Grumble

Today is Mana's birthday. She is crazy smart and quick-witted and pees on people when she sits on their lap, which makes her a perfect candidate to be my friend. I grumble, because I did not get the opportunity to be graced by her presence during my Boston breeze-through. You see, most smart people are completely one-track in their expression. (I know from whence I speak being casually smart at times...when I'm not trying extra-hard to seem dumb.) But, Mana can go from seriously high-brow to cornball in less than a nanosecond. You're all trying to digest these detes she's just laid out about the effect women's lib has had on the Iranian street and you think you've got your addition to this lecture/convo figured out, but then she throws you a curveball like "So, I fell down on the way to class the other day; I think I fractured my tailbone." And you just kinda sit there holding your mouth thinking "Is this her way of saying 'Don't bother, monkeyman. I've got this one covered.'?" The reason I bring this quality up is because there are very few ways to get hard info out of your friends. There's always that ticklish facade that presents itself as "sharing." Every so often, you don't want to share. You just want to get and get and get. Mana understands this. I get articles forwarded from her on subjects I should know about. I get drunken rambles on Harvard internal politics. I get these facts that I can fictionalize and internalize and metamorphose into something my own. She's like your favorite teacher. The one that bought you beers, even though that's totally unethical. Who needs ethics in the field of facts? Her husband refers to her as "his little brown companion." She is little and she is brown. She basically a less-hairy Ewok with a master's degree in skewering mass media. This cuddly quality is regularly undercut by her intensity, and her intensity never reaches severity, because she's so cuddly. If I ran the US, I'd appoint her Secretary of State. I'd send her in after I'd said something completely grievous in a fit of pique. And she'd smoothe out everything I said...by refuting it to the nth degree. Then she would make all those ministers and appointees give her a hug. Then she'd fart on them. This is my new model for political diplomacy. Silly, but aggressively silly. "Don't fuck with us. We have loose bowels." Ineffectual? Perhaps. But how much cooler would it be to be pressured by a stink bomb that's going to land on you personally, than a MOAB that's probably going to miss you and blow up an orphanage? Mana would say "But, Jeremy, we shouldn't pressure anyone." That's true. But her ability at detente is ironclad; that girl will NEVER sit in my lap.