I Stumbled Upon This One.

Well, as some of you know, I am currently nursing a sprained ankle. That means... no cycling, no running, close to no walking. I am, as they say, a gimp.

That also means that the "Stumble Upon" button has been getting quite a workout, instead. Out of sheer boredom, I happened upon this gem. Allow me to share!

(PS: The little cartoon up there is supposed to be of a computer mouse walking on a treadmill. Get it?)

"Dad, what would happen if you ran over a ninja?" by Stacey Thornberry

That was the subject of an e-mail I recently received from my roommate. She doesn’t typically send “forwards,” so I knew it had to be good. And, oh, I had no idea!

Here are some of my favorites from the e-mail, with some commentary. There were many more I enjoyed, but some weren’t entirely “blog appropriate”…

“I wish Google Maps had an ‘Avoid Ghetto’ routing option.”
Seriously! I remember moving to San Francisco, I had my roommate draw me a “safe” route to walk to work because I had no idea where the boundaries for the Tenderloin were.

“More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can’t wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that’s not only better, but also more directly involves me.”
This reminded me of a few people in my life. I pointed out this trait to one of them; I was surprised by how shocked they were to hear they did this. At least when I do it, I tend to be aware that I’m trying to be a one-upper.

“Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.”

“Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.”
Yes! Why do we care so much?

“Is it just me, or are 80% of the people in the ‘people you may know’ feature on Facebook people that I do know, but I deliberately choose not to be friends with?”
I find myself clicking the little “x” that will make these people disappear. And doesn’t it always feel creepy when someone sends you a friend request and Facebook tells you “Sherry Fredster found you using People You May Know.”?

“Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn’t work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in the U.S. did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no Internet or message boards or FAQs. We just figured it out. Today’s kids are soft.”
How did we know that? How did we do so much before the Internet?

“There is a great need for sarcasm font.”
If you know me, you know how often I use sarcasm. So, hopefully, when we communicate electronically, you know when I’m being sarcastic. But it can take years to cultivate that relationship to where someone knows without being told that no, I wasn’t serious, I was using a sophisticated sense of humor (or, as someone on urbandictionary.com says, sarcasm is “used sometimes in order to belittle someone and make them seem stupid…or equally to amuse and impress them with your mind.” - you decide). I could avoid many miscommunication snafus if I had a sarcasm font.

“I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I’ll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone’s laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I’m still the only one who really, really gets it.”
My list off the top of my head: Mean Girls (I love you, Tina Fey), Little Miss Sunshine (Steve Carrell, you genius), Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, what did we do without you?), Thank You for Smoking (just ignore Katie Holmes - this is a fantastic satire).

“The only time I look forward to a red light is when I’m trying to finish a text.”

“LOL has gone from meaning, ‘laugh out loud’ to ‘I have nothing else to say.’”
I think this captures why I’ve come to despise “LOL.” My best friend and I often discuss how much we hate “LOL” and are much more “haha” people. Who knew we could be categorized as such? One caveat: I love when my senior vice president uses it. Side note: My dad uses “LOL” to mean “Little Old Lady.” How times have changed.

“I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.”
For years, I’ve told people, “When I’m bored, I either sleep or I eat.”

“Answering the same letter three times or more in a row on a Scantron test is absolutely petrifying.”
Remember thinking, “There are three C’s in a row. That can’t be right. I must have answered one wrong!” and then second guessing yourself and agonizing over the pattern that had appeared on your Scantron?

“Whenever someone says ‘I’m not book smart, but I’m street smart,’ all I hear is ‘I’m not real smart, but I’m imaginary smart.’”

“How many times is it appropriate to say ‘What?’ before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?”

“While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it….thanks, Mario Kart.”

“Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.”

“Bad decisions make good stories.”
Oh, so true.

“Whenever I’m Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don’t mind if I do!”

“You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you’ve made up your mind that you just aren’t doing anything productive for the rest of the day.”

“Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don’t want to have to restart my collection.”
Please, please, please…let’s join forces and resist any new technology so I don’t have to waste my money on some new format.

“I’m always slightly terrified when I exit out of Microsoft Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten-page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.”

“I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Ugh!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What’d you do after I didn’t answer? Drop the phone and run away?”
I have one friend I do this with constantly. I never understand how this actually happens! Ridiculously frustrating.

“I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.”
That just happened to me the other day.

“I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.”
Exactly. Then, I just don’t want to hear classical music or the thousands of They Might Be Giants songs I downloaded because I saw them in concert once or the Broadway showtunes that litter my playlists. Skip, skip, skip.

“Sometimes I’ll look down at my watch three consecutive times and still not know what time it is.”
How is that possible? I do it and I still don’t know.

“I keep some people’s phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.”

“It really irritates me when I want to read a story on CNN.com and the link takes me to a video instead of text.”

“The other night I ordered takeout, and when I looked in the bag, saw they had included four sets of plastic silverware. In other words, someone at the restaurant packed my order, took a second to think about it, and then estimated that there must be at least four people eating to require such a large amount of food. Too bad I was eating by myself. There’s nothing like being made to feel like a fat glutton before dinner.”
This happened to me when I ordered room service in Phoenix. I ordered chocolate covered strawberries and a chocolate lava cake. The room service staff member asked, “Is this for two?” I said, “No, just me…” And I ate it all.

And the one that inspired the title of the e-mail:

“My 4-year old son asked me in the car the other day, ‘Dad, what would happen if you ran over a ninja?’ How on earth do I respond to that?”

Hope you got a giggle out of this. :)