How many times in your life do you get the chance to see a stranger out in public with a tropical bird on their shoulder? If your answer is twice, then you and I have something in common. Yesterday, as I drove back to the office from lunch, I watched a lady walk down the sidewalk downtown with a three-foot blue tropical bird perched on her shoulder. It sqauwked and did that head-bob thing that birds do as people walked past. And I thought, "Hmmm, this doesn't seem normal." Then I remembered the time I was driving in Scottsdale with Husband only to look over to the 1978 beater that was driving next to us to see a tropical bird sitting the driver's shoulder.
"Look!" I shouted. "That guy has a tropical bird on his shoulder! While he's driving! Crazy!" Husband shrugged. "Ummm, a shrug isn't the appropriate response to this situation." He nonchalantly said, "Meh. It's Arizona." Two things to take away from this experience: 1. Nonchalant could be his middle name. Husband Nonchalant LastName. To someone who has overreactions to almost every situation, this borders on maddening. 2. IN NO SITUATION IS HAVING A TROPICAL BIRD ON YOUR SHOULDER NORMAL. Unless you work at the zoo.
Then again, maybe this is my normal. I turned to my ol' friend Google to try figure out what kind of avian wonder I saw yesterday. My search engine savior didn't provide me with any definitive answers, which was surprising, seeing as the internet taught me a lot this week. Here are the things I learned, and because I believe in life-long-learning, I'm now paying the knowledge forward to you.
1. There's an app for that. So I have a friend who is as entertained and fascinated by dumb stuff as I am. I'm thankful for her for many reasons, but my most favorite thing about her is that I know that at any time, I can screenshot/text/or message her the dumbest, most fascinating, confusing thing I've seen that day and she will always appreciate it. I keep her around because she validates the thoughts in my head.
Anyway, this is a two-way relationship and she shared with me yesterday that she had discovered the existence of eating disorder promoters on Twitter. Obviously, I had to check it out for myself because I'm a voyeur and I enjoy watching crazy behavior more than anything in the world.
So to quickly summarize. there are these very thin girls who have insane handles like @ratherdiethaneat and @hungryallthetime (I made those up, but they are in the same crazy ballpark) whose whole presence on Twitter is to talk about how they don't like to eat, want bigger thigh-gaps, are searching for #thinspiration and eat squash for breakfast because it's only 15 calories (who eats squash for breakfast??) And they tweet each other to show support for pushing through the hunger.
And then I started looking at their pictures, because I was already in this deep. I couldn't stop.
As disturbing as everything I saw was, the most fascinating thing I saw was a picture of an app that helps you track how long you've been fasting. Down to the minute. One girl was disappointed in herself for not making it past 3 days and 2 hours of fasting. I learned this as I was shoving yogurt-covered pretzels in my mouth. You know what kind of app I need? A snack app. It can tell me the time between my third and fourth snack of the day and when it's time to eat M&Ms. Just kidding! You don't need an app for that. It's always time to eat M&Ms.
2. Thank you, Mississippi. I had the pleasure of watching a clip of a young woman being interviewed on the local news in Mississippi. I don't know the town. It's not relevant to the story. She was witness to a shooting and was being interviewed by a local reporter about what she saw.
In the middle of the hard-hitting journalism going on, the girl announced that she had to pee. And then...she peed her pants. On live television. I mean...I know it's sweeps week, but this seems extreme. My first reaction was, "Oh dear...." followed quickly by, "Well, at least she's not from Oklahoma." Thinking about this clilp makes me feel a mix of emotions. Why didn't she just end the interview early? Why, after peeing her pants, did she announce to the reporter, "I just peed my pants"? Why not just hope for good editing? Why are live interviews on the news still a thing? Is Sweet Brown to blame?
3. The end is nigh. And finally I got confirmation that the end is near. Get right with God, get to work on your bucket list, and get your finances in order. Because it's all coming to an end soon. How do I know this? Because the Kylie Jenner lip challenge is a thing and that volcano eruption in Chile. Both of these things have me concerned about the future. The Kylie Jenner thing is self-explanatory. You shouldn't be trying to suck your face off. That's a dumb thing to do. The volcano struck fear in me because....well, it appears that God/Thor/Zeus played a role in it. And you know when lightening wraps around volcanic ash and the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man is no where to be found...it's time to take shelter.
Obviously, thanks to the interwebs, I'm way smarter today than I was on Monday. I'm off to search for that snack app and like-minded people who are equal parts disgusted and obsessed with all of the dumb on the internet. And when I find those people, we'll start our own Twitter army and some girl in Mississippi will write a blog that says something to the effect of, "thank God, I'm not as crazy as Kathy in Oklahoma." #pipedreams
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