Embedded Files
Douglas found computer generated ‘style transfer’ art and went to Hawaii and Melbourne.
Daniel turned 15 [this fall] and was cast as Dogberry in a school production of “Much Ado About Nothing.”
Lesli didn’t compose a masterpiece, kiss a chipmunk, or go to Boston in the fall. -Daniel
Careers
Daniel- I’m going to start a fundraiser at school and pocket all the money.
Lesli- You have to be part of a club to do that.
Daniel- I’ll start a club—The Future Capitalists of America.
Lesli- You have to get a teacher to sponsor the club and no teacher will sponsor that club.
Daniel- I’ll get Mr. Mills to sponsor it. I’m pretty sure he’s a libertarian.
Daniel- If you were working on something Top Secret, you wouldn’t even tell me. If you were some kind of agent, it would explain why you keep traveling overseas.
Doug- I can neither confirm nor deny your suppositions. Let’s just say... when people like Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk talk about AI taking over the world, they might be speaking a little less hypothetically than you think.
[weeks later]
Doug- I’m not going to France. The assassination, I mean, ‘conference’ was called off.
Daniel (to Lesli) [excited, apparently having just learned of this career possibility]- I want to be a stay-at-home dad!!
Daniel- Mommy, do you want to know what I want to do for adulthood? I want to be a comedic Shakespearean actor like in the Renaissance Festivals.
Lesli- Not everyone needs to go to college. Apprenticeship programs and technical schools should be given more respect. They’re a viable alternative.
Doug- I completely agree. That said, Daniel, you are going to college come hell or high water.
Lesli- Yes, you are going to college, period.
Daniel- I want a shirt that says ‘I don’t play basketball’ on it.
Daniel’s current list of career possibilities:
street accordionist, beggar, go up to Maine live with bears, con man, crocodile wrestler, world record setter, one of those guys who plays three card monte on the street, hippy, the job they had on Sneakers, mockumentary author, wizard counsel to the king, art thief
Religion
[playing Dungeons and Dragons]
Daniel- You see the Frost Giant’s sword on the wall.
Friend- We’re going to need to build a mech to wield it.
Daniel- Hmm. You have the Engineering proficiency, so it’s possible, but you’d have to hire a carpenter with superhuman abilities.
Friend- So... Jesus?
Other friend- Can our cleric convert to Christianity?
Daniel [playing the game Civilization V]- Wittenburg just founded Protestantism. Should I suppress it? It will mess with my relationships with other countries.
Lesli- It sounds like you are being an evil dictator.
Daniel- More like a conniving mastermind.
[Lesli] Daniel read my Facebook post on a feminist Mormon site where I posted that I was uncomfortable with emphasizing obedience at church, because I think if you feel like the spirit is contradicting what you are being told, you should always go with the spirit. Later that day—
Lesli- You aren’t even doing the things I told you to. You are so bad.
Daniel- I thought you didn’t believe in obedience.
Teacher- What do you need to get into the temple?
Class- a temple recommend.
Daniel- a shirt.
At church youth conference testimony meeting, Daniel memorized the hymn in the hymnbook ‘Testimony’ and then got up and recited it as his testimony. Most people didn’t know, but his friends and church teacher did and thought it was funny. His teacher [who has that rare thing in a church leader, a sense of humor- Lesli] said when Daniel sat down, “It was like watching a gymnast stick the landing.”
Lesli- I wish I had the gift of healing.
Doug- I wish I had the gift of tongues. It would be fun to have two tongues.
Lesli- Funny. According to many people nowadays all you have to do to have the gift of tongues is speak gibberish and act all passionate in front of a TV audience.
Doug- Well, that’s how Trump got elected.
Language
Lesli- You don’t listen to me. It’s like you listen to every other word or something.
Doug- Sorry, “like listen every word something?”
Lesli- Yes.
Doug- Come on, that was pretty clever.
Steve- People think I talk strangely.
Lesli- People think Doug speaks strangely, too. What is that called?
Doug- Thinking before you open your mouth?
Daniel- For my speech to Latin class, I’ve basically decided to abandon every other requirement for the sake of humor.
Doug- Isn’t that pretty much the story of your academic career to this point?
Jokes
[taking a few family photos on Easter] Daniel- I hate benches
Lesli- Okay. This time everyone say “I like benches. Benches are my favorite.”
Doug [right before shutter goes off]- ‘I like wenches. Wenches are my favorite.’
(Parenting cont.)
We got rid of our old green couch. Doug counted the pens and pencils found under the cushions. He counted up to 50. Then we found several more.
Self-Improvement
Daniel- You know what’s also on my bucket list? learning to pickpocket.
Lesli- Daniel! That’s not a good thing.
Daniel- It is pretty much like a magic trick except you make people feel more foolish than you would otherwise.
Daniel [while being forced to floss]- I don’t support dental health. When I grow up I’m going to be a dental health denier. I’m going to go on talk shows and be the one dental health denier against pro dental health people. And I’ll get a third of the country to support me.
Lesli scrolling thru Facebook— Daniel reads a
meme: “Whatever it is. Forgive yourself. You did your best. Let it go.” Daniel said- what if you, like, killed a guy?
Daniel- I need a pillow. Give me yours.
Lesli- No. Take poppy’s. Use poppy’s stomach as a pillow.
Daniel- It’s too low.
Lesli- Use poppy’s chest as a pillow.
Daniel- It’s too hard.
Doug- That’s what happens when you work out every day.
Lesli- Please tell me you did not just spend an hour teaching the 11-year-old scouts how to pick locks.
Doug- I... might have just spent an hour teaching the 11-year-olds how to pick locks. Next week, pickpocketing!
Daniel- You need to make up a coat with a bell on it for training.
Politics
Daniel- Name a major event of the 21st century.
Doug- Invention of Deep Learning. Arab Spring. Donald Trump’s election.
Lesli- That’s not a major event of the 21st century.
Doug- If it leads to World War III it will be.
[Doug avoided directly having to ask someone to do a task by acting as if he’d already agreed to it.]
Lesli- That’s passive-aggressive.
Daniel- How is it aggressive?
Lesli- Well, passive-something.
Daniel- Passive like pacifist? So you’re saying he’s basically Ghandi.
Daniel- So in Latin class we were doing a simulation of the Roman senate and I got assigned the part of a wealthy populare senator which meant my goal was to get Caesar elected consul. I quickly realized that I could convince all the wealthy senators to support him by telling them they could bribe Caesar and telling all the poor senators that Caesar would support them in all economic issues considering Caesar was himself poor. And so I was able to convince literally everyone in the senate to vote for my candidate, despite being one of the only populares.
TMI
[Daniel and Doug were horrified by the ‘art’ in the Hirschhorn modern art museum in DC.]
Daniel- How do they choose the exhibits to put in the Hirschhorn?
Doug- They recruit a team of the top artists and art critics in the world, people with impeccable taste and judgement in art, and have them rank every work of art in the world. Then they take the bottom of that pile… No, what they really do is take that pile, put it in a chest, piss on it, and exhibit that.
As soon as she walked out of the church building today (after church) on the sidewalk, in front of a complete stranger, Elena [10 yr old cousin] took off her dress and said to him, “Don’t turn me in for public indecency. I have my clothes on underneath my dress.”
She meant it to be a funny joke.
I made a joke to John and Sam when we were removing the old, crappy, dirty, cat-peed-on carpet from the office that maybe we should give it to Goodwill because maybe someone could use it. And both of them immediately started trying to gently tell me why they probably couldn’t use it at Goodwill. Then, a little later, Kathryn came into the room and I made the same joke only about the crappy carpet padding under the carpet, all ripped up from us ripping it off the staples, cat peed, old, dirty, moldy, and Kathryn (in a non-gentle way) told me that no one would want it. What in the world? Why would they think I was serious? -Lesli
[Talking about a book of colors for blind kids.]
Doug [to Daniel]-I like what Thomas said about brown—Brown is sometimes chocolate, and sometimes it’s crap.
Lesli- Is that really what he said about brown?
Doug- Read brown.
Daniel reading- “Brown crunches under his feet like fall leaves. Sometimes it smells like chocolate, and other times it stinks.”
Daniel, watching Lesli blow out an egg- That’s really gross. Don’t kiss me goodnight tonight.
Literature
Daniel- What do you call a book that has a lot of deaths in it?
Doug- Operatic?
Daniel- Would you call it “realistic fiction” if it contained nothing fantastic?
Doug- Yes. Or “literary fiction” if it had pretensions of greatness.
[reading article about nearest earthlike planet]
Lesli- I wish we would send people like Trump to the nearest earthlike planet.
Daniel- Then those people would become the next human race.
Lesli- What do you mean?
Daniel- Everyone on Earth would die off and they would be the only ones surviving.
Lesli - That would make an interesting science fiction novel.
Daniel- Yeah it would. It’s called Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Mommy.
Sick Burns and Teasing
Daniel- I couldn’t think of a retort.
Lesli- You’re a retort.
Doug- Did she just call you retorted?
Doug [adapting a quote]- I don’t like Trump, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do; and for those who do like Trump, ‘denigrate’ means ‘to put down.’
Doug- I saw this statue of a saint I was tempted to buy. It was made of bismuth and between its hands was a levitating ball.
Lesli- How was the statue quality. Was it decent?
Doug - I don’t know. It was okay.
Lesli- How much was it?
Doug- $299
Lesli- Why don’t we make our own?
Doug- You want to carve a bismuth statue?
Lesli- You don’t carve metal! You pour it. [kept repeating this till Doug would acknowledge it.]
[a little later]
Daniel- Mommy, can you help me get my wood molding merit badge?
Lesli- You don’t mold wood! You carve it. [then I realized he was teasing me. -Lesli]
Elliot [7 yr old cousin]- What’s in there?
Lesli- That’s our bedroom. You can’t go in there because it’s super messy. But you can look in there. See?
Elliot [in awe]- How does it GET that messy?
Daniel- That clock has a different time every time I look at it.
Elena [10 yr old cousin]- That’s a typical characteristic of clocks.
Rusty- I had an orange watermelon last week. It tasted like cantaloupe.
Genevieve- Wait, was the outside hard, tan, and textured?
Lesli- I looked for it forever.
Daniel- I too looked for it forever. But I found it. And that’s the difference between you and me.
Daniel Ruminations
[It snowed this morning but didn’t stick.]
Daniel- Snowing without sticking is like smoking without inhaling.
Daniel- Sometimes I wake up and have bruises and scrapes and don’t know where they came from. And then I find large piles of cash under my bed...
Daniel- Someday I’d like to take every blanket, sheet, towel and pillowcase that we own and put them in the closet and climb under them.
Daniel- Thanksgiving is the worst holiday. There’s no good food. All the other holidays have good food.
The Rest
Doug- Look at Tennyson. He has more hair than my brother [Mike].
Lesli- Yeah, but that was back when everyone had big beards and lots of hair. Your brother just does it because. Only now hipsters do it. But he did it before hipsters did it. [pause] I guess that means he’s a hipster.
Daniel- “Tire World” sounds like an amusement park.
Doug- It is a lot like an amusement park, except instead of rides it has a coffee machine.
Back of snack package says- ‘Our convenient, resealable package lets you save some for later— if you can!’
Nutrition facts says- ‘servings per bag- 25’
Mike to Doug- Negation isn’t NOT in this system.
Lesli, looking at a black and white picture of a steam powered AT-AT train robot for about three minutes- Wait, is that photoshopped?
Doug- I bought a game called Grim Fandango
for $1.
Lesli- You know what the game is about? It’s set in a world where everything is terrible, that’s why it’s called Grim. And you try to buy movie tickets online in the game. That’s why it’s called Fandango.
Daniel [discussing fencing]- When you are doing a fleche, its best to run right past the other person, because your back isn’t a legal target in epee.
Doug- And if you do get hit, it’s merely a fleche wound.
Feelings
Daniel looking for socks- Mommy I hate this sock basket. It makes me sad inside, and sadness is a bad thing.
Daniel- Mommy, you know what I thought of?
Lesli- What?
Daniel- If you were healthy, my life would be a lot worse than it is.
Lesli- You mean you wouldn’t get away with as much?
Daniel- I mean, that week you were healthy was the worst week of my life. We cleaned the garage 24/7.
Doug [gleeful, repeatedly, about driving faster in the HOV lane]
Lesli- I thought you said it was less stressful to just ignore the traffic.
Doug- This isn’t stressful. It’s the opposite of stressful. It’s like going to an amusement park.
Daniel [sick today] - Mommy, I think I know how you feel every day.
Lesli [after eating half a gallon of cookies-and-cream and a big bowl of Cocoa Krispies]- This didn’t actually help me feel any better.
Daniel- Unfortunately, I cannot go to bed right now because I love justice too much.
Kathryn to Sandi - I liked it back when you were emotionally healthy and we could tell you something like that, back when you were 6 years old, and we could tell you you were pretty and you would say, “I know.”
Daniel- I have a happy-go-grouchy nature.
Lesli- What kind do I have?
Daniel- Grouchy-go-grouchy.
Parenting
Kathryn to Lesli- You know how mom had a policy of making us eat our age in bites? We’ve started doing that but it’s really hard to do.
John chimes in- Yeah, it’s really hard to eat 50 bites!
Lesli- Did you have lunch?
Daniel- Yes. And it was really good too, because I packed. Instead of Poppy, so he didn’t fill it with all this expired snack food, which is actually really disgusting.
Lesli to Doug- I had to take Daniel to the vet today. I mean the orthodontist. Sorry Daniel.
Daniel- [makes up some ridiculous story about filming at the library]
Lesli- [believes him]
Lesli- Tell me what you’re talking about.
Daniel- I’m going to brush my teeth.
Lesli- No, come tell me what you’re talking about.
Daniel- You’ve arranged the situation so that it’s actually worse for me to be brushing my teeth. Good job Mommy.
Doug- Nice reverse psychology there.
Lesli- Get the -nice- paper plates. It is Thanksgiving, after all.
Doug- Is that trash?
Lesli- Does it look like trash? [suddenly panicked] Wait! No! Forget I said that!
-the end-
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