I am writing words now, so technically, yes, it does seem to be true, but the true test will come momentarily when I return to the thing I actually need to be writing.

The thing that I need to be writing has the potential to be sort of a big deal (to me) and I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet, but it’s taking up all of my time.

Oh, also? I applied for a professor job at a community college today. That I am willing to talk about, but I find myself with very little to say. I filled out an application, wrote a page about why I’d be good at the job, a page about my teaching philosophy, and then submitted the whole shebang along with my resume and transcript. It was very exciting – but it’s possible that I’m letting Community cloud my judgement. Anyway, even if Jeff Winger doesn’t show up, I think it’s a job I would both enjoy and perform well.

That is if psychic detective is completely off the table.

P.S. Our toilet is bound and determined to run, and it’s going to drive me fucking insane. In my townhouse the toilet ran but a) you could fix it by jiggling the handle and b) I always blamed it on the ghost that lived there with me, so it never really affected my life. This? This is either my fault, Crockett’s fault, or no one’s fault, and when one is faced with a running toilet, one does not simply blame no one. And the handle jiggle is completely useless. It’s very irritating.

By pee sensor, I mean the little strip inside your bladder that they designed to emulate the little strip inside a gas tank. You know, the one that tells you when you’re full up or running on empty. (You know – ‘them’. The designers of body parts.)

What? Is that little strip not a real thing?

Ok, I see where you’re coming from. Bladders are not gas tanks. They’ve been around longer, for one thing. If anything, gas tanks were based on bladders rather than vice versa.

But still, there’s clearly something going on in there that tells you when you need to pee, right? It might just be a pressure thing, I guess. When you start to fill up, your bladder skin starts to stretch and then a ‘hey we’re stretching cause of pee’ message to your brain, and then you start to plan your next bathroom trip. I guess.

My college did not offer any courses in biology.

Not that that’s clear from what you read above.

Anyway, you know how when you’re going downhill (or uphill, depending on the design of your car), it looks like you have less gas than you have? My route to school is very very hilly, and when I’m running low, my gas light will flicker off and on the whole way there.

My bladder is clearly on an uphill slant.

I don’t have to pee, don’t have to pee, don’t have to pee…. HAVE TO PEE RIGHT NOW DEAR LORD IN PEE-PEE HEAVEN.

It’s terrible.

I wonder where they sell new pee sensors. Probably not in the automotive section of Target.

Me: Oh, did you hear that men who say they’re bisexual have not, in fact, been lying all this time?
Crockett: Did someone think they were?
Me: Apparently the scientists at Northwestern University were unsure.
Crockett: After they finished that study, did they turn their research towards bears and their woodland defecation?

Ahahahahaha.

I love having a smart man.

What am I saying – of course you do.

It’s 2011, people.

We all think about reality tv, all the time.

Right?

No?

Anyway, I would be quite lame as a contestant on any show that involved a skill of any kind.

• So You Think You Can Dance? – No, I can’t dance. Not even in my head. I have one move, and it’s best performed when sitting down, and when Crockett and I were driving across country he referred to it as the Emma-dance, and now I’m not going to do it anymore.
• Project Runway – There’s a contestant this season who taught herself to sew 4 months ago, and she’s awesome. Crockett’s mom showed me how to sew a year ago and I’ve made a few purses with varying level of success, and hemmed some stuff. I’m pretty sure Heidi wouldn’t approve.

I could continue, but it would be a variation of those two things. I can’t actually do anything better than anyone else… except make smoothies.

Is there a smoothie making reality show?

Being talentless doesn’t exclude me from the second category of reality shows, of course. You know, the kind where they follow you around and watch what you do.

That, obviously, is because I don’t do anything. Ever, really.

• This fall on Fox: 30 Year Old Grad Students and the Laptops that Love Them.

Finally, it goes without saying that I would get my ass kicked in any competition based show. I’m not eating anything disgusting, thank you very much. I’m surely not swimming for my supper, either. Obstacle course? Sure, as long as I had some help reaching the high parts, or it was a special course for short people.

Basically I believe I am destined to go to my grave un-televised.

How very 1980s of me.

Like, being a preschool teacher. Either parents are going to be all ‘hey take good care of my precious precious baby and don’t forget wood toys only and DEAR GOD keep those peanuts away from him!’ or they’re going to drop him off at the front door holding a Pepsi and a bag of airplane peanuts and screech away in their TransAm.

What? I’m not a parent – everything I know I learned from movies.

Also, I apparently think that bad parents drive muscle cars.

Other hard jobs? Working on an oil rig. Crockett and I just found out that someone we know was having a hard time finding a job, and has been working the night shift on an oil rig for the last six months. Apparently he’s lost 35 pounds and is slowly losing his mind. (Don’t worry – he’s got a line on a stockbroker position.)

It’s probably hard being a medical examiner, too. You have to help people identify their loved ones. You have to solve crimes while your pesky cop coworkers are breathing down your neck. You have to stick your hands in dead bodies, like, as a daily thing.

I would think, though, that establishing whether someone was dead or not would become sort of a normal part of your day.

‘Hey, Medical Examiner, we found this dude in bed this morning and he looks pretty dead. Can you check?’

Recently in South Africa, apparently the ME wasn’t feeling inclined to make that check.

Instead, he just took the word of the guy who went to pick up the body. Who, apparently, just took the word of the body’s family.

Seriously. A man’s family found him. He looked dead. They called the undertaker, who came and said ‘yep, sure looks dead to us’. They called the morgue people, who came and stuck the man in a car and drove him to the morgue.

The morgue owner (who I am assuming is the South African equivalent of a medical examiner) stuck him in a fridge.

Without noticing that he was just in a coma.

Sure, the family missed the coma – I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to get all vital signy on dead grandpa’s ass. And the undertaker? Kind of a stretch, but it’s not like they started replacing his blood with formaldehyde.  However, I would expect someone who’s job it is to examine dead bodies to notice when a body wasn’t actually dead.

Of course, everyone who worked at the morgue noticed 21 hours later when the -ahem- ‘dead guy’ woke up from his coma and yelled for someone to let him out of the fridge.

Again – being a person who deals with dead bodies? Probably a tough job. Right up there with preschool teacher and oil rig worker, even.

Making sure that the bodies you’re dealing with are actually dead?

Seems kind of basic to me.

P.S. The actual best part of the story is that the morgue owner called the police and told them that he had a ghost. And asked them if they’d shoot it. The guy doesn’t understand how dead bodies or ghosts work.

I sort of think the whole thing should be Camp Crystal Lake style – boating and fun sexy times and lots of drinks and then BOOM.

People start disappearing.

First a few counselors, obviously, and then – reverse hide and seek style – we start picking up people who go outside to investigate.

Of course, instead of killing them we take them to a party, where there are more drinks and maybe pin the tail on the donkey… some strip poker….

This is the best idea I’ve ever had.

WAY better than last week, when someone wanted to make their game of flip cup more interesting so I said ‘play strip flip cup!’ and then everyone looked at me aghast and I remembered that I was at a family birthday party and they were all cousins.

That was not the best idea I ever had.

During both dinners, I found myself yelling “but we’re grown ass women” at least once.

Last night, it definitely had to do with zits. And perhaps career goals. On Friday night I think it had to do with the fact that I didn’t want to play Rock Band.

I’ve finally pinpointed the problem.

See, I haven’t entirely given up on climbing trees. I climbed one earlier this year when Crockett and I were in Santa Fe.

As we all know, climbing a tree means you’ll never grow up.

Right? Because songs are always true?

Anyway, my tree climbing must be the reason that all of my magical grown up benefits haven’t kicked in yet. Clear skin and career certainty and all that stuff – big trees with strong branches are the only thing standing between me and them.

I’ve got you figured out, life. In your face.

Because I’m fabulous, obviously.

Oh, wait. That isn’t me?

ARE YOU SURE?

Ok, fine. I freely acknowledge that Emma Email Marketing was around before I took this picture (although I don’t know for sure when they started using their current logo…).

I also acknowledge that the entire world does not revolve around me.

I don’t acknowledge that freely, mind you. It’s more of a teeth pulling kind of acknowledgement, but still. It’s acknowledged.

The Emma company seems cool. Since I’m not in the email marketing world, I don’t know for sure if they’re actually good at what they do, but based on the prevalence of the not-my-Emma-face ads on the internets, they must have be earning some money to spend on adverstising.

Anyhow. In case it wasn’t clear, I am in no way affiliated with this company and I’m not actually accusing them of using me as their logo.

I am considering emailing them and offering to be their real live spokesperson, though.

This, despite the tattoo artist’s conviction that we were playing some sort of prank on her, is not what I’m talking about. (He has one too).

One Thanksgiving, we ended up laughing so hard we almost puked over this idea: gift baskets for death row inmates. See, if you delivered them late enough, they wouldn’t have time to open or eat everything in there, and you could just sell the whole basket to the family of the next guy in line.

I know. It’s not funny.

Or the time we found the girl who was killed in Monty Python because she weighed the same as a duck absolutely hilarious. I mean, that shit is funny – Monty Python always is – but the idea of that girl looking across and realizing that she weighed the same as a duck and that meant she was going to be drowned as a witch? Pee in your pants funny. Had she been dieting?

The day before yesterday, for reasons unknown, we were discussing whether or not we should have wills. We’re grown ups, with stuff – what happens to our stuff if we die?

We established that if we did write wills, they’d probably be full of secret fuck-yous. Like, to this woman at school (I know this comes as a shock, but I’m not actually crazy about everyone at my school), I would leave all of my ugly clothes. But I wouldn’t say it that way, so she might actually wear them.

Huh. Now that I think about it, that secret dark corner where our humor intersects seems to just be somewhere mean.

Last night I was all loopy and I was trying to tell jokes to Crockett, and here’s the best one I came up with:

Q: What’s more violent than hockey?

A: Getting stabbed in the neck by Jack Bauer.

I still think it’s funny.

See? Mean.

My friend didn’t want to know the gender of her child, but I asked the OB if he could tell, and he said yes.

I said they should put a little black bar over the genitals on the ultrasound machine, so that he didn’t know either, because he could accidentally give it away.

He said ‘then what if something was wrong with him, like he had two penises?’

Then my friend realized she was having a boy and kicked me out of the room.

I’m not sure if it was because I accidentally tricked the OB into spilling the beans, or if it was because I accidentally made the OB talk about dual penises.

I also don’t know if dual penises are a thing.

The stuff my mind throws away is pure gold.