Scaring people

My brother and I liked to play this game in high school. It was called Wait Quietly Outside the Bathroom Door So When Your Sibling Comes Out You Can Yell "RAAARRRR" To Scare Them When They're Least Expecting It.

I think the title is pretty self-explanatory. Usually we would also make a scary face and Attack Hands to go along with the "RAAARRRR." As you can imagine, it was a riot. Good times were had by all.

One day we took the scares to the next level. David and I made a man out of newspaper, and when we were done admiring him, we stuck him in the shower:




We succeeded in scaring the pants off not only our little brother Matt, but also ourselves. We constantly forgot he was there.

These are the good kinds of scares.

The bad kind is when you agree to meet your visiting teacher, who is in her 50's, outside her apartment late at night so she can let you borrow her key to the community hot tub because you lost your own, but then you get there early and hover outside the door, which is cracked open, and you can hear her rustling in the coat closet for her coat, and then you timidly tap on the door just as she is opening it and she throws her hands up in the air and screams at the top of her lungs. And she is wearing her nightgown.

No good.

Hamburger Helper

Last night I made Hamburger Helper for dinner. (Don't worry, we also had broccoli.)

Here is an answer I would like to demand of my mom: Why did we never have Hamburger Helper for dinner when I was a child?


It is delicious. It is a close-to-perfect combination of fat, non-complex carbs, and preservatives.

I guess we were too busy eating things like salad and vegetables and casserole and other non-boxed foods.

Another thing I missed out on as a child: sugar cereal, except when we were camping.

Well, Mother? What do you have to say for yourself?

Seth's Do Re Mi's

Do Re Me Fa So La Ti Dah!

As you can see, he grew up with more of a Chris Farley influence than a Sound of Music influence.

The rest of my life

Here's the plan. I just finalized it today:

Write a bestselling novel (preferably by mid-2010). Earn $5 million or more on it. This should be enough (including interest earnings) to afford Seth and the children and me a comfortable lifestyle for the next 70 years. Retire the second that 5 millionth dollar lands in my hands. Make Seth retire also. Sleep in every day. Stay up late at night. Have lots of friends. Go to the beach sometimes. Bake things.


Sounds great, right?

The only problem is I don't actually know what my novel would be about. But never fear, I've been brainstorming. Seth helped:

-vampires
-wizards
-crying in the shower
-Christmas (with some sort of touching element, like perhaps a crotchety old man who gives up his airplane ticket so a young soldier can fly home to see his family, possibly for his last Christmas ever)
-slave ship
-death

Okay, it's not a very good list. Please help.

wow

I just realized that four out of my last five posts were me making fun of myself for doing something embarrassing or stupid. You may think I hate myself. I don't.

And sometimes I do have cool or graceful moments. For example, last week at my parents' house for Thanksgiving, I told a joke that made everyone laugh. (Shut up, Cinderblock! anyone?) And there was this one time in college that me and my roommates and our Family Home Evening brothers did a lip synch to Neil Diamond's Coming to America and won the lip synch contest by a landslide (it may have had something to do with Mike Jensen ripping off his warm-up pants to reveal American flag pajama pants underneath as the grand finale. Also, we had this dance move where we pulsed). And there was this other time when someone told me I was the best.

So. You know. I'm cool.

Hunting with Hemingway

Yesterday I talked with a rich lady, probably in her 80s, who told me she used to go hunting with Ernest Hemingway.



And what did brilliant Dani ask?

"Did you catch anything?"

CATCH anything? You don't CATCH things when you go hunting. You SHOOT them. You KILL them. That is not the same thing as catching. Catching is what you do when you go fishing.

I think.

Anyway, her answer was yes.

Also, after I asked her what her favorite restaurant in Sun Valley was, she asked me what my favorite restaurant in Boise was. I told her there were a couple Indian food places that I like.

Her response: "Oh. Well I wouldn't like that."

what an idiot.

(Me.)

There was this one summer during college that I was in a writing group. Everyone wrote stories and then we all told each other what we thought of them. It was spectacular, or, as they say in Italy, spettacolare.

One week, when it was my turn to contribute the writing sample, I emailed out two VERY short stories. I didn't want my group members to read them thinking they were part of a larger piece of fiction, so I made it very clear. I said:

Though you may not think so instinctively, they are complete in themselves. i repeat: there is NO further story to either of these documents. so read them with that in mind.

So crystal clear, right?

Right.

So I show up at Taylor's apartment the next night, and we settle in to discuss the second story. Everyone kind of hesitates to speak. Then someone says,

"I thought it was.... interesting... that you chose to end this story in the middle of a sentence."

Um.

Huh?

I ask to see the copy of the story that someone had printed out. I look at the bottom of the page.

The last sentence says:

"She felt life pouring in through her skin, and she opened her eyes to see"

The end. All modern-like.

It wasn't even halfway through the story that I'd written. The "end" came before anything had actually happened.

And nobody had dared question where the rest of the story was because stinkin Dani had made a big fuss about how there WAS no rest of the story.

STUPID STUPID STUPID.