Thisssssssssssssssssssssssssssstinks

Wouldn't you know it? Just two days after getting a new little puppy, we've inherited that hungry snake that went missing. When Shea and Amber were asked whether they wanted to adopt Darby, one of the reasons the answer was initially "no" was because there might be a snake in her our house. After the snake disappeared, however, they decided to bless our house with Darby's presence.

Apparently, the crazed father of the student who bought the snake finally found the damn thing lounging on the bathroom floor on Friday night. He called Jessica and told her to either pick it up immediately or that he would shoot it. Yes, he has a gun. Yes, Jessica drove into the ghetto after dark to retrieve a sizable snake in a shoe box from an armed man. She had to inconspicuously transport it home on a train, too, meaning just one thing: Snakes on a Train!

So now we have a snake in the house indefinitely, too. Hello, Noah's Ark! As I suspected, you cannot love a snake. It sucks. It's not friendly, it's not cuddly, and it stares at me evilly. At first I thought I was paranoid and kept this thought to myself, but then Jessica, who has been working hard to convince me that the snake's all right, asked if I noticed how the snake just stares at me intently. Yeah, I had. Yeah, I hate it.

Saturday during graduate class, Jessica and I sat at separate tables, but an arm's length away. We learned cooperative learning strategies, one of which is called Rally Robin, which involves partners taking turns writing down ideas in a given category. Slipping a note to her, I headed the note with "Rally Robin: Fun Things to Do with a Snake." For a couple of hours, we passed it back and forth. Here's what we came up with:

Fun Things to Do with a Snake
*Dress it in a suit and top hat
*Wear it as a belt
*Kill it
*Sick it on your dog!
*Teach it to line dance
*Pierce its ears
*Go to "third base" with it
*Celebrate its quincenera
*Give it a wedgie
*Take it to the gyno
*Mini golf!
*Tae-Bo
*Long slithers on the beach
*Girl talk
*Hypnotize it and make it think it's James Madison
*Take it on a date with me and Blair!
*Recite MLK Jr's "I Have a Dream Speech" in a round!
*Breast feed it! Yay!
*Keep it real
*Take it to a Britney Spears concert and unite it with its sisters + brothers
*Jenga!
*Crocodile Hunter -- the game
*Write a fictional account of the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson entitled If I Did It, Here's How
*Enlist it in the army
*Practice table manners
*Play "Adam and Eve"
*Vote absentee for Green Party
*Tutor and early acquisition language learner and someone with a lisp. sssssssssss
*Compose the song parody "My Fart Will Go On"
*Put together Ikea furniture
*Form a prison literacy program
*Start a pop group with the facade that "we all grew up together" -- but we actually met after the audition
*Pairs figure skating
*Play Duckhunt - you use a gun, the snake uses... well...
*Mani/Pedis
*Anti-smoking campaign ads
*Sponge bathe comatose patients
*Russian roulette
*Rubix cube

After class, I was pretty optimistic that having a snake might be better than I gave it credit for. But I assure you - it could do none of these things - and we tried. I've had it with these motherfucking snakes in my motherfucking house.