SO MANY THINGS

1. You guys.  Groupon.  Why didn't any of you crazy kids tell me about this?  Whenever I saw GET DC FOR 94.5% OFF on the side of facebook, I thought it was just one of those spam gimmicks that make you sign up for $39.99 monthly subscriptions before you can do anything ("WE ARE LOOKING FOR TESTERS IN THE DC AREA FOR THE PURPLE MACBOOK").  So far, I've hooked us up with groupons for tapas, a deli, and photography.  I've been tempted to hook us up with groupons for many, many other things.  Really.  Do this wonderful thing.
2. I have made it my life goal to be obsessed with Ludacris.  I do hate How Low, but overall I am just so happy that this absurd early-aughts rapper has come out of the clear blue sky collaborating on like 17 hits that are so hot right now.  Oh AND, I happen to LOVE when singers introduce themselves before they start a song AND when they're featured on something completely outside their element.  So imagine my joy at "LUDA!  When I was thurrteeeen, I met my furst luuve."  Oh man.
3. Let's slow it down for a second here.  Let me tell you about one of my kids.  I'll call him Ryan.  Now, it's not in his IEP, but Ryan has something profoundly debilitating.  He's the kind of kid that's so disabled, to see him in his motorized wheelchair or standing contraptions (seriously.. for lack of a better word - he's more or less strapped and padded into a standing position for maybe half the day) and his bent arms and curled fingers that can't hold a pencil is more than a little ... intimidating.  There's a slight aversion, of course, a sort of fear that's jarring when you first see something like this.  Then you realize that if you listen closely, you can actually understand the words he says.  They're a little awkwardly paused or broken up, but he does speak in sentences.  Intelligent ones.  He correctly explained how something "impacted" something else recently, without hearing that word spoken by someone else prior.  He has huge eyes and huger eyelashes, which he bats flirtatiously and he knows it.  He smiles with a bizarre awareness, somehow his smile and his twinkling eyes convey that his degenerative condition is an inside joke and he's in on it.  With that smile and twinkling eyes he asks me what I had for lunch, or can I explain two-digit by two-digit multiplication to him again.  Roughly three billion articles have been written with the thesis either "disabled kids are just normal kids" or "disabled kids are way better than normal kids," and I'm not trying to say either of those, just a few crazy things that hit me both immediately and gradually. 
4. Also: How adorable is Tim Urban?  Ridiculously.  
5. Also also:  Totally validated.