The High Life
by
Nathananel Smith


Forward

There are some times in this life when everything happens. Sometimes, it's big, earth-shaking occurences, sometimes it's nothings. Here's a short list of the nothings that make up my life. If these things had never happened, I would never miss them, but if this kind of thing never happened, I'd be mostly dead. And I wouldn't have a crazy addiction to lasagna marshmallows, either...

Saturday, December 19, 1998

Part I: The Banana Argument

We were sitting at the table, quite innocently eating soup. My mother gave out bananas to each that was sitting at the table, which was all of us, and gave herself the last one. I was sitting next to her, and when she saw that her banana had bruises, she gave it to me.

I said 'thanks' in my most excited tone.

Then she took the other banana. The good one! I was not totaly surprised. After all, my mind hadn't even processed the information. But then she started laughing. And laughing. And laughing.

Nobody knew what was wrong, but she explained.

Apparently, she thought that she acted like a 2 year old, and was setting a bad example.


Part II: The Christmas Tree

We spent an hour and a half looking for the perfect christmas tree. I know that that's fast, but we have only 16 acres, and 5 of those are pasture.

When we had narrowed the choices down to 2 trees, I decided that we could use the one that was closer to home. It's now sitting in our living room, with lights and ornaments literaly bending it's branches to the ground, and, like Calvin's tree, it's hovering over alot of boxes. (here, let me SHAKE that one, eh?)


Part III: Psycholight

If you like psychadelic, hypnotic, or just plain blinks, get a long strand of controllable flashing lights, then staple them to your ceiling in a spiral. Whenever you play your music, turn the lights out and your spiral on. Set the mood. Try it. it's cool. It even made me dizzy!!


Sunday, December 20, 1998

Ali's Lasagna

Okay. First, I need to explain a couple things: (1) We go to a barn-church in the afternoon. (2) When we go to church, we stay later for a potluck-style dinner. (3) Mom makes some really good homemade marshmallows.

So we were eating dinner, and Ali comes up with this idea.

"Here, Nathanael, put some ketchup on a marshmallow and eat it."

I looked at her. I thought she must've gone insane.

"C'mon. It can't be too bad"

I gingerly reach out and get a marshmallow. I smear some ketchup on it, then in a moment of sheer ingenuity, I add some honey and a strip of lasagna.

She looks at me like I'm sick.

When I eat it and deliver my verdict of "that's not too bad," she decides that she'll try.

But she never swallowed hers. She ran outside and spit it out.

Ahhh... The odd tastebuds of the younger set (I think that if she had thought of it objectively, she would have liked it.)


Monday, December 21, 1998

Jon Reese

Jon Reese is cool. He's a younger guy (21 years old) who is a major time graphics designer. He even went to the art institute. Anyway, he was up at Winning Strategies on the 21st, and on the 22nd. (His dad owns the company.) He had a really cool presentation that I'm going to try to duplicate with HTML (NOT!!) and all sorts of stuff...