The Best Time I Cried for a Totally Ridiculous Reason

by Lindsay Robertson

On April 15th, 2009, I wrote a post on my then-blog Videogum.com about a video of some people dressed up as Cookie Monster and a pink ape who called themselves “The Xylofolks” and played for money on the subway. Only I accidentally identified Cookie Monster as “Ernie.” For some reason, this sent our site’s usually cool commenters into a tizzy that ended in a short but intense meltdown on my part.

I remember that day well. It was one of those late afternoons where it seemed like someone had tripped over a cord and unplugged the internet, and I was chasing the all-important Next Post so hard I’d fallen into the dreaded Shame Spiral. I needed something, anything, fast, or the entire day and night would be ruined. Then I saw the Xylofolks and forced myself to care about them long enough to pretend to have an opinion, and the heavens opened. And then I called Cookie Monster “Ernie.”

Ernie and Cookie Monster look nothing alike. This we know. It was just an honest mistake, and I should have laughed off the commenters. I mean, who gives a fuck? Why the anger? It’s not like I said “Curb Your Enthusiasm is a ripoff of Seinfeld” or something else that betrayed a basic lack of pop-culture understanding. I just typed the wrong word. And who the hell were these people? Did they come from some Cookie Monster Anti-Defamation message board? A lot of them seemed to have joined the site only to call me names!

For one reason or another, possibly related to hormones (or the fact that I spelled “upright bass” “upright base” in the same post, ugh, of course), I didn’t have thick skin that day. Conveniently, I also had a friend over who was co-working at my apartment. That friend, and the other friends he told, and now almost all of my friends, know and recount the story of how I burst into tears and, truly wracked with hyperventilative sobs and in all sincerity, wailed: “They called me SHIT FORRR BRAAAAINS.”

Anyway, I got over it and now it’s funny. But I stand by this assessment:

Seriously, you can suck it, Cookie Monster freaks.

Among other things, Lindsay Robertson will be editing a new blog about TV for Yahoo very soon. She is now impervious all to Sesame Street-related insults.