Letter-writing advice from an 11 year old

Last night I was at Rite Aid with Mimi, searching for my favorite Easter candy: Cadbury caramel eggs. You can only get them at Easter so you have to stockpile them so you can have enough to last until next year's Easter candy hits stores.

While I was searching in vain for the caramel eggs--NOT to be confused with the gross cream eggs--Mimi was talking about something which I admittedly wasn't listening very closely to. Then I heard her say "Shining pillar of urgency." What? What the hell is a shining pillar of urgency?

She backtracked and told me how a kid in her class (who, let's just say, is not a native English-speaker) was writing something explaining how to write an effective letter? I didn't really understand the point or what exactly the kid had been writing, but the upshot is that this kid's advice for writing an effective letter boiled down to this: if you use the word "administration" in a letter, it turns the letter into a "shining pillar of urgency."

I'm not sure what this kid was trying to say--who knows what "shining pillar of urgency" lost in the translation from Chinese to English--all I know is that I'm now obsessed with the phrase. The only thing that comes to mind when I think "shining pillar of urgency" is that it sounds sort of X-rated.

Speaking of X-rated, while I searched the cold medicine aisle for a cold pill small enough for Mimi to swallow, she had wandered to the "family planning" aisle. When I walked up to her she ticked off the names of various types of lube and vibrating condoms, and asked why they came in flavors. She then proceeded to pick up every bottle and ask me "what flavor is this?" "how about this one?" Who knows what the appropriate response to those questions is--I just went with "I don't know."