Only because my links are sadly outdated, here are the answers to your questions:

 

To buy a Cancer is Bullshit tee, click here.

 

To buy an I Kicked Cancer’s Ass shirt, click here.

 

The rest of my shirts are here.

Before you click away, horrified that I’m about to launch into a detailed description of a dream I had about my cats going snowboarding, don’t worry, Pranksters. I know the painful retelling of dreams is second only to memes as “most annoying thing on the Internet*.”

In the Paleolithic era, when my inbred cousins were dinosaurs, I was a small child. Let’s call me “Young Aunt Becky,” because that makes the assumed familiarity sound a lot more white trash. My parents were hippies, hopelessly stuck in an era of Wall Street Boy Wonders snorting piles of coke of three thousand dollar an hour hookers, and mullet-ed Trans Am owners trying to get chicks in bikinis to lay on their car hoods while Whitesnake blasted in the background. Needless to say, they were entirely lost in this brave new world.

(pointless sidebar: weren’t we all?)

We we were a civilized bunch, if it killed my mother, we’d attend the ballet, the symphony, and the opera. While my friends visited Salmonella-infested water parks during their “family days,” my parents dragged us to look at the dusty rocks that had once resided in the pancreas of Catherine the Great. You tell me who won on “family fun days.”

And you can forget listening to Bret “I Have VD” Michaels croon about roses and thorns – that shit was beneath us. While the rest of the world fawned over Axl Roses’s mullet, we listened to public radio. All day. Every day. Most of the time, I tuned it out.

That was, of course, until the day I heard one of the commentators on NPR lose their fucking shit. See, for those of you not forced to listen to tragedies about billions of babies dying in a country I couldn’t locate on a map, public radio does their own ads. So instead of hearing Billy Mays screaming in the middle of a coke binge about my “whites getting even brighter!” It would just be one of the droning voices reading ad copy into the microphone.

And, I learned that day, it was live.

I couldn’t have been more than eight the first time I heard someone say the word “pube” on the airways. In fact, the word was so innocuous that I didn’t even recognize it for the comedy genius it is. There is no finer word in the English language than “pube,” my Pranksters. I continued going about whatever business it is that eight year olds have before I realized what was going on. My lizard brain recognized that something was gloriously rotten in the state of Denmark when I heard laughter – actual, real, laughter – emerging from the stereo. I dropped whatever I was doing and began to listen.

Did NPR REALLY just say a naughty word?

Between giggles and guffaws, the commentator choked out a few words I did happen to recognize: “shit,” “it sounds so sexual *bwahahaha* just *gasps for air*” before someone interrupted and continued in the sober, drab, dull-as-dry-toast commentary I’d grown accustomed to.

That was my first experience with the miracles of naughty words on NPR. And it left me with the singular desire to have more, MORE! debauchery, more nasty, more gross, more AWESOME words on public radio. For years, I suffered through other people listening to public radio in my presence – some would cluck their disapproval when some far-away land experienced a life-shattering earthquake, while I, having spent my young life listening to these tragedies, played an eternal loop of Britney Spears in my head. Accused once of “not caring” about the “social injustice in the world,” I merely laughed – this coming from a slacktavist who worked at a garage door company. I was in nursing school at the time.

Still, I listened diligently. And still, I heard nothing. No “pubes,” no “shit,” no maniacal laughter when someone fucked the shit up on NPR. Not a single naughty word on NPR was to be had; instead, I had to listen to people who spoke through a mouthful of grogginess in a sleep-inducing lull. And nothing. I’d nearly given up my dream of listing for naughty words on NPR.

That was, until Thursday, when I was finally able to cross an item off my ever-implausible bucket list.

I stepped into a cab Thursday morning, dodging the icicles hanging precariously from the tall building, glinting sinisterly in the early morning sun. I announced my intended address to the cabbie and away we went. I stared out the window, trying to rattle my brain into coherency as we drove, halfway listening to NPR while trying to connect still-asleep synapses.

And there it was.

Completely detached and speaking through a mouthful of marbles, an NPR announcer made my dream come true without even realizing it. Barely listening, my ears perked up when she said in a dull monotone, “Poo.”

While it’s not the “motherfucker,” I’d been praying for since I was 8, it was a damn good substitute. Like most people, I find the word poo hilarious, in part because my hippie parents insisted we refer to bodily functions as they were named. We did not shit. We did not piss. We “urinated.” We “defecated.”

I’m not in the slightest bit ashamed to admit that the word “poo” still sends me into gales of laughter. Which is precisely what I did when I heard it in the cab. I laughed until a stream of saline spurted from eyes and rolling down my face. My sides hurt. My back ached. I pulled an intercostal muscle. And I didn’t care. The pain meant nothing.

I had finally realized my dream. NPR said naughty words to the sounds of my thrilled – yet cold – ears. And, my Pranksters, there is nothing sweeter than that.

Somewhere, my parents are feeling an intense pull of pride toward their only daughter…

…or not.

*I am the second-most annoying thing on the Internet.

Okay, Pranksters, YOUR TURN – what’s the most ridiculous have on your “I must do this before I die” list? (I overarching loathe the term “bucket list”)