The reason I hate rigid people is that I’m one of them and they remind me of my greatest flaw. Today, for instance, Klara started screaming like she never had before. Strangely, she’d stop whenever I took her outside and then would resume screaming the moment we went back inside. I put her in the bathtub, and she stayed silent. Took her out, and she screamed. She wasn’t hungry, sleepy, colicky, or cold. So I was at a loss as to what was bothering her.

Finally, N came home from the store and immediately figured it out: she was hot! Since she’d never been hot before, I didn’t even consider this possibility. Even though I was hot myself and one would think I should find it easy to notice when people are hot since hot weather is my greatest complaint against the universe.

It’s very frustrating never to be able to notice things until somebody takes the trouble of pointing them out to me.

“Why do you never go to conference X?”

Because nobody told me I should, that’s why!

“If you like these sprouts so much, why don’t you buy them?”

Because nobody told me I could!

For years, I’d make an idiot out of myself, putting a hundred used plastic bags into the tiny opening of a recycling bin one by one instead of lifting the lid and dumping them there all at once. Because nobody told me to!

In what concerns work, though, I’m a very original thinker, brimming with fresh ideas.

 

AT&T has realized that customers are finding it way too easy to haggle over the phone and made it impossible to negotiate with the company unless you are willing to subject yourself to in-person haggling at the physical store. Today I decided that time had come to stop dreading confrontation with AT&T workers, went to the local store, planted myself on one of their massively uncomfortable stools, and made it clear I wasn’t planning to leave until I got a free new phone and a reduced bill. 

When the store worker realized that her “My system must be down, I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you right now” wasn’t making me go away, she decided to try to get me out of the store through a tried and true guilt-tripping method.

“So. . . do you have children?” she asked.

“Yes, I have a 3-month-old baby at home,” I said.

“She must really miss her Momma,” the AT&T employee exclaimed triumphantly, sure that this was going to guilt me right into running back home.

But I was ready for her and parried with, “You know, it’s so nice to be out of the house for a few hours.”

When she heard the word “hours,” the employee’s face fell, and she gave me everything I wanted.

Our Klara is so chic that she has never even peed or spit up on anybody without a PhD from a prestigious university.

• I would therefore argue that the corporations promising to boycott states like North Carolina for their traditionalist politics are not so much for LGBT rights as they areagainst arbitrarily restricting lifestyle options, since such limitations are deemed inconsistent with a society comprised of consumer-based self-expression.

Well, duh. Absolutely nothing should stand in the way of a consumer choosing what to consume. The freedom to purchase anything one wants has substituted any other vision of freedom. The idea of gender being fluid would not exist if it weren’t helping to improve sales.

A professor of music is being interviewed for the top administrative position at my school. This already sounds better than his predecessor who had a degree in community building and was shocked to discover that people in China speak like a totally different language.