Celebrating Stupidity

So I’m walking by the local bookstore, Diesel (totally cool place that makes you want to read every book in it), and I always stop to look at their window displays. In part, Kate just loves to look at all the books and say, “Book! Book!” as if alerting the other pedestrians that an anvil was about to fall on their heads. And I too just like to look at the books, but I keep my, “Book! Book!” on the inside.

Today they had a calendar in the window, one of those daily calendars that is small and you tear a page off each day, called Stuff on My Cat. The cover shows a lounging cat covered in small yellow Post-Its. And yes, there were 363 pages with other pictures of, as billed, things on someone’s cat.

(Yes, I had to go into the store to take a closer look.)

I couldn’t help but wonder when stupid things like this became so acceptable to so many people. And I’m not saying I’m above the celebration of it all. Maybe it’s these damn internets that allow everyone to let their freak flags fly. There is so much out there for us to process, that we’ve just had to move in a totally inane direction in order for anyone to stop and pay attention.

I’m by no means a dumb-stuff connoisseur, mind you. Our friend Jamie is pretty good at digging up cyber-weirdness and delighting in it. And every once and a while I’ll come home and Mark will need to drag me to his computer to show me something that he saw at work and found outrageously funny. One time it was a website that showed what happened when you left a gummi bear in water overnight–or for some faux-scientifically significant amount of time. What happens, somewhat unsurprisingly, is it gets all bloated. Anyway, Mark found it incredibly hilarious and I think I looked at him with disdain and thought, “I’m married to a 14-year-old.”

Ah well, one person’s stuff on a cat is another person’s waterlogged candy.