Mitch and I were in Sweden visiting Brittany and Zach, some friends from college. Brittany took us to this gorgeous and huge park in Malmö.
Parts of the park are so forested that it's easy to forget you're in the heart of a major city. In one of these areas is a preschool, a year-round outdoor preschool. There is no building. The kids stay inside a perimeter of sticks, wear bright yellow vests so that they're visible in case they run away, and sleep on crates during nap time. It's one of the hardest preschools in the city to get your kids into. It reminds me of a child-care scheme I would have come up with when I was five and day dreaming in the woods. See these sticks? They're actually walls.
And the last bit is that I don't know how that preschool can be so hard to get your kid into. You just plunk them down on the other side of the sticks and run away.
2. Water Rocket Man
Out my window at work I saw this guy wearing water-rocket boots on Lake Michigan.
What at first seemed to be a cool thing out my window, rapidly turned into a story about loneliness and dorkdom the more I thought about it. This guy was out there for hours (two days in a row), tooling around with his little jet ski behind him, looking down on the people hanging out with their friends on boats. At best he had a wife or girlfriend reading a book on the beach while he spent his day alone on a ten-foot water platform.
There are easier ways to get laid, man.
3. 9/11, Personal Holiday
My friend Lisa was relaying a story that her mom told her. Her mom got in trouble about explaining something... in class. I wish I could remember it. But the parents who called up to complain also don't let their second grade daughter go to school on September 11th because they're worried that she'll find out about the terrorist attacks. I asked whether the girl got December 7th off, too, or maybe April 15th in case the girl found out that Lincoln was assassinated. Not sending her to school on the anniversaries of terrible events might keep her home full time. And it'll come as a bit of a shock when the girl eventually discovers that 9/11 isn't just her special holiday.
We concluded that the upside of the story was that if the girl doesn't know about the attacks at least she'll never forget.*
*That last story comes across a bit harsher in writing than in conversation. Let me know if you think I'm being the worst.
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