I know you're going to find this hard to believe--I hardly believe it myself--but new evidence has emerged that advocates of Intelligent Design are entirely in the right. While it may in fact be the case "that a
Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe," I have reason to theorize that life as we know it on Earth was designed by none other than
my youngest child. And she is very intelligent.
To protect her privacy and preempt deification, I will call her "Little Leeserannie." The evidence itself emerged from under my little one's bed after she moved away to college, and I hope you will appreciate the scoop in my first-ever diary entry at dailykos. (I was planning to leak the story to Judith Miller, who would be the perfect reporter to trust with a secret of such magnitude, but I hear she's between jobs.)
If your inquiring mind wants to know the truth about intelligent design, read on....
So Little Leeserannie had moved away, and I was reaming out the ungodly mess under her bed: water bottles and wadded socks and used tissues and lots of papers and packaging from this and that, Reese cups and Kit Kats and something called Zig-Zag (is that as good as Snickers?), all gobbed together in dust and cat hair in a mass that looked like poor Frodo after Shelob had her way with him. And from this primordial stone soup I extracted the five-subject trapper in which my daughter kept all of her work senior year.
What a find to feather the empty nest! Misty-eyed with nostalgia, I leafed through the pages, putting my hand over my heart to tame it at the sight of my dear girl's handwriting, which triggered memories of all the homework we had done together, her sweet voice piping up during television commercials, "Mommy, what's a gnomen?" or "Mommy, were the Neanderthals cannibals?"
One of my warm tears dripped on Little Leeserannie's brilliant "Ode to My Belly Button," composed for her creative writing class, and then I turned the page to find an assignment that I couldn't recall her ever mentioning to me. I wonder why? My daughter tells me everything.
I know many of you will try to wheedle the actual document out of me, but Little Leeserannie owns the copyright and I'm no plagiarist. The gist is this: my daughter designed an ESP time travel machine by which she could project her intelligence into any point in the past, present, or future. The first place she traveled was back to the beginning, where she was not at all surprised to find only some gases and dust swirling in the dark cosmos. Luckily it was merely her intelligence and not her body transported there; she survived unscathed.
Next, she journeyed to Washington DC to see what will be happening on her 100th birthday, but to her utter shock and dismay, there was nothing there. No Abe Lincoln in his giant chair, no White House, only some gases and dust swirling in the dark. Her vast intelligence immediately led her to realize that she had gone too far. By 2086, either she was already dead or the whole world had been destroyed by Iraq. So she put her time machine in reverse and went back to Washington that very day.
And here comes the eerie part.
To her doubled shock and dismay, there was still nothing around except gases and dust swirling in the dark. Little Leeserannie herself somehow remained, a sentient being who had projected her intelligence into another location, and yet the world had disappeared. Perhaps her own ESP time travel had mucked up the planet, or perhaps it was just a coincidence, but something was clearly amiss.
I'm sure you have already surmised that the story has a happy ending because here I am, telling you about it. My daughter projected her intelligence back to the beginning, and how's this for smart: she implanted the swirling dust of the cosmos with her knowledge of evolution from ninth grade biology class! I was so proud of her when I read that part. Then she took a quick jaunt back to the future to check her work.
Thank goodness, she had succeeded. Abe Lincoln was back in his big chair, the White House had a black female lesbian atheist president in it along with her first lady and two kids conceived by parthenogenesis, and my Little Leeserannie finished her homework just in time to watch The Osbournes.
So there you have it, and now I need some advice. What's a mother to do?