my father is in town

Every now and then, he reminds me that I was afraid of him when I was a child.

dad: So you got my message?

me: No, I just randomly dialed hotels asking for you. This is my thirty-seventh try.

dad: Cut the snark.

me: Yes sir.

humour in the classroom

today my prof decided to liven up the lecture with a little humour:

"So you may have seen the comic strip 'Dilbert'. Sometimes Dilbert's boss asks him to add a feature onto software at the last minute, and then Dilbert gets pretty upset. And depending on what the feature is, it can be pretty funny."

The True Point of Adulthood

I finally ordered some Kliban books online. Bernard Kliban is my favourite cartoonist, whose work I first encountered when I was a little kid. Incidentally, he used to be a regular contributer to Playboy magazine. I've wanted these books for nearly twenty years.

When I was nine I found some Kliban books in my dad's office, and when he caught me looking at them, he took them away and hid them in a closet. I waited for him to go to sleep, then snuck into the closet with a flashlight and notebook and spent several hours copying the cartoons (Apparently the composer J. S. Bach did this with sheet music by moonlight when he was a young boy, after his brother forbade him to play the music. So maybe I'm the Bach of nudie drawings or something).

As I lie on my bed reading my new books and eating from a gallon jar of M&M's, it occurs to me that a large part of my adult life is spent fulfilling my childhood wants. That's why fully one half of my desk storage space is devoted to candy. If I could talk to my nine-year-old self, I would totally rub it in her face.