Summer is the worst

It's the time of year where I start freaking out about summer being almost over. There are probably only nine weeks left of it if I'm being incredibly generous, eighteen weekend days and you'll definitely waste four of them so really just two weeks of summer left.

It makes me sad and then I think "If I'm sad, that will be a waste of summer" and that makes me even sadder.

The only thing that makes me happier is taking out the garbage. Because to take out the garbage I have to go down this little locked alleyway behind my building, where two baby birds fell out of a nest a few weeks ago and have just been slowly decomposing. Maybe I was supposed to bury them when I first noticed their bodies, but I didn't and neither did anyone else, and now it's so hot and they're just slowly baking on the sidewalk like the grossest barbecue I've ever seen. 

I have to take wide steps around the birds and then I have to carefully maneuver the garbage can area because ever since summer started half a dozen huge spiders have started building this complicated six-part web, and they're using half the garbage cans as anchor points. You have to pull some Ocean's 12-type moves to navigate through them without any of the spiders freaking out at you, and Ocean's 12 was the worst Ocean's movie and I only like spiders from a safe distance, and after I throw away my trash and walk back through the birds I can't wait for summer to be over and thank goodness there are only pretty much two weeks of it left.

Go to the beach while you can, you guys.

High five me if you love bloody hands

My friend Krissy loaned me her bike and promised me that no matter what I did it would be impossible to hurt it.

I wasn’t thinking about that while we were biking this weekend, and I also wasn’t thinking about looking both ways so I didn’t notice a truck coming toward me until it was so late that I had to pull the brakes very fast, and the bike flipped over and I flew over the handlebars and landed in the street, just to the side of the truck.

I’ve been skinning my knees a lot lately and I am very into it. Skinning your knees is like a facial for your legs - the skin grows back brand new and glowing and fresh. But this fall was a lot worse and I skinned most of my leg, and somehow my palms AND the outside of my wrists and shoulders, which seems like it would have required some acrobatics and I'm barely capable of biking let alone acrobatics.

While I was lying in the street sort of enjoying the gravel and getting my bearings a camp of people who had established permanent residence in the bushes a few feet away from the road started panicking and going on about the little girl in a bike accident and a woman whose hair, skin and clothes were all the same blonde color yelled out “Honey are you ok?” and “That guy is lucky I don’t have a crowbar on me.” I’ve only been called “honey” maybe ten times in my life and all of them have been bad times. This is the sort of thing the honey industry or the national bee-keepers association needs to be worrying about. 

I was too shaken up but if I had been able to talk I would have first wanted to talk about how much I was bleeding, and then I would have wanted to ask her what she would have done with a crowbar. Wikipedia says they’re used to pry open wooden crates but apparently they can also do damage to trucks or truck drivers who are just minding their own business.

All I know for sure is they can’t do any damage to Krissy’s bike, because I have really been pretty aggressive with that thing and it is still in amazing shape.

Guess my favorite word

If you had asked me a month ago to describe the world I would have needed a minute. Maybe my answer would have to do with people, or families, or traveling, or owning the right number of socks or being surprised or getting old, or animals. I would have said it was about a lot of things.

Now if you ask me to describe the world I can answer immediately HILLS. The world is about hills.

Because a month ago I started biking and guys, hills are everywhere. Hills are all that matters to me now. Does that road have hills? How many bike pedal rotations would the hill take to bike up? Are there downhills? Please describe the downhills.

I only think in hill metaphors now. Long line at the checkout is a hill. Someone smiling at me: short downhill. Learning Spanish: too hilly. Not even worth it. 

Most days are a mix of uphill and downhill and some days are a slow uphill then a downhill, and some days are just straight uphill which is the worst because where am I going, why do I need to get up there?

Every shape looks like a hill to me. Eyebrows. The letter n. Sandwiches are a good food because they're flat. And pizza because I love pizza.

Idioms with the word "hill" in them make me go insane. If I hear someone at a table next to me in a restaurant say "It's all downhill from here" it takes all the self-control I have to not turn around and scream HOORAY DOWNHILL IS THE BEST and high-five all of them because they get it. It's about hills.

My dalmatian tree

I don't know what happened but suddenly I have fifteen plants in my apartment.

Fifteen plants is so many. You would guess that after a handful they would all be the same to me, like people who have more than one child. But you would be so wrong and as soon as you see this picture you'll realize why.

Look at it! It's so beautiful, did you look at it? Scroll up and look at it again.

Now that I look at it again I realize maybe inside the bookcase might be a better place for those books than on top of it.

I wanted a plant like this forever (or at least since October when I wrote that) but they're real expensive and impossible to take care of because they're native to the tropical rain forests of West Africa. They're like having a dalmatian as a pet, which thousands of Americans wanted to do after the movie 101 Dalmatians came out in 1961 so they raced out and bought them before learning that dalmatians are difficult and terrible and hate apartments and then for years there were homeless dalmatians everywhere because people took on more than they could handle because they fell in love with an idea that wasn't going to love them back. I thought this plant was just like that.

But then one day I discovered they are $12 at Ikea. For $12 at Ikea I was willing to risk a dalmatian-level mistake so I went to Ikea and bought it and carried it home on the bus.

I assumed it would die in about a week. Other bloggers who have fiddle leaf fig trees say they had to move them subtly one inch a day to find what sort of light they like best, and that they wrap blankets around the pots on cool days and never stand too close to the window in case they mess up the light. My plant looked like a hot mess after our bus experience. I give it two glasses of water every Saturday morning. That's all I do. I haven't said this word in probably a year, but this situation deserves it: this plant looks rad.

It might be the photo of the cheetah that's helping it stay alive. I try and take tons of showers so the apartment stays humid. Sometimes I worry that the reason it looks fine is it's actually an artificial plant in a pot of real dirt, and that I've been pouring two glasses of water on a large plastic plant every Saturday morning.

I haven't repotted it yet even though I have all the supplies. Repotting it is what I'm really dreading. It reminds me of the feeling I had before I got my ears pierced, and that idea scared me so much I once chickened out at the mall but bought magnetic earrings instead so I wouldn't have to tell my grandmother I had chickened out.

Please don't tell my grandmother I haven't repotted the plant yet.

Some other plants:

One of those five plants is super dead, guess which!

This totally counts as a plant - that's an avocado seed I'm growing in a glass. They take eight years to grow but I'm already two months in.

Please don't be sad if you have a dalmatian as a pet and it's the best pet. I bet your dalmatian is the sweetest and I bet you are also a better pet owner than some people were in 1961.

DALMATIANS by Simon Rich

“Hey, look, the truck’s stopping.”

“Did they take us to the park this time?”

“No—it’s a fire. Another horrible fire.”

Trains and tigers

Last month I started volunteering as a reader at a preschool in Portland. It means once a week I read books with four preschoolers, fifteen minutes per preschooler. It means I have a lot to say about books for preschoolers. So let’s not waste any more time setting this up: the best and worst preschool books.

THE WORST BOOKS

Thomas. Any and all books featuring Thomas the Tank Engine.

There are others I dislike but mentioning them would lessen the impact of saying there is one bad thing in the world and it’s Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s nice that some things are still simple: up vs down, black vs white, good vs Thomas. 

Every kid wants to read Thomas books, there’s a mad scramble for them every time a new group of preschoolers comes in. The books are organized differently every day so the kids go crazy hunting for the Thomas books while the readers hang back, hoping our kid is the slowest kid and doesn’t get any.

Thomas books are the worst, they’re so long and the pictures are terrible. If a Thomas writer is reading this and you’re offended, you need to hear it. There’s no real story, no exciting parts, and kids glaze over three words in and start aggressively picking their noses.

Luckily they can’t read so the pain is over just as fast. “Hello Thomas said Sir Topman Hat, I have an idea said Thomas, let’s turn seventeen pages ahead. Turn another four pages! shouted Annie and Clarabell. Everyone cheered. It was another day as a train. The great story was over.” 

Then I get to pick the next book.

THE BEST BOOKS

The best book is any book read with Ian.

Have you met Ian? Supposedly he’s a four-year-old attending this preschool but he’s probably actually a child actor someone hired and trained to be my favorite person on earth. My first day as a reader he came in with the crowd of not-Ian kids, walked up to me, looked at me, and said “Let's read about gorillas."

Last week he picked a Winnie the Pooh story that I was lukewarm on. It was super long, and the words per page count was gross. But Ian’s really patient and a great listener so I went ahead anyway. In the book, Tigger (who Ian says I do a great impression of) decides that he’s self-conscious about his stripes. 

The book doesn’t really explain what causes this, maybe he was reading a magazine or maybe he noticed that a celebrity he likes doesn’t have stripes, but whatever the reason he decides to get rid of them. His friends help him execute a variety of horribly-conceived ill-fated removal methods, and sometimes before or after they offer to help they’ll mention off-hand that they like his stripes.

“Eeyore says he likes Tigger’s stripes” Ian would whisper, tapping gently on the picture of Eeyore. “I like them too, they’re part of what makes him special.”

Man it was a long story. But Ian was so invested and laughed at every voice and got so discouraged when dumb ideas like covering the stripes with honey didn’t work. And it made me think of dumb things I do, like not smiling in pictures because I think my teeth slant a little to the side. 

It’s weird to say, and probably not the point of being a volunteer reader, but by the end of this book I was feeling pretty choked up, and so was Ian. “That. Was. Such. A. Good. Story.” he said. “What I would love now, is if we could read another.”

Ian can read my mind sometimes. “You make the best snoring noises!” he’ll say, somehow knowing that’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear my whole life. That’s why any book with Ian is the best book. 

And Ian never picks Thomas books.