Floss and I were blowing bubbles in the front yard with Julian when the Professor happened upon us. The Professor lives on my block; he is from the Czech Republic, wears a suit and bowtie every day, speaks with a slight accent, and is altogether delightful. He said ( Read more... )

The other day at the pool, while the kids were taking a break and having a snack, this skinny boy, maybe eleven years old, came up to us and started signing. Sign language is a very interesting language: very orderly and fairly easy to understand, at least sometimes, but it was not until his mother had dragged him away that we figured out that he'd ( Read more... )

Emily, I was just reading over your 24 hour comic, and
I came to the claim that the statement "The positive
square root of 4 is dancing" is nonsense.

Balderdash!

The tango is, of course, eternal. And it takes 2 to
tango. Therefor, the positive square root of 4 must
always be dancing!

--Nat Gertler
founder
24 Hour Comics Day
That made me very ( Read more... )

"Look, Emily, horses," said Leah, much as you would when entertaining a five-year-old on a car trip. I swivelled my head around ( Read more... )

Yesterday I had my first ever driving lesson! Of course, I don't have a permit, but then neither does Floss, who is only 15, and my dad let her drive, so naturally I had to have a turn as well. It was an intoxicating rush of power as I brought the minivan up to 7 mph. I went around a lamppost- first clockwise, then counterclockwise. As soon as I ( Read more... )

"What clapping games did you like to play when you were ten?" Lillian asked me last night ( Read more... )

I was supposed to work today but I'm sick. Really. Sick. This is the most sitting up I've done all day, and there's nothing to eat in this house except cookies. First year is over. Provided I managed to pass Biology, I'm a sophomore now. Maybe if I keep saying it I'll start to believe it ( Read more... )

In Tlon, the concept of plagarism does not exist: all literature is the work of one author, who is "atemporal and anonymous": all men who write are acting as the manifestation of this one author. In Tlon, as in the minds of small children, knowledge is universal. I wish I had myself some of that.

I'm taking my Bio exam tomorrow, and then I'll presumably be dead/kicked out of school/ashamed to ever show my face in the science quad again, so if there's anything you'd like to say to me, you'd better do it now. I'm not studying right now: I am reading Cat and Girl and halfheartedly editing the paper I wrote today on "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ( Read more... )

How could we be? My peers, with their regrettable tattoos (the little prince, a three musketeers hat) and armchair communism, will never settle into respectable adult life. They will not have dull, well-paying jobs: they will have dull, non-lucrative jobs to support their feminist book collectives and anarchist zines. Their children will all have ( Read more... )