Boxed Insanity

A few months ago my son had a birthday just before we moved out of town. A family member and his wife sent a gift to what they thought was our new address. However, their method for obtaining our new address was not the same method that most people use, which is asking. Most people just go, “Hey, what’s your new address?”

But not these two. These two printed out a whole bunch of real estate info from our area before we moved–just to see what we were looking at. Or something. I don’t know; it’s kind of hard to understand why, because many of the houses they printed out weren’t even houses we looked at. They just printed out random houses. So when we finally bought a house and told them about it, they threw out–apparently randomly–all of the pages but one. Which happened to not be the house we bought. Or even one we looked at. Then they sent a gift to that house.

That was the beginning of May, and as you may have noticed, this is not May. My husband finally asked them where they sent it and they replied that they sent it to our new address–to the street we don’t live on. Clearing up that part of the insanity, the gift was sent back to the return address where the family members also don’t live. Anymore. They moved to Idaho.

The box’s route: Oregon to Tehachapi, Tehachapi to Oregon, Oregon to Idaho, Idaho to Tehachapi. Just your standard shipping experience. When we finally got the box it was much the worse for wear, which was not a problem for the various hats contained inside, including what I’m pretty sure was a hat used in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as part of an Oompa Loompa costume. Some of you may remember what cool taste this person has in hats; let me remind you of the last time we got hats from him:

This is my fully-insane okie girl/hunter impression. It just goes with the hat, you know?

So the hats were fine. However, they had also sent a gift for our daughter. It was surely once a neato vintage porcelain doll. That had been shipped to different states, like, four times.

Fortunately, my daughter is too young to care about dolls and wouldn’t have been traumatized by this even if she had seen it. My eight year old son, however, was completely freaked out.

When he first pulled it out of the box, he saw only this:

Horrified, he turned to my husband and said, “Dad, why would they send us a headless doll, huh? Why, Dad, why?”

My husband said, “Well, son, I’ve been telling them how naughty you’ve been lately and they didn’t think you deserved a real birthday present.”

And then my son said, “Don’t they love me anymore?”

And then my husband said, “Frankly, son, no they don’t.”

Maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that. My husband explained what had happened and my son was mollified with the cowboy hat in the box. It was I who dug through the rest of the box looking for broken glass and had to be creeped out by this:

As I continued to pull out pieces, I couldn’t help but think of that one Courtney Love song that was ubiquitous in 1996. You know, the Doll Parts song? It was all “doll eyes/doll arms/doll hearts/doll parts” and then bizarrely, “I wanna be the girl with the most cake.” But surely you remember.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am the there was no actual doll heart. Just a doll ear, doll fingers, and a doll neck spring.

So for those of you who have come to visit us on a Saturday or who plan to come up on Saturday, yes, we might take you on a cool hike. We might take you to the pool. We might take you to Oktoberfest or a craft fair or to the 4th of July hot-air balloon festival. But if you’re really super lucky and the stars have aligned and smiled upon you, you will be present next time we get a shipment of hats. Because that is a special kind of fun, the kind of fun that makes you laugh in the daylight but when night comes you get to be afraid that some kind of curse came in that box, too, and that doll is gonna come alive, climb over the side of the bed, and steal your eyeballs.

A Brief History of Everything that has Ever Happened, Ever*

 (History according to random Wikipedia generations)

A thing that happened.

 

Beginning of Time-480 Absolutely nothing happened. Apparently.

480-484 (either BC or AD I can’t know, since those easily recognizable designations stopped being used in favor of less uniform, more confusing standards)Emperor Seinei is Emperor. Of Japan. While Wikipedia names an entire section “Legendary Narrative”, leading researchers to expect the description of something fascinating, Wikipedia goes on to state “there is an overall paucity of information about him”. The writer goes on to demonstrate that paucity and neglects to mention anything of particular note about Emperor Seinei.

773-777 Flaithri mac Domnaill ruled Connacht from the Ui Briuin branch of Connachta. He belonged to the sept of Sil Cellaig of Loch Cime. No one knows what these words mean or what place this happened in. Experts are pretty sure all of this was made up for an episode of Star Trek. Domnaill either restored the law of Ciaran of Clonmacnoise or had it forcibly restored upon him, depending on how you read the sentence about it.

777-1192 Either nothing happens or Wikipedia does not seem to be interested in those things. Here is a picture from a book I like to make up for the lack of anything happening. I don’t really like this picture, but as I said, the book is neat. I recommend you buy this book and see how many better pictures are in it than this one:

Huh.

1192 A priest was murdered at St James’ Church in Longborough, England. Apparently nobody cared about the priest enough to write down his name or why he was murdered. But surely he rests in peace knowing that he did matter for people to vaguely remember the very fact that he existed.

Incidental: Plate-billed Mountain Toucan exists in Ecuador and Colombia. Its existence is not, however, easily pinned down to particular dates.

1842 Charles Henry Parkhurst is born. For many years he lived and did some stuff, mainly in Massachusetts. He was some kind of pastor, and the words “Tammany Hall” were evidently used frequently in relation to things he did and things that happened to him.  In 1933 he died by sleepwalking off his porch roof, proving that even the most boring of humans do something interesting at some point in their lives.

1918 Osmania University was founded. While Canny Gal researchers noted the location of this university to be in India, the article seemed to contain a lot of long and foreign words, which were hard to discern as belonging to either places or people. However, it’s a mildly interesting looking place. Look.

There it is.

1920 John Mantley is born. He was an actor from Canada. Several times Wikipedia distinguishes which roles of his were performed in “legitimate theater” while neglecting to describe the alternative to “legitimate theater”. Researchers speculate that he perhaps dabbled in porn. Please note that these “researchers” are not well-respected, had never heard of John Mantley before approximately 3 minutes ago, and don’t really know what they are talking about. Just seems like porn is the logical alternative to “legitimate theater”.

1933 Canada’s ice-hockey Allan Cup is awarded. To a team. Absolutely nobody cares about this or has ever cared about this. I was going to show a picture from National Geographic that I liked, but the June 2007 issue that I have on hand only has pictures of glaciers and bats in it and none of them are really that cool. Let’s see this guy again.

Yep.

Incidental: Plate-billed Mountain Toucan continues to exist.

1962 Prasanna Vithanage is born and proceeds to make films. “His most recent film Akasa Kusum” ran for a record 77 days in Sri Lanka.” Researchers are unsure as to whether or not the film lasts 77 days or was played consecutively for 77 days. As a side note, Prasanna kind of looks like a muppet. Which could be a good thing, as most muppets have been very successful in their own film careers.

See, now I'm a fan of this.

 

1974 The National Parks and Wildlife Act of 1974 protects the Chestnut Teal “dabbling duck” in Australia. Why does History think birds are so important? Prestigious historical scholars may never know.

2008 Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory, not to be confused with Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, is a television documentary that aired in March of 2008. Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory has absolutely no singing or dancing in it, no promise of golden tickets, no funny fat kids, no glum/poverty-stricken families in it, and absolutely no Gene Wilder. Critics agreed that the inclusion of any of those things would have made it a lot more interesting.

2010 The Oklahoma Legislature authorized the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority to study the construction of a turnpike. Historians (or “historians”) thought more interesting things would be happening in 2010.

Conclusion: many things have happened. A lot of them have happened in England, India, and surprisingly, The Netherlands. A great many occurrences are sporting events. Most things that have happened are not very interesting to learn about, although they may have been interesting to the people experiencing them at the time. Birds exist. Places exist. Warships have and do exist, although many stopped existing when they got crashed or blown up. Unfortunately for mankind it is likely that more interesting things have happened and not gotten written down than interesting things have happened and gotten written down. Most unfortunately of all, way, way too many boring things have happened and gotten written down, and been disseminated to the public who likely care nothing about them. Observe:

I'm not wrong.

*This is only true in the sense that I have temporarily stripped every word in the title from its “traditional” meaning.