Learning Day: The Tomima Edmark Academic Study on Creative Bankruptcy

In 1991, a woman named Tomima Edmark wrote a book about kissing. It wasn’t a good book, or a useful book, and she called it Kissing. Most people today would recognize her style of writing as the Google results for “kiss -band” with the safe search very much on, but it inspired a career and the terrible books she wrote over the next decade allow for a unique opportunity for science. This is the Tomima Edmark Academic Study on Creative Bankruptcy.

In chronological order, Tomima “wrote” “books” about kissing, kissing, kissing, dating ideas, gift ideas, cigars for ladies, guy things, and girl things. At the risk of speaking a secret language known only to us, this makes Tomima both a Godek and a Kipfer. And she will be the control in a scientific experiment to determine how long it takes a mediocre mind to shatter against the task of Coherently Listing 300ish Things. Here’s how this will work:

We are going to read each of Tomima’s books and mark the point where she completely ran out of ideas. Where her shipwrecked mind cursed God one last time and let the ocean take it. Science is not forgiving, but I am, so her first two unforgivable mistakes will be forgiven. As for the methodology, the entries of Tomima’s dumb little lists will be rated using the standard DUH and UHH system where DUH is something so obvious no reader could conceivably not know it and UHH is an idea so desperate it misunderstands the history and nature of mankind. You get it. It’s like getting caught with cocaine by the Clinton administration, or softball. Let’s get started.

Tomima’s first book, Kissing, and her second book, The Kissing Book, were the same book, so we’ll study them together. She set out to fill 128 pages with interesting facts and ideas about kissing, and she was never going to do it. The world’s greatest mouth genius would call that impossible before she dipped you and wetly told your lips a thousand stories of passion. So we are not going to review the entire book. The book sucks and had no chance of doing anything else. As I described perfectly above, all we are going to do is read until Tomima’s mind shatters under the weight of saying lots of things about kissing. I’m sure it won’t happen during the very first parag–

Holy shit. She looked up kiss in the Dictionary and told us about it. And her takeaway was, “I checked and nobody really knows what kisses are.” There isn’t a worse way to start. If she said, “Mouths, mouths, mouths, sorry my cat recently died in a fire,” it would be better. If a zany knockabout looked at The Kissing Book‘s cover and joked, “I bet this starts with, um, Webster’s defines kiss as!” that would feel like a tired bit. I’m saying not only this intro, but the mocking of this intro, is an antique. Fucking strike one, Tomima.

Tomima’s research keeps leading her to the same place: “Huh? What am I doing here!?” She doesn’t understand mouths or their origins, and this goddamn librarian is no help. I’m not sure I can count this as a strike, but I want you to know how frustrated I am with Kissing.

For the first forty pages, the first forty pages, Tomima lists every quote she can find about kisses from any era or context. An idiot’s first idea for a high school paper.

Just for fun, I looked up one of the quotes. It turns out the American ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, didn’t tell the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations how he likes diamonds even more than wrist kisses in 1946. So not only is this book a random collection of loosely related quotes, they’re wrong. It took 32 years for anyone to read this book long enough to think, “Hold on, everyone! I think this idiot might be stupid!” Strike two, by the way, Tomima.

You’re close, Tomima! This line comes from Francis Biddle in his statement to the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, 1945. No, but real fact check: the actual quote is “I always say a kiss on the hand might feel very good, but a diamond tiara lasts forever.” Again, close! I think I’m going to keep reading because I technically already gave Tomima a strike for this quote and misquoting Marilyn Monroe is a time-honored tradition among women. But you’re on thin ice, Tomima. Your mouth stuff book is a childlike catastrophe, Tomima.

Oh my god, fuck this. We are declaring Creative Bankruptcy on page 39. Which means, at the height of her artistic inspiration, she ran out of ideas 30.5% into her first book. Now you see how this works and what we’ll be dealing with! Let’s move on to her followup!

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines hubris as “believing you can come up with a ‘creative kiss’ for every day of a calendar year.”

After Tomima wrote her first book, Words I Found About Kissing in a Tacoma Library, she suddenly discovered, and I quote, “she knows very, very more about diamond and sapphire wrists than anyone else.” How did she become such an expert? Well, there was that B- freshman research project she did, sure, but did you know she also once kissed a man who was bad at it? Now that Tomima is a renowned kiss celebrity, she wanted to share the source of her genius with her fans. For example, her writing process:

Wow! Who knew the writing process for this book would be writing down every stray thought about mouths an unremarkable person had while jogging! I’m sure this will be great.

The second entry is to charge yourselves up electrically and give each other painful lip shocks. After only one creative kiss Tomima was already saying, “Jesus, fuck, I don’t know… electricity fight?” She’s already made it clear she’s not going to think about or try these things. The world’s foremost kiss master, and she only knows one sane way to make out.

What are you dating a 7-year-old? This isn’t a kiss. It’s not even a reward. This is hiding candy somewhere. This is hiding candy and assuming someone who hates cleaning bathrooms will clean the bathroom and decide this abandoned chocolate is their prize. We are only four entries in, Tomima, and if I was addressing the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, I could make the case this is the precise opposite of a kiss. You have failed your fans and readers, square middle-aged men who are bad at buying gifts and estate sales for women with no living relatives.

Are you kidding me, Tomima!? We are already hiding candy again!? Let me tell you something I learned from a divorce lawyer: if you hide chocolate in your husband’s suitcase with rated PG instructions on how to eat it, he is legally allowed to fuck his secretary, you lustless, dried up desert of a woman. No one is or will ever be less creative or worse at kissing than this. 365 Ways to KISS Your Love only makes it an astonishing 1.9% toward its goal before failing. This is like setting off to run a marathon and learning you died from diabetes three weeks ago.

I’m sure released from the creative prison of kisses alone, Tomima’s romantic expertise will be able to fill an entire year with innovative dating tips.

This is a great example of someone who doesn’t know they’re dumb. Tomima’s creative date idea is “get coffee,” but she knew her fans were expecting more. Maybe… b-best? Oh hell yeah, there it is: get best coffee.

You know what? I’m not going to count this one. Driving around and asking for the best, free coffee is as small an idea as a person can have, but I can tell Tomima is trying.

“Oh no, there are only ten kinds of dates to go on,” Tomima suddenly realized. “I have three hundred and forty five more of these things to write,” she thought. “Wait, wait, wait. Leapfrog,” she decided. A small and hungry crab skittered out of her ear.

Collecting prizes, eating fourteen cheeseburgers, and repairing shoes is the kind of date you go on when you’re sleeping with a leprechaun, but at least these are real activities you might do with someone. It’s not some forced erotic playfulness like, I don’t know, Strip Book Balancing, or something.

Tomima.

When you’re putting a book on your head and having a pants-taking-off contest, you’re out of ideas. You’re waiting out a storm in a log cabin shortly before a voice tells one of you to kill. Even with my generous scoring, Tomima only made it 4.6% into her creative dating project before her brain gave up. By now she has proven listing more than 17 things is beyond her means, but she set out to do it again with 365 Romantic GIFTS For Your Love.

I should mention Tomima Edmark is massively wealthy for inventing a ponytail holder in 1989 and she never had to write these books. She wanted to. This shameful series of humiliations is how a woman with unlimited money has chosen to run out the clock on her life.

Already something feels off. It opens with a page of orange text on an orange background saying “TO _____ FROM _____ ON _____” as if this book about gifts was itself meant to be a gift.

It’s only the third entry and Tomima has already proudly written down one of the dumbest ideas any person has ever had. A gift so terrible most people would argue it’s much, much worse than no gift at all. “Honey, I told your favorite retailers where you live! Expect exciting deals from their telephone representatives as well!” And while it’s horrible, it’s also very much not “daily.” The stated goal of the book is to be a daily guide for fun gifts, but this is not only nothing, it’s nothing weeks from now. Your Love will think you forgot about the dumb gift thing three weeks into the year. They are going to think you are fucking lying when weeks later you pull a catalog out of the trash and tell them or current resident this was their gift.

Again, we are on entry 3. The book’s premise has fallen apart. Tomima’s brain has given out. If you ask someone for romantic tips and their third piece of advice is to add your lover to a JCPenny mailing list, hit that fake human creature with an axe. And don’t bother NASA with it. No one will want to study the remains of an entity that shitty.

After eight ideas, one of them being catalogs, Tomima thinks, “You know what my Love enjoys? When I hand him the remote control and shut the fuck up for awhile. Me sure I can type that up in a way for sounds like language.”

Let the record show: Tomima Edmark’s idea of a creative gift is to walk around the house and collect your things in a box. Ignoring how these are their own things you’re giving back to them, this is closer to how you fire someone than tell them you love them. If my wife did this I’d say, “Put all that shit back and stop taking the shape of my wife. I will one day find a weapon that renders you inert, Morphlax.” Anyway, congratulations to Tomima for making it 7.9% into a book before embarrassing herself three times.

After blowing it with kissing, kissing, dating, and gifting, Tomima went back to her roots: looking stuff up about a subject and probably getting some of it right. She wrote CIGAR Chic: A Woman’s Perspective. That’s right, ladies, questionable facts about cigars… for you. It’s violently unappealing. This book flickers like the universe keeps forgetting it’s there.

The foreword is more of an apology than an introduction. From the mind that brought you “Shoe repair is a date, the best kisses are hiding candy” comes “I do not condone smoking cigars, but I have, after much personal reflection, decided to smoke cigars.” I’m calling this a strike because I want to stop reading Cigar CHIC as soon as possible.

Despite the advances in research technology in 1995, Tomima Edmark still wrote like, “Where is things from? As with all things, nobody knows where things derive. Hungry natives, if I had to guess, but I don’t.” Strike two, Tomima.

“Chapter three. Before we get into the definition of a cigar, let’s discuss what definitions themselves ar–” Oh my fucking God, Tomima. At no point in this entire book does a word approach anything close to interesting or useful. The first space visitor to find an ashtray among the remains of our fallen civilization will know as much about cigars as Tomima Edmark does after a lifetime of research. There’s no way to score this since she never really gets started, so… I don’t know, -14.9%? Who gives a shit.

In 2001 Tomima published twin humor(?) books: It’s a GIRL Thing and It’s a GUY Thing. They are each meandering, sad lists of gendered qualities, but I’m making them sound too funny. You might think you already know what’s inside, but you’re wrong. These are not misogynistic ’90s jokes written by a woman with provably zero ideas. These are more like athletic guidelines a GOP lawmaker would propose after you told him he couldn’t check girl swimmers for penises.

You get it, reader. Stereotypes, only without the wit. Things Mark Wahlberg believes while he commits a hate crime.

This is the first page of the book and I’m already paralyzed with choices. This is barely brainstorming. Tomima accidentally published her notes for future joke ideas. This is a nightmare. The very first GIRL Thing in the book is sexual manipulation, as described by a woman’s future murderer. The next one is how girls want money. The next one is how kindness is slutty. And the next one is “durrrr commitment.” I have been making fun of Tomima for her lack of expertise on anything, but this book is about the basic concept of being a woman, and the first four things she shares are an incel subreddit’s least up-voted posts on a slow morning. Her cute lady facts are functionally identical to ones you might hear from men who hate women and men who have never touched one.

This is the second page, the very next page, and Tomima’s wisdom is poorly worded nonsense, sexual manipulation, a cancer-tragic whiff of a joke attempt, and sexual manipulation. We may never see creative bankruptcy such as this again. Tomima Edmark sat down to think up ideas and only a dry cough echoed off the inside of her skull. These are things Adam Carolla would groan in a movie where zombies retain the abilities they had when they were alive.

The very next page reveals something I have suspected since her first kissing book: Tomima Edmark can’t fuck. Look at that quote. “Having sex is akin to giving a dog a bone for good behavior?” She hates sex so much she doesn’t see the need for it outside of tricking gardeners or dentists into effort. Maybe I’m wrong. Honestly, she’s such a terrible writer this might be her trying to say “I kind of give sex to dogs.” The point is, fucking 0.0%.

I’m sure this one will be better. From the bad kisser who wrote almost several non-insane things about kissing and none about anything else comes It’s a GUY Thing: More than 300 Tics, Traits, and Tendencies That Uniquely Define Men!

Most gender experts aren’t brave enough to do this, but for the introduction to It’s a GUY Thing, Tomima gender-swapped the introduction from It’s a GIRL Thing. “We’re all pretty much the same anyway,” thought the electro-fetishist hiding chocolate in the suit pockets of the man she manipulates with lifeless, mechanical sex.

The third tip of the book is about how us fellas are always wondering about the girls from Hee-Haw, which is so accurate I’m going to give her a free one. Let’s jump ahead three entries.

What the fucking fuck, Tomima. This is the most offensive gender stereotype anyone has ever conceived. I would rather someone accuse me of being a sex criminal than thinking Dennis Miller has more than zero talents. I mean this sincerely, Tomima: fuck the dark emptiness where your soul should be. Free strike revoked. This one counts, and fuck you again.

Strike two. Shoe repair is not a part of anyone’s personality, Tomima. The fact that you fuck leprechauns is not a universal experience, Tomima.

Okay, now it makes sense. Everything Tomima Edmark knows about men comes from the bloated corpse of a porpoise she dragged into her beach house. And with this unpleasant list of awful things she watched it do as it died, Tomima gets her third strike. She made it a full 11.8% into a list of 300 GUY Things before her mind collapsed, the best she’s done since her first book. Which means we now have all the official stats, and we know that if you were in a five minute conversation with Tomima Edmark, this is how far into each subject you could get before you had to tell her to shut the fuck up:

The History Kissing: One minute and 40 seconds

The Act of Kissing: Almost six seconds

Dating: 14 seconds

Gifts: 24 seconds

Cigars: N/A she is no longer welcome in the tobacco shop

Women: 0 seconds

Men: 35 seconds

I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with these numbers, or how to apply this to any field of science. I’m only a researcher specializing in dipshits, and Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines ending an article as fart sound.

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