Throwback Thursday – Time Traveling

I just finished Yes Please by Amy Poehler on audio, and part of that book has her discussing time-travel. Yep, Amy Poehler takes on time-travel. She also wins, frankly. Anyway, the point is that she discusses how places and people and things can propel you through time and take you back or tuck you away for the future in ways you don’t realize until they happen – but that key to this is remembering, in detail, the moments that might be useful for time-travel. Or something like that, I don’t know, while I was listening my dog rolled in a giant pile of wild animal shit and I spent the next forty-five minutes washing shit off him with a watering can, dog shampoo, and my bare hands. This morning I said I loved my husband more than I loved my dog and this afternoon I proved that was a fucking square tonne of love.

Uh. Anyway. While I was washing the dog, my book ended, and I was still washing the dog and my hands were wet, so I used the little controller thingie on the ear buds to move on to the next book available in the library, and it was actually Fool for Love, the first anthology in which I ever had a story published. It got made in to an audiobook quite a while later. I pressed the buttons on my ear buds controller thingie and listened to “Heart,” said first story.

And I time-traveled.

The following post is rescued from Livejournal, dated March 8th, 2009:

I don’t know about everyone else, but I had a freaking awesome time (how can you not, when wearing a Mardi Gras hat and listening to the wisdom of fools?) I don’t think we’ve had that mix of people in one place since our wedding day, and it was awesome to watch the groups mix and mingle.

Everyone took it well when there was a pop-quiz (ten quotes about fools, with parts missing). Two prizes were given; Yumi got a copy of ‘Fool for Love’ itself for getting the most quotes correct, and Janine won for making the most quotes foolish. A particular favourite, the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “We must learn to live together as brothers, or serve as Cthulhu’s minions.” Wise man.

In case you want to play your own home edition of the incredibly difficult (apparently) FFL game, here’s the ballot card:

“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and ________________________.” – Mark Twain

“Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to _________________________.” – Charlie Chaplin

“An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring ________________________.” – Charles de Montesquieu

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not ________________________.” – Abraham Lincoln

“We must learn to live together as brothers or _______________________.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“Fools in love they think they’re heroes, ‘cause they get to feel no pain. I say fools in love are zeroes. I should know, I should know, __________________________.” – Joe Jackson, ‘Fools in Love.’

“Fools rush in where _____________________.” – Alexander Pope

“A fool and her money ______________________.” – Helen Rowland

“I had rather have a fool to make me merry than __________________________.” – Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’

“It was revealed to me many years ago with conclusive certainty that I was a fool and that I had always been a fool. Since then I have been ____________________________.” – Alistair Sim

Remember, though, teacher says, every time someone cheats and googles for answers, a fairy loses its wings.

Props to my father-in-law for being the only one to get the Joe Jackson quote, and major props to Yumi who did, actually, get six of them out of the ten. Also fun was, “A fool and her money seek implants.” I don’t think that’s wrong, per se, but it isn’t the answer to the quiz.

Also, of major importance, I got fan-mail. Real, on-paper, honest-to-goodness fan mail. The fifteen year old daughter of a couple who were at the party wrote me an actual piece of mail about ‘Heart’ and how she liked it. I choked up like a girly-girl. Any letter that begins with: “I really enjoyed your story ‘Heart’. I read it 6 times, you really appreciate it to its fullest after the third time…” is a really good letter. Just so you know.

Anyway. I haven’t stayed up that late since Saints and Sinners, and I am once again reminded that I am now an old man who can’t stay up late without consequences, but it was so worth it. I’d do it again.