Author: ME

It’s Time for Some Poll Dancing

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

I am so sick of the elections that I’m ready to jump on any bandwagon that involves having no form of government whatsoever. So what if we’ll need to stock up on ammo and heavy artillery to survive in the anarchy? At least I can quit getting updates from HuffPo on which candidate has a smoother complexion and therefore is ahead in the polls.

After all, polls might be some kind of indicator of how the election is going to go, but as Americans we are a fickle people who like to grab the shiniest thing in the drawer. That means we really don’t know how it’s gonna go down until the fire actually starts.

So instead, I would like to ask all of my readers to answer the following polls about things that actually matter in life.

 

 

 

 

 

Just remember, America, it’s not too late. There’s still time to make a good choice, and with enough effort and campaigning we can get the entire human race to declare the eggnog tastes like something a buzzard would puke up.

Tweets from the Bathroom

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

I adore walking around in Hobby Lobby. It’s an awesome place that makes me think of the Arts & Crafts rotation from summer camp. I’ve never been to summer camp, but I bet Hobby Lobby would be the best place to get the supplies for Arts & Crafts.

The best part of Hobby Lobby is I can look at all the cool supplies and lust after them and then think to myself, “Oh, but I’m so busy with my career, I simply don’t have the time to sculpt my own mailbox out of resin, and I can’t possibly make my own lavender scented soaps.” See? It’s not that I’m too stupid to work anything more complicated than the can opener, it’s that I just don’t have the time due to my jetsetting lifestyle and power career.

But my kids and I were wandering in Hobby Lobby when nature called. The youngest and I wound our way to the very back corner of the massive store to use the facilities but something horrible happened to both of us: there was no toilet paper in the entire bathroom, something we sadly discovered AFTER the fact. Luckily, my oldest was still browsing the aisles and dreaming of all the cool stuff she could make if SHE had the time. I got out my phone and texted her.

Mom: HELP! There’s no toilet paper in this bathroom! (As a writer, I’m required to use correct punctuation when I text.)

ADAMON: OMG what should i do (As a 12-year-old, she is not.)

Mom: Go over to the yarn section.

ADAMON: ok im there

Mom: Find a skein of white 40-weight yarn and some size 12 knitting needles.

ADAMON: ok got em

Mom: Sit down on a chair in the cake decorating section and begin to knit me some toilet paper.

ADAMON: wtf? wont knitting some take a long time?

Mom: WHAT DO YOU THINK I WANT YOU TO DO? GET ME SOME TOILET PAPER!

ADAMON: how

Mom: I recommend asking an employee for some toilet paper.

ADAMON: NOOOOOOO!

Mom: Come again?

ADAMON: how embarrassing! theyll find out your in the bathroom (Her punctuation and grammar are killing me at this point.)

Mom: They’ll figure out I’m trapped in the bathroom when they find my skeletal remains in a few weeks. I need toilet paper!

ADAMON: sheesh hang on

(Meanwhile, I began tweeting from the bathroom, just to have something to do. The entire dramatic saga of not having toilet paper was going to be documented under the hashtag #Trapped, but it turns out that’s the hashtag that guy used when he fell while rock climbing and got his arm caught under a boulder. I didn’t want anyone to read my tweets about being stuck in a public bathroom, then get grossed out by reading about him cutting his arm off with a pocket knife. Thinking of y’all, here.)

Mom: Any luck?

ADAMON: i told someone and they said there wasnt any more. im at target buying some.

Mom: Perfect! Good plan! Buy milk, too. But put it in the car before you come back with the paper. That would be gross to bring it in here.

Mom: If you have your fake ID, get me another bottle of white wine. Never mind, you’re only twelve and your fake ID is from the Justin Bieber fan club.

ADAMON: eeewwwwww hes so gross

ADAMON: omg they have that new metallic nail polish!!! can i get it plz???

Mom: I’m going to really need you to focus here.

I continued tweeting until the help arrived, much to the poor traumatized child’s chagrin. My later tweets that day can be found under the hashtag #YouWontLiveToSee13.

THERE’S An Episode of Hoarders I Would Pay To Watch

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

We’ve already established that I’m a bad person and no one should ever be forced to talk to me because I’m going to ramble on about how you should eat your own limbs in a desperate survival situation (see previous blog post). I can’t help it and I don’t mean to be horrible, but literally EVERYTHING is funny to me.

EXAMPLE: I wasn’t in a giant hurry to start writing yesterday, so I stalled by sitting down with my twelve-year-old to watch a movie after I got home from work. We were enjoying a rather funny film about some girls who intentionally stop a wedding by worming their way in as bridesmaids and sabotage everything like a bridal inside job. At one point during the movie, the defeated would-be saboteurs commiserate their failure thus far by opening a bottle of wine and plotting their next move. Only I didn’t see the rest of that part.

Instead, I jumped up, suddenly excited like a poodle on crack, began rooting through the really high cabinets, and screamed, “Oh my gosh! I have that exact cork screw and I never knew how it worked! Rewind that part so I can watch her open that bottle again!” My daughter sat traumatized as I pressed my nose against the screen, trying to learn from a kids’ movie how to open wine with the expensive new-age cork screw I’d received years ago.

So I’m a bad person AND an iffy mom.

We did eventually watch the rest of the movie, and we were too lazy to do the TiVo magic thing through the commercials because it would have involved reaching for the remote and I had already spent all of my energy practicing opening all the bottles of wine in the house (you see where this is going). But then the best commercial EVER came on and I was suddenly back to crack-poodle status.

It was a commercial for an upcoming episode of Hoarders where the crazy lady’s son just goes nuts and starts breaking stuff. I absolutely cannot wait for that episode.

I know, don’t even think about leaving ugly comments because I already know. I’m a horrible person. Hoarding is apparently a very serious and upsetting mental illness (even though Americans seem to be some of the only people on Earth who can catch it or afford it) and there’s nothing funny about smashing all of their carefully hoarded stuff. But am I seriously the only person who thinks every episode could be about forty-five minutes shorter if they would just take the camera crew through the house, show us how bad it is in there, then torch the whole structure with the crap inside? This lady’s son was just doing what we’re all thinking.

They had gotten to that part in EVERY EPISODE where they start to clear it out piece by piece, doily by doily, creepy yard sale doll by creepy yard sale doll, when eventually it gets to be too overwhelming for the hoarder and she starts to freak out over the loss of each used cough drop wrapper. She started to reclaim her stuff and cry. Well, this lady’s son was having none of it. He started smashing her crap every time she reached to put something back in the house. At one point he even threw something down, yelled at her, and said, “Well NOW you can’t have it!”

I know, I’m horrible, he was abusive, I get it. So just don’t look at me while I laugh. I’m truly ashamed. No, really, I am, I mean it! And I do understand her pain, since I am at this very moment hoarding eight open bottles of wine.

Eat The Toes First

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

I was trapped in line in the grocery store the other day, mostly because I’d already opened the bag of gummy bears and eaten a few and now had to pay for the gooey things. The lady in front of me kept trying to engage me in conversation about the headlines on the tabloids and magazines, hence the gummy bears: every time she tried to start talking to me, I would pop more bears in my mouth and make motions like I couldn’t talk because I was chewing. It was either eat the candy or the whole cloves of raw garlic in my cart, so I went with the bears.

Anyway, this quite elderly and quite conservative woman kept insisting that everything would be fine if we would just go back to the days when you had to pass an exam to get to vote. You know, back when we had exams to keep a “certain element” from voting, she said. I tried to answer with, “Oh, you mean back when your redneck sheriff and his posse of Klansmen decided black people and women didn’t need to vote,” but the gummy bears kept me from saying something ugly.

She kept on talking, even after I got out my phone and started shopping for ringtones to drown out her manifesto. Finally, she announced, “The real problem in this country is there’s no common sense anymore.”

She got me. I swallowed my bears and told her, “That’s because there’s no such thing as common sense. Common sense is really the stuff that you used to learn by growing up in an environment where people made good decisions on a daily basis. Now, we’ve shoved the job of parenting off on the schools and no one is teaching people common sense.”

“Well,” she answered smugly, “you don’t TEACH common sense. You just HAVE it.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong,” I said, offering her the gummy bears so she could shut up for a minute. “You’re not born knowing things, common sense comes from experience. If the people in your life are so poverty stricken that they don’t have the opportunity to make life decisions, of course you’re going to grow up not learning common sense.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but I applied a generous helping of gummy bears.

“Have you ever been trapped in the woods without food? No,” I said, looking her up and down, “I don’t think you have. Here’s some information that might seem like common sense, but if you’ve never had the experience, then you really wouldn’t know it. If you’re ever trapped in the wilderness with nothing to eat, you should start by eating your feet first. Then work your way up your legs as the need for food continues. It will keep you from starving to death, and when you’re finally rescued, medical science has come a lot farther with prosthetic legs than with prosthetic arms. Your quality of life with artificial legs will be somewhat higher than with artificial arms. And besides, you’re going to do a better job of surviving out there with your arms still in tact, because making a fire to keep warm is gonna be a BITCH if you’ve eaten your hands. See? Common sense. You just didn’t know about it, because you didn’t have the life experience.”

It’s really weird, she didn’t want to talk to me after that, and it wasn’t because she was eating my gummy bears.

Happier Than Pigs in Mud

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

Coming from a long line of people who lived in the South, and then marrying a man who comes from a long line of people in the South, you would think I’d be prepared for every Southern slang and phrase to pop up at inopportune times. But no, this weekend took a whole new spin in the stuff-you-don’t-wanna-hear category: happy as a pig in mud.

Our oldest offspring had a cross country meet more than three hours away. Of course, she also had to be there at eight am. We overslept because we’re cool like that, jumped in the car with the youngest still wearing just the T-shirt she slept in, and headed off to the competition.

Somewhere around the town of Junebug (yes, the town’s official name is Junebug and they have a mayor AND a Miss Junebug pageant), it started to pour down rain. The coach texted everyone on the team from the venue and told us the race had been delayed.

Once we arrived and the race was underway, our daughter’s category was the seventh event. That means that some four hundred runners in each category in each of the six prior categories…carry the one…subtract three because it’s Tuesday…that means that a bazillion people had already run on the wet, muddy course, tearing up any hope of actual grass on the course and along the spectator side. By the time we arrived and got out of the car, we slopped ankle-deep in mud.

Back up: yes, we took my new car. The new car that has all kinds of rules for the passengers, rules which include no sneezing or burping in the car. There’s no eating or drinking and there is definitely NO MUD ALLOWED.

So it was really a shock to my family when we slogged our way back to the parking lot, filthy from head to toe and picking the mud out of our teeth, when I announced, “I saw a Starbucks on the Interstate, we can walk there and clean up before getting in the car.” I knew before I spoke that no one was going to take me up on that offer, least of all the child who had just set a new personal best in her three-mile race, but I at least thought they could pretend to entertain the idea before shooting it down. They were a little surprised, though, when I held up the key fob and ceremonially locked the doors until they all stripped their muddy clothes off and put them in the garbage bad I held out.

Luckily, the nearby town of Junebug has several major food franchises. And just as luckily, no one in the town of Junebug minds if tourists come into the restaurant wearing only car blankets from the waist down.  They’re just happy as pigs in mud that we spent our tourist dollars there.

You’re not getting in my car. Ride home with the pigs.

It Can’t Be Done Without Glitter

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

Writing a book is a real bitch. Unless you’re really good at it, then I guess you might argue with me. Oh, and unless you’re JK Rowling and it doesn’t matter what weird crap you stick between two book covers, people are gonna buy a million copies before the thing even hits the shelves. I guess writing a book would be a lot of fun in those cases.

But I am neither JK Rowling nor am I good at it. Writing a book for me is like taking a cross-country car trip with eight toddlers and no DVD player or Vicodin. It’s tedious, it’s loud, it’s sweaty, and there’s usually a lot of crying.

But since November is just days away, I’m gearing up and steeling myself for NaNoWriMo, or as my husband calls it, “That thing again where you quit cooking?” I’m training like I’m running the Badwater, practicing setting aside time for writing, organizing my thoughts on paper this time (instead of on graham crackers like I did last year…the plant to eat the graham crackers every time I completed a notecracker as a form of motivation didn’t turn out too well because I got hungry and ate all my notes by Day Two), even naming and getting to know my characters. I’m so psyched!

Of course, one of my NaNo traditions is the giant plot poster. It has all kinds of helpful information and charts and graphs and government secrets, but the best part is it’s covered in glitter. I never allow glitter in my house because it’s evil, but once a year the kids get to break out the glue and take my notes into the yard where they sprinkle away like it’s actual magic fairy dust. They like it because they never get to use glitter, and I like it because it gives me something to look at and remember them by when I’m ignoring my entire family for the month.

Happy writing!

My Children Are Here to Serve Me

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,

Oh stop it, you know I don’t make them stick their heads in the oven to clean, or anything like that. Not after that first citation we got from the judge, I mean. No, we have a far better use for our children.

Once we learned that our offspring want to grow up to be a) a nail salon owner and b) a fashion designer for dog clothing, respectively, we realized that they were never going to support us. We’re going to be shoved in the crappiest nursing home they can find. So why not have a little fun along the way?

That’s how the kids became the very butt of every joke told in our household. And I don’t just mean the knock-knock kind, although those are really funny.

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“One of our kids.”

“One of our kids, who?”

“Are you kidding me? Knocking on the door would take ambition and a little bit of training! Our kids can’t knock on the door!”

“HaHaHaHaHaHaHa!”

(voice from the other room): “Would you two please stop laughing at us?”

Mostly, whenever we laugh at our kids, they totally know we’re doing it out of love and not because we’re secretly afraid that they’re never going to leave home ever. Mostly.

But sometimes, the kids really, really deserve to be laughed at, and I really wish I didn’t mean the pointing-and-laughing-and-holding-your-crotch-so-you-don’t-pee kind of laughing. It’s usually when they walk in the room with something stuck in their hair because they were trying to reach something out from under their beds without actually getting off the bed.

UPDATE: the kids have learned about revenge and I found a plot notebook where my oldest has been plotting ways to either get even, or get money for the insults she’s endured. I’m going to have to be more stealth. Or hire a ninja for a babysitter.

I would have made my kids wear this just because I would giggle every time I had to change their little diapers.

Don’t Judge…He Really Deserves It

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

My husband really is a great guy, even if I sometimes find myself having to repeat those words as a mantra of sorts.I could certainly do worse than to have a husband who goes to work, pays the bills, loves the kids, and at least pretends that he should keep himself in good physical shape.

Sadly, my husband doesn’t read my blog, so he’ll never know those things. While I can freely write them for the entire internet to see, if I were to walk up and tell him how pretty close to great his is, it would just result in him getting to be too big for his britches. Gotta keep ’em humble. And a little bit afraid, but that’s another post.

His major character flaw right now, though, is that he absolutely cannot stand our little dog. His hatred of this poor little animal knows no bounds. I, too, am not this animal’s biggest fan, but (mostly as a reaction to his venom) I am on the brink of painting her nails and carrying the little thing around in a Kenneth Cole handbag.

The dog’s greatest flaw is her constant need to use our entire house as her personal toilet, something that my germaphobe husband cannot live through. (I forgot to mention that he’s a germaphobe…it’s Hill. Air.Eee.Us). Whenever the dog has a tinkle moment (if you carry the dog in a purse, you have to refer to it as tinkling), my husband gets on the floor with eight chemicals and a portable carpet shampooer and begins scrubbing at the spot like Lady MacBeth on crack.

So here’s the fun part: I’ve been going through the house for the past month spilling shot glass-sized puddles of water on the floors. I’ll give you a dollar if you don’t tell him.

It’s absolutely hysterical to see him calmly walk into a room, stop, turn, peer closely at the tell-tale spot on floor, dab it with his toe to see if it’s actually wet, then go positively ape-shit and start gathering his supplies. He drops to the floor cussing under his breath and scrubs violently for about ten minutes.

The best part is, I’ve also been keeping a map of where I’ve done this and I’m rotating out the spots so eventually he will have deep-cleaned the entire floor. The living room carpet should be finished by sometime next week and you can now see your reflection in the kitchen grout.

My dog is neither this smart nor this athletic.

The Memes Are Chasing Me!

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

First, I cannot write a blog post about internet memes without a shout-out to my awesome friend and fellow writer, Rachel in the OC. She has been diligently educating the world on the proper pronunciation of the word “meme,” even going to great lengths and vodka-infused research on how it should be pronounced due to its Greek roots. I think the vodka might have extended the diligence and the research, but don’t tell her I said that.

So there we were, minding our own business at a cross country meet. Hundreds of high school girls with their hair in the requisite bouncy ponytails were lined up to run three miles on this really grueling, muddy, yucky course, our daughter included. Wait, I have to back up.

I have to tell you about last week’s cross country meet. Why yes, as a matter of fact, society screws over every single Saturday of your life when your child is good at sports. I digress. LAST WEEK, unbeknownst to us, our daughter stepped in a hole and twisted her ankle during the warm-up. Every time we saw her during the three-mile race, she was crying and on the brink of outright sobbing. Even for someone who was injured, it was a little bit embarrassing, mostly because we could feel the ugly stares from other parents and hear their whispers: “Those monsters shouldn’t make her do this, what kind of parents make a child cry???” Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, some of those ugly comments came from my own husband.

*IN MY DEFENSE: There were lots of girls crying during this race. Apparently, it’s just a thing they do. And none of them had seen that great baseball movie where the guy yells in her face, “There’s no crying in baseball!”

Back to yesterday’s race. I had prepared my daughter all week for the fact that it’s really not okay to cry while running, even if you’re injured. We worked out a strategy to hold back the tears: total bribery. If she made it through the race in good spirits and got close to her goal time, I would buy her these boots she’s wanted for weeks. Go ahead, judge me, then ask me if I care.

So the first time she passed us yesterday, she wasn’t exactly crying but she wasn’t looking like she was having fun. And despite the other people around us quietly applauding like this was a golf tournament, I began screaming, “BOOTS! BOOTS! BOOTS!” I’m sure the other parents thought I had entered Dora’s pet monkey in this race.

Our running child perked up a little bit when she saw us because how do you not crack a smile when a middle aged woman is screaming, “BOOOOOOOTS!” for no reason? Then I began screaming, “SMILE! You’ve got to SMILE! THIS IS FUN! WOOOOOOOOOO!” That brought on a full-fledged tooth smile for only one second before she recovered and said: (drum roll)

“I can’t smile, I’m Kristen Stewart!”

It was the proudest moment of my life. My twelve-year-old isn’t allowed to play on the internet and she’s never seen any movie starring Kristen Stewart (except for that kids’ movie she made about a board game that sent the whole family into outer space). But yet, somehow, she just knew.

Sadly, my daughter didn’t make her goal time but she did such an awesome job that I told her she could have the boots anyway. Then even more sadly, we went straight to the mall to get the boots she has dreamed about for two weeks, but they look like hooker boots and I had to tell her no. She’s getting a pair of jeans instead. Unless they look like hooker jeans.

The boots looked a lot like this. You’d better be able to run really fast if you think you can pull those off in public.

Okay, THIS One Is The Shameless Commercial

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

Yup, my new book is out. It’s amazing how you go through the lengthy process of writing a book, and the whole time you’re writing you can’t be bothered to clean house or cook. “Honey, I’m writing my next book!”

Then you have to go through this whole process of editing your book, so it becomes, “Honey, I’m EDITING! I can’t make dinner, just put in a pizza.”

Then you go through the process of finding a publisher (no cooking, no cleaning, just LOOKING), then if you’re lucky enough to find a publisher after a year of not cooking or cleaning, you have to remain in daily contact with the publisher because a lot of stuff goes into the months-long process of publishing a book. “But honey, that’s my publisher on the phone…just peel back the foil before you stick that in the oven!”

Of course, now I have to market my book, which means interviews and blog tours and stuff. There’s absolutely no way I can cook or clean AND market my book.

This is where you would think my husband would just give up and start cooking all of our meals. But no, he’s nothing if not persistent and by golly does the man have hope. If living with me through the writing, editing, publishing, and marketing of four books wouldn’t teach him to just go ahead and buy himself an apron, then he’s never going to learn.

And on that note, my fourth book was published yesterday. I’m completely wiped out. The most productive thing I did today was to refill the salt shaker, and I only did that because I wanted some popcorn and it just seemed like the housewifey thing to do.

I don’t see how I can ever cook or clean AGAIN, so I do have to figure out what excuse I’m going to have now. NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, so there are story lines to plot and characters to sketch. I dug out an old manuscript that was so bad, I probably should have burned it but it might have contaminated the fireplace if I had…that thing could probably use a few rounds of editing. Then of course, there’s marketing this new book: buy my book (I make marketing look so easy).

In total seriousness, my fourth book, Knowing Autism, is available from Amazon. It’s short, cheap, and it’s way friendlier than my first autism book. It’s actually a kind of helpful hints book for all the other people out there who interact with autistic people. Sort of like the book I wish I could make people read before they were certified to hang out with my kid. I don’t think I have that authority, but I’m working on it.