Month: February 2012

Eating a Horse Might Be The Most Un-Boring Thing You’ll Ever Do

ME Food stuffs, Overly simple thoughts , ,

I can’t wait until I’m old enough to start my stories out like Sophia, from Golden Girls. I can’t really pull it off because I don’t have a wicker basket for a purse, a look that she absolutely rocked. But there I was at a beautifully rustic dinner party to welcome my family and me to Italy. We sat at one giant table outside with dishes passed around, just like the Olive Garden people want you to think eating in their crappy restaurants will feel like.

A lovely member of the host family, I can’t remember who it was now, leaned over and said in Italian that the next dish we would have is a local delicacy called cavallo. At the time, I didn’t speak Italian, but I vaguely remembered having heard that word somewhere before.

Oh yeah. In Spanish class. And in English class when we talked about root words and their Latin origins and blah blah blah before my mind started that swimmy thing that happens to people on TV right before they pass out. My mom began thumbing through her Italian-English dictionary to find out what the word meant.

Yup. Cavallo is a really neat rustic-sounding word for horse. We were going to eat a horse. And given how long this dinner party had already lasted, it’s really possible that it was one of the horses we’d just seen munching grass in the fenced paddock on the way up the road, eating like it was his last meal or something.

This is exactly the horse I was trying not to picture, but I wasn't successful.

I immediately started looking on the bright side by thinking of famous horses I knew, wondering if I was going to get to eat something famous like maybe a race horse or a TV star. Of course, I’ve eaten meals in foreign countries before that one, so the real bright side was that horses don’t have tentacles and it couldn’t be as gross as eating octopus, unless maybe they left the hoofs on for decoration. Like those little pants fancy restaurants make turkeys wear.

I had enough time between the announcement of what we were going to eat and the actual arrival of said meat course to undergo this life-before-my-eyes montage of everything I’d ever eaten in my life, including school cafeteria food and stuff I’d eaten on a dare. I struggled to recall anything that I’d eaten that could prepare me for horse.

Nothing prepares you for horse. It was just a regular-looking slab of meat with a nice marinade ladled over the top. Did I mention it was raw? Yes, apparently actually cooking it would have done something to detract from the experience, because it was raw. And mildly slimy. Like chicken, when it’s raw.

When you do have to consume something that you’re not really sure was supposed to be food, take small bites, swallow them whole, chase them with a glass of water that has preferably been laced with bleach just in case. I consumed that meal (ate is just the wrong word here) wondering if the locals had some special enzyme that would keep them from getting sick and wondering if I was lucky enough to have caught the enzyme as I was going through customs.

Then I decided if Sophia could eat food in this country and still live to be four hundred years old, I was probably going to be okay. That woman went from eating horse to eating store-brand hot dogs, and no one has an enzyme to battle those things.

I’m Going to Eat My Young. And the Young of Six Other People.

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

I hope this is the strangest post I ever write. It’s 2:51am, there are a couple of not-even-remotely-tired children in my living room, I’m awake in my office with our dog because she’s geeked out on Dorito powder and little girl giggles, and there’s a weird taste in my mouth from falling into a sleep-coma while eating a grape Jolly Rancher.

The whole scene from The Shining playing out in my house right now is due to a “school project.” Yes, I fell for it. I let my child convince me (mostly through her wide, innocent eyes and cute smile) that she needed to have just a few friends spend the night so they could destroy my entire life work on their group project. And I fell for it.

The ten minutes of school work this group actually performed in the space of the last eighteen hours actually did look great. But other than six preteen girls making loud noises while my child did the work (other than the random girls who would pop in occasionally to bring her more Mountain Dew or wipe sweat off her face like she was performing brain surgery in a mechanic’s shop instead of standing in an air-conditioned master bathroom larger than my first apartment), I didn’t see a lot of GROUP in this GROUP PROJECT.

But here was the end result of this massive joint effort of emerging estrogen:

Here it is when I actually hold still:

Helping my daughter with her school project. #goodmommy on Twitpic

I’m a good person. And I’m eating one of the children for breakfast. I’ve already made that announcement, telling them trial-by-fire auditions to see who gets to live will take place promptly at six. Welcome to insomnia, babies.

Shaken Puppy Syndrome

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

My dog was going to revenge-blog about me, but she can't because she has no thumbs. #EpicPawFail

I’ve blogged relentlessly about the very special stupid that is my dog, but I keep getting shocked by how grave a situation her lack of intelligence really is. This is an animal that not only barks every time you come in the house, but every time you come in the room. Like you weren’t just in the room and stepped out to get a sammich, then came back with said sammich. She has literally no idea who you are once you’ve been gone for four minutes. And by you, I actually mean me.

This dog has several hobbies, like crapping in the floor, knocking over garbage cans to get to the used Q-tips in the bottom, and…drum roll…eating our panties. Yes, this deranged whore-hound eats the crotch out of every pair of underwear she can get her stupid little teeth on. She doesn’t discriminate, either, going for male or female panties and those belonging to household members both young and old. One time, she was having such a county-fair-picnic with a pair of our youngest child’s Little Mermaid panties that she actually got her head through the leg hole and nearly cut off her own oxygen supply on the nirvana that is left over little girl farts. I wish she had gone ahead and strangled herself with them.

Oh, stop it. I’m not cruel. And what the hell, call PETA, I’ll look up their phone number for you. Even those guys wouldn’t put up with an animal who obviously was the dog equivalent of a crack baby for more than five minutes. This dog has fetal alcohol syndrome from its mother drinking puddles of antifreeze during her pregnancy. Maybe my dog’s the victim of Shaken Puppy Syndrome at the hands of a deranged British nanny. Maybe she’s just really, really genetically and irreversibly dumb.

Despite all the household poo and strewn-about garbage and the crotchless panties my family now accidentally wears, my biggest issue with this dog is the raging hyperactivity. She makes a fast-talking auctioneer look nearly comatose. She runs through the house screaming (well, barking, but it’s as annoying as if she were screaming), her two inch legs carrying her with surprising speed for a midget. She actually does these NASCAR-style laps of every room in the house, my office included, until finally I can’t stand it and I scream to no one in particular, “It would be awesome if this dog wasn’t doing that!”

So why do we keep her? Why, you ask, don’t I just drive her to the next county and drop her off on someone’s porch? Because I’ve figured it out: this dog is my canine Purgatory. I’m working off every animal-related sin ever committed, and I don’t just mean ones I may have accidentally done, like the opossums I may have inadvertently run over in the dark. I’m working off every sin-against-animals ever committed by anyone on the planet. Thanks a lot, Japanese whalers. My dog eats another pair of underwear for every humpback whale that gets boiled down for lamp oil, or whatever it is you do with a dead 10,000-pound mammal. And it’s a shame, too, those whales are supposed to be pretty smart.

Baldilocks and the Three Hairs

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,

Those hairs are actual size.

Out of the mouths of babes. Awesome verbal spew comes flying out of their tiny angelic little pieholes, especially when they’re mad. And when they’re autistic. When they’re autistic AND mad, just go ahead and give up. Of course, if you’re the spouse of the person the autistic, angry child is mad at, get your pencil ready because it’s going to be epic.

My husband and my daughter had done the “you can’t have that”/”why can’t I?” dance for about ten minutes and both of them were a little short on patience. Right up until my daughter ended it once and for all: “I can eat that later and you’re bald.” We had to make her repeat herself just to be sure that’s what we heard.

You know how when your child says something she shouldn’t say, the worst thing you can do is laugh? Because that just teaches them the behavior was acceptable? No one ever said I couldn’t give her a fist bump behind my bald husband’s back.

Well, that sealed his fate. Every time the man walks through the room, whether she’s angry or not, she feels compelled to point out his lack of hair. Before you get mad at me, I have to say: the man is actually bald. It’s not receding, he’s not thinning on top. He’s been bald since college and he even shaves what little hair he has left. So technically, she’s just practicing her language skills by stating things she observes around her. We’re supposed to be encouraging her experimentation with language, right? RIGHT?

The problem is this: she’s also not stupid. She’s not pointing it out because she’s trying to make a new sentence, she calling him Bald Guy because it bugs him. And because she can hold a grudge for weeks if you don’t let her have a BlowPop before dinner.

Things got ugly when she came home from school holding the new stapled-together book she had written and illustrated for reading class. It was called, “Baldilocks and the Three Hairs.” The teacher wants a conference with us. (By the way, I’ve read the book and given it five stars on GoodReads.com. Excellent plot development, although the characters don’t really give explanations for their actions.)

We all learned a valuable lesson from these recent events. My husband learned that, despite the autism, she really is just as pissed off as the next kid when you won’t let them eat candy. He also learned he should probably sleep with one eye open. My daughter learned the very fine art of muckraking, of solving your problems by writing ugly things about people and publishing them. I learned that I’d better not piss her off unless I want to be called Old School for my gray hair.