Cooper Being Peter Finch in Network

Thought of by many as The Original Occupier, he often recited his famous I'm Mad As Hell and I'm Not Going To Take It Anymore! protest while standing in the 15 item express check-out line behind some idiot with 45 items.

Tuesday Expert Advice

Dear Cupcake,

This morning, when I was watching the Today Show, I saw an interview with a boy named Colton Burpo who wrote a book titled, Heaven Is For Real, about how he went to heaven.  And it is for real.  And in the interview he regaled everyone with all the incredible details about how he walked around heaven and how he met the lord (I mean hot damn, right?) and how he is going to write another book. And as I listened to him I wondered if you think it would be okay to ask little Colton why, if he spent so much time shufflin' around the pearly gates in his Vans, did he not make a pit stop at the Identity Department in order to figure out what IN THE HELL he did to earn the last name of BURPO or do you think any poking around in this area will result in Saint El Burpito unleashing an army of fiery chariots on me?
---Squinty Eyed with Suspicion in Syracuse

Dear Squinty,
No.
Good luck,
Cupcake

Things That Are Easier Than Trying To Explain How To Get the Television Back On Channel 3 So the Cable Will Start Working Again To Your Aging Parent Over the Phone

1. Assembling a nuclear bomb in the pitch dark

2. Driving your car using only your nose

3. Climbing Mount Everest while carrying all three of the Black Eyed Peas
on your back

4. Getting Kanye West and Jerry Falwell on the same page

5. Winning the Kentucky Derby riding a Cuisinart 

Saturday SlobberLove

There are some faces I never get tired of looking at.  My sister's children possess two of those faces.  They are possibly the only two faces that thrill me with their gorgeousness every single time I see them.

My sister and I used to spend good portions of whole afternoons talking about how it was almost bizarre how cute my nephew was and when my niece was born we would stare at her while she watched Barney and furrow our brows because we simply could not process her cuteness.

It is almost as if they are too cute to comprehend.  This is how we explained it to ourselves.

Looking back, I know now that they were indeed incredibly cute but as they grow into young people who will become adults I see that their faces remind me how far my heart can stretch and how important it is to be kind and that they gracefully carry a certain open awareness that shines such a bright light of hope and strength that it is hard to ever look away.

You Can Call Me Auntie,
Deputy of Doting
Heart Bursting Precinct
Continually Astonished Division

Things I Don't Understand, Items 389 thru 391

389. Why Justin Bieber doesn't pull his pants up
390. Black Friday camp out people
391. When Rachel Ray does that thing where she carries 57 ingredients from the pantry to her cutting board like she's a pack mule who'll be shot if she doesn't do it all in one trip

Cooper Being the Dalai Lama

Here, His Holiness meditates on what he is most grateful for, such as the aromatic behinds of each and every canine that crosses his path---or that doesn't cross his path for that matter.

"You must be the sniff and then you must let the sniff go," he advises, with so much love and wisdom.

Tuesday Expert Advice

Dear Cupcake,

I'm not sure if you can help me because I may not have long to live but I thought I'd write to you just in case you had some key information that might save me and my small family.  What happened was I recently cooked a recipe from a cookbook that has VERY definite sections for each season---Spring.  Summer.  Fall.  Winter.---and I guess I was feeling lawless because the other night I decided screw it and I whipped up a yummy Corn Chowder from the Summer section even though it is Fall thinking no one would ever notice but moments after my husband and I finished our bowls of smoky goodness a rock came hurling through our living room window with a note attached to it that said YOU DIE, SEASON IGNORER! and the next morning when I went to start the car there was an ominous message written in what appeared to be unsalted butter smeared across the windshield that said IF IT'S SUMMER WHY AREN'T YOU WEARING A BATHING SUIT YOU IDIOT? and after that I realized this might be serious and I filed a police report and we have set up a barricade to protect ourselves from the hand grenades but we wanted to know---is there any national protection from this Seasonal Recipe Mafia or should we just consider ourselves goners?
---Petrified and Panting in Puyallup

Dear Panting,
No.
Good luck,
Cupcake

Monday Judgements and Warnings

Just in case you missed the recent addendum to your How To Be a Human Rule Book, here are the What To Never Ever Think or Argue In Defense Of chapter details:

Glen Campbell and Tanya Tucker Were a Good Couple

Capeci?
Delilah Don't Be a Dope

Sunday Survey

THIS IS HOW IT WORKS:

An idea flutters around me for a while, for a good solid time, for the time it takes until I can't ignore it and it tells me to write about that time I helped my dad in the hospital.  That time when he was sicker than any person I'd ever seen sick.  He was sicker than I'd thought he deserved.  But the idea tells me to write about that time.  How we both knew, without talking about it, that this was the moment that would change us forever and this was the moment that would forge us together as BRAVE.

This is what the idea does. It sits around like a drooling Labrador.

Go on ahead and write about the way you and Linda used to spend hours taking in your Ditto jeans until they were so tight you doubted you would even be able to step over a small bench on the 9th grade lawn.  Write about that now, regardless.  Regardless of how much you don't want to---especially because of that.  This is the idea's idea of a big joke---

Keeping track of all the stuff I want to say just in case anyone else has ever felt it---this is the idea's gigantic, weird job---filling up notebooks with scribbles like:
CLUTTER KILLS and
Twinkle Toes and Worry Wart and Anxiety Blog and
Don't Do One Thing That Scares You and
Un-Mommy and
What Other People Fight About and
Finding Out Mom Wasn't Crazy But Just Selfish and Lazy and
Oh the Bougainvillea brightens the grimy street gravel and
In the morning the newscasters are dreary serious although their hair is big and real and
That time I saw Ed Begley, Jr. in my rear view mirror screaming at his girlfriend and
I'mNotALoser.com and
How the most nice people are often times the most hateful and
Anger is hurt left unattended and
When In Doubt, Be You and
All these other lives I will never ever know and
The difference between What I Was Thinking and What I Said and
The Big Club of Motherless Children and
They all smoked because they didn't know and
How many others overheard the unhearable and
Those mornings when the light makes things so much more doable and
I AM WORTHY YOU ASSHOLE and
Places Other Than Here and
and, and, and, and, and, and,
and, and, and,

Does that ever happen to you?

Toodles,
Lieutenant Lookaway It Never Stops
Platitude Precinct
Long Winded Division

Saturday SlobberLove

Sometimes on Saturday, we like to spend some tender, philosophical moments staring out the window from our Captain's Perch and think about how fortunate we are that our shrill bark carries as far as it does from up here---on the arm of the couch.  

And we feel a little weak in the haunches, to be honest with you, thinking about how carefree and fanciful our life is now compared to the dangerous dark days of our childhood before we were rescued and we come to believe that, aside from that aging basset hound that gets chauffeured around the neighborhood in a stroller, we think we might just be the luckiest hound in the whole wide world.