The Tale of the Toaster

Confession:

I kind of wish I had named my url something besides "toasterxors" because while it does express (too much, I daresay) my true inner nerd, I feel like something more poetic or cute or generally less ending in "xors" would have been wiser. But, we live with the choices we make, I guess, and it's WAY beyond the point that I could change it now. I would have just used "lifesatoaster" but, inexplicably, someone else already has that one... It's random enough that I want it. It's even weirder than someone already has it. I was not so versed in the ways of blogging to realize that I could just separate with hyphens, but I digress. The "Life's a Toaster." story must be told.


So the saga of the Toaster began as many things do between Seester and myself: as ridiculous and outlandish sarcasm.

My sister Whitney (who will generally be referred to as "Seester") and I were sitting at the dining room table and she was working on her high school graduation announcements. "I need a quote to go on these. What should I use?" she asks me. She is very into quotes, so it wasn't so much that she didn't have a quote, she just couldn't decide what to use. I look at her, and with utmost sincerity, say, "I've got it-

"Life's.... a toaster."

She just looked at me, waiting for the rest of it. Then she asked, "Life's a toaster.... what? Life's a toaster, it's got lots of crumbs... Life's a toaster, it's burned on the edges... what's the rest?" I just tell her, "Nope. That's it. 'Life's a toaster.' End." She didn't end up using it, but the whole thing was endlessly funny to us, and it was added to the already extensive list of inside jokes that no one else gets.

This quote resurfaces about two years later when she is filling out her application to go to school in Oklahoma City. They want her to write an entrance essay about a quote from "a movie, a book or a song that is meaningful to you." Again, we sat across from each other at the dining room table, she asked me,

"What quote should I use for my essay?"
"Life's a toaster."
She laughed, "I totally should. But they said it has to be from a song or book or something."
"I promise you, they don't care what source you get your quote from. They want you to be able to string words together into sentences and say something interesting. You can BS something about how 'Life's a toaster.' came to be and how your relationship with your sister is very meaningful, blah blah."

{pause}

"Say all that slower and let me write it down."

My sister wrote her college entrance essay on the endlessly deep and meaningful quotation "Life's a toaster."


This is getting lengthy, but I can't talk about the toaster quote without mentioning the toaster lamp.

Yes.
Toaster lamp.



My sister is, and has been for quite some time, very involved in theatrical lighting. That was actually what she was in school for in Oklahoma. One of her classes had an assignment to turn some object into a lamp that isn't supposed to be a lamp, but still looks like what it is supposed to be. She said that lots of people put light bulbs into books and flower pots and things that are pretty easy to wire (whatever that means). Well, as is Seester's tendency, she waited until the night before she was supposed to have parts and pieces to even think about what she was going to lampify. She was literally walking around our apartment poking things and trying to find something that would a) work as a lamp and b) be relatively cheap to replace, since she would be destroying it. She said of the final choice, "Well, it was between the toaster and the coffee maker. The coffee maker was like twenty bucks. The toaster was six. Toaster it is." The pictures are the result of her taking OUR toaster right out of our kitchen and making it into a lamp. With a dimmer.


Sidebar: Seester is a total badass. Always.


So, there it is! The Tale of the Toaster. Doesn't it feel good to be in on the joke? Also, it's so interesting to me which of the seemingly insignificant things I have said sometimes stick around forever!