Google is both a useful search engine and a source of humor

In attempting to locate a specific Kanye West blog entry to reference in my own previous blog, I Googled: WHY WON'T YOU LET ME BE GREAT. The Google function that attempted to guess what I was looking for as I was entering it provided me with the following list:



It made me laugh outloud at work, worry about getting in trouble with IT, and realize how concerned people are about their ipods. To offer my own answer to the most popular question: well, maybe the fact that you're consulting Google about your sex life has something to do with it.

If you can tell me why the fen appears impassable* …

... well then okay, I won’t bother.

"WHY WON'T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!?!?!?" notorius ego-maniac Kanye West pleads with his fans on his blog. He needs to know why people are always trying to bring him down. As I close in on my quarter-life crisis, I’ve started to ask the opposite question of myself and my peers: WHY WON'T YOU LET YOURSELF BE REGULAR!?!?! In our lives why did people insist on building us up, when really we're just like everyone else? And why do we insist on believing in spite of all evidence to the contrary?

In college I babysat for a family with two little girls. I smiled when they told me what they wanted to be when they grew up: an astronaut, a gymnast, a singer, a veterinarian, a mom, and a teacher. I encouraged their unrealistic dreams and now I'm sorry that I did. I should have turned off A Bug's Life, sat them down, and told them the cold hard truth: you will not be all of the things you want to be. Truthfully, you might not be any of those things. Quit dreaming so big. Pick an average dream, preferably one that revolves around spending a lot of time in front of a computer, and then nail it.

One of the little girls was especially a dreamer. I should have looked her in the eye and said, “Listen Sally, I know that you're four and you think you're a good dancer. But you're not. Your technique is terrible and frankly, I don't know if the potential is there. So throw in the towel now before you actually start believing that you can be a dancer and a mom and a chef and a princess. Because you can't.”

Upon hearing this, she may have started crying, at which point I would have given her a cookie, teaching her another valuable life lesson: The easiest way to deal with disappointment is to eat your feelings.

Sure, deep down, I hope that one day soon Tina Fey will come across my humble blog and I'll be ‘discovered.’ However, in truth I know that the only people reading this are members of my own family and that I shouldn’t say anything too harsh about any of them or else my readership will plummet. So, while I wait for a call from Tina or, more likely, from my mom, I’m working on being content with never daring to pass the impassable fen or achieving anything that gives me a forum to ask thousands of fans: WHY WON'T YOU LET ME BE GREAT?!?!?!

I'm not Kanye West. I wear comfortable shoes when walking to work. I shop at a regular grocery store and frequently eat beans as a cost saving measure. Sure, famous high achievers put their pants on the same way that I do but just because we share this trait doesn't mean I'm anything other than regular. It just means there's really only one way to put on pants.

*This is the first line to Marianne Moore's poem I May, I Might, I Must, which I love.

What’s more frightening than seeing a bunch of cops running in the same direction?

Seeing a bunch of cops conspicuously not running in the same direction.

There are some events I never want to witness as I'm waiting in line for my morning coffee. One is an adult wearing Winnie the Pooh clothing. Few things put me in a bad mood faster than adults who wear cutesy clothing inappropriate for anyone over the age of five. Another event I don’t want witness is every cop in the train station running past me toward the nearest exit, walkie-talkies crackling. Alarm bells!

But what’s worse than these two scenarios? Seeing every cop in a hundred-yard radius not running to the nearest exit, walkie-talkies crackling. This restrained-run shuffle is meant to get a person, in this case a police officer, to certain location as quickly as possible without alerting the general public that said officer needs to get somewhere urgently. It fails on both accounts. Shuffling is not the fastest way to get somewhere, running is; additionally, as soon as I see a cop shuffling I know shit is going down, something serious too. If it was just a fight happening or an unruly bum, the cops wouldn’t care if I knew or didn’t know. But knowing that the cop doesn’t want me to know what’s happening scares me.

I know this move. I’ve employed it myself when a new checkout line opens up. I run-shuffle towards it, hoping that others won’t notice the new line and try to cut in front of me as I’m cutting in front of hordes of other shoppers. When I see cops shuffling by me, I know they’re hiding something and it makes me anxious.

It’s almost enough to make me I want to stop one of the shuffling cops and ask, “Where are you not running off to?” but I don't want to get out of the coffee line. Some might say a thing scarier than seeing a bunch of cops not running in the same direction is seeing me in the AM if I haven’t had coffee.