See this tweet I got from Inge-Somethin-Bitchy-Or-Other? I had just sent out the Tweet that my poodle had been stolen from my yard, miraculously escaped from his captors, but then was run over and killed on a major highway about a mile from our house. So IngeBitch the Spambot decides that this is a great time to REQUEST A PICTURE OF MY DOG SO I CAN WIN $1000. Would you like a before or after picture, dumbass? Because the after picture is KIND OF TWO DIMENSIONAL.
Pole dancing lessons are totally on the list.
There’s really no good reason why I’ve never had a martini. I’ve just never gotten around to it. I’ve actually heard that they’re pretty gross, like drinking watered down battery acid, but apparently there’s a whole segment of the population who chooses vodka over food all the time, so how bad can it be? If I found myself in a bar with nothing else to do and my choices were Dr. Pepper, Korean beer, or a martini, of course I’d swill the vodka in the spaceship cup.
There is a very short list of stuff I’ve never gotten to do that I’m just dying to try, and it’s a pretty eclectic bucket list. Hang gliding looks pretty interesting, I’ve never taken a two-hour zip line tour over the treetops of Costa Rica, and I’ve never been to Mount Rushmore. I think I’d even like to go to a snake handling church just once, just to cheer for the snakes.
However, there is a list of things I’m just not interested in trying, no matter how much someone paid me. It’s my F*** It List, stuff that I just could give a hoot less about. Eating pig testicles is definitely on that list, but it’s not even at the top.
I don’t ever want to feed Alka-Seltzer to seagulls to see if they blow up. If they don’t, you just wasted a lot of expensive Alka-Seltzer. If they do, you just blew up a seagull.
I’ve never eaten a Big Mac. I’m only five-and-a-half feet tall, where would I put it? And who decided to put schloopy Thousand Island dressing on a hamburger? And why is there an extra piece of bread stuffed in there for no reason? I’ve purposely eaten raw horse meat and I still don’t want a Big Mac. Go figure.
I’ve never seen Love Story. Does it have Barbara Streisand in it?
I’ve never been to Wisconsin, but in that particular case I don’t think I’m welcome there. Shut up, I don’t have to tell you why. Well, the feeling’s mutual, Wisconsin, so suck it!
For some reason, I really, really don’t want to try bungee jumping. I’m not even afraid to do it, I just don’t think it would feel great to be slingshotted. (author’s note: I thought I just made up the word slingshotted but my spellchecker’s totally buying it. Someone must have beaten me to it. Thanks a pantsload, Shakespeare.)
While I’m a try-anything-once kind of person, there’s just some things I don’t need to do. I’m sure there are lots more things I have no desire to do, but it just hasn’t come up yet. But I’ve decided to focus on the F***It List, because bucket lists are for people who are dying and I don’t want to do that yet either.
As a teacher, I’m sometimes faced with students with horrible learning impediments. Some of them have medical problems that keep the children from achieving in school, others have family and home life problems that make them into not-so-stellar pupils. But there’s the whole other category to consider: just plain stupid.
Oh, stop gnashing your teeth. I’m not suggesting that we wash our hands of these youngsters and put them to work in the factories straight away. I’m merely pointing out that once upon a time people recognized that humans are born with varying levels of intelligence, but now we’re not having any of that.
If your child just cannot understand fractions, a long time ago we would send him to the lower math class where he would cut up plastic pizzas into different sized wedges until he understood it better. Odds were awesome that he was never going to grow up to be a pharmacist if he couldn’t figure out how to divide doses, but that was okay. He could do something else.
If your daughter struggled with reading, she used to be in the Blue Birds reading group and she got extra attention from the special reading teacher. Chances were excellent that she wasn’t destined to be an author if reading wasn’t her favorite subject, but there were plenty of career paths still open to her.
Now, there’s something wrong with your child and with you if he’s just stupid. You didn’t use enough flash cards or he’s not on the right medication or you didn’t breastfeed like you were supposed to. It can’t just be luck of the draw that he can’t remember to keep his shoes tied, it must be because of asbestos in the walls of your house.
Years ago, Governor Fob James made a startling announcement on the news, “ALL children in Alabama can be above average.” Wow, the governor sucked at math, too. Apparently, you can be in the stupid-kid math class and still succeed in politics. That’s a career path that thrives on stupid.
We tried sinks like this, it didn't end well.
I’ve always had a secret loathing of those signs in public restrooms that inform employees that they must wash their hands before returning to work. I’m really peeved about the fact that someone somewhere had to pass a law requiring businesses to post a sign telling their employees to wash their hands. Common sense should really come into play any time now.
If you’re someone who needs to be told to wash your hands before leaving a restroom, I have the ideal training program for you. Come to work with me. For just one day, if that’s all the time you have. You will be cured of your disgusting forgetfulness in no time.
Here’s a typical day in the prison:
6am – Wake the inmates for morning exercises. They’re going to perform these exercises in the comfort of those jumpsuits they’ve been wearing 24hours a day for the past three days. Oh yeah, and they’ve been exercising in them for three days now. And eating in them. And sleeping in them. Do your very best to avoid touching any of the jumpsuits, and that includes the ones that have just come out of the giant washing machine. Just in case, and all.
9am – Inmates go to school. They sit in my desks writing with my pens on my paper, sometimes holding my books. They rub their hands on my computer keyboards and hold my Kindles. You see where I’m going with this.
12pm – It’s lunchtime! All the inmates get to come out of their cells—you know, those little rooms with a stainless steel toilet in them—for meal time.
5pm – More exercises! Yippee! Because you didn’t sweat in your one jumpsuit enough this morning, we’re going to let you loose for an hour on the indoor basketball court.
10pm – Lights Out. This is the time of day when the inmates get to rest their heads on their pillow-less rubber mattresses wearing—you guessed it—their jumpsuits. Under a wool blanket that was issued to them a week ago.
In the empty spaces in this highly regimented cruise ship schedule, the staff get to enjoy random tasks like picking lice out of the inmates’ hair or bandaging a bleeding busted knuckle or helping scrub down the residents (and the jumpsuits) from the scabies outbreak.
NOW do I need to remind you to wash your hands? Seriously? Washing my hands is a luxury that I like to indulge in seven or eight times a day, and that’s just during the working hours. No, I don’t have a psychological hand washing problem because days that I don’t go to work I honestly don’t have to wash any more often than the sign hanging in my bathroom at home tells me to.
I am completely prepared in the event of a home invasion. I’m also completely prepared for a Russian invasion, thanks to a propaganda video we all had to watch in fifth grade. But for the home invasion, I have Klingon-like weapons strategically placed all around my house, like Jodie Foster did in Safe Room. The bad guy will just think he’s tiptoeing silently into my kitchen when all of a sudden…whoosh…a knife flies through the air in stealth-mode and goes right through his ear into his skull. At least that’s how it happens when I think about it a lot. With a shirt that sexy, who would ever think you've got a knife back there?
But I didn’t get to ear-stab anyone today because all of the people in my house were sort of invited. I didn’t invite them, but I invited the person who brought them. I think I actually said something like, “You should all come to my house for this presentation and I’ll make some snacks, too.” Go figure, they took that as an invitation.
It’s like Reverse-King-of-the-Vampires…instead of rendering my safeguards useless because I invited him in, I lost the right to show my stabby love when I told them they could come over. It’s a good thing that they’re really nice and well-mannered and don’t care that I’m writing this about them. I didn’t even have to tell anyone to use a coaster.
Having that many people over at one time (I think there were about 93 people there, but I could be exaggerating just because I was having trouble breathing) was a little unsettling because I’m out of practice on having guests over. I started counting feet at one point, and once it passed twenty I didn’t know what else to do but get out some more chairs and stand back in case one of the feet stepped on me.
All in all, once I got over the feeling that someone was going to punch me in the throat or accidentally spill a Coke on the carpet or something, it was a good experience. Two of my four family members hid in other parts of the house the entire time, and the remaining person just peeked down the stair case from time to time. I could be wrong, but I think I saw the glint of steel in her other hand once in a while. I love my family.
In order to explain the crazy that is November, I’d have to back up and explain the insanity that is October. Every year in NOVEMBER (not October), the Office of Letters and Light hosts a month long event called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I participated last year, it was a total barrel of monkeys.
In order to get ready for the grueling demands of NOVEMBER (not October), some writers decided that OCTOBER (not November) should be dedicated to disciplining ourselves for the job of writing almost 2000 words every day in NOVEMBER (not October) by holding what they call NaBloWriMo in OCTOBER (not November). Get your mind out of the gutter, the Blo part of NaBloWriMo stands for “blog.” Yup, we’re supposed to write a blog post on our sites every day in OCTOBER (not November)(doing that to the months of the year will never stop being funny).
So I’ve some how been dragged along to this clam bake by my fellow writers, and that means a daily blog post in OCTOBER (okay, it’s kind of wearing off now) from yours truly. Sadly, it takes massive amounts of energy drinks mixed with alcohol to write the funny stuff that I manage to post maybe four times a month, so OCTOBER on this blog is going to be fairly dull. Feel free to go over to ShitMyDadSays.com for the duration of the month.
However, as I QUICKLY run out of things to talk about, I will have to resort to posting a lot of pictures of random stuff from my new camera phone and every third picture I take is usually an accidental crotch shot. Fully clothed, get over yourself. I will also have to write a LOT about my friends and relatives, so check back often to see if you should take me off your Christmas card list for telling the entire Internet about you getting your first period in the food court of the mall when we were twelve. You were warned.
I get it. I am fully aware that fortune cookies are not Chinese and have no cosmic pathway to a reincarnated Confucius. But I can’t help the eager feeling of cracking open the cookie and reading the words, “You can quit your job and still send your children to college.”
Instead, I get fortunes with this crap:
So when I got one last week that not only told me specifically WHAT to do but actually gave me a time line of when I should do it, I admit I thought it was a ransom note. (Author’s Note: how cool would that be? A book where the bad guys keep leaving instructions in fortune cookies? “Drop the bag with the sixteen million in unmarked bills in the garbage can inside the men’s room.” And then in a shocking plot twist the cookies get swapped in the restaurant and an elderly couple from New Jersey who HATE each other gets that fortune, and they each think the other spouse is plotting to kill them, only the real kidnapping victim is still chained to a steel I-beam on the 400th floor of an unfinished skyscraper in Dubai because no one put the money in the bathroom! Don’t steal that idea!)
But my fortune from last week told me to not only play the lottery, but to do it THAT weekend. Ordinarily I don’t fall for pranks from the Universe, but when everything kind of falls into place, you start to think just maybe you’re going to play the lottery AND win, and then you won’t have to be a teacher in a prison anymore. Our state doesn’t have a lottery, even though we have one of the worst educational funding records in the history of people going to school; BUT I happened to be going out of town THAT WEEKEND! I COULD PLAY THE LOTTERY IN THE STATE WHERE I WAS GOING!
You can guess how it turned out. Obviously, since I’m still sitting here writing blog posts hoping against hope that someone thinks I’m funny enough to want to publish all my drivel in one bound edition and make it available at your local bookstore, I probably didn’t win anything other than the receipt from buying the ticket.
Here’s the punch in the throat part: the cookie never promised that I was going to WIN the lottery, it just merely suggested that I PLAY the lottery. What a crumby joke. (See? Get it? I’m FREAKIN’ hilarious!)
The problem is you would think I would have learned my lesson after the state government of Georgia suckered me out of one dollar, but no. I had to go to McDonald’s on my lunch hour yesterday to play Monopoly. My co-worker and I had it all planned out. She was to get Park Place, I was going to get Boardwalk, and then we just wouldn’t come back from our lunch breaks. And I mean wouldn’t come back to civilization, not just to work. Sure enough, she gets to her pieces first (because I’m driving with two hands on the steering wheel) and she’s got Park Place! It was meant to be! The Universe is in line with our lust for financial security! I went ahead and veered the car towards the Interstate to head to Florida.
And then I got Baltic Avenue. Even my snack foods are underachievers. No one wants Baltic, even when playing ACTUAL Monopoly. The rent on it is like $3, and that’s if you own both purple properties AND you have nine hotels on it.
All of this has taught me a valuable lesson. If I can’t win the lottery when the cookie clearly told me I was going to, and if I can’t even win a free small French fries at McDonald’s, it’s a damn good thing I didn’t try to meet my husband on eHarmony. The one I ended up with wouldn’t have had a pulse.
I want to have a country but I can never finish a whole one.
I have reached that point in my middle-aged life where I’m looking for a new challenge, something to break up the routine. It would be great if it could be something that I would actually have to plan for really far in advance, like a marathon or being a freelance wet-nurse, because then I’d have months of preparation and training ahead of me before I could actually attempt the goal. It would definitely kill time.
I’ve already run a bunch of marathons and done a few triathlons and I can’t actually lactate anymore even if I concentrate really hard, so I’ve kind of closed the door on a lot of goal-oriented pursuits. One thing that I haven’t gotten to do is stage a rebellion and overthrow a government in order to seize power and make the minions—I mean, millions—do my bidding. There’s a really long line of people in this country who’ve already filled out the necessary forms to try that here, so I’m putting out feelers on Twitter for a foreign country that really needs a good coup.
I have pretty high standards sometimes, so my dream country would be fairly tropical with a steady tourist-based economy and lots of time spent being fanned by cabana-people who bring me drinks. I also want a country that would never see this overthrow happening, since I’m not a large person and I don’t really have enough friends and co-workers who would want to participate in my uprising. Those jerks.
I have to say I would really be great at taking over a country and making everyone do things my way, and not just because my way makes sense all the time and not just on paper. I would be really awesome to the little people and only unleash my inner crazy on politicians, criminals, and boards of directors. Of ANYTHING. Schools and hospitals would have to play a big huge game of Brewster’s Millions where they see if they can possibly spend enough by the deadline in order to get even more money, and anything that provides cool interesting things to do for children or the elderly gets an automatic green light from the treasury. We’ll have to make some cutbacks to bankroll my game of Magical Fairy Wish Machine, so all funding for Viagra is hereby cut.
When I’m elected dictator, (by which I really mean, “When I take over your country,”) road construction cronies will have a time limit to complete highway construction! Pre-packaged food products with more than eight ingredients will be outlawed! People will stop wasting precious electricity with inflatable yard art! Football season will last exactly two weeks for college teams, three weeks for pros! Big Bird will have a permanent home on Sesame Street and Glenn Beck will have to hold a monthly telethon to get to stay on the air! The masses will both fear me and adore me!
Sorry, I got a bit woozy there. The extreme power went to my head for a second, but I’m okay now. I can’t lose it like that in front of my victims—I mean, constituents—ever again if I want to stay in a leadership position for long. I wouldn’t want to look crazy and find myself overthrown.
I rarely take medications. It’s not a personal vendetta against the pharmaceutical companies, although ever since the invention of “restless legs syndrome” I’ve been kind of gun-shy on their ability to cure me of anything important. I’m also not a hippie or any kind of purist, because I’ve decided if you’re willing to put as many Doritos and marshmallows into your body as I do, a few pills aren’t going to hurt anything. I’m basically just freakishly healthy. Every time I actually get sick enough to see a doctor I end up having to fill out all new forms because their computers kicked me out of the system as probably being deceased.
That makes me pretty much a lightweight in the pill-popping department, which is probably why one of the three things I’m supposed to be taking for my neck is now in the bottom drawer of the bathroom vanity. I tried for several days to get used to the side effects, but I couldn’t do it anymore. The first problem was very real, vivid dreams, the kind that make you more tired in the morning than when you went to bed because your brain wouldn’t shut the hell up while you were trying to sleep. I distinctly remember waking up in the middle of the first night and walloping the crap out of my poor husband for stealing my artificial legs. What kind of A-hole steals a woman’s fake legs and hides them where she can’t get to them? (He’s just as confused by this as you are.)
The little pill deal-breaker for me was when I started hallucinating, which was clearly NOT written on the package insert as a possible side effect. I realize that hallucinations are ultimately a by-product of the owner’s subconscious, and therefore, things that are already manifested somehow in her brain. Sadly, my hallucinations were as boring as I am.
One of my first hallucinations was dryer lint all over my shirt. Jim Morrison gets to see rainbow colors and flying unicorns when he’s high, I just keep seeing fuzz all over my laundry. Another one was the feeling that my ponytail holder was sliding off my ponytail. That’ll keep those patients in rehab going nuts for hours. Possibly the only scary hallucination was a Jewish mother-in-law complaining about my cooking and my housekeeping. The joke’s on her, I don’t cook or clean and my husband’s not Jewish. I totally took her down with my verbal ninja skills.
Since the neck-curing pills aren’t working out I’ve decided to just keep leaning my head to one side like I’m deep in thought, so I’ve been practicing my pensive look. Unfortunately, the sideways head and the deep-in-thought face only convince people around me that I might be having a stroke. I don’t even want to think about the pills I’d have to take for that.
If Snooki can pull off a neck brace...oh wait, she can't.
I went to the doctor yesterday because I couldn’t stand the scary pain in my chest anymore. It was thrilling to see one car in the whole parking lot, but at the same time, wouldn’t you think there would be more patients wanting to see this person? Apparently he’s not in high demand, but that’s okay, all I really wanted out of this person was a signature on a prescription pad. If a vet could have made the pain stop, I would have gone there. So what if there’s a picture of a horse on the side of the bottle?
And even though there was no one waiting to see this doctor, I had to wait a horribly long time in the exam room for him to come in. That was their first mistake, because if you leave me in a room with lots of stuff and no surveillance cameras, I’m totally gonna mess with things. I actually started live-tweeting the appointment, complete with photos from my camera phone. The entire internet saw the blood stain dripping down the garbage can. The longer you leave me in there, the more stuff I can make up about you, Doctor. You’re only hurting yourself.
When he finally came in, he was a very nice elderly grandfatherly type. He told some jokes, asked me a lot of questions, moved my head around, poked my neck in places that made me bite the inside of my mouth, then rolled back on the chair (the one I had been spinning on earlier) and told me that I have arthritis. Of the neck. Nowhere else, just my neck.
My first thought was, “Aren’t I a little bit young for arthritis?” Actually, that was my second thought. My first thought was, “Jackpot! Handicapped parking tag!” THEN I thought, “Wait, I’m only thirty-eight years old.”
Now, I’m not sensitive about my age. I actually proudly tell my students that I was alive for the Vietnam War. I leave off the part about how we had the last soldier out of there before my little black umbilical stump had fallen off, but technically, it’s the truth. But I was really kind of weirded out because if I’m falling apart this badly at 38, sixty is going to be a real bitch-slap.
The hard part was telling my husband. Actually, that was kind of fun, too. I remember saying to him, “Now, before you even think about laughing at me, remember…you’re bald.” Husband was not laughing, he was actually very sweet. So sweet, in fact, that I felt a little bit bad telling him that the doctor said I have to see a massage therapist weekly and I can’t do any lifting at all for the rest of my life because it could make my head fall off. I think I mentioned I might have to quit my job, too, but once he started squinting his eyes at me I knew he wasn’t buying it. Especially when he said, “You went to that old man doctor again, didn’t you? The one who tells everyone whatever they want to hear?” I was busted. I tried playing it off by having a dementia attack, but sadly, I’m not quite old enough to pull that off. Maybe by next year.
Lorca Damon 