I use the same tone of voice when talking to my cat as I do when talking to my toddlers, and sometimes after all day with the toddlers, I come home and say things like this to my cat: “Do you want the toy bird? Do you want the green toy bird? Show me something else green.”

I walk pretty fast (like, professional athlete-caliber fast), and so I’m often speeding up behind people in front of me on the sidewalk. When this happens at night, the person always does that over-the-shoulder sneak look, to make sure I’m not a criminal or a vampire. (Because you can tell this with one glance.) Even giant dudes do this. Even when there are three of them. Nobody likes being followed.

I am a really terrible team player, and also a really poor sport. So I was never that into organized athletics. I have no idea how good at sports I am – not very, probably, but who can say? I’ve never been tested, and since I’m female, there are sports I’m not even allowed to play. This has the unexpected benefit of giving me a totally deluded sense of my own athletic ability: I can watch a football game and honestly think, I could definitely do that.

One of the toddlers in my school puts on dress-up clothes immediately when she enters her classroom, but she doesn’t ever play a game related to the clothing. She just puts on a giant pink frothy gown and sits down to play with blocks. That's what I like about children: They’re insane.

In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury describes, taking place in 1999 (but written in 1950), “housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.” This world has space travel and alien beings, but people still use the word “housewife” and wear fur. FUR. Nobody wears fur! Even people who eat meat three times a day and own twenty-seven pairs of leather shoes are like, FUR, my god. Anyway: I think it’s funny how cultural changes are impossible to see coming. Not that Bradbury was right about the aliens. SO FAR.

I was watching the US Open on Tuesday, and I got confused about Rafael Nadal’s nickname. At first I thought his nickname was the Minotaur, but then I thought maybe his nickname was just something bull-related, and for some reason my first association with bulls is the Minotaur. Which is not surprisingly, actually, as I have almost no idea what a bull is, like, it’s a cow? I have a sort of animal recognition disorder; I play this game with my toddlers. I’ll hold up a horse and say, “This is a hippopotamus, right?” The toddlers will say, “No! It’s a horse!” That’s how we make learning fun. Only sometimes I’ll hold up what I think is a horse, pretend it’s a hippopotamus, and it turns out to be a moose.

I was in a drugstore yesterday and the boy in front of me in line was shirtless – but he was BUYING shirts, a three-pack of those Hanes underwear T-shirts. Here are my questions: Does the fact that he was purchasing shirts negate the “no shirt, no shoes, no service” rule? He began opening the package as soon as the cashier handed it back to him, after ringing it up, so maybe the fact that he was only shirtless for PART of the time he was in the store makes it okay. More importantly, WHAT could possibly have happened? He couldn’t just have spilled something on the shirt, or ripped it in some way – in that situation I have to imagine he would keep the shirt on while buying new shirts. The shirt he was wearing must have been DESTROYED in some fashion, and destroyed while he was far enough away from home that going home and getting a new shirt wasn’t an option. He clearly needed a shirt immediately, thus the new shirt purchases: if he was just wandering around shirtless, why enter the drugstore and buy shirts? He must have been wearing a shirt and then it somehow became UNWEARABLE, but whatever happened wasn’t traumatizing enough to make him go home. He was ready for more shirt-destroying action.