my own best interests after all, re: the hornets.
To access Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine, Mario enters a cannon, which then shoots Mario to a different island in a cutscene. However, by rendering the scene as a wireframe, we can see that whatever is shot out of the cannon is not Mario, as he remains inside the cannon after it is fired.
Suppermariobroth I just want to say your expertise at subtley phrasing basic video game construction factoids as if something sinister is going on every time is acknowledged and appreciated
The problem with math puns is that calculus jokes are all derivative, trigonometry jokes are too graphic, algebra jokes are usually formulaic, and arithmetic jokes are pretty basic. But I guess the occasional statistics joke is an outlier.
And the jokes for elementary math all appeal to the lowest common denominator. Or are only funny to small fractions. Fortunately we have fractal humor, which just keeps getting funnier the more you get into it.
Anyone not married by age 25 gets a spouse assigned to them by the government. You are fine with that: most matches are a success and it’s less effort for you. But it’s your wedding day and you’ve just met your match. You cannot imagine how this was the person they chose for you…..!
… you’re walking down the aisle. It’s dark outside the chapel and your phone is dead. As you approach the altar, you see him- Shia LaBeouf.
WAIT! He isn’t wed, SHIA SURPRISE! There’s a ring in his hand and love in his eyes!
(Standing underneath a chuppah) They’re reading the ketuba, Shia Labeouf It’s his promise to provide for and love you, Shia Labeouf You were lead to him by your mothers, Shia Labeouf He presents you the ring to complete the betrothal, Shia Labeouf You’re getting blessings and wine from your new inlaaaws
I’ve been linked to this so often on facebook I had a surreal moment of wondering what website I was on (in my defense I’m very sick and medicated). Until the confetti streamed over my dash again.
hmmmmm. so while i was at boarding school i took ap physics, which was a bad decision for all parties involved because a) as a pigeon-toed loser with a center of gravity her body doesn’t know what to do with, physics has never done anything but betray me, and b) i’m not very good at math.
the good thing about AP classes is that you only have to take the actual school exam once, at midterms. the bad thing about AP classes is that you have to take the AP exam. at the time, there were just… a of things i’d rather have been doing than studying for an AP physics exam, like, for example:
makin out with my then-boyfriend
watching lois & clark: the new adventures of superman in my dorm room, where once my roommate’s mother actually said to me “i don’t think i’ve ever come into this room and seen you out of bed”
wrestling guerrillas
filling out paperwork at the DMV
solving the then-impending economic crisis
giving myself a root canal
listening to the zac brown band’s “chicken fried” on repeat for the rest of my natural-born life
finding out that waterbeds don’t have fish in them, what the hell is the point of a water bed if it’s not also a NAPTIME AQUARIUM?
being stuck forever at that point where you’re JUST ABOUT to sneeze
breaking up with my then-boyfriend over a series of commitment issues and personal insecurities
realizing they never sold the last season of lois &clark on DVD
finding out dean cain campaigned for rick perry
RICK PERRY!!!!
DEAN CAIN, YOU WERE SUPERMAN.
SUPERMAN WOULD NEVER CAMPAIGN FOR RICK PERRY!!!!
ugh
UGH
WHAT A BETRAYAL.
you get the idea.
anyway, the problem with not studying for your AP physics exam if you’re not some kind of physics genius who hangs out in dexter’s lab and makes periodic table puns at dinner parties is that when it then comes time to sit down in the exam room, the AP exam asks you what happens when a 3-kg object is release from rest at a height of 5m on a curved frictionless ramp and you’re like, “…………well DID YOU KNOW THAT DEAN CAIN CAMPAIGNED FOR RICK PERRY????”
did you???? DID YOU???
DID EVERYONE KNOW???
DID EVERYONE KNOW AND NOBODY THOUGHT TO TELL ME?????
no. i didn’t write that. what i DID do was think to myself, “well, molly, you’re going to major in Books And Thinking, not NUMBERS AND SCIENCE, so who cares, really, in the long term, about this exam??? i mean, getting a good grade on your AP physics exam isn’t a judgment call on you as a PERSON. you could get a 5 and be a douchebag, just like you could get a 1 and be a saint. so really, i mean, REALLY, would it be the end of the world if you chose to just…. maybe chose to answer this question creatively??? show that you can use limited resources, like your brain, to find creative solutions. BITCHES LOVE CREATIVE SOLUTIONS.”
so what i did, instead of attempting to answer the question, was to INSTEAD write a 5 paragraph essay, in spanish, about why we shouldn’t be throwing 3kg objects off ramps in the first place, because that’s dangerous. what is this object? is it breakable? are we aiming for something? 3kg might not SOUND like a lot, but at the speeds it could theoretically reach when being released down a frictionless ramp, i mean, that kind of thing could do SERIOUS DAMAGE. PEOPLE IN FRICTIONLESS WORLDS SHOULDN’T THROW 3KG STONES.
also, nobody should throw stones.
stop throwing stones at each other, what the hell dude.
in the second essay, which was like, “idk idk trains are going in different directions or something,” i wrote that the easy solution is to check the train schedules to see what time the trains will arrive, and check periodically with the conductor to see if there have been any delays. with the time saved by taking that approach and not DOING MATH, we should ask ourselves the Real Questions, like what season we are and how that should affect our wardrobe choices. i laid out a series of questions for the reader to determine whether they were a Winter, Spring, Summer, or Fall:
do you prefer apples, oranges, or strawberries?
would you rather be hot, or cold?
what is your favorite holiday: christmas, thanksgiving, or easter?
would you rather go rock climbing, swimming, skiing, or apple picking?
based on these questions and a complicated point system i set up, the reader could determine their One True Season and what type of color palettes they should then focus on.
the bell rang. exam over. BYE, AP PHYISCS!!! SEE YOU NEVER, HAHA!!
the next year, fresh-faced mollyhall was walking through the halls of the science building on the way to AP environmental science (WHY DID THEY LET YOU TAKE ANOTHER AP SCIENCE CLASS? you may be asking yourself. WELL, i tell you, chuckling, WELL, THAT’S—that’s a really good question, actually.) when i was stopped by mr. h, my AP physics teacher.
“you know,” he said to me, “AP exams, like model un or athletic competitions, are representations of us as teachers, and of our students as people. they reflect the school.”
“cool beans, mr. h,” i said.
“which brings us to the subject of your essays,” said mr. h.
SO HERE’S SOMETHING I HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT AP EXAMS:
they send copies of your essays to your teachers, and
my AP physics teacher spoke spanish.
“uh,” i said. “yes. right. i see your point there. my essays. they were. well, i did put words on paper. you cannot deny that words were written. i think—i think i did okay? on the multiple choice? i think i…. gosh, mr h, you look very smart in that orange and brown color palette, is that new???”
just moving along like everyone else 