Saturday, January 7, 2012

Did You Miss Me?

Why yes, I have been taking a little break from publicly abasing myself. Thanks for noticing. Fear not, though: I'm back. Not making fun of myself is so boring.

1. I was updating my to-read list on Goodreads.com this morning and I typed Remarkable Creatures (by Tracy Chevalier) into the search bar. I was immediately redirected to a page with a list of books I did not ask for, at the top of which it said "Did you mean: 'hello''?"

2. Yesterday at work a fifth-grade girl asked me for help with her homework. She pulled out a sheet with three math problems and I noticed they were algebra. While I always have been and always will be horrendous at math, I actually quite enjoy solving algebraic equations. They're like little puzzles, and I am a big fan of puzzles. So the girl read the first problem aloud and I helped her figure out what n should represent. (By this I mean that the problem told you what n represented and I simply underlined it.) That was about as far as my usefulness went. We eventually arrived at the correct answer to each problem, but only because this brilliant little girl, bless her heart, second-guessed my stuttered instructions. I can't help it if it makes no sense to convert a problem into an algebraic equation when all you have to do is subtract one number from the other! (Addendum: I just wrote out the problem, going on and on about how easy it was to solve without algebra, when I suddenly realized that I had indeed "helped" the girl to the wrong answer. I feel so awful. Addendum to the addendum: The girl came up to me at work today to thank me for helping her. "I'm so sorry all your answers were wrong!" I told her. "They weren't," she said. Um...pretty sure they were.)

3. I was in my room this morning and out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving out my window. It was my dad, broom in hand, wildly beating at something in the grass. For some reason that struck me as something my two readers would be interested to know.

4. Three. That's the number of times I cried in the span of thirty minutes one evening last week. So much emotion, and I'm not even pregnant! What had my tear ducts in a tizzy, you may ask? The following three things:
  • The ABC World News story about an American family who flew to Ukraine to rescue a little girl with Down's syndrome from spending the rest of her life in an adult mental institution. This story had me crying so hard I could barely see the TV screen. How could you condemn three- and four- and five-year-olds to a life like this just because they have an extra chromosome? It makes me sick.
  • The clip of Charlie Davies, a professional soccer player with D.C. United, scoring his first goal in his first game after recovering from a horrific car accident in 2009. And just as a heads-up, I will also be crying when my beloved Steve Zakuani steps back onto the pitch in March. (A dangerous tackle by Colorado Rapids' Brian Mullan left him with a broken leg in April, ending his season barely two months into it.) Here's the video in case you're interested, which you're probably not. The helpful man who posted this recorded it straight from his television so you can actually see, in slow motion, Zakuani's right leg bend backwards where no leg should ever bend backwards.
  • I have just decided that Reason #3 is too embarrassing to share. Instead I will leave you with this impossibly adorable picture of a baby bunny, which I found by typing "cute things" into Google images.