Okay, somedays are lived on Twitter. That doesn’t mean I spend my entire day there, but it means that the highlights are short, pithy, and, well, sort of trivial.
(I’m going to diverge from my topic for a moment and say that it terrifies me how many political movements catch fire at 140 characters a shot– people, important concepts demand more words and more brain pan than that, and dealing with things like, say, mass shootings on Twitter makes us little more than a flock of really dangerous starlings. The person with the shrillest cry steers the flock, and eventually a big cloud of idiot asshole parasitic birds are bringing down a jet airliner with their ignorance. *phew* And don’t get me started ripping the NRA a new one– my thoughts in that direction are furious and dark, and I’m just going to keep signing online petitions and seething until I erupt.)
So, on to small stuff, which is where I swore I was going this round–
The following things happened today:
Squish and ZoomBoy were talking about how to trap Santa and prove he was real. Zoomboy was more than happy to relate the old urban legend about the guy who accidentally poisoned his cookies and killed an old, fat, bearded dude who was found sprawled in front of the tree on Christmas day.
“Do we really need to poison Santa?” Squish asked, upset. “I mean… can’t we just give him a sleeping potion and– wait. Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Do we have sleeping potions in this world?”
“As opposed to Hogwarts?”
“Well they use them a lot in games– are they real?”
“Yeah– we can roofie Santa’s cookies, sweetie. That’ll be awesome.”
“Good– because we don’t want him to die!”
This is true. We DON’T want Santa to die. Especially because I’ve come to the conclusion that, now that we’ve weaponized most of our peaceful religions, Santa has become what we wish God/Allah was supposed to be. He’s kind, he provides for us, and he accepts us for all of our flaws. All he wants is a little gratitude and for us not to beat the shit out of each other. With the exception of the evil Santa in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, who appeared to be the network reaction to the sweet liberal Santa in Santa Clause is Coming to Town, Santa has become the guy kids pray to at night– particularly in December. So no. We don’t want him to die. And I’ll try to talk the kids out of slipping him a mickey too.
And then there was ZoomBoy, who was busy telling me that 3D printers could do all sorts of interesting things.
“I know they’re awesome, man–but they still seem like something out of Science-Fiction.”
“They’re real mom–all you have to do is blah blah blah techno speak programing three-dimensional plastic tubes my kid is smarter than me about these things– and the 3D printer works.“
“No, ZB– it’s not that I doubt that they exist, it’s just that, when I was your age, 3D printers were right next to flying cars in terms of stuff we’d be able to do in the future. I just always thought the flying cars would come first.”
“Oh. Well. Yeah– that’s be cool.”
“I’m saying.”
And then, tonight, this Tweet hit the airwaves:
Oh holy mother of hell– where did that huge fucking spider come from? And even more important–WHERE THE FUCK DID IT GO?????
Which is sort of self-explanatory, really. But I’d like to add that it was about two inches long, it apparently bounced off my head after DROPPING FROM THE SKY, and possibly disappeared into Squish’s yarn bag.
Which is not going to encourage her to knit any time soon.
Also– it was scary and huge. Too big to squash without crunching exoskeleton– the next time I see it, I’m going to have to stage a rescue. Wish me luck–but wish me luck tomorrow. I’m going to stay out of the living room tonight and write in the kitchen, and pretend that spider never happened.
