I (heart) five-year-olds

Longtime blog readers may remember my ex-boyfriend The Cowboy*, most notably featured in the post in which I excoriated the asshole who broke The Cowboy's collarbone with his (the asshole's) cab door.

Yesterday, my good friend Megan, another recurring blog character, most notably featured in the post in which she bought me children's underwear, sent me an email thanking me for various hand-me-down objects I had given her over the years (in brief, I am a minimalist, and she enjoys fun new possessions, so her visits to my house usually involve her leaving with my clothes, accessories, and kitchenware, not that she cannot provide those things for herself as part of her normal and productive professional life).

I was amused to discover that Megan's new husband's mother wore my large pink straw hat to St. John the Divine for Easter, but even more amused to discover that Megan had the "I (heart) my cowboy" t-shirt I once owned (originally ordered from Neighborhoodies and which I think Megan ended up with just to get it out of my house, for breakup-related-clothing-catharsis reasons), which turns out to be "a perfect size for (and hilarious on)" Megan's new five-year-old stepson.

Dear god, I can only hope that somehow, The Cowboy might someday run into a five-year-old wearing that shirt.

* Many blog readers back in '05 did not realize The Cowboy and I had broken up, as I informed everyone with the sentence "The cowboy has ridden off into the sunset on a metaphorically short-butted horse unable to accommodate dual-rider saddlery", inserted into the middle of a post about the hot guys who work at the Apple Store's "Genius Bar."

iron-on technology meets the wireless age

On her last birthday, Megan received what looked like a plastic-wrapped t-shirt that said "I (heart) carbs" and then had a picture of a penguin, of roughly the same size as the heart, so as to give the impression of "I heart carbs penguin."

It turned out that the item was not a t-shirt, but a t-shirt iron-on kit, containing enough letters and characters to make shirts emblazoned with, say, a "your mom" and a bald eagle, or an "I loathe teddy bears."

I am currently proctoring an LSAT (in a room air-conditioned to about 50 degrees, in an apparent bid to make law school more attractive to Inuits), and there is a woman who apparently took the suggestion of the iron-on kit's manufacturers -- she is wearing a shirt that says "I (heart) carbs" and has silhouettes of, I believe, a teddy bear and a spaceman.

I have been sending Megan text messages for months that say things like "I (heart) U.S.A. jetrocket penguin!"

I wonder if discalceation was as big a deal as transubstantiation

At Monday's spelling bee, Miss Megan got the word "discalced," defined by Scripps Howard as "not wearing shoes." This is one of those great words that seems a bit superfluous -- was something wrong with "barefoot"? However, dictionary.com has some additional things to say:

dis·calced
Barefoot or wearing sandals. Used of certain religious orders.

[From Latin discalcetus : dis-, dis- + calcetus, shod (from calceus, shoe, from calx, calc-, heel).]

They also tell us that "calced" is, in fact, an antonym:

\Calced\, a. [See Calceated.] Wearing shoes; calceated; -- in distintion from discalced or barefooted; as the calced Carmelites.

I may have to send this in to Engrish.com

My friend Megan gifted me with this fabulous Japanacrazy bee-themed pencil box! (All bumblebee items now refer to spelling bees, whether entomologists like it or not. Funny, it's like the concept of the "spelling bee" is the one thing that unifies entomologists and etymologists).


The poem reads:

Good luck and happy will be friends
It is a funny and amusing story for you
We show you the real friendship
Come and join us quickly!