Sunday, October 23, 2011

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.

Monday, October 17, 2011

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."

Sunday, October 02, 2011

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.