Lucy's Spleen

Google Doodles Puked on My Shoes

Spare me your canned answers, kids. Granted, the question suux, but come on! Your world revolves entirely around junk food and boy/girl cooties/relationships, and not at all around using Google "to search for the peace." Please don't expect me to buy your moralizing about ending racism and reversing global warming. The world will never be "full of magic and fairy tales." As a matter of fact just your mentioning that has caused the Chinese/Tibetans/Israelis/Palestinians/Rwandans/Anarcho-Syndicalists to communicate with one another using American Sign Language even less often than previously. And after all those rainbows and flowers there was not one mention of homosexuality in any of your spiffy little ideals; don't the teachers who put you up to this think that fags might want to live "in a world where prisons are empty and churches are full" too? I wonder if there were ever any doodling crusaders for controversial issues, or if- ahem- Google just filtered them out before putting the entries up for voting. Either way, I can't help but notice there's no Google Doodle entry about "what if there was a world with no female genital mutilation."

Anyway this whole exercise seemed so censored and disingenuous it wound up exasperating the hell out of me, so I went back to the K-3 age group to try to get fucking real already. Long live the weird science-y kid who thinks it would be cool/possible for humans to live underground someday! I voted for this:

"What if we live inside the Earth also in the future. It will give us a lot more room. We can have air vents for oxygen, tunnels for transportation, food storages, drinking water generators. We can use a lot of energy from the Earth's core."

Runner Up goes to the kid who believes that people will all be happier if they can just rock out the way they like to rock out:

"I think that the whole world would be happier if they rocked out to the music they love."

Living Under the Sea is not a bad idea, but loses due to a lack of specific ideas regarding means of execution and to major demerits for cheesedick rhyming.

 

Winner for grades 10-12 is the kid who wondered what if "we distorted our flesh to the extent that so little remained of what made us human that we became but a twisted, robotic caricature of our former selves." Now that's what I call a plausible adolescent fantasy. The rest is all bullshit.

Things Worth Doing

Maggie started this and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. So, without further ado, here are some of the scenes I hope to relive as my life flashes before my eyes:

1. Camping in Southern Utah with friends and the dogs; no one else around for miles.

2. She-crab soup in Charleston, S.C.

3. Sunset on the beach on Hawaii, staring as I hard as I can at the horizon to try to catch the green flash.

4. Dancing as if my life depended on it.

5. Any of various caffeine rituals I have had over the years.

6. Watching the path of moonlight across my bed under the skylight; not being able to sleep because the light was so bright, but not minding because the full moon was so stunning.

7. Racing wagons fast down the steep hill of the sidewalk on our street.

8. That party we threw was a terrific success.

9. Riding bikes to the Saturday morning farmer's market, the breeze in my skirt.

10. Taking a standing-room-only train to Karlsruhe, Germany to sit on the ground outside the town zoo with hundreds of multinational strangers staring at the sky and sporting funny sunglasses. Feeling awed as the clouds parted just in time to reveal the total solar eclipse.

11. Making out with a stranger.

12. Dogs, mountains, me. 

13. Phoning my singingest friend from La Scala opera house.

14. Turning twenty-something (24, maybe?). First/only real birthday party I ever threw myself. Friends and family, little kids and pets and everybody all gathered in my own backyard. They like me, they really like me!

15. When I wake in the morning next to my new forever lover he opens his eyes, sees me, and sighs, "Yay!"

16. Christmastime evenings when the only light in the room comes from the tiny colordy ones on the tree.

17.  Walking Prancing out front door and down the steps of my high school right in the middle of 5th period while the rest of the class was in chemistry to be picked up by my older boyfriend in his car so we could go make out at his apartment.

18. Turning twenty-one in Paris on Bastille Day.

19. Bedecking the Girls' Hideout at the cabin with a literal carpet of moss.

20. Returning to The Hideout the next day to discover that deer had been by in the night to appreciate our decorating scheme- by sleeping in it.

21. My very own puppy!

22. Walking at sunrise over prairie hills; a tiny plane flies low overhead- it's a friend of ours! We can't see him in the tiny yellow plane in the giant outrageous pink-orange sky, but I know he sees us and is waving down hello.

23. Sunday afternoon naps.

24. Paddling across the lake, the water under the canoe is so blue that, peering over the side I can see clearly every fish, every stone in the white sand.

25. Sipping a cocktail in my pajamas on the balcony of my apartment downtown, recalling that as a kid I had a fantasy of what "adulthood" would be like and this is exactly it.