A week from today is the ten year anniversary of my favorite blog on the whole internet, Mimi Smartypants. Like myself, she started out on diaryland, the wacky invention of much-beloved Andrew. Unlike me, she kept blogging there regularly up until very recently (July of this year), when she switched to a self-hosted wordpress blog (like this one! see how similar we are?).
Her blog reminds me of the tagline of Cat and Girl, which is “About a cat, a girl, and experimental metanarrative.” Mimi Smartypants writes about her Chicagoan editor self, her hilarious daughter Nora, her husband “LT,” the internet, and generally a sort of experimental metanarrative. It’s the literary equivalent of someone taking quotidian reality, shaking it inside out, tamping it down on their head like a hat, and dancing around in it. Well, not quite, but that might be as close as I can get.
I love her for so many reasons. Briefly, a few:
- She doesn’t allow comments, and never has. Each entry feels like a special letter written just to you. Ten years’ worth of letters. It’s like David Foster Wallce meets Heloise and Abelard, except no one’s dead yet, or castrated, or a nun.
- She writes entirely on her own terms (which she should! It’s her blog!). There’s no updating schedule and rarely any images. Just lots and lots of glorious text. And lists. And occasionally bizarre literary devices. Things in which I revel!
- I don’t like kids. I don’t even really like most straight people, to tell you the truth. But the way she writes about her daughter Nora makes a) her daughter seem the coolest, funniest, smartest kid in the world. I would give Nora one or both of my kidneys, and b) you can tell how much she loves Nora, and what a crazy great parent she is. Even I am moved! I can’t underscore how much of a recommendation this is.
I am going to take this occasion to highlight some of my favorite Smartypants moments, in list format:
- from “hovering in the subjunctive mood”:
Three cheers for the lungfish. It is a quiet creature but it has volatile emotions that it keeps bottled up inside. What does the lungfish dream about when it is curled up in its mucus-lined mudball? It dreams of you. And it dreams of revenge. It thinks the Big Thoughts. It wonders, “What am I? A fish with lungs? A proto-amphibian?” It thinks, “You bitch. You thought you would break me with your whoring around and your dishonesty but no way. I’ve survived for millennia and I will survive you too. This lungfish will have a new girlfriend within a week, and you’ll be crying your slutty little eyes out. And I want my Weezer album back too.” (Lungfish mostly listen to poppy “alternative” stuff like Weezer and The Promise Ring. They are a simple fish with simple pleasures.)Did you know that the Shedd Aquarium has a lungfish that was captured in the wild and brought to Chicago in 1933? HOLY SHIT. I have tried to call the Shedd Aquarium several times this morning to discuss this further; they took my name and number and said they would give it to an aquarist, but I have my doubts. Elderly lungfish! Let’s go visit him!
Isn’t this a fantastic tangent? Tangents like these are one of my favorite features, if they can be called that, of Mimi Smartypants. I can never listen to Weezer again without thinking of lungfish.
- from “making out with a witch in a coffee truck”:
Another continuing debate with myself (which is about 1000 times less serious than the “should I spawn?” debate) is whether I should cover up the gray streak in my hair. I change my mind on this every other day or so, to the point of actually making and then canceling salon appointments. Since the gray streak is only on one side, the Susan Sontag/Cruella DeVille comparisons (which I’ve made before, I know, but if you can’t repeat yourself in your own webspace where can you repeat yourself) are quite appropriate, and I’ve been thinking of how I can somehow synthesize the two characters into my own person, and become one of America’s premier dog-fur-swaddled intellectuals, with a long cigarette holder and a purple roadster and henchmen and ideas about experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself without interpretation. That sounds like a nice lifestyle.
Susan Sontag/Cruella DeVille. I can do nothing here.
- from “my theory, the theory which is mine”:
You know these little capsules that you put in warm water and a foam animal emerges? Do you? Well, get some. And do them inside your mouth, with beer. This was great fun recently, at a bar with Kat I had one in my mouth, almost finished exploding, when a guy sat down near us and said, “Hi” in that I’m-going-to-chat-you-up way. I held up a finger to say, “Wait a minute,” leaned over the bar, and spat a foam brontosaurus onto the bar top. He didn’t stay long. It was beautiful.
I’ve in fact tried this, and it is glorious. Wonderful. But it takes a damn long time for the foam thing to fully emerge. You better get used to the fact that you’re going to be tasting it for a while. Mixed with the beer taste.
- and my personal favorite of these, from “cold outside and cold inside”:
The other night I had a dream that I was running a boutique that sold knitted scarves for bears. All kinds of bears would come in. Polar bears, grizzly bears, black bears. They were not anthropomorphized in my dream (no talking, no walking upright for no reason), but apparently they needed scarves. I would hold a scarf out to a bear and tie it around the bear’s neck and say, “That looks fabulous!” and then I would ring it up and the bear would wear it out. (I don’t know how or even if the bears were paying me.) I called my dream-boutique BEARWEAR.
Again, I can add nothing to this. BEARWEAR.
These are just four of my favorite entries, of the dozens that I love dearly. Once she writes about something, it hooks into my brain, and recalling it becomes strangely compulsive. I probably think of her and something she’s written at least once a day. And believe me, every single goddamn day is the better for it. Thanks, Mimi!
Tags: mimi smartypants
