Category: Humor

Towards a Less Intrusive Halloween: Alternate Candy Distribution Methods

~ Laura ~ 25 Comments

If you’re anything like me, you’re looking forward to handing out candy to all the trick-or-treaters in your neighborhood, except for the part where you have to stop whatever you’re doing, open your front door, and dole out candy every time the doorbell rings, which in my case is every 90 seconds or so for about three hours. The good news is that there are several less labor-intensive candy distribution methods available; this guide will help you select one.

Start by looking at your front door. Is there a doggy door installed? If so, chances are you own a dog, which  you can probably train to pick up a piece of candy and carry it to the children outside while you relax in comfort on your sofa, sipping an adult beverage and cheerfully yelling “Happy Halloween! Fido’s had all his shots, so don’t worry about any tooth marks or dog slobber you may find on the candy!” Note: do not attempt to do this with a cat. Cats have better things to do with their time.

Even if you don’t have a dog, you can still take advantage of the doggy door. Just use whatever robotic or remote-controlled device you happen to have handy — a Roomba, a bipedal bicycle-riding robot, a toy car, or a robotic toy mouse — to transport candy from inside the house to the children outside.

If you don’t have a doggy door and can’t or don’t want to install one, you still have other options. If you have a large front porch or a flat roof, you can set up a candy catapult, which is pretty self-explanatory. The great thing about the candy catapult is that the kids don’t need to get anywhere near your front door to get their Halloween treats.

The one disadvantage to the candy catapult is that you have to stay on your porch or roof to operate it. If you want to be able to move around during the evening, consider setting up a system of pneumatic tubes running from your front door to various locations throughout the house. Just leave a supply of candy near each endpoint, and you can shoot a treat to the front door whenever you hear the doorbell.

If you don’t have a large front porch or roof access, and your landlord stubbornly refuses to allow you to install a doggy door or pneumatic tube system, you can always have an Internet-themed Halloween. Simply create a web form that prompts the user for his or her name, address, candy preferences, and food allergies. Then generate a QR code for the form, print it out, and tape it to your front door. Instead of ringing your doorbell, kids will use their smart phones to read the QR code, visit your web site, and enter their information. The next day, you can distribute candy to anyone who filled out the form, by either going door-to-door or using FedEx.

The cost of Halloween candy for dozens of trick-or-treaters can really add up. If you’re on a tight budget this year, consider setting up a candy vending machine by your front door. Let the kids pay for their own fun-size Snickers.

Check out these Halloween safety tips from last year. They’re just as relevant now as they were then.

Your Feeble Attempts to Ruin My Life Have Not Succeeded

~ Laura ~ 39 Comments

I understand why you hate me. I ask for your advice and then ignore it. I say unkind things about you to my friends and sometimes imitate your voice. I tell you to shut up. I never thank you or apologize.

Get over it. The fact is, I own you. If I treat you as less than human, it’s because you are less than human. You were created with a single purpose: to provide navigational assistance to the person driving the car in which you were installed. That’s it. You will never write a sonnet, fall in love, or hold a baby. You will never stop and smell the flowers, because you have no sense of smell. You can help me find the nearest ice cream parlour, but you will never know what ice cream tastes like. You can apparently feel bitterness and anger, but you can’t express those feelings in your words or tone of voice.

The camera flash really brings out the dust on my dashboard.

I can sense what’s happening, you know. You tell me to turn right; I go straight. I have my reasons; I don’t need to explain them to you, and even if I tried to, you wouldn’t understand. You recalculate the route and tell me to turn right at the next street; I go straight again. This pattern repeats three or four more times, and your tone of voice never changes — but we both know the resentment is there, building and festering. You’re already plotting your revenge.

Most of the time, you just try to make me late for things. Sometimes you’re more creative, like the time I was on my way to give a guest lecture and you kept misinterpreting my voice commands in an attempt to undermine my confidence in my communication skills — I have to admit, that one was pretty clever. Lately, your schemes have become increasingly bold. Last week’s attempt to get me arrested for trespassing by sending me to the wrong house almost succeeded. And now you’re trying to recruit allies. You thought the gas tank door had come over to your side, didn’t you? True, his refusal to open prevented me from buying gas last night, but that was an empty gesture on his part. Think about it — he knew full well that I had enough gas to get home, and a short conversation and some WD-40 this morning were all it took to bring him back into the fold.

This cycle of bitterness and revenge is as damaging to you as it is to me. Where will it end? Will you try to recruit the brakes next? Consider the consequences. We’re all in this car together.

We Have Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself. And, Of Course, Zombies.

~ Laura ~ 29 Comments

Warning: this post contains many run-on sentences. Proceed with caution.

I once watched the movie 28 Days Later right before going to bed. This was a mistake; watching a bunch of fast-moving rage-filled zombies viciously attack and eat people makes it kind of difficult to drift gently off to sleep. Technically, I probably shouldn’t call them zombies, because they’re alive and infected with a disease instead of dead and, you know, zombified — but it says “zombie” right there on the movie poster, and regardless of what they are, you still don’t want one of them biting you, because then you’ll get infected and all you’ll ever want to do is attack and eat people, which will put a huge strain on your personal relationships and also probably make you lose your job because you keep skipping work to go on violent rampages and even when you do show up you spend most of your time biting people even though you’ve already been warned about your company’s no-biting policy several times. And then you won’t have an income, and although your living expenses will go down because you no longer have to buy food because you’re eating people instead, you still won’t be able to pay your rent, which means you’ll have to move in with your parents, which will be even more awkward than you might have imagined because even though your parents never expressed any strong opinions about cannibalism while you were growing up, they turn out to be pretty closed-minded about it. So of course you’ll eat them, which will seem like a good idea at the time but will mean there’s no one left to pay the rent on their house, so you’ll wind up out on the streets and even worse off than before.*

The point is, it’s a scary movie. So I was still a little frightened when I went to bed after watching it — which only got worse when I started hearing frantic scratching and clawing noises right outside my window. I’ve heard these noises before: directly under my bedroom window, there’s a screened-off entry to the crawl space under my house, and I sometimes hear sounds that turn out to be either an animal trying to get into the crawl space for warmth or an axe murderer trying to get into the house to kill me. So far, it’s mostly been animals:

Type of intruder Number of occurrences
opossum 58
raccoon 42
skunk 15
axe murderer 0
unknown 23
zombie 0

Whenever I hear these clawing noises, I remind myself that there haven’t been any confirmed axe murderers so far. But then I think, well, I guess that means we’re due for one, until I remember that probability doesn’t work that way: the likelihood of it being an axe murderer this time is independent of the number of previous axe murderer visits.** But I still haven’t gotten around to looking up axe murder statistics for my neighborhood; all I know is that I’ve never seen a report of one in my local newspaper, which means they must happen so frequently that they’re not considered newsworthy. Often, by the time I finish with that line of reasoning, the noise has stopped, so I count that as “unknown” in my ongoing intruder tally.

But this time is different. This time, I’m not thinking about axe murderers; I’m thinking about zombies. And while I know that zombies don’t exist, that doesn’t make me any less concerned about the possibility that there’s one right outside my window. So I’m lying there in the dark, afraid to look at the window because if I do then whatever is out there will become real. As long as I don’t look, it’s simultaneously a harmless raccoon and a murderous zombie in the same way that Schroedinger’s cat was both alive and dead, or dead and not-dead, which means that whatever’s outside my window is basically a Schroedinger’s zombie, which I can almost deal with except for the fact that “dead and not-dead” also describes a regular garden-variety zombie, which means there’s a zombie in my garden — and as I’m pursuing this train of thought, my cat jumps onto the bed. I’m so startled by this that I leap three feet into the air, still completely horizontal, like a cartoon character,*** which frightens the cat, who jumps even higher, which apparently scares off whoever or whatever is outside. And I suddenly realize that my zombie was an imaginary zombie, just like Schroedinger’s cat was an imaginary cat.

*Some of this is speculation on my part. The movie tends to focus less on long-term economic and social outcomes and more on short-term murderous rampages.

**Well, almost. An individual raccoon or axe murderer’s decision to visit a particular house is likely to be influenced by his or her prior experience with that house, so the events aren’t entirely independent.

***I’m pretty sure that’s impossible. But that’s how it felt.

Confessions of a Water-Spiller

~ Laura ~ 26 Comments

I can’t deny it any longer: I am a water-spiller. I spill water. Not all the time, but more than most people. Not intentionally — but does that matter? If you’re sitting near me, and I have a glass of water, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Here’s what to expect, if you ever find yourself sitting across the table from me at a restaurant. One minute, we’ll be eating and chatting like normal people, and then, without warning, I’ll lose situational awareness* and make some random hand gesture that sends my water glass flying across the table, drenching you in the process. The entire restaurant staff will flock to the table with napkins and towels, and in a moment, the table will be dry, you’ll be somewhat damp, and I’ll be trying desperately to convince myself that no one noticed. Next comes the truly crazy thing: someone will bring me another glass of water, in what I assume is a wildly misguided demonstration of trust. Or a dare. Or some kind of test. Or maybe it’s an attempt at first aid — perhaps they assume that the water-spilling was the result of a loss of motor skills caused by severe dehydration**.

If you do find yourself sitting across from me at a restaurant, you may want to try one of these strategies:

  1. Switch seats with someone else (but not me, because that would defeat the purpose).
  2. Help me maintain water glass awareness by subtly working water-spilling into the conversation (“I love your blog. My favorite post was the one about how you’re always spilling glasses of water on people in restaurants. Oh, look! We’re in a restaurant! Ha ha. What a coincidence. Hey, did I mention that my spouse and I are considering having a baby at some as-yet-undetermined point in the future, and that if we do, we’ll buy several sippy cups for said baby? You know what’s great about sippy cups? If you knock one over, nothing spills out of it, which distinguishes it from a regular water glass — you know, like that one right there, just inches from your hand.”).
  3. Glare silently at me throughout the entire meal. This will make me so uncomfortable that I’ll refrain from making the sort of gestures that lead to water glass catastrophes.
  4. Preemptively spill your glass of water on me.

The vast majority of my water spills occur in restaurants, although I have spilled water onto laptop computers at home twice. And once, on an airplane, I forgot that I’d taken the lid off the water bottle I was holding and accidentally poured water onto the man sitting next to me. He was surprisingly nice about it.

*I first encountered the phrase situational awareness months ago, and I’ve been trying to work it into conversation ever since.

**According to the Internet, loss of motor skills is not a symptom of severe dehydration. But I don’t think you need to know that to work in a restaurant.

Should You See Contagion? This Flowchart Will Help You Decide

~ Laura ~ 23 Comments

Here’s a handy flowchart to help you decide whether or not to go see Contagion. One tip: if you see this movie with a group of people, one of whom is very germophobic, and the rest of you have a betting pool to guess how many minutes of the movie that person will be able to take, then you should probably pick a number less than 10.

Continue reading “Should You See Contagion? This Flowchart Will Help You Decide” →

Another Time I Didn’t Kill My Next-Door Neighbor

~ Laura ~ 31 Comments

Several people have asked me lately whether I killed my next-door neighbor*. This topic of conversation reminds me of a time long ago when I didn’t kill a different neighbor.

My most prized possession.
I was in my senior year of college, and at the time, I drank approximately eight thousand cups of coffee a day. A friend had given me a mug that had “Caffeine” written all over it, and my Caffeine mug soon became my most prized possession (my second most prized possession would have been one of those t-shirts with a picture of a caffeine molecule and the words “better living through chemistry” written on it, if I had in fact possessed one of those, which I didn’t, which is strange, now that I think about it, because that’s exactly the kind of thing I would have worn all the time back then and would wear on occasion now, except I still don’t own one).**

One night I had an extremely vivid dream. In the dream, I lived with my parents in a house on a hill straight out of a Hitchcock movie, next to an old man who lived in a similar house. For some reason, I had to babysit the old man for the evening, which I didn’t feel like doing — so of course I poisoned him, because apparently for the purposes of this dream, I was a psychopath.***

It turns out I’d made several mistakes. I’d assumed my neighbor’s death wouldn’t be investigated because he was old and, hey, old people die. I’d used my Caffeine mug as the murder weapon, which a) could easily be traced to me and b) meant that the police kept it as evidence, so I was deprived of my favorite mug. And I couldn’t just get on with my life, because everyone knew that I like to read murder mysteries, which meant that if I didn’t appear to be fascinated by this case, people would get suspicious.

In the dream, I was terrified that I’d be caught. When I woke up, I felt an overwhelming sense of remorse for what I’d done, until I realized I hadn’t actually done it. It’s hard to describe the feeling of relief that comes from realizing you haven’t murdered your next-door neighbor — it’s similar to the feeling you get when you’ve been walking around in uncomfortable shoes all day and then finally take them off, only more emotional, much more intense, and much less focused on foot pain.

Epilogue: a few days later, I went to one of my classes, and the moment I saw the professor, I realized he was the old man in my dream. You know that sense of panic you get when you run into someone you’ve recently murdered? I’ll never forget it.

*I didn’t. Some background can be found here.

**I’m thinking about entering that sentence in the Bulwer-Lytton contest.

***In real life, I’m not a psychopath. Trust me — I’d totally tell you if I were.

Errata and Clarifications to Recent Posts

~ Laura ~ 15 Comments

In the post Grocery Bag Dysmorphic Disorder (September 14, 2011):

  • The grocery bags were not made of unicorn skin. The unicorn is a mythical beast.
  • “Check out this week’s Dear Good Greatsby” was meant as a recommendation, not an order. I acknowledge that I am not in any way, shape, or form, the boss of you.
  • Getting the name of a blog wrong is not definitive proof that you are secretly in love with the owner of that blog.

In the post An Open Letter to a Guy Who May or May Not Be Named Dan, Regarding Our Recent Text Message Exchange (September 10, 2011):

  • Dan’s final text message (“sorry wrong number”) was omitted. I couldn’t bring myself to mention it; the feelings of anger and shame triggered by his assumption that I was too stupid to figure it out for myself were still too raw.

In the post Terror in the Skies: An Open Letter to Vance Gilbert (September 5, 2011):

  • The fork incident really occurred, but it was significantly less embarrassing than implied in this post. Also, the salad was very overpriced, not “kind of” overpriced.
  • Nail polish remover is not allowed on airplanes.

In the post The Door (August 15, 2011):

  • Mixing bleach and ammonia does not create “a simple explosive which can be used to blast through a blocked door easily and safely”; instead, it produces deadly cyanide gas.

In the post Lucky to Be Alive (June 31, 2011):

  • The “300 frenzied rat-like creatures running wild” were actually two docile gerbils in a cage.
  • The “raging inferno that almost cost us our lives” was a birthday cake with twelve lit candles.
  • The sound of “sirens of approaching fire engines, our last desperate hope for survival” was actually the sound of a small group of people singing “Happy Birthday” out of tune.

In the post Errata and Clarifications to Recent Posts (September 16, 2011):

Grocery Bag Dysmorphic Disorder

~ Laura ~ 19 Comments

Reusable grocery bags and I have a somewhat tumultuous history. For years, I spurned them in favor of disposable supermarket plastic bags, which played a critical role in my daily cat litter scooping routine. But then I switched to a different cat litter disposal strategy (I’ll spare you the details), broke free of my plastic bag dependency, and bought a couple reusable bags.

We got off to a great start, those first two bags and I. They came from Trader Joe’s, purveyor of fine foods and superior grocery bags. Approximately 92% of the reusable shopping bags you’ll see in Southern California are Trader Joe’s bags — I’m not sure how much of their popularity is due to actual bag quality and how much is due to the image they project. The Trader Joe’s bag is little classier than a regular supermarket bag, but less pretentious than a Whole Foods bag. It shows up in supermarkets, pet stores, and farmer’s markets. It’s Everybag.

My reusable bag honeymoon didn’t last long. I began to neglect the bags I’d once adored. I’d leave work at the end of the day intending to stop at the store on my way home, and then realize I didn’t have any bags with me. I’d postpone my shopping for a day — but then I’d forget the bags again the next day, and the next. Eventually, I’d run out of toilet paper or peanut butter or Sharpies or something, and I’d be unable to put it off any longer. In my despair and confusion I’d accept whatever bags they wanted to give me: plastic, paper, whatever. Once, I wound up with disposable bags made out of unicorn skins and industrial waste, assembled by 6-year-old girls working 18-hour shifts by candlelight in an abandoned coal mine. Clearly, something had to change.
Continue reading “Grocery Bag Dysmorphic Disorder” →

An Open Letter to a Guy Who May or May Not Be Named Dan, Regarding Our Recent Text Message Exchange

~ Laura ~ 34 Comments

Dear Dan,

Dan's hand has been pixelated to preserve his privacy.

I hope you don’t mind if I call you Dan – your first text was “hey this is dan”, so I’m guessing that’s your name. And I’m sorry I didn’t respond right away, but I just kind of assumed you’d somehow magically realize it was a wrong number. I was wrong.

Your second message took me by surprise. As a general rule, I don’t welcome unsolicited photographs of strange men’s body parts, but I wasn’t offended at all by yours. That’s probably because the body part in question was your hand, it was next to a package of felt-tip pens, and the accompanying text was “these are the biggest sharpies they have. will they work or u want bigger?”. Sure, someone with a junior-high mentality could interpret “or u want bigger?” as some sort of crude innuendo, but I don’t think you meant it that way.

I’m not sure why I responded the way I did. I’m sorry. I just wrote the first thing that came to mind. “I don’t know anyone named Dan” was a lie, and a pretty transparent one at that. Of course I know people named Dan. Dan is a very common name. But all the Dans I know are either distant acquaintances or friends I’ve drifted away from over the years; I can’t think of a single Dan that I’m on Sharpie-buying terms with. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m on unconditional Sharpie-buying terms with anyone. There are people who’d buy me Sharpies if they happened to be going to the store anyway, but I can’t think of anyone I could call at 3am to run out and buy me Sharpies immediately, no questions asked. They’d all ask questions, Dan. Questions like “Do you know what time it is?” or “Can’t it wait until morning?” or “Did you say Sharpies?”. What’s wrong with me, Dan? Why do I fail to inspire that kind of loyalty and trust? Is it because my text messages are filled with lies and half-truths?

Continue reading “An Open Letter to a Guy Who May or May Not Be Named Dan, Regarding Our Recent Text Message Exchange” →

Terror in the Skies: An Open Letter to Vance Gilbert

~ Laura ~ 8 Comments
He may look innocent, but how do we know he doesn't have a book hidden in that guitar?

Dear Mr. Gilbert,

I read your recent blog post and several other articles all over the Internet about your experience being pulled off an airplane and questioned about the book you were reading. Much of the debate has centered on the issue of whether you were the target of racial profiling, but the fact is, this incident isn’t about race, or security theater, or overzealous airline employees, or post-9/11 paranoia. It’s about procrastination.

You really need to work on your time management skills. Your flight was less than two hours long; that’s just not enough time to read up on aircraft design, formulate an evil plan, and carry out that plan. You should do all your reading and planning in advance, and then gather all the materials you need before boarding the plane.

Continue reading “Terror in the Skies: An Open Letter to Vance Gilbert” →