Think I’ll Go Eat Worms . . . Not

I was going to describe yesterday’s trip to buy school supplies, complete with my mixed feelings of shock, pride, and inadequacy when hunting down a calculator with required square root, exponent, and cosine functions—for my fifth grader*—and trying hard to set a good example for Sunny in my favorite office supply store, when all I wanted to do was join the chorus of, “If you get one, I get one, too!”

But this morning, a friend of mine—you can thank her later—sent me the latest in an off and on conversation we’ve been having about a flow chart she’d sent me:

I’d said that the whole thing looked sadly familiar, but that I really wanted to kill off a character with a Mongolian Death Worm.

She told me no.

I persisted, claiming that I really needed an interesting plot point, and she finally said this morning that I was welcome to kill off my characters (I’m paraphrasing slightly) but please NOT with a Mongolian death worm:

“First, how would you explain that it got there? Second, what the hell is a Mongolian death worm anyway?”

I gave it a generous second or two of thought and answered:

“Mongolian Death Worms are a delicacy in the finer Asian danger-fusion restaurants right now.  If you remove certain parts of the worm, all the diner experiences is a warm glow and, an hour or two later, a colonic purge that is near-orgasmic in its intensity.

So it would be very easy to simply ‘forget’ to remove the certain parts of the worm (or switch worms) so that the diner/victim experiences an excruciating, karma-satisfying death.

Or so I imagine, since I refuse to google ’em.”

She e-mailed me back, saying that she’d changed her mind and I HAD to drop a danger-fusion restaurant in my new WIP and murder someone via Mongolian Death worm.**

I’m taking that as a victory of sorts.***

It turns out that she’d been picturing these Dune-like sand worm things—which I have to admit would take some finagling to be a realistic murder weapon outside of Frank Herbert’s universe^—while I’d immediately assumed it was a sort of hagfish/tapeworm thing, with a hint of fugu and maybe a soupcon of that psychotic shami kebab in the “Polymorph” episode of Red Dwarf. 

I don’t know what influenced my friend’s vision, but  mine stems from my fascination with what people will happily eat if they think it’s trendy—other people, I mean—and my inability to rationalize the existence of the hagfish.^^

And this fascinates me, how two people can come to completely different assumptions.

Three, really, because after I described the Death Worm differences to a co-worker,^^^ she looked at me for a second and said, “Oh . . .  I thought it was something from the Kama Sutra.”

Now there’s  a game of Clue . . .

What’s YOUR Mongolian Death Worm Like?

What Would YOU order at a Danger-Fusion restaurant?

Is fifth-grade math going to be THAT COMPLEX?!?

_______________________

*Found it in pink.  Who’s the Mom?  I’m the Mom.  Boo-yah.

** “It was Chef Antoine!  In the Bathroom!  With a Mongolian Death Worm!”

***Though I’ll have to set it aside for the right story . . . or the really, really wrong one I’ve always wanted to try . . .

^”It was Paul!  In the subway!  With a Shai-Hulud!”

^^I don’t lie awake at night or anything, but ugh.

^^^When you giggle in a library break-room, people ask questions.  Oddly, they don’t seem to mind the answers.  And sometimes they run with them . . .

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Random Thursday: Abbreviated Awards for Random Excellence

Short post, today, as I’m coming up on that deadline.  You know the one.

oooOOOooo

Best New Catchphrase of the Week:

A few days ago, Sunny was walking around in her pink cowgirl hat and plastic Disney Cinderella heels, dragging her unicorn hobby-horse with her.

“I’m a cowgirl,” she said to my MIL.

“Really?  I don’t think cowgirls wear high heels to ride horses,” my MIL told her.

Sunny tilted back her hat, squinted up at her grandmother, and drawled,
“Some do.  Some don’t.”

oooOOOooo

Best Two-Minute Short Film Ever:

Gumball Wars from Scott Thierauf on Vimeo.

See?  Wasn’t kidding.

oooOOOooo

And the Award for the Best  Husband  Ever—Dune-Quoting Enabler Division—goes to:

I wrote until well-past midnight last night this morning—Lisa (aka First Reader of Awesomeness) is my witness, as I keep e-mailing her in the wee hours with the latest chunks of Pigeon,* and telling her I’m going to bed—and had to get up a little earlier than I’d planned to wait for the central air guy to look at our system while everyone else went off to summer camps, yoga classes, ladies’ meetings, or whatever it is they do while I’m hard at work providing the raw informational materials for a better, more literate democracy.**

I was okay with this, until I realized that the only diet Pepsi in the house was the half  bottle I’d left in the cupholder in my car. 

With dire predictions of the state I would be in when they returned, I schlepped off to my laptop to string words together. 

Two hours later, when I was trying to decide if combining the last respective bags of English Breakfast and Irish Breakfast teas would cure the pressure in my skull or start some sort of internecine warfare in the microwave, my husband returned.

With two 24-ounce six-packs of carbonated liquid gold.

“I love you,” I told them  him.

“He who controls the spice, controls the universe,” he said. “And they were on sale.”

___

*Yeah, I know how that sounds.

**It’s true.  I can’t help it if people use the blank sides to scribble down Farmville cheat codes.