Shakespearean Dandruff

Despite being present and very, very alert during her birth, I have occasionally wondered if Daughter-Only was perhaps switched at birth or dropped here from an alien ship because she is so very different in so many ways from her dear old mom. She's very social for one thing, supremely confident--occasionally annoyingly so, she will say anything to anyone (or so it seems). She has, for instance, proposed to several total strangers with a relatively straight face. She has walked down Main Street in town asking random people if they've ever been to Chuck E. Cheese or if they know the Mexican Hat Dance. She's just an all-around out-there kind of kid--unlike her mother, who while decidedly weird, has always kind of hidden her weird little light under a bushel.

Anyway, last night, she says to me, "Mom! How come T-9* has 'Shakespearean' but it doesn't have 'dandruff?'"

Try--just try--to imagine a texting world in which it would be necessary to use either the word Shakespearean or the word dandruff. And then, take that one step further into a universe in which the same person might need to text both words in the same one-hour period.

She's mine. She's definitely mine.

*T-9 is the texting "dictionary" in some cell phones.

Lessons Learned #346

In no particular order, some things Masked Mom has learned in recent weeks:

1. While I was born right-handed, I did go through a phase as a kid where I tried to retrain myself so I could work equally well (or at least acceptably) with my left hand. This was wildly unsuccessful and motivated almost entirely by the fact that I loved the word "ambidextrous." Recently I noticed that without even being aware of it, I had been texting left-handed. Not only can I text left-handed, I can text signficantly faster and more accurately with my left-hand than with my right: I'm ambiTEXTrous!

2. My 14-year-old daughter has a firm grasp of supply and demand and may be some kind of budding economic whiz kid. When she found out that tickets to the high school's production of Little Shop of Horrors cost $6, she said, "I thought, 'That's ridiculous for a high school play.' But then I realized that Hot Senior Boy is wearing tight leather pants in the play--now that's worth $6!"

3. There's nothing quite like waking up with a migraine to make you appreciate waking up the next day without one.