The Time Wee Married The Shredder

Once upon a time,

this past Saturday,

in the land of PoPo's house,

Ayee found The Shredder

hanging out somewhere.

She brought him to the table we were all hanging around,

and like the squirrel from Chinese New Year,

he was quite mischievous.

At the time, we weren't sure

what he wanted with those flowers,

but surely enough,

his intentions became extremely clear.

Now if only he could figure out how to get the flower through the hole,

he'd be golden and his plan would be set into motion.

With flowers at his side and a ring in his hand,

he proposed to Wee,

kneeling among the orange slices and donuts.

He was so nervous that he was stepping on his cape!

But to his and everyone viewing's relief,

she said . . .

YES!

Wait, let me just say it like all the kids on facebook nowadays do:

I got on one knee with a ring,

and she said yes!

Status: Engaged

He had a little trouble putting the ring on her finger

since it was so heavy for him.

He has a forty pack of muscles on his torso,

but the multicarat ring was a little hard for him to manage.

Anyway, things couldn't be done fast enough!

Wee put on our heirloom cheong sam,

the one our PoPo, aunt, mom, and I wore for our weddings,

along with some other family and family friends,

and she and The Shredder just got hitched!

She's adoring and thinking about The Shredder.

Is he thinking about me?

I wonder if he'll think I'm pretty.

She called everyone she knew to tell them to good news!

She sang for him.

Chris had no clue what had transpired

with his fiancee or The Shredder.

Anyway, they lived happily ever after!

Sunsets: Two Tiny Stories About My Neighbors

There once was a man

who thought no one was watching.

He picked his wedgie.

Then sniffed his fingers.

An old man swung

from the hammock on his porch.

His belly hairs swayed gently in the breeze.

He felt like a king

in midtown Manhattan.

I'm a World-Record Breaker x2 This Week

It was a big week for me.



I participated in the world's largest yoga class, which I mentioned got rained out.

I was also published in the world's longest literary remix.

Here's my passage:

Page 104 by Christina Solazzo

“Then all I can say is, strangers, that you sleep uncommon sound.”

“I do, except for my sleep apnea,” said Bickford. “What about them fairy godmothers? Any of them around?”

“I think so,” said the Pike, “but it was dark. Maybe midnight. There were pumpkins and mice. Their squeaking woke me up. I saw a glass slipper, and in the canyon, a man’s voice echoed ‘’ella, ’ella. Eh, eh, eh.’”

“Do you think he was singing the ‘Umbrella’ song?”

“‘Umbrella!’” the Pike, incredulous at the suggestion, spat out. “No, he was calling for Cinderella. The Rip-tail Roarer of Rihanna knows all of her lyrics. I can whip my weight in karaoke-ing Rihanna—”

“Yes, we know you can,” interrupted Joshua. “You demonstrated it to us yesterday and the day before and last Tuesday at happy hour.”

The Pike rolled his eyes at Joshua, who only mastered the lyrics to “Love Shack” and ABBA, but Mr. Bickford appeared to credit this statement.

The Pike resumed his story. “Anyway, I hopped on my scooter and gave them chase.”

“Did they see you?”

“They did.”

“Why aren’t you dead then?”

“Why?” repeated the Pike. “I’m the Rip-tail Roarer of Rihanna. They knew they were no contest against my skillz.”

“Fo sho!”

“Kill any of them?” asked Joe.

“No, I left my tuner back here, so I couldn’t properly warm up to actually start anything.”

“It’s right there,” said Joshua, who put it back next to the Pike’s pillow because his own tuner had no batteries.

The Pike took it and played a note, which he then sang a little sharply.

“Then they’re not going to make it to semifinals?”

“No, but I drove them away. They won’t trouble you any more.”

Christina Solazzo is a managing editor at a children’s publisher.

The guy who will probably win one of the prizes did this:



And I'm okay with not winning a literary contest or that there was rain at the yoga event. It was just nice to be invited to participate.

Badger, BADger, BADGER

Mike and Carol had been married for three years. Mike was uxorious. Carol was gravid. Mike and Carol’s life together was good.

Their daily hypocoristic exchange was sweet but dumb: “baby” and “sweetie.” Despite their college education, they failed to ever come up with anything more exciting.

The couple that lived next door were Jim and Jem and their little guy Jam. Jim and Jem called each other and Jam “baby” and “sweetie.” The wall that divided their homes was paper-thin, and they too failed to come up with anything more exciting to call each other.

Jim and Jem wanted more babies. They were determined to be a proper cete, but it was hard with their full-time jobs as astronauts.

Mike joked to Carol that Jim and Jem would probably name their other kids after other condiments that are delicious on bread like "Marmalade" or "Peanut Butter" or "Mustard" or branch off into different flavors of jam like "Strawberry Jam." Baby Jam would be "Jam (original)," though what that flavor actually is was unclear.

It was when Mike said stupid things like this that Carol wished she had abulia. At least there would be a disorder that would force her to have to sit around while Mike spewed verbal vomit like this. The worst part about it was that she really liked "Jam" as a baby name, or maybe it was because she was constantly craving jam on any warm food now: cheese pizza, mushroom soup, dirty rice . . . fried chicken.

She didn't dare tell Mike to shut up though. Carol was a people pleaser, and she never wanted to upset anyone, let alone Mike. It wasn't Carol's fault that she was a people pleaser. Her mom made sure that Carol was a legatee of two things: a yacht named "Valgus," which looked like a tugboat and was named after her grandfather's valgus knee (he liked the name), and being a people pleaser.

While it may be peccant to wish for something so debilitating as abulia, was it really so much worse to be a people pleaser and detest it? Anyway, it was her legacy to be a people pleaser, and there was no point now in fighting it.

Carol looked down at the book of baby names that she was browsing through when Mike told her his joke--she hadn't gotten to the x, y, or z sections yet.

Genesis of a Short Story

So that short story I wrote way back when, it's based on this article about DFW that I thought might be fun to try to write a story based on the vocabulary words in the article to kill some time during lunch.

Excerpt from the article is here:

Some other words circled by Wallace in his dictionary and their definitions (a longer list is available here):

abulia

-noun Psychiatry.

a symptom of mental disorder involving impairment or loss of volition.

cete

–noun

a number of badgers together.

gravid

pregnant.

hypocorism

–noun

1. a pet name.
2. the practice of using a pet name.
3. the use of forms of speech imitative of baby talk, esp. by an adult.

legatee

–noun

a person to whom a legacy is bequeathed.

peccant
–adjective
1.sinning; guilty of a moral offense.
2. violating a rule, principle, or established practice; faulty; wrong.

uxorious
–adjective
doting upon, foolishly fond of, or affectionately submissive toward one’s wife.

valgus
–noun
1. an abnormally turned position of a part of the bone structure of a human being, esp. of the leg.
–adjective
2. of or in such a position; bowlegged, knock-kneed, or the like.

No words were circled in the x, y, or z sections of the dictionary.