Author: ME

Lorca’s Week in Review (Kind of like Tosh.0, but nowhere near as funny)

ME Overly simple thoughts


A whole lot of crazy has happened this week, including receiving a 20% off any service from Pauline’s Escort Service (except group packages) coupon in the mail. Our dog managed to break her tail, I finished my last day of school for the summer in the jail even though we decided not to have a graduation ceremony this year after last year’s graduating class threw their hats over the surveillance cameras and started a riot, and I ran out of mint for making mint juleps and had to resort to dropping peppermint Tums into a chilled glass of whiskey. I also commemorated the twelfth anniversary of the day my lady garden got ripped apart by a mini-human. What’s been happening with you?

On my friends’ blogs, I came across:

“I Shaved My Back for Nothing!”

“Fifty Shades of Gay Karaoke What?”

“Your Drunken Parents”

On my Autism blog, I explain all about how summer can just suck if you’re not entirely normal and how it’s probably not right to compare autism to the hottest book of schmexy erotica available in your local library.

Just to prove I really do want to be an intellectual when I grow up, I reviewed the memoir of Jacqueline Kennedy’s Secret Service agent. It was good. It had lots of pictures, but that’s not why it was good.

On my Pinterest boards, I pinned a whole lot of pictures of funny things.

I also found a whole new blog by a lady who is determined to take down Pinterest, one irritatingly cute perfect craft idea at a time. She basically fucks up all the cute “super-easy” things that people pin, then she blogs about it. It’s not fair…I was fucking up simple stuff way before Pinterest came along.

Have a great week!!!

 

 

Vagina Birthdays

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,
Sure, you look all peaceful now. Just wait til the day you can’t bend over to pick something up without wetting yourself.

Everybody thinks birthdays are so sweet and awesome. Well, okay, I admit that maybe people living in the gutter or who are basically being karma’s whipping boy at this stage in their lives may not think birthdays are all that awesomesauce, but generally speaking the people I come in contact with tend to see the glass-half-full when it comes to birthdays.

What no one realizes is that for every birthday in the universe, there is some woman who is commemorating the event by remembering how amazing her lady garden used to be. Past tense. Was.

I actually don’t remember thinking about my hooha all that much (well, except for the obvious times when I was supposed to be concentrating on my hooha) before that fateful day twelve years ago when I suddenly found myself feet in the air, having everyone from the ultrasound tech down to the custodian coming in my ugly industrial room to “check me” during the labor and delivery of my firstborn. After the fact, though, all women begin thinking about their cooterlands a lot, mostly starting with those first few days when we think, “So, when does it stop resembling ground beef?”

I am pleased to announce that vajajays are universally resilient little things and that all is mostly well, except that I am too young to have to cross my legs when I sneeze.

(author’s note: the comments section on this post will be closed to anything resembling a description of how to do Kegel exercises.)

(more author’s note: my spellchecker is taking issue with the word “Kegel,” which means the spell checker was designed by a sexist woman-hating man who doesn’t want women doing crotch crunches to make their girl parts pretty again.)

(still more author’s note: just to prove my sexism theory, I typed “prostate” and “testicle exercises” and the spell check had no problem with those terms…everything’s a plot, I swear.)

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. Happy Birthday, sweetie!

(another author’s note: Dear First Born, when you forget to put away the dishes like I told you to six times, my revenge is to write a blog post for the entire internet about you emerging from the womb and shredding my privates on your way out that door. Do the dishes next time. Love ya!)

You Can Quote Me On That

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

The best part about being me is I get to string together all kinds of sentences that no one else ever thinks they’re going to have to say. I don’t mean those, “I never thought I’d have to tell you this,” kinds of sentences, I mean whole words that don’t have any business together. These are really and truly some very for-real things I’ve had to say:

“Wait, I don’t think that kangaroo is cooked all the way through.”

“Oh no you don’t, ma’am, you can just take that armadillo right back outside.”

“If you didn’t want me to lick that rock, why did you ask me where I thought it came from?”

“Yes, honey, I really do think ‘assnugget’ was the right thing to say to Father Michaels in this situation.”

“We’re going to need another brick of cocaine if we want this project finished on time.”

All of the above statements are things I’ve really had to say to people, and if you take them out of context they just sound really, really bad. If you know the context in which I’ve said them, they sound slightly less bad. But only slightly. Of course, they would sound even better if I had a really great cartoon-character voice, like Woody Woodpecker.

Wait, did I just say “pecker” in this blog post?

I Had Dinner with the Poet Laureate of the United States

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

I know what you’re thinking: “How in the hell did someone as carnie-folk-bizarre as Lorca get herself invited to eat dinner with someone as classy as the Poet Laureate? There’s no way.” Well, you can just stuff it with your snooty self. I did, too, have dinner with the Poet Laureate and it was even at her private house and everything. So there. The really weird thing is I kind of only just now remembered that I had dinner with the Poet Laureate and I only remembered that I’d been to her house after I just typed all that.

See, when I knew her, she wasn’t the Poet Laureate (let’s see how many times I can type Poet Laureate in this blog post), she was just my Poetry professor in college. Anyone who has any delusions about my writing talent and my love of poetry can read my blog post about being forced to enter an erotic haiku writing contest. Needless to say, I did NOT do well in Poetry (and I did not win that contest).

But at the end of the Poetry class, we all got to have dinner at the professor’s house. I only got to tag along because I was technically still enrolled in the class and because I waitressed at a restaurant that made kick-ass hot wings and I could get them at a discount. Yup, I brought hot wings to the Poet Laureate’s house for dinner. She made these funky Middle Eastern dishes and I contributed hot wings to the soiree. Betcha can’t get guess whose dish got gobbled up first.

The great part about this professor being named as the new Poet Laureate of the whole country is that I know some really awesome dirt on her that I could potentially sell to all the tabloids who want to bring down the Poet Laureate in shame. Okay, I’m willing to concede that there probably aren’t that many tabloid staffers who know that we even have a Poet Laureate, let alone who she is and what she did. And I also concede that the only really juicy story I have about her is that she wore this brand new cerulean blue shirt on the first day of class and that it reacted somehow with her deodorant so it turned the armpits of her shirt hot pink. I wish I had thought to go digging through her drawers while I was at her house for dinner…

Isn’t it great how I didn’t even TRY to make it look like we’re really standing together in this photo? But I promise, we’re totally standing together…

My Fat Wakes Me Up at Night

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

There was a time only two years ago when I actually had to order Levi’s jeans online because our local stores didn’t carry anything smaller than a size four. Don’t stab me. I was finally directed to the juniors/girls section because the saleslady realized I was short enough to pull off wearing little girl pants.

Before you gnash your teeth and shake your fists to the sky over how unfair it is that some people are genetically tiny, let me tell you that I am teeth-gnashing right alongside you. I am not genetically skinny, but at the time I was a marathon runner and triathlete. My training schedule would have made the Olympic committee proud (I am also not genetically fast, so there really was no contact from said Olympic committee).

Then something terrible happened: I actually wrote a book that people wanted to read, and that made me become a writer. Gone were the frivolous hours in the evenings when I could put my children to bed then go for a thirteen mile run. Those hours were now taken up with me sitting on my enlargening ass in front of a computer screen.

And while I am now solidly tricking myself into believing these size eight pants aren’t too tight to wear to work, I am tired of waking up during the night because fat that didn’t used to be there only a matter of months ago is now rubbing against different fat that didn’t used to be there, either. It’s very disconcerting.

I know a lot of people who have a few pounds they could stand to lose, and those people tend to grab whole handfuls of their flesh and announce, “I need to lose weight.” I, on the other hand, carefully arrange my new fat rolls into odd shapes and tuck it into different parts of my clothing and announce, “Thank god I don’t have to go run thirteen miles tonight.” I said I DID run, not that I WANTED to run.

So for now, I’m inventing a new line of clothing that keeps all parts of your body from touching other parts of your body. Titanium fiber is involved. It looks a lot like those suits from the Tron movies, only it doesn’t light up because blue glowing pinstripes are incredibly unflattering and they’ll be mistaken for varicose veins. Of course, if I begin a whole new career path of inventing clothing that keeps my fat from waking me up, I’ll have to give up the extra time in my day that I used to use for personal hygiene. There’s no line of clothing for that.

My clothes will make people look like that. Really.

I’m Still a Writer but I Still Don’t Have Cirrhosis

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

Another fake conversation in my head with nobody:

“So, what are you doing today?”

“Me? Nothing much. Except my third book came out today. Yeah, it’s no big deal, you know how long these things take. Oh? You didn’t know I’d written two other books? Huh.”

Yes, I managed to keep up the pretense that I’m a writer by releasing a third book. This one is my first published work of fiction. I am here to officially tell you that nothing will make a human being take up stupidly heavy drinking like giving birth to a whole other human being on the pages of a book, then killing that person after several chapters of suspenseful physical and emotional torture. Unless you’re a sick individual, in which case you can be that horrible to a made-up person while stone cold sober.

I write young adult fiction so I do have to tone it down a lot, but as one publisher told me, “There’s a really high body count in your work.” She was referring to a book to be released at a later date in which the main characters reach their intended destination only to discover that the entire town has been executed and is on display in the trees outside the city walls as a warning to others. There was a lot of drinking while writing that scene.

My non-fiction book about autism also took a lot of drinking to write, but I make no pretense about that because it’s an instructional memoir and it took an equal amount of drinking to live through it the first time, let alone when I decided to tell these things to the entire world in a book. It’s like I’ve done all the necessary pre-drinking for you. You’re welcome.

At the rate I publish books times the rate squared at which I drink while writing, I figure I should be well on my way to being on the list for a donor liver sometime next September. I was going to switch to writing greeting card copy as a way to salvage my already raggedly precarious inner filtration system, but I learned that greeting card writers are all secretly addicted to cocaine. (note: I made that up, greeting card writers are no more likely to be cocaine addicts than any other kind of writers.)

In the meantime, a toast to your good health and my publishing-slash-liver-donation success.

I don’t know if people should buy this or not. It will just give me more money to spend on booze. You’re such an enabler.

Why Waste a Good Drinking Binge?

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

See? It has magical restorative powers. It says so.

I went out of town for work and came back with a horrible chest cold. Or maybe the plague. I don’t know, this was New York. Even their advertising campaigns announce that “anything is possible in New York,” so maybe it’s possible to catch a disease that wiped out millions some five hundred years ago.

Head colds are really annoying because they give you all the same phlegmy symptoms as other colds, but there are so many more ways to treat them including just knocking yourself unconscious until it’s all over. Chest colds are tricky: you still have to be breathing to make it through and the last thing you want to do when you have a chest cold is breath.

I’ve been falling back on a remedy as old as the hills (insert random Southern colloquialism here): whiskey. No, not straight from the bottle, this isn’t 1928.

My dear friend Trace (shoutout!) told me about a good remedy for when you still have to be able to go to work and drive your car and stuff like that, so I’ve been falling back on that during the hours of the day when I still need to know how to tie my shoes or reach them without falling over. But once I get home from work and change into a fluffy bathrobe despite the Sahara temperatures outside, I grab up the whiskey bottle like a man drinking formaldehyde during Prohibition.

The copious amounts of whiskey will either kill any germ in my system or just make me not care when the germs finally organize a union and take over the place. I’m good either way. I just hate that I’m getting this much alcohol into my body and there is not a beach umbrella or cabana boy in sight. If I’m going to drink this much, I really should be having a much better time and I probably should come out of it more tanned than I am, instead of this kind of off-green color.

Just wake me when it’s over…

The Flowers Made Me Suspicious

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,

My husband got up early (okay…earlier than usual) this morning, drove to the store, came back with a million ingredients, and cooked us all a big Southern breakfast. Biscuits, grits, eggs, sausage, even orange juice. Nice.

He cleaned out my car. He folded laundry. He played with the kids outside so I could write two articles I had to get finished. He wiped down the counter tops.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. He’s done something wrong. Hell, that’s what I was thinking too. And since I did get a new car two weeks ago I immediately ran outside to see if he had smashed it by mistake. Nope.

ME: (making a squinty face) Why are you being so nice to me?

HIM: What?

ME: Should I just repeat myself, or are you stalling for time?

HIM: I was stalling. But now I don’t know what you mean. I’m not being nice. I’m just being normal.

ME: No, your version of normal is to fart really loudly and then yell at the dog. Why are you being really nice?

HIM: Well…

ME: (more squinty looks…I’m gonna wrinkle if he doesn’t quit stalling.)

HIM: You’re leaving for three days and I just thought I’d be extra sweet.

(Author’s Note: This is where I almost felt bad. Yeah, I made that noise that you just made in your head except I did it almost out loud, the noise where you go, “Awwwwwww.” Almost. Because he made the mistake of continuing to talk.)

HIM: And since you’re flying on a plane, I thought I should be really nice in case your plane crashes and this is your last day here.

ME: (blink…pause for effect) That is so seriously screwed up.

HIM: No, it’s not.

ME: It is too. You’re being nice so I can remember you as being really nice IN CASE I DIE???

HIM: Well, you won’t remember. You’ll be dead. I’ll remember, so I would want to remember that I was really nice to you the last time I saw you, and not all schmucky.

ME: (blink.)

HIM: What? Who wants to live the rest of their lives knowing the last time they saw their wives, they forgot to put the toilet seat down and she fell in? You could try giving me a little credit here.

ME: Seriously? You just made my death turn into All-About-Youville!

HIM: Well, you won’t remember that either.

(Author’s Note: Once again, I wish this post had been some bizarre made-up conversation that I dreamed in my head after mixing lattes with Red Bull, but no. It happened. And I am flying on a plane to go to BookExpo, so you should probably be really nice to me.)

“I’d Like To Thank The Little People…”

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Once again, I’ve been nominated for an award. And let me tell you, it’s an off week when I don’t get told on the entire internet how great I am. Usually it’s for something like being the only person willing to flash her ass on a video chat platform to raise money for a sick kid, but that’s what makes me a force to be reckoned with.

Seriously, I got nominated for an award and then I forgot. Not forgot I got nominated, because I was all jazz hands about someone liking my blog, but forgot how to find out who nominated me and what I’m supposed to do about it. Nothing says, “I appreciate your respect and your kind words,” like having to dig through your Twitter contacts because you vaguely remember that some guy whose gravatar was of a man in a striped shirt looking to my left wrote a whole blog post about five great writers he likes. Sorry, Awesome Guy Who Nominated Me! I really do appreciate you!

Seriously again, I was nominated for the Liebster Blog Award by Adam Martin and there’s a really great story about how he was one of the three people who bought my book that month AND had the nerve to tell Twitter that he was actually reading it. I was so grateful for his 99-cents that I wrote back and told him I would send an autographed copy of the print edition. (I left out the part about how I have boxes of these things lying around the house…I plan to give them out to the children at Halloween this year, just to save on the candy budget.)

Now I have to nominate five other blogs, so here goes:

Vinnie The Vampire. Because it’s great and because I can’t do that. It’s so cool how there are pictures and it’s on a website, but I don’t know how he gets comics on his website. And it’s completely oozing with teen angst, if the teenager in question was a vampire and had to put up with all the people in a regular vampire’s life, but if they were vampires, too. “Back in my day, we didn’t have juice boxes of blood, we had to bring down our own victims! Vampires these days have it too easy, I tell ya!” or something like that. I don’t think I have the accent right because they’re probably from Transylvania or Minnesota and plus they have fangs, so they probably lisp.

Tears of Crimson. The whole blog kind of creeps me out, but in a jealous rage kind of way. She has this iPod on the side of the screen that plays music that sets the tone for her books, and all that stuff. I can’t even get my blog to put the pictures in the right spot. Anyway, Michelle Hughes writes this schmexy vampire stuff, but that’s not the cool part. The cool thing is I found her on Twitter and she lives in a tiny itty bitty town that makes my tiny town look like New York and her town used to have its own dog. The whole town. They shared one dog. And they named him Fred. More jealous rage over their dog.

Fear Not The Darkness. Again, creeptastic stuff on her site, but Sheilagh Lee is the absolute best person to know in the whole world of being a writer and trying to use social media without looking like an asshat. She is so supportive of everybody she’s ever heard of and just basically is made of win. Gladiator-style win. The kind of gladiators who actually won their fights in the arena and looked all hot like that guy from The Immortals, not the actual historical gladiators who got crushed to death when their chariots flipped over. Those guys were gross looking.

Write Now. Let me explain to you how much I hate poetry. If the only thing I could ever read for as long as I live was poetry, I would stage my own book burning and roast marshmallows over the crackling flames of dying books. But I have a really good excuse for it (author’s note: it’s not a really good excuse, but I did have a bad experience with poetry once. No, it did not involve a man from Nantucket.). NOW, if I DID like poetry, it would be Aileen McGhee’s poetry. Her poetry makes her look so serene and happy, not like she’s about to drive her car through a crowded McDonald’s like I always look.

What’s A Little Fan Fiction Between Friends? Okay, don’t get mad at me. I know,some people consider fan fiction to be more than a little bit like stealing and other people go so far as to consider it a lot like tossing live woodland creatures into a roaring fire to listen to their screams of agony. Personally, I feel a little sad for people who get so caught up in the lives of characters from a book or movie that they begin to envision all kinds of other stories about those fake people, because there’s a thin line between imagining a fun story line and setting a place for Draco Malfoy at your dinner table every night. HOWEVER, you could actually argue that fan fiction means a reader LOVED your book so much that they couldn’t just let it go when it was all over, so it’s also supremely flattering (or it’s a real bitch slap, because it could also mean you didn’t do it right and they had to come in and fix it. Forget I said that.) Anyway, this site has some awesome fun fan fiction from all kinds of books, movies, and TV shows. The best part of it is you have to click to agree that you’re over 14 years old, so you just know there’s some good sexy stories.

So there they are. The winners. Or non-winners, if you take into consideration the fact that the only reason they won anything is because I thought they were awesome. Trust me, you never want me to be the one vouching for you or being your only character witness or anything. But congratulations from me to you!

It Doesn’t Cost Much to Adore Me

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

I’ve always envisioned coup leader as my ultimate career goal. All the aptitude tests said I’d be good at it. They also coincidentally said I’d be good at being an engineer, but since I’m horrifically stupid at math I think they meant the person who drives the train.

But if I got to take over a country, I’d be so, so good at it. I wouldn’t start out with killing people or making them change their religions and there would be no book burnings except of children’s books that don’t rhyme. I love me a good rhyming picture book.

Obviously, this has not come to pass. But if I ever do get the chance to take over something, even if it’s just a corporation or something in a major stakeholder buyout thing, I’m prepared with my legions of worshipful followers. In the form of one undersized and very stupid dog.

What my dog lacks in physical stature and mental capacity, though—and I mean she doesn’t have the mental capacity to walk into a darkened room without falling down, and falling down for her only means moving about two inches—she more than makes up for in worshipfulness. This dog literally sits outside the bathroom door and waits for me to get finished showering so she can drink the water that’s left in the bottom of the tub. THAT is adoration, people.

I’ve given this a lot of thought and I realize there were a number of famous czars and dictators and emperors who had this kind of effect on people, but those leaders also had to have royal tasters to keep them from being poisoned. How awesome could they have been? Doesn’t every willing-to-die-for-you-subject get negated by every assassination attempt?

I mean, sure, so there’s a servant somewhere who drinks your bath water to prove his loyalty. So what? Good grief, he’s got to be crazy! Your claim to fame is that you surrounded yourself with people who are just psychotic enough to lick your feet, and you BRAGGED about it? Desperate for friends much, are we?

Nope, I’ll take a standoffish cat any day, and I hate cats. But at least you know where you stand with them. They’re not going to stretch their lean bodies out over a mud puddle for you, then run inside and rip holes in the crotch of all your underwear with their claws. They’re going to let you know that you are only around to work the can opener for them. Hmmm. Maybe you could soften them up by drinking their bath water.

I wear a size 11. You could die from alcohol poisoning if you tried drinking champagne out of my shoe.