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.

Fashion alert

My pants are sticking to my wool socks and I LOOK TOTALLY STUPID.

What I did while I waited for the bus this morning

I made up a song (more like a rap) whose lyrics were:

2-11-50. 0 0 647. 1. 5. 1. 8.

I'll rap it for you sometime, if you ask. And I'll also rap it in my head, while tapping my foot, the next time the public library's website asks me for my library card number. Cuz that's what it is.

There was this one time...

...when my neighbor and I planned to put on a show centered around Mariah Carey's Daydream album.



The plan was: we'd play the CD. One of us would pretend to hold a microphone and sing along. The other would dance her little heart out, using the stairs liberally as a prop.

We'd do this for each of the 12 songs on the album.

Our parents would watch each number with delight. The best-spent hour of their lives.

But then I realized that there were some flaws in our plan:

1. Our dancing wasn't that good.
2. Neither was our singing.
3. Nobody would be interested in our ill-rehearsed show.

So I called it off.

My neighbor's name was Michelle Farmer, but we secretly called her Michelle Fahma because her parents were from England and that was how they said their last name. After my dad met Mr. Farmer, he reported this conversation to us:

Mr. Farmer: "I'm ____ Fahma." [I don't remember his first name. I was 9ish.]
My dad: "Fahma?"
Mr. Farmer: "No, FAHMA."
My dad: "Fahma?"

I wish there were a punctuation mark between "!" and "."

Maybe it would look a little something like this:









.

Then when someone sends me an email that says "I'll see what I can do" in response to a no-big-deal request, I could reply without seeming overly excited or overly ungrateful.

I could be like, "Thank you " instead of "Thank you!" or "Thank you."

You see how much better that is?