I spuddle.

1.  What is it with the word “booyah”?   And is that how you spell it?  It must be, because the spell checker says it’s correct.   Well, booyah.   What a completely ridiculous word, and yet also fun to say out loud.   Try to work it into your conversation at least ten times in one day and see if your friends and family don’t start talking behind your back about how maybe you need medication and/or might be losing it the tiniest bit, and how old do you have to be EXACTLY for dementia to set in?   I’m just saying.  It’s a word.  A real, actual word.   Well, sort of.   And yet people don’t really say it.   Unless they want to be perceived as insane or just accidentally are perceived that way because they’ve just realized how fun it is to say “booyah” out loud.

2.  Now that The Birdy is learning to talk very rapidly (not talking rapidly, but learning rapidly, somewhere in this setence is a terrible grammatical flaw that I’m too lazy to fix), she sounds like a robot.   This is because she pauses briefly in her rapid-fire speech before each word to think of what EXACTLY the right word is that she’s looking for.   So it sort of sounds like instead of having a period at the end of each sentence, she punctuates sharply with one after every word.   Such as, “I. Love. You. Mama.”   Which is awesome.  I encourage my kids to say “I love you” so often that The Bun often says it to fill silences or if he forgets what he meant to say to begin with.   So it sounds like this, “MUMMY!  MUMMY MUMMY! MUMMY! HEY MUMMY!  I HAVE TO TELL YOU SOMETHING!”  Me:  “What is it?”  The Bun:  “Ummmm.”   Me:  “I thought it was something urgent!  The way you were screaming!”  The Bun:  “It WAS urgent!  It was….. I LOVE YOU MUMMY!”   Yes, I know.  That pretty much rules.    Booyah.

3.   Lately — as in for the last hour or so — I’ve been randomly freaked out by Twitter.   After a bunch of effort and begging, I finally have over a thousand followers, which I realize is small potatoes in the big fat world of Twitter where some people (I’m looking at YOU, Heather Armstrong) have over a million followers and can get appliance manufacturers to donate washers and dryers to homeless shelters.   By that measure, I actually have no followers and no one has ever asked me if they can give me anything for charity or just for me because I’m pretty nice and (some) people like me.   But anyway, I was lying awake the other night imagining all sorts of horrible things and one of the things I randomly imagined based on nothing by my own insanity was that maybe — just maybe — one of my followers is a total nut case and is slowly and methodicallly KILLING ALL HIS FOLLOWEES.    Now I want to look at all my followers to see which one has a list of followees that shrinks by one every single day or even once a week.   Because that would be creepy.   But think about it:   once you have more than a thousand people following you — or really any number of people — what are the odds that at least ONE isn’t a crazy whackadoo (which, FYI, is not the correct spelling of that word according to the spell check built into WP) who is there for the wrong reasons?   Think about it.

4.  After not buying magazines at all for about three years, I started occasionally buying People.   If you know me at all, you’ll know that I used to be a magazine junkie.   I bought a minimum of ten magazines per month and I knew EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE WAY to cut my hair, paint my toenails, or achieve orgasm.      I knew what clothes were hot, what house design styles were all the rage, what celebrities were sleeping with whom, and what was new in the world of science and technology and literature and pretty much everything.   I was an equal opportunity magazine reader:  I didn’t care what it was, if it was a magazine, I read it.   Lately I’ve realized that all that info is on the big ol’ interwebs, so why bother?   And also, no time for reading.   But I did buy September Elle out of some old nostalgia for buying magazines and especially SEPTEMBER magazines.    Oh so fat and lovely, even though they are 90 percent advertising and otherwise just the same old celebs with good hair and nice houses and pretty clothes.   So there’s that.    I actually can’t remember why I brought that up.   It’s been a long day.

5.   I am just putting the finishing touches on a MG novel that I have loved since I started writing it and never once stopped loving through the whole process of, you know, actually writing it.   More often than not, when I’m writing something, I hit around page 80 and then I start to hate the idea, the characters and basically the whole lot of words with the fierce heat of a thousand saunas.     As frequently as not, I abandon it at that point, thinking I may go back to it later, but really who goes back to write something that they hate?   No one, that’s who.   But this little monkey of a novel, I never stopped adoring because I love the character to bits and I’d be lying if I didn’t say in sort of a hippie dippy way, IT WROTE ITSELF.    But it did!   I am not crazy, or at least not THAT crazy.    I’m crazy enough to write books to begin with but not absurd enough to think that I’m not writing them, that maybe they are being written through me by the spirit of J.D. Salinger.   Oh, but he isn’t dead.   So why would he write through me?   That would be wrong on many levels.   My point is that I am — next week — sending this new baby to a new agent who is my Dream Agent ™ and I want everyone to just stop reading for a minute and think good hippie dippy positive thoughts for my book finding a home with this person because actually, you know what?  I do sort of believe in the power of positive thinking, except when it doesn’t work, and then I think it’s just freaking ridiculous and people who believe in it have obviously been smoking too much pot and eating too many vegetables or something and what the world needs is action, people, and not just a bunch of good THOUGHTS.    Either way, the book is going out there and it wouldn’t kill you to be nice about it, would you?  No?   I thought not.

OK then.   Booyah.

Filed under: Five Thing Friday