Revenge of the Paste Eaters (30 page)
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five things i have learned in fifty years
1.
The fact that it smells delicious does not guarantee it will taste good.
2.
Kicking small boys in the shins as hard as I can will not make me feel better.
3.
When you step on the brakes and they are “mushy”—even if they kick in a second later—park the car.
4.
The small red indicator light on the dashboard that says OIL
should
say IF YOU CAN READ THIS I’M PROBABLY ALREADY DEAD.
5.
If you are an imaginative child who makes up her own friends, you should not let your parents watch movies about ventriloquists whose dummies take over their lives. It never happens: but it will fire the latent imagination of a brooding parent in just so many different ways.
five things i am still learning
1.
The fact that it smells delicious does not guarantee it will be good for me.
2.
Kicking grown men in the shins as hard as I can will not always make me feel better.
3.
The actual mechanical reason why stepping on a pedal inside the car will make the wheels stop turning may not be a concept I will memorize in this lifetime: sometimes it’s enough to know that it will.
4.
Even newer, better-engineered cars require those same old annoying fluid exchanges.
5.
If you are an imaginative child who makes up her own friends, buy a computer. Sooner or later someone may pay you to print what you’ve created out of someone else’s life and besides, writers are a little odd anyway.
*
This is a historical reference for those of us born and functional before 1982. In those dim, gray times before CDs we had “records,” or “albums,” which were larger than CDs and more fragile (they scratched easily), and if we played an album too many times the needle would wear on the vinyl and the track we were playing would literally turn whitish. If you doubt this, I have a whole crate of used albums waiting for their comeback in my basement and I can show you. To this day it annoys me to pick up a CD I haven’t played in a long time and have to read all of the song titles and try to figure out why I bought it—on an album, it was the gray track.
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