Notes on my recent internet searches
"Cattle dog puppy. "Cute cattle dog puppy." "Wombat." How online history captures (and misses) life's little moments
I am slightly overwhelmed in the Cracker Barrel parking lot. Cattle dog puppy, I type into Google images. Imagining Baby Scout—a version I never got to meet—always helps.
I shove my phone under Sean’s nose. We try to find puppies with face masks just like hers (even at first glance but actually slightly askew) and equally soulful expressions. “These are all adorable, but none of them are enough, you know?”
Cute cattle dog puppy, I amend.
It’s no use. No image endears like her.
Wombat, I search, simply. I thumb through photos and scan first results. Why do wombats have cubed poop, I ask next. The wombats proudly present.
Katherine Rundell’s Vanishing Treasures and Joanna Bagniewska’s A Modern Bestiary are infiltrating all my down time.
Travelers tv show. We’ve decided to stop watching a few episodes in. It’s not that we don’t like the characters or premise—more that we can’t imagine committing three season’s worth of our time. (“If it isn’t a ‘fuck yes’, it’s a no,” I remember Sean reading from a vaguely self-help book shortly after we started dating.)
But I do not have his ability to stop in the middle of things. I spend the next hour scanning every episode recap on Wikipedia—and a few Reddit threads—until I know how the story ends at least in broad strokes.
Then I can move on.
Replace sweetened condensed milk with evaporated milk. Why does every key lime pie recipe insist on so much sugar?
Notes on an execution review. Notes on an execution explained. I wonder if I am the only one who didn’t feel the book worked expertly toward the author’s professed goal.
Sure, Kukafka’s novel did not glorify its killer or even intend you to fully sympathize with him. “Sympathize is too strong a word,” I said to Sean this morning when he asked. But I don’t think it focused on the women as fully as it might have, either. The aim was to examine how absurd it is to dissect serial killers… but the chapters seemed to do just that. Dissect.
Perhaps I read it wrong. Perhaps I am the problem, prone to trying to get inside monsters’ heads. Perhaps Goodreads and Reddit will tell me the truth.
(They don’t, really. Art is always subjective.)
Miami beach overnight parking code. Hmm. Miami beach recreational vehicle parking. Scroll, click, parse legalese. Fill with mild despair.
Everglades pinelands tree snail. Ah, hello, liguus fasciatus! I know that second word means “banded”—but doesn’t it sound just like fascinate?
Will alligators puncture inflatable kayak. I mean… it would be sillier not to at least wonder, right?
Ashamed of vs ashamed by. Sometimes you need prescriptive language advice. (Then I can feel shame about my writing’s topic… not its structure 😉.)
Best key lime pie in florida keys. Okay, okay. Give me all the sugar.
Do orb weavers eat their webs in the morning? We hypothesized this on a moonlit hike in the Everglades when we almost walked into a web as big as Sean’s wingspan… that was gone by 8 am the next day. Sean and I are shocked, in the most satisfying of ways, by the answer to my query: Yes. Many orb weavers do recycle their nighttime creations to rebuild later.
Cute blue heeler puppy. You know it—we’re here again.