*

As usual, Laura isn’t able to do anything half-way. So she spent the morning organizing her brants into categories (see right of brant for complete listing). This should take a normal person an hour or so, but as we all know by now, Laura is not a normal person. It’s taken her two and a half hours and she’s still not finished! Why? Well, see for yourself. Laura just can’t resist the enormous potential for extensive list humor* right on her very own brant!

(*List Humor: This is a touchy phrase for Laura since it was once used in a rejection letter from The New Yorker referring to a piece of hers — “The International House of Hunan Pancake” — they were at that very moment rejecting. The aforementioned alleged “list-humor piece” was a parody of the ubiquitous Chinese Take-Out menus that were constantly getting slipped under Laura’s apartment door or into the foyer of Laura’s apartment building and the International House of Panckes menu with which Laura was intimately acquainted (not to be a tease yet again, but more about her “Resume of Failure” later). The complete phrasing of the rejection letter was:

“Sorry, but we’re not taking list humor right now.”

Laura was deeply annoyed by that phrase since she had no idea what it meant. I mean, obviously she knew that her piece contained a list and was humorous. But she certainly wasn’t aware of any Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory of List Humorists creating massive amounts of derivatively unpublishable list-humor pieces.