Experimentation Is Good for the Soul

I’m taking a brief vacation from ze blog until after the long weekend.  There will be plenty of reading, some writing and some good old fashioned fun with friends, board games and alcohol.  I’m going to be experimenting with language, too.  I think I’ll start every with sentence with the word Bitches and end every sentence with ya dig?

And when that gets old (10 minutes), I’ll go back to responding to everything with “Jolly good.”  That’s been a huge hit.

So here’s the real experiment:  I’m putting together a word list to use as I write.  If you’re here, please leave a comment – your favorite word or words, what you like the sound of, how if feels when you say it, the meaning, the combination of letters, whatever.  Or tell us what you’re doing for the long weekend.

The deal is I would love to hear from all of you.  Even those of you who never make a peep.  Please.  And thank you.

May you enjoy your long weekend and let us all remember those who served.

Until Tuesday,

Lisa

Brought to You By the "Miracle" of Modern Science

The cultural development of the children continues*….

Today’s Musical Challenge, Marshall
Setting:  Inside Roxanne, the 1995 Toyota Celica, some nice Luigi Gatti is playing in the background as Nate and I make the trip to his new high school where he’s on the summer baseball team (yay, Nate!)

Me:  This music is killing you, isn’t it?
Nate:  It’s almost as bad as the Adult Album Rock you forced me to listen to.
Me:  Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.
Nate:  You cut me off.  Yesterday.  You forced me to listen to yesterday.  Can we listen to some of my music?
Me:  Sure.  Is it going to be women or men singing about sex, money and fame?
Nate:  Let’s see what’s on, shall we?
From the radio’s speakers.  Eminem:  When you’re not fucking grown men, listen too….
Me:  That’s not music.
Nate:  You’re not listening right.

THIS is not starving.  A little perspective, please
We’re at the thin end of the month again.  You’d think I’d figure this out so this wouldn’t happen, but it does.  We’re out of milk, bread, eggs, meat, sugar, plain cream cheese, bagels and chocolate. One lonely apple sits in the fruit bowl.  It’s seen better days.  So we’re living on the pasta and tomato sauce I’ve hoarded, some leftover cereal (dry), and lots and lots of Ritz and Townhouse Crackers that were buy one/get one free a couple of months ago.  Thank you, modern American science, for preservatives.

Anyway, Chloe and I spent  approximately eight minutes discussing whether the low-fat garden vegetable cream cheese we were scraping from its plastic tub was more like a spread or a dip.  We finally settled on dip.  It’s faboo on Townhouse Crackers in case you’re wondering.

So after our dinner of  crackers and cream cheese in front of Golden Girls, I mentioned that I’d found tucked away into the stupidly high cabinet where I hide things an unopened box of Lucky Charms.  And thus dessert included the shoveling of dry sugary cereal into my mouth while watching Toddlers and Tiaras.  I did, of course, pick out those shamrock and rainbow-shaped marshmallows to save them for last.  My brain doesn’t know it’s done eating until I’ve had something sweet, you know.  Tonight I needed that little extra oomph delivered by those other-worldly-colored hard marshmallows to switch off my hunger.

Be that as it may, the star attraction was the show.  Oh my gawd, people spray tan their kids?  And give them false tooth covers and hair pieces? And I thought I saw some freaky stuff on fetish websites.  Not even in the balllpark, my friends.  Tonight’s episode featured a little red-haired girl who was adorable with porcelain skin and gorgeous wavy locks.  Her mother covered up her little girl teeth with a toothy set of falsies and had her beautiful, milky skin sprayed tan.  Even her face.  The results were sadly hilarious.  We elevated the moment in our own living room….

Chloe:  I want to adopt a little red-headed kid when I’m older.
Me:  You know if you adopt one, you have to keep it.
Chloe:  Okay, I want to find a friend who has red-headed kids who I can spoil.
Me:  That’s a bit odd, you know.
Chloe:  Do you want to be called Grandma?
Me:  I didn’t mean odd in a bad way.

I understand that sometime this evening Sophie sent MathMan a text reading “Food, food, food.”

I suggested that maybe it’s time to cancel the cellphone service and satellite t.v. so we can buy food, food, food.  That suggestion was vetoed as they dug into some left-over baked penne.

Yeah, thought so……

*Some of this may or may not be true.  I’ll let you smarties decide.

There Must Be a Simple Explanation for It

Today was the first day of summer break for all the kids in the house and ‘hood.  So far I’ve been asked the following:

For a puppy 
For $2.00 for a Kona Ice 
To move out of the way because I was blocking someone’s view of Millionaire Matchmaker
Did I need any more strawberries?
To please explain exactly what does “Adult Album Rock” mean

The following answers applied (in random order)

Thanks, but we’re good
You just want me to change the channel, don’t you?  (that’s the bonus answering a question with a question)
Bite me
Not just no, but hell no to the infinite power
Ask Chloe

In addition, I wrote about 1,500 words (yeah, I know what I said), read some, watched some, cooked some, fed some, laundered some and laughed some.  And those kids better not think that just because I made French Toast for them this morning that there will be special breakfasts every damn morning.  They can eat PopTarts and other sort of foods brimming with high fructose corn syrup just like every other kid in the U.S.  I mean, we live next door to a coal ash mountain.  You think I’m going to worry about their diet?

All in all a good start to their vacation, wouldn’t you say?  

And how was your day, honey?

P.S. I found a pair of unexplained underpants somewhere in the house.  They don’t belong to any of the gents here.  That I know of.  Care to claim them, any of you darlings?

P.S.S.  I have developed some kind of strange super power.  Every time I hold my book in my hand and walk toward the door leading to the deck, I make it thunder.  An interesting super power, I assure you, but not really lucrative or helpful.

Thanks for Rubbing It In, Bing Crosby

Yeah, well, not if you don’t pay your gas bill….

Yesterday was one of those days.

The money noose tightened.  We got the gas turned back on so it’s not all bad.  You know, if I had to choose though (and the last three weeks have been an “experiment,”) I’d rather go without gas than water.  Just sayin.’)

As a result of the continued money issues, I’ve expanded my job search quite a bit outside the field I’d worked in for nearly twenty years.  Whatever it takes….

Using the online form from the Georgia Department of Labor, I tried to apply for a job which is considerably lower on the food chain from whence I came. It sounded like an interesting job in a different kind of setting, so why not apply?  The skills I’ve acquired over my twenty years in not-for-profit and association management are highly transferable and fit the job description – administrative, communications, coordination, working with people, etc. 

The Dept. of Labor denied my request for a referral.  Wanna know why?  I don’t have the required six months of experience in academia.  You know, because admin jobs are soooooooo different from one field to the next.  You pretty much use your skills to do what other people ask you and voila!  Job done.  I mean, even when I was the head of the organization, that was basically what I did.  I made recommendations to the Board of Directors, they blessed it as was or complicated it and then I did the tasks to complete the job.  Sometimes a volunteer came in and helped, most times not.

So I think I could handle this job working for a junior college.  Coordinating a couple of student programs doesn’t seem so far out of my realm that the learning curve should be unreasonable. We wonder why people are out of work.  Six months required experience is arbitrary at best.  It occurred to me later, of course, that it may have been a situation where they had to post the job, but already had someone lined up for it.  Ah, well.  I’ll keep looking.

In the meantime, I decided to give up the fantasy of publishing a book.  A complete waste of time.  I have no talent, blah, blah, blah.  MathMan was on the receiving end of this bout of self-pity and doubt.  I love that man for putting up with me, I really do.  He sent me a couple of positive thinking texts and came home prepared to give me a stern talking to about my attitude.  He walked into the bedroom and was shocked to see me smiling.

He did a double take.  “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing, why?”

He gave me one of those looks.  Nothing is such a dangerous word…

“Oh, this?”  I pointed at my grin.  “I decided to stop worrying.  Worry or not, doesn’t change a thing.”

While I was in the shower getting ready to go to Sophia’s 5th grade graduation ceremony (hello, contrived sentimentality!) I could hear MathMan rifling through my bedside stand looking for whatever I’d taken to alter my mood.

My mood change really was a combination of his attempts to buoy my flagging spirits and an hour and half of thinking time as I pushed the back and forth across the slope that is our back yard.

Later we sat reading our books while we waited for the graduation ceremony to start.  I’m reading A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery.  He’s not all Pooh, you know.  “Oh my god,” I whispered to MathMan.  “I’m losing my mind.  I realize as I read this, I’m editing A.A. Milne.  See here, he doesn’t need that was….” I pointed to the words on the page.

MathMan just shook his head in that way he has when he realizes yet again that he’s chosen to spend his life with a needy lunatic.  “And you say you’re not a writer……..”

Adventures in Real Parenting: No Matter What You Call Her….

The Baby…Cupcake…Resident Evil…Garbo…RezE….Sophia…she leaves elementary school behind tomorrow. I’m a bit stunned that we’ll no longer have a little kid in the house.  Of course, as far as she is concerned, we haven’t had a little kid in the house for a long time.

A couple of days ago, she mentioned that she doesn’t really want to grow up.  I told her there was no rush…….

May middle school be easy on you, kid.

Love,

Mama

It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas….

Good morning.  I’m sitting here bracing for an exhilarating shower while you’re sitting there all snug in your office, kitchen, bedroom, parents’ basement, bomb shelter, right?

The Goldens didn’t pay their gas bill on time.  Talk about nasty surprises.

We discovered this bad bit of business last night when Chloe tried to make some pasta on the uncooperative stovetop.  Tick tick tick, IGNITE! go out. 

So perhaps it’s no surprise at all.  It would help if we’d gotten some sort of disconnect notice, though.

As it was, we each had all night to consider the back to nature joys of a cold shower.  I believe Joan Crawford was a fan of the cold shower.  Better for the skin and all that….

Not that I want to use Joan Crawford for a role model or anything.  I mean, there was that questionable business with the wire hangers and she was a fan of Pepsi, not Coke.  Here in Georgia, Co’Cola is the state drink (with or without the moonshine chaser).

Because perspective is of the utmost importance, I shall think about how this little speck of trouble fits into the broad scheme of human experience.  This is when I roll out the Pioneer Living Scale with 1 being “I’m not whining about a minor inconvenience, I’m simply noting that I’ve noticed the difference between now and then” to 10 being “At least we don’t have to dig a hole in the meadow where we can bury our dead.” So this is what?  A 1?  Maybe a 2?  Nah, a 1.  It’s a cold shower, for heaven’s sake, not an amputation or the roof of the lean-to caving in during a blizzard in June.

It could be worse, of course.  It could always be worse.  My soap is not made of lye and fat butchered from my favorite cow and, what’s more, when I’ve toweled off and turned back to pink from blue, I’ll just stroll right back into my well-appointed home office and be grateful that I won’t have to waste fifteen minutes surfing porn (to take the edge off, you know) before my mind is clear so I can get busy writing.

Perspective.

How was your shower today?

The One Where I Missed the Meaning of Getaway

Things have been a bit busy lately.  Lots of grown up stuff and kid stuff, too.  The end of the school year is loaded with activities that are both delightful and sigh-inducing.  i.e. Really?  I have to sit through an hour and a half of a D.A.R.E. graduation?  Capped by a sappy song sung by my least favorite teacher at the elementary school.  But I already know Drugs Are Really Excellent. Prescription drugs, I mean.

So when on Friday night MathMan and I found ourselves suddenly and temporarily sans les enfants, we were beside ourselves with possibility.  The evening stretched out before us like the old days.  Like before I saw that precious yellow dress at Carson Pirie Scott in 1990 and made a high-pitched noise that indicated my maternal instinct had just clicked firmly and irrevocably into place.

Since it wasn’t Sunday morning, we opted to keep our clothes on and do something different.  A movie? Why should we want to sit in the dark not talking to each other?  The grocery store?  Too predictable.  Dinner?  We’d already eaten when we discovered we’d been released for the night from parenting.  Think!  What haven’t we done in a long time or ever?

After having deposited the last child at her overnight destination, we drove through the dusk, taking our time as we meandered over the country roads.  We rode with the windows down and breathed in the freedom.  The air smelled like…Maui.  I am not kidding.  The Virginia sweetspire and honeysuckle are in full, glorious bloom and the air is so sweet you want to stick your tongue out and taste it. (I wonder if that would be okay on this low carb thing I’m doing…) The evening cooled as we zoomed along, the wind in our hair, listening to some nice Brahms* cranked past eleven and marveling at an enormous cloud that contained lightening like an electric snowglobe with lightening instead of snow.

Taking the road home, we found our calling.  Perhaps it had been a subconscious nudge, the answer hidden in the depths of our collective psyche all along.  Our chosen activity did not represent something one would consider a family outing.  One normally would not do such a thing with children in tow unless, of course, one might require the help of a child sitting on one’s shoulders, for example.  But for now, it was just MathMan and me and a plan.

We’d noticed the sign he’s been coveting lo these many days.  It hangs like a yellow slash of memory from an abandoned Chicago hot dog restaurant.  Now that the joint is kaput (sigh), the Vienna Beef sign is nothing more than a tease of delicious all beef delicacy.  Like mustard and relish on a condiment table, it’s just there for the taking.

Our time had come.

No one was around.  I glanced at MathMan and saw the lustful gleam in his eye.  He nodded.  I assumed his intentions and turned into the parking lot.  Because neither of us are criminals at heart, this was a risky venture for us.  The restaurant is on a busy road and we could have easily been seen.

“Okay, be ready to haul ass out of here when I come back with that sign,” he was looking around to make sure the place was empty.”We don’t want to get caught.”

“Yes, yes, okay.”  I pulled my cellphone out of the car’s console as he scrambled out of the passengers’ side.

I glanced up from checking my text messages to watch him jumping up trying to pull the vinyl sign down from where it hung.  He pulled once, twice…..I went back to checking my messages.

The car door opened and closed.  A few seconds passed.  “Are you going to drive?”  I looked at him forlorn and empty-handed.

“Sure.”  I closed my phone, put the car into reverse, checked my mirrors, waved to our neighbor who was walking out of the adjoining Domino’s Pizza, her arms laden with three pizza boxes stacked atop each other.  I paused and looked at MathMan.  “I guess we’ll have to come back, huh?  Bring a ladder and something to cut it down with?”

He just stared at me.  “Yes.  And someone else to drive the getaway car.”

*Somewhere along the way, Brahms replaced Rush’s Tom Sawyer?

Or Maybe It’s Because I Just Have One of Those Faces

So the nurse came and…………………………………….went yesterday.  She was a very chatty lass who was all about the testifying.

Chloe, who is now home from college and has a new job waitressing at the local barbecue joint (yay!) was here, too.  To be more specific, she was working on her butt-groove in the loveseat just like she does everything else.  Driven.  Goal-oriented.  Successfully.  Let’s just say if she could have a G.P.A. for butt-groove wear, she’d have a 4.0.  Her butt groove would qualify her for high honors.  Is that cum laude or the other one.  Anyway, now this just sounds like a dirty post which it is not.

So there I was trying not to make eye contact with the scales Nurse Chatty had placed without comment on my kitchen floor (good thing I mopped ten minutes before she got there or those scales may have become a permanent fixture on that sticky mess) and Nurse Chatty was opening sterile plastic packages of medical supplies with her teeth and talking to me about her ex-cheating-husband and the three guys she’s met on Plenty o’ Fish and Chloe was in the next room fusing with the loveseat when Nurse Chatty tells me that upon her husband’s last escapade of illicit sex and such, GOD spoke to her and told her what to say to him and what to do.

I tried to maintain an air of complete ….um………believability?  not-about-to-run-screaming-from-the-room-ility?  Criminy, is there even a word for that demeanor one tries to maintain when confronted with something just short of shocking and not exactly not amusing?  What does incredulous mean, anyway?

Okay, yes, yes, I live in the Bible Belt and should be used to this religious-speak by now, but it wasn’t so much the testifying, but Nurse Chatty’s complete lack of self-consciousness when talking to a stranger about intimate details of her life and then dragging her god and his voice into it.  I was knocked back a little on my heels, I suppose.  I mean, I’d apologized to her because the house still smelled of bacon from that morning’s breakfast.  (Honestly, I was relieved the bacon smell masked the eau de cat)  I’d been concerned about an overpowering bacon/cat smell and she was telling me about how her husband’s new woman had spurned her attempts to pray for her.

For the record, she didn’t mind the bacon scent at all.  “Oh don’t you worry about that.  You wouldn’t believe the smells in some of the houses I go into.  It’s enough to make you cry for the people who live there.”  I hoped she couldn’t smell those cat undertones.  Or even if she did, she certainly was gracious about it.

So anyway, there we were, her personal stuff out there for discussion, me still fretting about my little white weight lie and Chloe becoming one with the leather.

I smiled and tried to keep my blood pressure from betraying my sense of anxiety on both our behalfs.  And then Chloe got up to switch out the dvd she was watching.  I glanced at her as she walked across the living room.  Yes, you guessed it – we made eye contact.  And I sucked in my lips trying not to laugh and that’s when Nurse Chatty looked right at me.  Quick!  What does one do?

I did what anyone who’s been living here as long as we have would do.  I smiled, “Well, bless your heart.”

It’s the only proper thing one can do in that situation, of course.  And she smiled.  “Thank you for listening to me.  I haven’t told anyone this stuff.  Except for my pastor.”

I swear, when I was finishing college and took that What Color Is Your Parachute Test (okay, I know, that was bad timing, maybe taking that test before spending all the time and money on a degree would have made more sense) the results announced that I should be a minister, rabbi, writer (ahem), teacher, psychologist or some kind of therapist.

Silly me.  I thought it was a joke, that test, because it never did tell me what color my parachute was.

I Hear Audrey Hepburn Had a Thing for Red Velvet

Because it’s been brought to my attention that I could keel over or get hit by a monster truck or attacked by a pack of rabid raccoons at any time, I recently applied for a life insurance policy.  I suppose MathMan is right when he tells me that leaving him alone to raise these children would be inconsiderate enough, but to leave him broke and alone?  Unforgivable.   (Please take note:  MathMan is the beneficiary.  I’m counting on you to watch my back.)

Besides, saying that I’m worth more dead than alive and meaning it, knowing it’s true strikes just the proper morbid tone I need to help color “those” days.  It lends a faux-authenticity to the narrative I indulge in right before I quell and admit to myself that I still like me just a little to much to do that.  Well that and an unmitigated fear of the unknown. Plus I’m not so keen on final acts. Too final.

So now we begin the process that often ends with a body in the library.  At least in the mysteries of which I’m so fond.  Those wacky Brits.  They’re not dying of gunplay.  Well, not so much.  They’re much more creative.  Arsenic poisonings, stabbings with ancient Celtic spear points, “accidental” shotgun wounds, shoving one another off church towers.  They’re so not gangster.

But back to this life insurance business.  It’s a three step process because it’s that much fun.

First I went to the office of the nice lady who sends us those colorful birthday greetings postcards with The Big Insurance Company Logo.  I gave some them information about my height and weight, paid my money and signed on the official line.

Next I answered four hundred and six questions about my health history, the health history of my parents, my siblings, my next door neighbor Ed and the Boxer down the street.  That was over the phone.  I said yes as my “electronic” signature.

Step three is a visit from a nurse who will give me an exam.  She told me to fast for 4 – 6 hours before she gets here at 2pm on Friday.  Fast?  No problem.  I’ve been in a near starvation state for three days now. It’s technically a low carb eating plan, but I prefer to think of it as a slice of hell.

Many years ago I smoked.  I quit.  No problem.  I like my alcohol, but I can take it or leave it.  No problem.  But breaking up with sugar?  Well, I’m not climbing the walls, but I assure you there have been moments when you might see me stealing empty Oreo packages from my neighbors’ trashcans just so I could lick off the crumbs.  Did you know coffee grounds look an awful lot like Oreo crumbs?

Addiction is so undignified.

So the nurse is coming and I’ll be all ready to pee in a cup and my stomach will be growling like Leonard Cohen without the clever lyrics.  It will be like tea time at the Manor.  Without the tea and fancy cakes.  I’ll try to be gracious, of course, but it may be difficult from my place on the floor where I’m sure I’ll have fainted dead away. 

It occurred to me tonight as I stood on the scales for the 82nd time today that I should probably stick hard to this eating plan because I may have told the woman at the insurance office that my weight range is Audrey Hepburnish.

I stepped off the scale and wandered aimlessly around the bedroom in a stupor.  My pants remained on the bathroom floor where I left them when I weighed myself.

“I need that cake,” I whined to MathMan.  That cake is what is left of the red velvet confection from Chloe’s birthday.  Just one piece sits there oozing cream cheese frosting.   

MathMan would not play along.  He understands his role, my role and the role of the cake.  Were I to give in to temptation, I’d spend the rest of the evening extolling how I should now go ahead and have some ice cream, that stash of Hershey’s in the top drawer, what’s left in the potato chip bag and the remaining chocolate truffles from Mothers Day.

“Forget about that cake.  How about a little workout instead?”  He was looking at me over the rim of his glasses as I lay across the edge of the bed where I’d flopped so unceremoniously.

Silly me.  He meant the gym.

I still want cake.

Was No More

I’ve finished attacking the word was and completed (for now) the Ethan story.  That project proved to be a great writing exercise.

To be sure, the story goes on.  Ethan remains one of my best friends.  When we reconnected a year or so ago after having not been in touch since the mid-1990s, it seemed as if no time had passed.  But of course it had and we’ve had all kinds of fun catching up and creating new stories.  For now, the story of our shared youth is captured here on its own page.  Whether he likes it or not.

Thank you, Ethan.