Haiku Hijinks
Many, many thanks to the folks at Haiku Smackdown for an evening of great entertainment at yesterday’s Smackdown. I laughed, I cried… it was way better than “Cats” (yo!). Please do check it out, if you haven’t already.
Parental advisory warning: Some of the haikus are raunchy, and some are well beyond that. (You might need to skip a few, Dad.)
Let me tell you, it is impossible to wallow and ‘ku at the same time. Can’t be done. I went to bed with a crick in my neck and a happy heart.
Scissors are Fun
Important discovery: I can have oodles of time to myself to blog, pay bills, and do dishes, and still garner Fun Mama points, if I allow the Monkey to cut up his Spiderman coloring book while I do so.
He has spent most of the morning cutting out every little spider in there and then running to me to present it… whereupon I shriek a fake little scream of horror, he laughs himself silly (remember, he is easily amused), and then he runs off to find me another one.
“Mama, you don’t like spiders, do you?”
“No, honey, not very much.”
“Mama, spiders and Barbies freak you out.”
“Yes, sweetheart, they do.”
“That’s okay, Mama… I love you anyway.”
Typical Me
Oh.my.God. This is just SO like me…
I mean, leave it to me to flipping save all of humankind and not even notice (or get credit). Thanks, Liz. I think. (Tell ya what… I’ll bring the butter for your toast and you can bring whatever goes well with the spoils of righteous–if somewhat oblivious–victory and we’ll make a celebration of it.)
More typical me:
1) Discovered this morning that I left the garage door open. All night. With the door to the house unlocked.
2) Woke up with a migraine, took my meds, asked the kids to play quietly, went back to bed for half an hour.
3) Got up to what can only be described as a spectacular explosion of the arts-n-crafts chest all over the kitchen.
4) I am brooding over a really bad decision I made a year ago today that came back to bite me several times, hard; and it might be cathartic to write about it, but as there is no spin I could put on said decision that wouldn’t make me look like a total asshat (I’m stealing the word, but giving credit where it’s due) I’m just gonna shut up and get back to wallowing.
Editing to add: If I fill in “Miriam” instead of “Mir” I’ll be creating some super-weapon in August of 2007. Apparently my more formal self doesn’t know how to harness her powers for good.
As if I wasn’t neurotic enough…
I’ve come to that time of the evening when I paint “NERD” across my forehead, put on my jammies, turn on “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” and get into bed with my laptop. (All of the aforementioned really happens except the forehead painting part….)
Julia and I often chat on AIM and watch “Whose Line” together (well, as together as you can from several states apart) at this time of night, and I kind of wind down from the day, and all is grand.
Tonight I’m feeling a little jittery. First of all, Waldo is still at large, and as my bathroom is connected to my bedroom and I can no longer find him in the bathroom, I’m just a tiny bit worried that he may kill me in my sleep. In addition, the Monkey is having a rare difficult night and has already been up to tell me he’s “wone-wy” at least four times (I get the good mommy award for not once snapping back “Yeah, I’m lonely too, but I’m not bothering you when I should be sleeping!”). It’s hard to relax under the certain knowledge that you won’t know when, but at some point in the night a flailing bedhog will be upon you. (But on the plus side, he might scare Waldo away.) And last, tomorrow is likely to be a Very Sucky Day and the only thing I’m even better at than wallowing is anticipating a good wallow.
Anyway. What’s a girl to do with all this on her mind? Read weird crap on the web, of course. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this article about a prison in Indiana which is instituting a dress code for visitors. Among the various edicts listed in the article is this gem: “underwear is required to remain invisible.”
I’ve long suspected that I lack many of the feminine wiles of my sexier counterparts. Now I’m really stunned. There’s a way to make underwear invisible?? There are hours, nay, days of my life, cumulatively, that I’ve spent shopping for undergarments that won’t leave panty lines. If any readers know the Underwear Invisibility Incantation, please enlighten me. (Thank goodness there’s no one in prison I need to visit. Yet.)
But I NEED that!
Panic. Complete, total, utter panic.
I was sitting here… minding my own business… finishing up the Mother’s Day gifts for the grandmothers (yes, thank you, I know today’s date… there were technical difficulties beyond my control and… why am I explaining this??)… when the phone rings.
It’s Eric, or maybe it’s Erik, I really don’t know, and he’s calling me from the 401 area code, and I have no idea where that is, but if I haven’t mentioned before that I love having Caller ID, I really do, and I would like to thank the Ex for the early days of post-separation insanity wherein he felt the need to call my house a hundred times a day, prompting me to get said Caller ID, anyway, back to Eric, he’s calling to inform me that my bank is making exciting new changes to their online banking this Summer! Hurray for them! And I am just about to hang up on his cheery earnest script-reading self when he jubilantly proclaims that as a part of these changes, customers will no longer be able to receive e-bills online through the bank. But stay tuned for exciting new functionality….
“Back up,” I said. “I can’t get e-bills anymore? Why not?”
There is a pause. Eric or Erik clears his throat.
“Ma’am,” (nothing endears me to a young twerp more than being called ma’am as if I’m twice my actual age, let me tell you), “you can still elect to receive e-bills through arrangement with your various billers, just not through our online banking.”
“Ummm… you said the bank is bringing an updated interface and exciting new functionality… this sounds to me like a revocation of services. How is that beneficial?”
Eric or Erik could be heard flipping through his script. I don’t think he knows what revocation means. But I’m guessing he could tell that I was annoyed.
“Ma’am,” (there it is again) “I’m really not sure why they’ve decided to do this, but I’m sure there will be even better functionality in its place once the upgrade is complete.”
I resisted the temptation to ask what functionality would be better than the extraordinary convenience of having all my bills linked to my checking account in one place, save for the bank perhaps paying off those bills before I ever even saw them. With someone else’s money (natch).
I also resisted the temptation to scream “You fool! Do you have any idea how long it took me to get my finances organized to a level where I no longer break out in hives every time I log on to my account? DO YOU???”
Furthermore, (and here is the very nicest part, because I’m all about loving my neighbors, figurative and otherwise) I have resisted the overwhelmingly strong urge to include the name of my financial institution in this post. I was asked to “stay tuned” and that I shall, and if the Summer brings me the banking travesty I fear it may, then I will of course put links to my bank’s online consumer grievance area all over my site.
Bah.
Where’s Waldo?
Last night I noted that I needed to help a friend after the kids were in bed. By “help a friend” I of course meant that my friend Eileen is too chicken to color her own hair, and in the logic that only a best friend can have, figured it was somehow safer to come over to my house, ply me with alcohol, and let me do it. I am pleased to report that we did indeed wash that grey right outta her hair and it was a fairly early night. I didn’t even dye much of her face.
However, lightweight that I am, it seemed somehow wrong to try to sit down and do my reading for my church study group after an evening fraternizing with Mike (purveyor of fine hard lemonades; in this case, cranberry flavor). So, I turned in early and actually set my alarm, something I rarely do as I own two loud, unprogrammable alarm children already.
I did it. Got up before the smaller lifeforms, did some reading, hopped in the shower. Enter Waldo. Waldo and I have been facing off for a couple of days, now. I haven’t quite worked up the nerve to do something about him, and he hasn’t had the decency to disappear.
Waldo is a humongous spider. I don’t tend to be too squeamish about bugs and other creatures. But I have my limits. Although I firmly believe in leaving spiders be to eat the other, more disgusting insects who have rudely invaded my home, Waldo is too big to be a common house spider. He’s too big to ignore. And it appears that he has taken up residence in my bathroom.
Upon entering the bathroom Waldo was nowhere to be seen, even when I did an inspection of the shower stall. So I went along my merry way, got the water started, hopped in and started getting my hair wet. Then we came eye-to-uh… hairy belly. (Anyone who thinks the hairy belly is mine needs to leave now.) Waldo had set up shop between my shower curtain and the transparent liner, and I found myself staring at him through the blue-tinted plastic. I think he was laughing at me.
A quick mental calculation assured me that there was no way I was going to be otherwise confronted with him or have to touch him or anything, so I went about my business. I washed my hair. I started to shave my legs. I glanced over and Waldo was… gone.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to shave your legs, wash, and condition your hair with an industrial sized bottle of Pantene clutched in one hand, ready to strike?
He’s still MIA. But I have a sneaking suspicion he’ll be back. It’s the where of it all that’s gonna give me nightmares.
My glass is… cloudy
Honestly, I’m a glass-is-half-empty kind of person. I don’t want to be. I’m trying to change. For me it’s something that requires real effort, and of course I suspect that for others it comes easily and that only contributes to my frustration.
It’s evening, I have plans to help a friend with something tonight after the kids are in bed, and I’m on the verge of hyperventilating. Today I didn’t:
- pay the bills…
- balance my checkbook…
- call the lawnmower repair guy…
- write the letter I need to write to get my summer camp money refunded…
- fold the @&%#! laundry…
- receive my child support payment (3 days late, now)…
- remember to remind the Ex about the child support payment…
- manage to order that fan off of Amazon before it went out of stock…
- exercise…
- do my reading assignment for my small group study tomorrow…
- clean the crap out of the car that I keep meaning to clean.
That’s my glass, half-empty. But this is the New Me. No more woulda-coulda-shouldas for this girl, no sirree bob! But ya know, the New Me is in many ways remarkably like the Old Me (who wasn’t, in my humble opinion, such a bad sort; just a little more neurotic than necessary). Here’s the only way I know to make my glass half-full. Today I didn’t:
- swear when I took the bills out of the mailbox…
- spend any money…
- forget to shower…
- bite the Ex’s head off about the child support…
- so much as secretly fantasize about something large and heavy falling on the Ex…
- walk into anything…
- watch any TV…
- run the car into anything…
- harm either child, even when said children tracked mud through the house after I’d just asked them to take their shoes off…
- harm the child who came over for a playdate and peed all over my freshly cleaned bathroom…
- eat anything that was not more or less life-sustaining and appropriately caloric.
This is progress, right?
It’s like passing a car accident….
I have a confession to make. I have been watching The Swan on a regular basis. Smack me. Hard. Please. I watched it tonight. I have no valid excuse, other than that my choices were to sit on my couch and watch that or actually haul my butt upstairs and fold laundry. I’m not out of underwear yet so you can see that this was really no choice at all. (There may have been more choices earlier in the evening, but after the post-bedtime hour of “get back in bed,” “if I have to come up there again someone had better be either on fire or bleeding,” “could we please have this crisis about your feet in the morning?” my brain had narrowed the field.) (Yes, a foot crisis. Don’t ask.)
So have you seen this abomination of a program? “Ugly” women are selected for complete, radical makeovers and half of them are then selected to compete in a pageant after their transformations, with one winner ultimately being crowned “The Swan.” I think that if there were truth in programming, they’d crown this woman “The Barbie.” I think every contestant, after the unveiling, should have to imitate the little segment of Tour Guide Barbie telling everyone good-bye during the credits at the end of Toy Story 2. (“Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, so long, good-bye!”) So far, every woman I’ve seen has received breast implants (except one, who had a reduction down to a D cup), and all have had hair extensions and basically identical Barbie hairstyles at the end. Spooky.
Oh, don’t worry, enlightened women! This isn’t about physical beauty only. No no no. You see, part of the team of Swan miracle workers is a therapist. After your gazillion surgeries, in addition to spending 2 hours a day at the gym with your personal trainer, you get to go to therapy to work out your issues and become beautiful on the inside as well. Hurray! What do you suppose they talk about during therapy?
Ugly Duckling: “I’ve always felt so ugly and like an outsider… I just don’t know….”
Therapist: “Of course you did, but now get a load of those knockers! Plus they sucked all the fat off your ass and injected it into your lips. Trust me, your troubles are over.”
Tonight’s episode included a contestant who was a mother to three and stick skinny (a major achievement in my book). In addition to a tummy tuck–which I didn’t think she needed, being so thin, but okay, there was some preggo-skin there–she was placed on a 1700 calorie/day diet as part of her “rehab.” Lemme tell ya, I nearly choked on my ice cream.
And we women wonder why we never feel comfortable in our own skins. Every brain cell in my head enters a hypnotic trance when The Swan comes on and then unites with the others, Borg-style, to send a single message: I’m fat. (Let the record show that I’m a size 4. What’s wrong with this picture?)
One the one hand, I’m horrified, outraged, disgusted. On the other, I’m thinking damn they got all that for free? Bitches. Maybe they’ll decide on a mini-version… maybe call it the Chesire Cat pageant, where they only do the dental work… and then I could sign up and get really white teeth (which is about the only procedure I’ve seen on The Swan which I’d be willing to undergo)?
I wish I’d folded the laundry….
Small Joys
For a Monday morning, today was fabulous. I don’t know what I did to deserve it or what horrors lay in wait for later today or tomorrow, but I’ll take it.
Monday morning is Back To School, and Monday morning is often also Battle of the Cranky Tired Ones. If the Monkey (my 4-year-old son) is overtired, he gets up at the crack of dawn (“crack of darn” as he has aptly named it), comes down to my room, and is as unpleasant as possible until I get out of bed and run away to the relative seclusion of the shower. If the Chickadee (my 6-year-old daughter) is overtired, she just doesn’t get up. (I think she’s smarter than he is. Don’t tell.) At some point I have to drag her skinny butt out of bed to get ready for school, and let’s just say she isn’t a morning person.
Today, well, I think maybe they didn’t know it was Monday. The Monkey was kind enough to sleep until 7:00–positively, sinfully late for ’round here–and bounded his way into my bed in rare form. He didn’t even smell bad! (Still in nighttime pullups; and yes, I think he’ll be headed to college in them.) First we had to play with his stuffed puppies for a while, which I actually don’t mind when he’s in a good mood. (When he’s in a bad mood, I invariably make one of the puppies do or say something unacceptable and then he screams at me.) Then he got all snuggly and cuddly and started talking about his upcoming trip to Grammie’s and how much he’s going to miss me when he’s gone.
“You’re gonna hafta call me,” he informed me, in all seriousness.
“I am? What should I call you? Monkeypants? Monkeypants!” Now let me tell you… you may not find me amusing, but in fact, I am just about the most hilarious person on the planet. At least the Monkey believes I am, and I care more about his opinion than yours. This little “misunderstanding” on my part caused him to lose all composure. He laughed so hard I was extremely grateful he was wearing a pull-up. He fell over. He tried to explain to me what he meant, inbetween giggles and gasps. I put on a contemplative expression and nodded at everything he said and responded to every attempt to clarify with, “Okay… MONKEYPANTS!” And I thought I was easily amused. After he stopped falling over so much I of course started just pushing him over at odd intervals for the fun of it. (Point to ponder: I do not allow jumping on the bed, but I am perfectly okay with knocking my children flat to the mattress for my own amusement. Hmmmmm.)
After a while we settled down, and who should come bounding along but the Chickadee. She was awake (obviously) and cheery, which was nice even if a little unsettling. The Monkey recounted the hilarity of how silly Mama is that she doesn’t know what it means to call someone when they’re away, which the Chickadee graciously responded to with giggles and compliments to her brother for trying to set me straight (rather than her new favorite I’m-a-cool-kindergartener-and-you’re-a-small-creature little-brother-soul-crushing response of “So what? You’re boring”). Then, of course, I had to knock her down on the bed for a while, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.
They dressed. They brushed teeth. I brushed their hair. They ate breakfast. I packed lunches. I announced that anyone who said I was the best Mama in the world would get a rice krispy treat in their lunchbox, and they both did (the Monkey immediately and whole-heartedly, the Chickadee after several other declarations such as “You’re the best shower curtain in the world”… I have no idea where she learned to be such a smartass), and they might have meant it. No one cried. There was no bickering. No one spilled their milk. They put their dishes in the sink without me asking. They played together nicely in the car. We arrived at school early.
Is it a full moon?
Sunday evening, already?
Ooooooh noooooooo. The kids will be home from Daddy’s in about an hour. They will probably be unfed, definitely be wound up, and I haven’t gotten enough done in their absence. I have this fantasy, you see, that some weekend they will leave for Daddy’s and when they return I will have the house In Order.
Don’t ask me to define it. I told you it’s a fantasy. I can only verbalize parts of it: The refrigerator and pantry would be freshly stocked (I forgot to get to the store this weekend), the house would be clean for a change (I don’t think I’m in line for a CFS bust or anything, but it could be cleaner around here), the laundry would be put away (it’s still in the basket, albeit clean), and I would have completed all the tasks on my to-do list (ha!). Plus… I would feel refreshed and ready to start the week. I’m beginning to suspect that “refreshed” is an unattainable state for single moms.
On the up side: we went to the girls’ tea, and my daughter won the hat decorating contest, which put her over the moon. I did get a fair amount of gardening done. And last night I attended an interfaith benefit concert with some friends, plus we had–please allow me a moment of indulgence in a New England expression of reverence–a wicked thunderstorm that lasted several hours. In fact, there was a huge flash and crash and the lights went out while one of the performers was singing “I hear the rolling thunder” in How Great Thou Art. I defy anyone to say God doesn’t have a sense of humor.
But Sunday nights are hard. Sunday nights–especially the ones where the kids have just come back and I’ve finally wrestled them into bed–find me fighting those woulda-coulda-shouldas. Sunday nights are lonely. Sunday nights mean it’s almost time to get up Monday morning and face another week.
Does anyone have easy Sunday nights?
It’s okay. I’m gonna go finish up a few things and in a little while I’ll be listening to one of the many battles of the Chickadee vs. the Monkey while they both talk over the other, trying to tell me all about their weekend. It’s way too brief, but the snuggling on Sunday night is the absolute best, bar none. Even though I’m fully aware that our offspring appear adorable to us so that we won’t eat them, I fall for it every time. Long live the sticky, giggly kiss!