Ms. Smartarse > Recent Status Updates

When one door shuts, another one opens...

needles and haystacks

The civil ceremony went mostly fine. The wedding officiant had called [the groom] the wrong name, which should have voided the wedding. And when the clerk wanted to play the ceremonial music, the record player got stuck at first, only to eventually boom out very loudly "This is crazy, why are you sending me to Hell". That certainly put a damper on things.

The wedding loader goes from house to house and delivers the invitations personally to each guest. The difficult part in it, is that he's invited in for a little schnapps everywhere. Since one couldn't just keep balancing on one leg, and we had around 80 guests, you can imagine the state in which [the wedding loader] arrived back home.

Every WEDDING needs a bride's mother who cries all the time, and a bride's father who takes PHOTOS all the time.

"You look a little shy: let me introduce you to that leg of mutton," said the Red Queen. "Alice - Mutton: Mutton - Alice."
The leg of mutton got up in the dish and made a little bow...

"It seems very pretty, but it's rather hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are! However SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING: that's clear at any rate --"

Sooo,,, poetry in a nutshell, yes?

"Collar that Dormouse!" the Queen shrieked out. "Behead that Dormouse! Turn that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his whiskers!"

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad."

'I'll win completely fairly. For Madagascar.'
'The junk land that you can't stand,' snarled Biscuit.
'It's enough if the land can stand me,' said Hery.

"There are five things that every Malagasy knows how to do," he said. "Make hats, starve, laugh, wait, dance. What can people do in your country?"
Terje thought about it. "Hold meetings. Complain. Worry."

There were days when he'd be pushing the pedicab up steep inclines, and days when he'd be carrying too much weight: cupboards, doors, machine pieces [...] And after half a year had passed, the people of Antsirabe would be telling each other: if you're in a hurry, take the green pedicab with the red bell.

Every hour I was experiencing something new, every hour I was wishing I wasn't.

We're all something we're not. 'Every one of us is stuck between the person we want to be and the person we can be. And there doesn't have to be a why. All things have to do is feel right.

What are you still doing here?'
'I'm sorry?'
'I'll rephrase that: what in all that's cold and dead and putrid are you still doing here?'

Looking back it seems darkly comical, her lumbering in through the front gates with everyone screaming. Mother Fallopia was made of sterner stuff and retired her properly with a rounders bat behind the bike sheds. Lucy Knapp had nightmares for a week, but in general I think everyone was ok about it.

Pep talk during the regency era be like:
He put on new clothes, shaved clean, adjusted his cravat with a care he never normally took, told the man in the looking-glass that he was a coward, and went to see Giles Verney in his rooms.

"Careful, Loxleigh." It was a rumble. "Your envy is showing."
"Envy," Robin said. "I heard a sermon about that once. The poor shouldn't envy the rich, it said. They should accept their lot in life and not want to possess just a fraction of what others have. I wonder who paid the first priest to declare THAT from the pulpit."

"They can't do that! That would be bribery. It would be unfair!"
"You know, somewhere on the flight, somewhere up there, you cross a border between two worlds. Things work differently here. Time, for example, passes slower. Sometimes even erratically. And things like fairness and justice, they all obey different rules compared to our world."

I wasn't too keen on money. You couldn't eat it, nor could money keep you warm in winter. You could of course buy things to accomplish all that with money. But in a neighborhood where nobody had anything, money wasn't always worth something.

"You can doubt my judgment of character, and keep interrupting me, but I won't let you cut my son off from the family!" she replied angrily and I could barely believe that it was indeed my mother who'd stand up to my father like this.

My head started to rumble, as it considered the best approach, and I just knew that there had to be a solution to this problem. After all why would I have read all those books, if I couldn't make use of the knowledge from them?

"Technical frippery is no progress, Miss Crumb, " she interrupted and starred me down with her poisonous green eyes. "If women were studying at this university, or could at least make use of the stock of the library, THAT would be progress!"

I mean, she's not wrong, but...

I wanted to at least cover a full 50% of the book before dropping it, but it's just not worth torturing myself to read yet another page.