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.

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.”

You’re welcome, penguins.

Until February my apartment was usually filled with flies. 

I know what you’re thinking: “That seems normal, flies aren’t anything to worry about” but it still always bothered me, sort of a nagging, dark cloud, a cloud of flies that is, hovering slowly around my apartment like a small horrible indoor weather system.

It was the plants that were causing the problem, if you considered it a problem. The flies would just sort of emanate from them. I thought maybe these particular plants grew flies instead of flowers, or that dirt was made from ground-up fly eggs. It seemed possible, I don’t know much about plants. But I still liked having them. I loved having them.

The best way to show plants you love them is to water them at least once a day. Twice a day if you think of it. And the best sort of plants to buy are ones that say they need to be watered once a week or less - those plants are low maintenance. Plants are beautiful and fun but after a few days they always turn brown and soft and then the flies come and the plants get super dead and I know what you’re thinking: How could this possibly be happening. It defies logic.

Then one day in January I accidentally left one of my plants behind a bookcase and forgot it existed. Safely out of reach from my care it transformed into a completely healthy plant, no more flies, green and vibrant and adorable.

So I did a little research, which is my second-favorite thing to do (my favorite thing is to do a lot of research) and found out that my plants not only don’t need the love I was giving them, but due to the humidity of my apartment, need no love at all. The most informative article summarized them as plants that “thrive under neglect.”

Those three words seemed a little harsh. The gardening article was a little too personal. Because looking at the healthy plant refugee made me think of all the other terrifying ways I try to make the world better, and made me wonder if they had failed as conclusively. The middle school girl I mentored, the birthday card someone at work asked me to sign, that blind French man I tried to help in the subway and ended up getting us both lost in a corner because I didn’t know the French word for “turnstile.” And the woman in Namibia I bought a cow for last year. Looking at my plants made me sure things with that cow must have gone horribly.

The list of well-intentioned things I had done during my life was suddenly disconcerting long.

Luckily less than a heartbeat later I had already thought of all the things I neglect every day. Thank goodness I didn’t knit any sweaters for those penguins, or remember to call my former roommate on her birthday. I’ve never played that game where you have to know vocab words to give people rice, and my mom wouldn’t let me be a Girl Scout. How many times had someone posted on Facebook about something where I needed to call a congressperson and tell them something was important to me, and I didn’t call them? That must have happened ten thousand times. 

So now I keep my plants by the window, untouched, unloved, and thriving, healthier than any plants I have ever had, after nine years of plant-ownership. I look at them every morning from a safe distance while I swallow a fistful of vitamins. As long as I don’t have too much of a hand in it, it’s going to be another great day.

These aren’t my plants, but I don’t have a good picture of my plants.

These aren’t my penguins either, but if they're yours I'd like to meet them.

What your kids will be like

A few months ago my friend told me that his wife is working at a daycare, and that it’s “the best birth control ever.” 

And I feel like it’s important enough that I tell not just him but everyone: if your wife is working at a day care, you also need to also be using a second form of birth control. I didn’t pay a ton of attention in health class but even with my limited knowledge of reproduction I know that using a part-time day care job as your main method of birth control lowers the chances of pregnancy by about zero percent, in every study.

It seems especially important to remember this because of something that happened the other day in the locker room. There was a mom teaching her toddler to poop, but the toddler was stalling. (Get it! It’s a bathroom joke!)

“Where do babies come from?” the toddler asked in an “I bet this question is going to annoy you and that makes me so psyched to ask you” sort of way. Her mom referenced some vague story about sperm meeting an egg.

“But how?”

Her mom changed the subject: “Do you remember, in your All About Me book, who does your body belong to? Who’s in charge of your body?”

“My body belongs to a man!” she yelled. I don't think she learned it in the All About Me book, I think she probably learned it during the nine months she was living inside her mom, connected to her brain, learning what she could do that would bother her the most. That's where I got all of my best material.

Then the girl just started screaming swear words, which I won't type here in case some of my readers are under three and haven’t learned them yet.

Babies can come from anywhere, the jury’s still out on the logistics and even the All About Me book doesn't have all the facts. If you work at a daycare, it could still happen to you.

The picture on the left is me before I had learned any swear words, and on the right is after swear words. Knowing swear words makes you super tan.

World's shortest quest

My two favorite foods are probably carrots and eggs because I don’t have to buy a special version of them, no matter what kind you buy they never have gluten and so they won't ever kill me or even make me sick.

Some things are hard or impossible to make gluten free - mostly pastries and bagels, and some things would probably be easy but no one does it - like Pop Tarts and Cheerios. And then some things are so easy apparently, that there are tons of them. Like Oreos. 

There are at least a thousand (or three that I can think of) brands of gluten-free Oreos and all of them get incredible reviews. The incredible review is: “They taste just like Oreos.” 

Sometimes I buy them because I think there might be a brand I haven’t had yet that will taste just like Oreos, sometimes I think maybe my life is actually a quest to find a really great wheat-free chocolate sandwich cookie and I start to think about the songs they will write about me and so I buy a lot of different types of these Oreos and recently I realized some bad news, I don’t think it’s the rice or quinoa or potato or whatever weird flour they’re putting in that’s the problem. I think I might not like Oreos.

The best thing about Oreos, even gluten-free ones is you can take them apart and build your own real Double-Stuf® Oreos, and the best thing about being an adult is you can just throw your Double-Stuf® Oreo in the trash, no one is going to make you eat it. 

The best thing about being a rich adult is you can throw it in the garbage disposal.