I Wish This Had Really Happened – to Me

“I hate Jenny Lawson.”

“You hate your Maid of Honor?” my husband, the Honorable Cap’n Firepants asked.

“O.K.  Wrong Lawson, dude.  Don’t you even remember my Maid of Honor’s first name?”

Quickly sidestepping that land mine, the Cap’n said, “Well, who is this Lawson you hate?”

“She is a writer.  And I hate her.”

“I think we’ve established that.  Care to explain why?”

“First of all, she had a crazy childhood.”

“So did you.”

“But hers was a happy, crazy childhood.  And funny.  And she lives in Texas.”

“So -”

“In the Hill Country.”  This will make the Cap’n hate her, too.  He has always wanted to move to the Hill Country.  “Where vultures try to resurrect your buried dead pets and scorpions invade your attic.”

“That doesn’t sound so good.”  Although he did kind of perk up at the dead pet part.  There are moments when he does not have kind thoughts toward Wonderbutt, our Bulldog who Ate the World.

“It’s funny!  Well, the pet dying part was not funny.  I cried.  But she made it funny.  That’s why I hate her.  And she uses profanity indiscriminately.”

“Well I’m glad she does not use discriminating profanity.”

“Haha.  Seriously.  She is hysterical.”

“So, what I’m getting here is that she wrote a book that made you laugh and so you now hate her.”

“Exactly.  Plus she collects taxidermied animals that are dressed up.  How am I supposed to compete with that?”  Again, Cap’n Firepants seems to brighten with a thought.

“It sounds like you’re jealous,” he says after a moment, perhaps thinking that is a better thing to say than, “Wonderbutt would make a fine tuxedoed and taxidermied collectible.”

And this is where the conversation ended.  Not because I threw a deadly scorpion at Cap’n Firepants and a starving vulture ate his carcass.  Though I seriously thought about it.

Only because this conversation did not really happen, except in my head.  And I really hate it when I can’t even control the conversations in my head enough to make myself look good.

If you are interested in hating Jenny Lawson, too, I highly recommend her book, Let’s Pretend this Never Happened.

(And by the way, Crash, thanks for texting me today that I should read this book – which I finished this weekend, laughing so hard that I was crying – and then not saying anything like, “She’s just as funny as you” or “You could totally write a book like that”.  Instead, you just said, “We thought r life was crazy.”)

(And by the way, Parents-in-New-Jersey, you are not the crazy set of childhood memories to which we are referring.  Thank you for reading my blog and not being crazy.  Although, if you were crazy, I might be able to make a lot of money off of  the stories.  Now I just have to do it the hard way and make up my own stories.  Don’t worry, though.  I’ll just make them up about Crash and Cap’n Firepants – not you.)

(And by the way, People Who Might Read Jenny Lawson’s Book, I would probably advise you not to read the iBook edition on your iPad while you are sitting in the middle of a group of parents at your daughter’s dance class.  Particularly if it is the chapter entitled, “My Vagina is Fine.  Thanks for Asking.”  People look at you funny.  And not in a good way.)

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