Tag Archives: Humor

Walk the Walk

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My son walks to school every day, but this week it has been really cold so we have been driving. And to clarify, I mean it has been really, actually cold. Not like, “OMG, guys, it’s normally 76 year round and now it’s 59 degrees, where is my long underwear?!” Yeah, I’m talking to you, friends in SoCal. Today it was so cold that I had this conversation with my son: “Mom, why do you keep squeezing my cheeks?” “I’m just checking to make sure they are not frostbitten oh no TURN AROUND TURN YOUR FACE AWAY FROM THE WIND!”

Now that we’re driving to school, I miss walking with him and his buddies. It’s so nice to start the day listening to elementary school kids talk about their video games and iPhones and all the things that they love that did not exist when I was little.

In honor of my lovely morning walks, please enjoy. The hook of this song is so catchy that I don’t mind the sad lyrics about bad investments and ripping apart socialists. What? Who cares, take a walk.

Keeping It Realz

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Today I am writing at the library because I needed a change of scenery and wanted to get away from my husband blasting Taylor Swift while he works. (Apparently that is who you turn to when you realize that Ke$ha sucks.) Also, writing at a study carrel next to older men wearing sunglasses and cowboy hats while they try to discretely look at porn reminds me of college, when I was particularly creative.

Lest you think that my life is perfect, what with my proximity to porno cowboys and my public library workspace, I’d like to show you my closet.

Closet

I’m not going to surprise you now with an “After” picture where my closet looks like the cover of Real Simple. Those kinds of pictures, with their Instagram filters and perfect lighting, are the WORST. Instead of inspiring me, they make me feel awful and force me to go add a layer of clothes to my closet piles while eating fried food.

I read this article about how Facebook users’ perfect pictures of their vacations and thoughtful spouses and overachieving kids are making us all insanely jealous and filled with envy (did they really need two German universities to reach this conclusion?), so I am really doing a community service by showing you my closet. You are welcome. For an extra feeling of superiority, you may want to pay special attention to the half-torn-off Halloween stickers all over my mirror, the ripped garbage bag full of five year old maternity clothes sitting by the door, or the random sweaters hanging over the lower hangers. Also, please take a good look at the lonely boot sitting atop the mountain of crap and let me know if you’ve seen the other one. I miss it and am afraid it is at the bottom of the pile (i.e., gone forever).

This disaster has been brewing since November. My closet really was reasonably organized for a lovely two week period back then. But every time someone would come over (which was a lot during the holidays), I would throw any loose crap straight in my closet, because who was going to look in there? The house is clean, the kids’ closets are organized, who cares about my closet.

But when I pulled a muscle trying to find a t-shirt the other day it finally dawned on me that, as a semi-functioning adult, maybe I should not live like this. So over the next several weeks and months, I will be obtaining my commercial driver’s license to operate heavy machinery so that I can begin excavating. And I will not show you any pictures of how awesome it looks when I am done.

And this is the boring lawyer in me coming out, but seriously: as willing as I am to show you my embarrassing closet, please remember that there are some things you just should not put in writing.

Pining Away

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I would like to introduce you to the newest member of our household, Piney Porky McHedgypants.

Piney

Piney arrived on a cold December evening, shortly after Christmas, wrapped in a massive amount of leftover Hanukkah wrapping paper from our beloved Uncle John (who, interestingly, is neither an uncle nor a John). After a fierce debate about whether it was a boy or girl porcupine or hedgehog, and why the hell didn’t it have any pants on, the kids settled on the name Piney Porky McHedgypants. Obviously.

Don’t let his painfully adorable smile and whimsical little ball nose fool you. Piney is kind of an asshole and has scared the shit out of me twice now: once when I checked on my daughter in the middle of the night and found him sitting in her rocking chair (I swear the chair was moving), and once when I walked by the kids’ bathroom and found HIM SITTING ON THE TOILET. The kids promise they did not put him there, and I totally believe them.

After that second scare, I had a brief, horrible thought of “losing” Piney the way certain noisy or messy toys seem to always get “lost” in my house. Whoops, mommy threw them away by accident, my bad. But LOOK at him. I can’t imagine seeing his sweet huge face staring up at me from the trash can, surrounded by empty juice boxes and banana peels. Or worse, his nubby, soft arms reaching out for a hug from the garbage man right before he chucks him in the back of the truck.

So I’ve asked Piney to start running errands for me. He’s been extremely cooperative.

photo 2 (2)

But the little bastard sucks at laundry. I told him he’s got two weeks to figure out how to use the dryer, or I might accidentally misplace him.

Insane in the Membrane

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My husband and I started an appropriately named workout video called “Insanity” a couple days ago. If you enjoy spending 40 minutes of your day trying really hard not to have a stroke, then I totally recommend it. After only three workouts I am so sore I can hardly function. I asked my husband today how he was feeling: “OK. I only feel pain when I move.”

I decided to do Insanity for the standard reasons: to look better, to feel better, and to jumpstart my next career move as a skripper. But I’ve also been thinking about setting a good example about body image for my daughter. And this mom making the talk show rounds this week has really made me think about it. She very publicly chastised her clinically obese 7-year-old daughter in Vogue magazine, and put her on what sounds like a mean, mean diet. The mom has written a book that, I guess, has a happy ending because the girl lost weight. And now I guess she’ll treat her daughter with a little decency? I hate that the lesson for this poor girl is that she was fat and then learned some self control, when I think the lesson should be that her mom never dealt with her own body issues and her poor daughter paid the price in a really hurtful (and public) way. And now her mom is making money off of it. It all just grosses me out, and makes me want to eat a big snack.

I read a Jezebel article last week that said women’s bodies are “always fodder for public consumption.” (Read it here – scroll down to the Life&Style recap. And yes, those are free, snarky summaries of all the gossip magazines. You are welcome!) That sentence has stuck with me. And I’m realizing now that it starts YOUNG. I’ve noticed that my son gets compliments about what he’s doing, or what he likes – “That was an awesome fart noise you made,” or, “Wow, you really like farts,” or “Did that sound just come from your body?” – but nine times out of ten, the compliments my daughter gets are some form of, “Aww, you/your clothes/your hair is/are so cute.” And all of those things are true (mostly – she did go through a phase of using her hair as a kleenex, and boogery hair is not always “cute”), but she also makes really good fart noises. What if I said that to some random person after they said my daughter was cute? “I’ll have you know she can rip one, too, jackass.”

Exhibit 1: we visited my father-in-law over Thanksgiving and hung out at his restaurant. My kids were so good, sitting quietly and coloring while my husband and I gorged on free, amazing Chinese food and tried not to look like uppity east coasters. And three different times, three very polite midwestern folks walked by my two kids coloring and said to my son, “WOW, look at that drawing, you are a such an artist!” and then said to my daughter, “And aren’t you just the cutest thing?!” For the record, here is what my son was drawing:

StickMan
And here is what my daughter was working on:
Masterpiece
I MEAN, come on.

I’d Like to Thank the Little People

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A fellow blogger, Susannah at outwentthelight.blogspot.com, nominated me for a Liebster Award for blogging. Danke, Susannah! Even though I have no idea what this is and did nothing to earn it, I am extremely excited and am going to dress up fancy today so that I am worthy of this great honor. So excuse me while I change out of my filthy sweatshirt and yoga pants and put on a clean sweatshirt and yoga pants. Please go read Susannah’s blog – it is hilarious, and I can’t wait to read her erotic bondage and vampires autobiography. Wait, I mean novel.

The only other award I have ever won is a hot ham and cheese sandwich at a sub shop in central Missouri, where I grew up. When I was in elementary school, I was briefly obsessed with hearing my voice on the local radio station and winning one of their contests. They gave out great prizes, such as a gift certificate to the mall, or two gift certificates to the mall, or lunch at the mall. But the day I won the radio contest, the prize was a gift certificate to a sub shop that was NOT at the mall. The DJ posed a simple trivia question: name the three chipmunks. I didn’t care about the non-mall prize – I dialed the phone like a maniac (it was a rotary phone, and it was exhausting) and after several busy signals I got through. When the DJ played my recorded response on the air, with my squeaky little voice whispering, “Alvin, Simon, and Theodore?”, I was so proud. And then that bastard said, “I guess the question was a little too easy today if some LITTLE KID is getting it right!” Hey, then how about you don’t ask questions about cartoon characters? And can I trade in my sub sandwich for some neon jelly bracelets?

Anywho, the Liebster Award is for up and coming bloggers with less than 200 followers as a way of getting the word out. The rules of acceptance for the Liebster Award are:
1. Visit and thank the blogger who nominated you.
2. Acknowledge that blogger and link back.
3. Answer the ten questions posed by the blogger who nominated you.
4. Select three to five bloggers for the award.
5. Pose ten new questions to the new nominees.
6. Post the award on your blog.

Steps 1, 2, and 6, check. So here are the questions from Susannah that I need to answer:
1. If you could have any super power, what would it be? Invisibility, so I could watch people and not be creepy. And so I could shoplift.
2. What has been the proudest moment in your life so far? Winning the Liebster Award, obvs.
3. If you could go to any point in history, what would it be and why? I was going to say 19th century England because I have romantic notions of Jane Austen times, but I think women had it pretty crappy back then. So I’m thinking yesterday, because I took a really good nap.
4. Did you have an imaginary friend as a child? No, I had real friends because I was not a huge loser.
5. What is the best thing about blogging? Using humor to avoid actual emotional intimacy on a near daily basis.
6. What is the worst thing about blogging? I AM SO LONELY.
7. People would be surprised to know that I ________________. Can’t stand any of the Real Housewives from any season or city ever.
8. What is your favorite movie? All I can think of is Shawshank Redemption, probably because it is on TBS every night.
9. Beach or mountains? Beach, because if you stay out of the water, your chances of being eaten by an animal are very small. The mountains have bears, pumas, and Sasquatches, all of which can and will eat you.
10. Cats or Dogs? Dogs. My daughter just said this weekend that if we get a dog she will make a saddle for it and ride it like it is “my tiny small pony.” No daughter of mine is going to ride a cat, for crying out loud.

So now the next step to claim my award is to name some other small bloggers that I like. I can only think of two right now, but I am still claiming my award because DON’T I DESERVE SOME SMALL BIT OF HAPPINESS? Wow, not sure where that came from. So check out: Karen at karenleonardphotography.com/blog/ — she doesn’t post too often because she’s on some amazing sabbatical in Vermont right now, but she takes beautiful pictures and her blog highlights her favorites; and Cindy at www.eyecovet.com, who has lots of eye candy and beautiful images pulled together on a lovely site. I had a hard time answering ten questions, so I’m only posting one for Karen and Cindy to answer: how YOU doin’?

Auf Wiedersehen! Oh, and CHECK IT:
Liebster