The First Annual (or Whatever) 99 Monkeys Stupidest Random Awards

The Stupidest Song You Can't Not Sing Along With: Daydream Believer. That song is as impossible to break away from as the Borg. And I'm not bagging on the Monkees. I love the Monkees. I had as big a crush on Davy Jones as any other girl.

The Stupidest Best Philosophy I Just Might Adopt Immediately: WWKRD? What Would Keith Richards Do? Say what you want about the man, he's a survivor. "Keep calm, get blazed, and play the riff " has a simple purity to it.

Of course I am not the first to have thought of this. It's a real book, and I want it.

I am aware that Keith Richards and Davy Jones are sort of the antithesis of each other, and I'm okay with that.

Elegantly wasted, indeed.

The Stupidest Dictionary: The one in my phone. It absolutely will not learn the word "damn," but regularly tries to autofill "fisting" for any number of normal, everyday words. Are you fucking kidding me, Samsung? Learn "fuck," too.

The Stupidest Super Power: My inability to sleep adequately for years on end. I can sleep only 10 minutes a night for a week at a time, and somehow my body thinks a 10-hour collapse once a week is sufficient for me to catch up and somehow avoid a psychotic break from sleep deprivation.

Unless, of course, this is due to a psychic awakening because I am, in fact, one of the Star People from the Pleiades. If that's true, then I'd just like to go home now, please. A pair of ruby slippers would make short work of the 445 light-year trip.

The Stupidest Ostrich Argument: All these inane social media posts about wonderful white cops and wonderful black detainees and just all-around warm and fuzzy racial wonderfulness. It's like posting about all the people who don't have cancer to "remind us the world isn't completely bad," which really means "allow us to pretend the bad thing isn't there." No matter how many people don't have cancer, cancer is still an ugly plague. So is racism. Stop trying to pretty it up or shrug away from it.

Of course. Racism solved.

The Stupidest "News": That two little kids held hands. I don't know what's stupider, that someone actually got paid for writing this crap, or that people continue to eat up anything about the Kardashians. But that's our society these days: the most money and the biggest boobs.

The Stupidest Place to Get Your News: Facebook. Remember, what you read is only as accurate as the most ignorant user.

This prank meme, Steven Spielberg posing with
a fake dinosaur from the Jurassic Park set,
was taken seriously by a disturbingly large number of people.

The Stupidest Alert System: Whoever invented obnoxious car alarms should be shot. OK, maybe not shot, but perhaps forced to be awakened by this rude noise every 15 minutes for the rest of his life. Nobody goes running out to catch the car burglar when these things go off, and go off, and go off, and go off, ad insaniam. What they do is start looking for the baseball bat they will use to shut the damned thing up, when it turns out the car's owner is away on a three-week tour of Russia and the Balkan lands.

The runner-up is whoever thought up using a car horn as an alert to tell you that you've locked or unlocked your vehicle. Do it the old-fashioned way, by, um, remembering where you parked it. And if you can't remember, then you're missing out on the fun of trying to find your beat-up ride in the sea of a coliseum parking lot, with your ears still ringing from the concert and your head swimming from the ganja. Where's your sense of adventure?

Overall, I think car horns are far too subject to rude usage, and should therefore be un-invented.

That's it for this installment. Here's the earworm. You're welcome.

Poof! You're a Tree: #1000Speak

Acceptance is so very, very hard. The one thing it absolutely requires is suspension of judgment, true absence of judgment, something few of us are very good at.

One thing I am learning, slowly, as I struggle uphill through my haphazard life, is that if we're going to be able at all to accept the world around us and the people in it, the first thing we need to be able to accept is ourselves.

This month's #1000Speak post is not a how-to or a how-I-got-here or a here-is-what-I've-learned. It's random thoughts, mainly, on something I need to get a lot better at. But I didn't realize that at first. As usual, I was struggling with what to write this month.

And then I saw this on Facebook the other day, and it was perfect:

I can't credit the author of the meme, but I can tell you that it came from the Facebook page of Tree Sisters, and I love it. Trees and Ram Dass; what's not to love?

I struggle horribly with acceptance. Like so many, I'm a lot more forgiving and accepting of others than I am of myself. (Well, except for bigots and Kardashian fans. We've got nothing to talk about.)

The different body types. Oh Lord, is this a peeve of mine, the notion that an imperfect body denotes a imperfect person, and don't even get me started on my loathing for the ridiculous standards of beauty rampant in this country. I'm the first to defend anybody else for not being physically "perfect" (whatever that's supposed to be anyway), but I'm the first to criticize myself. I remember when Dream Girl was little and she asked me why people love other people who are ugly, and I told her that no one who is loved is ugly, because love makes people beautiful. I would do well to remember that I am loved, and therefore I am beautiful.

Personal faults. How silly is it, to be accepting and understanding of the faults of others but not to extend that same grace to myself? This is not an excuse to decide I don't need to try to become a better person. I believe that's one of the things we're living this life for - to evolve. But it is a reminder that as much as I want to be better, I am also exactly where I'm supposed to be. If I was supposed to be somewhere else, that's where I'd be. As long as I don't stop striving, it's okay to cut myself some slack.

The views and opinions of others. Yes, even bigots and Kardashian fans. Each of us here is evolving, in our way and in our own time, with our own unique histories and memories and battle scars and fears and windmills to tilt at. No perception of the world around us is without stain or skew. We're all learning. Some of us are a little further along than others, and not for one second am I claiming I'm any further than anyone else. Except Kardashian fans. No, wait -- them too. And yes, even bigots.

So, back to Ram Dass. How awesome is that quote, how perfectly true? We see a tree, or a flower, or a star, and we don't criticize it. We may analyze it and classify it and place it in a certain context, as it paints part of our picture of the world for us, but we don't criticize it. It just is.

Acceptance.

And that's how I'm going to look at this from now on.

I'm a tree.

You're a tree.

And how much do I love trees?

Some of my favorite trees. Founders Grove, Humboldt Redwoods
State Park, California.
Time, and judgment, stand still.

Bullshit, Kim.

I publish a post about what a waste of news space you are, and now you're everywhere even worse than you were. An app for your stupid Hollywood game is banner-style down the side of my Facebook page. An ad for your gacky perfume, and I hate perfume anyway as I made clear in this post, is now big and fat in the middle of my news feed.

OK, I get it. You're rich. You're insidious. You're crafty. You will make me pay for mocking you.

That's okay. Please note that I use apostrophes correctly. I am the apostrophe champion. I don't know for certain that you misuse apostrophes, but I'm guessing. I know it's pathetic, but it's all I have.

I'm not even really that irritated. It's just that I have a head cold and I don't want to do my statistics homework and tomorrow's Monday. If you weren't everywhere I go you wouldn't be such a handy scapegoat.