last night i finished a book that was really well written and intelligent and funny, and the last four pages were totally devastating and brutal, and i cried. for real. actual tears over a book. okay, i'll tell you what the book was, but not the devastating part. population:485. it's about a small town emt/firefighter guy in wisconsin. i know you are dying to know what happened, so i'll tell you now that if you want to read the book, skip the next couple of lines. his little brother had gotten married seven weeks before the day of the incident. the day in question, he got a call to come to a car accident. his little brother came with. the victim was his new wife, who died on the scene. i can't imagine anything more horrifying than answering an emergency call and having the dead person be one of your immediate family members. so i held mr. fuzzy, my stuffed koala, and stared at the ceiling and felt sadness for all these people that i would never know. and i cried.

then i told chris stories at his request as i was falling asleep and he was working on a friend's computer. this is what i came up with:

my mom used to help me put together model dinosaurs. i loved them so much,and would try really hard to put them together correctly, and would get really upset when the parts didn't match up. i probably threw fits. which is probably why she helped me. to avoid the compulsive freak out that was only a deep breath away. so anyway, i was building the biggest dinosaur ever. it was a brontosaurus: pointy, brown, plastic parts slowly resembling a big pile of sharp, sticky crap. mom had to hold the final leg in place with superglue to help keep the wobbly guy from collapsing. when it had dried, she relaxed her grip, but the stumpy bronto-leg held fast to her thumb. the superglue had oozed over the edge of my dinosaur's knobby knee and grafted itself onto my mom's hand. xenotransplantation has always fascinated me, i always kind of wanted a monkey tail. but my mom didn't like any of this at all. she panicked, ran to the bathroom to run hot water over her hand, which of course, didn't do anything except maybe give her first degree burns. man, superglue truly is great. it really is the glue of the future. with the model hanging off of her hand, mom decided to use brute force. she grabbed a hammer, and started tapping on the leg. it didn't do anything, so she started hitting it harder. eventually, the leg cracked and and the brontosaurus came flying off, but the lower leg was still stuck fast to my mom's hand. she kept pounding away at it, amazingly never hitting herself very hard with the hammer, but i don't really remember how she got the remainder of the toy unstuck from her thumb. i think a steel nail file was eventually employed and there was much cursing under her breath and laughter from my father. i wonder what happened to that model dinosaur...