The regular publishing schedule here at Coquetting Tarradiddles is pretty simple: two new essays each week, with one released on Tuesday and the other on Thursday. It doesn’t sound like a difficult thing to manage and, truth be told, it really isn’t. However, every so often Life meets up with Fate over a game of cards in the back room of some celestial speakeasy where anthropomorphized representations of the human condition get together to eat ambrosia and figure out clever ways to screw with mortals, and their little omnipotent games of chance almost always result in Interesting Times for us regular schmoes.
Recently, for example, I found myself on the receiving end of just this sort of celestial conspiracy when Serendipity decided to take an interest in my quiet little life and sent Opportunity to come knocking on my door like an overzealous Mormon kid on tracting duty, and I just haven’t been able to get the little bastard to shut up and leave me alone. Fortunately, this means that some pretty exciting stuff has been going on over the past couple of weeks, but unfortunately, I can’t really say much about it right now. Hopefully, with a little time (and provided Luck is in a good mood next week), I’ll be able to reveal some really great news very soon, but for now the only thing I can do is apologize for interrupting my regular blogging schedule and get on with trying to provide you with today’s entry, at least.
This will be amongst my briefer entries, as my days have been absolutely filled with goings on that I can’t yet talk 
about, which leaves me with, well, not much to talk about. Instead, I will use the opportunity of today’s brevity to perhaps pass a little of my hard-earned wisdom onto you, my gracious and ungrateful readers. Heck, I’ll even strip out my usual verbosity and further truncate my ramblings into a simple list form for all of the web-obsessed waterheads out there who can’t imagine life ever moving slowly enough to warrant devoting more than five minutes to reading anything. See? I’m catering to the needs of others. I think I’m growing as a person.
about, which leaves me with, well, not much to talk about. Instead, I will use the opportunity of today’s brevity to perhaps pass a little of my hard-earned wisdom onto you, my gracious and ungrateful readers. Heck, I’ll even strip out my usual verbosity and further truncate my ramblings into a simple list form for all of the web-obsessed waterheads out there who can’t imagine life ever moving slowly enough to warrant devoting more than five minutes to reading anything. See? I’m catering to the needs of others. I think I’m growing as a person.A Brief Selection From
Kristian’s Rules To Live By
#8,477: The price of sanitation and hygiene is eternal vigilance, so one must always be aware of the unfortunate explosive effect that multiple juice boxes can have upon a toddler’s sensitive digestive system, and plan accordingly. Failure to do so is guaranteed to result in a Regrettable Situation involving an unscheduled shower for clean up, followed by the sudden necessity to briefly regress your child’s potty training development from Underoos back into the more leak protecting appropriateness of a snug fitting pull-up.
#4,357,293: You will lead a much happier and stress-free life when you realize that computerized navigational systems are more like serial killers than wonders of modern technology. And, just as with any serial killer who wants to lead to you a secluded area and make you disappear from the world, your average GPS is not to be trusted. Placing 
too much faith in your TomTom will only get you hurt, or at least hopelessly lost. Apart from advising you to take phantasmic and non-existent highway exits, it will steer you towards closed roads, then completely deny any knowledge of recent construction as it quietly mocks your navigational acumen while it makes ridiculous demands for immediate u-turns every fifty feet for the next several miles. Left to its own devices and free from the scrutiny of a careful and untrusting driver, your average GPS is as likely to get you to your destination safely as it is to guide you down a snowmobile trail, then abandon you after your car gets stuck and you slowly begin to succumb to the elements and die from exposure. True story, sort of.
too much faith in your TomTom will only get you hurt, or at least hopelessly lost. Apart from advising you to take phantasmic and non-existent highway exits, it will steer you towards closed roads, then completely deny any knowledge of recent construction as it quietly mocks your navigational acumen while it makes ridiculous demands for immediate u-turns every fifty feet for the next several miles. Left to its own devices and free from the scrutiny of a careful and untrusting driver, your average GPS is as likely to get you to your destination safely as it is to guide you down a snowmobile trail, then abandon you after your car gets stuck and you slowly begin to succumb to the elements and die from exposure. True story, sort of.#12: Always look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when it comes with attached surveillance equipment. High school students in the Lower Merion School District in Ardmore, Pennsylvania learned this the hard way after discovering that the school-issued laptops they’d been given were using built-in webcams to record their every move. That’s the official complaint filed in the lawsuit, anyway. Apparently, after their son was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” by the school’s Vice Principal, the parents of student Blake Robbins were a bit miffed when they learned that the VP used a photo of their child at home as evidence. Allegedly, the photo was taken by the laptop itself in some seriously creepy covert spy sort of deal designed to catch a student unawares anytime and anyplace including, one would assume, at night in his bedroom, during his special private time with Skype, his girlfriend, and a bottle of hand lotion. Then again, it could just be that little boy Robbins uploaded a naughty picture to MySpace and blamed it on his computer when he got caught. Either way, the lesson here is to distrust cameras. And the Internet. And computers. And school officials who are on the Internet and using cameras and computers. And the Nazis, just to be safe. Frakin’ Nazis…
#922: Deciding to consume a full year’s worth of dental insurance benefits over the course of just a few weeks is a fine and healthy goal, but one should never attend an important, potentially life-changing business meeting immediately following a lengthy 
and painful procedure – especially when it’s a lunch meeting. An inability to properly control your facial musculature is probably perceived as some sort of a weakness by the people to whom you are speaking, and dribbling tomato soup down your chin whilst enduring the special horror that comes from suddenly realizing that your tongue has betrayed you and gone completely useless right in the middle of a very important and clever-sounding sentence certainly doesn’t help the situation, either. Still, if you manage to impress even under the anesthetic haze of a completely numb mouth that has you talking like a sedated Porky Pig with a lithium habit, you probably have nothing to worry about, even if they did notice what happened when you tried to bite into your sandwich…
and painful procedure – especially when it’s a lunch meeting. An inability to properly control your facial musculature is probably perceived as some sort of a weakness by the people to whom you are speaking, and dribbling tomato soup down your chin whilst enduring the special horror that comes from suddenly realizing that your tongue has betrayed you and gone completely useless right in the middle of a very important and clever-sounding sentence certainly doesn’t help the situation, either. Still, if you manage to impress even under the anesthetic haze of a completely numb mouth that has you talking like a sedated Porky Pig with a lithium habit, you probably have nothing to worry about, even if they did notice what happened when you tried to bite into your sandwich…#5,632 #2: Don’t pick a fight with your spouse if you have a Y chromosome. This one shouldn’t really need any explanation, but I should also point out that attempting to defuse any such ill-advised disagreement via a follow-up e-mail the next morning is A Very Bad Idea. To elaborate just a bit further, it’s best to not mock your wife’s Law and Order: SVU habit, especially if it concerns an episode where you’re siding with the character standing on principle versus the hapless woman who is overwrought with emotional distress and hysterical. Furthermore, using the word hysterical to describe the woman’s mental state is also A Very Bad Idea. Also, making an effort to point out the absurdity inherent in almost every episode of the brainless procedural drama is a sure way to find yourself evicted from the bedroom for at least a two night sentence. However, should this advice not reach you in time and you find yourself already mired in the murky blackness of an untenable debate between reason and emotion, take comfort in the knowledge that sleeping on the couch isn’t all that bad. It’s sort of like camping, except with TV and snacks along with unchallenged dominion over the remote control. In fact, now that I think about it, I might risk pointing out to my lovely wife that there’s no such thing as a “high definition graphics equalizer” needed to download porn from the Internet, no matter how emphatically Richard Belzer claims there is. It’s absurd!
Maybe there’s an Outer Limits marathon on tonight…
Don't you wanna be cool, too?
