As you are aware, Skylar is a smart person. Like, I think he might actually be a genius.

Sometimes I think that maybe his brain is functioning at such a high level that when it has to do day-to-day insignificant computing it's like "BASIC THOUGHT IS FOR POOR PEOPLE I CAN'T BE BOTHERED WITH THIS!"

And so he dies trying to make toast in the bathtub right after winning Jeopardy.

A few weeks ago Adam had a pumpkin-carving party at his house and I knew Skylar was going to be at the grocery store that day at some point and so, hoping to save myself a trip, I asked him to pick up two pumpkins for the party.

For a second I was like, "Ok, Eli. Maybe you should call him and micromanage this." But I stopped myself because Skylar haaaaaaaaates being micromanaged by me just because of these like 15 to 30 times when he was cooking and I was hovering over him constantly saying things like "stir it this way" and "you're doing that wrong" and "here, let me just take over. Go outside and play."

So I didn't. I didn't micromanage him. I decided to choose my micromanaging battles and save my contributions for times when the instruction truly leaves a lot of room for discretion.


"Please pick up two pumpkins for the pumpkin-carving party" is not ambiguous instruction. Surely if you asked 1,000 people to do this, 998 of them would come back from the store with essentially the exact same thing.

Well, as it turns out, the other 2 people in that sampling are Rebecca (we already knew this) and Skylar (it has now been confirmed). Because when I got home from work, I discovered the following sitting by the door on my driveway:


By the way, the orange one was like the biggest pumpkin I've ever seen in my entire life.

When I asked him how he planned to carve the white one, he responded "oh are we carving these?"

No, Skylar. Adam is just hosting a pumpkin-carving party and he asked us to bring our favorite pumpkins as our guests.

It's like that time I asked him if he liked going to haunted houses and he was like "I guess. But, I mean . . . I don't believe in them." And I was like "what do you mean you don't believe in them?" And he said back to me like he was trying to get me to confirm the secret that the adults have been keeping from him, "like, I don't believe that they're actually haunted."

Or the other week when I mentioned that brownies are just chocolate bread and he responded, "I mean, I guess that's true. But then what would you call normal bread?"

Or the time he saw a button in his car while he was sitting in a car wash and he didn't know what it was so he pushed it and it popped the trunk open and then he panicked and reversed the vehicle and drove into the car behind him because he couldn't see it since the trunk was popped open.

Ok. That last one was me. BUT STILL.

We all have these moments. What's your best one?

~It Just Gets Stranger