Author: ME

One Man’s Secret Admirer is Another Man’s Stalker

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,
Even this guy can't survive a Valentine's Day on the outside.

I survived another Valentine’s Day without a) over spending or b) taking out a restraining order. It’s not that I’m so unbelievably attractive that I have to fight stalkers off with a legal document and a taser, but the whole concept of secretly mailing someone a package and signing the card as “Your Secret Admirer” makes my blood run cold.

The unfair thing is it’s considered lovely and romantic to sign a card, “Your Secret Admirer.” So why is it creepy and wrong to sign it, “I want to drink your bath water,” and leave a smudgy kiss on the card? I think that might be an unfair double standard that discriminates against people who are really passionate about someone. Or crazy.

So yesterday, you know, Valentine’s Day, when I arrived at work and picked up my desk phone to hear horrifyingly ominous words, my heart stopped briefly. And at my age there’s always a possibility it won’t restart. Which is why I avoid fast elevators. Anyway, the voice on the other end of the phone was really breathy and eager sounding and it said the most chilling thing I can hear: “Hey Miss Lorca.”

Now, I realize that may not mean anything to you, my dear reader. But in the world of working in the prison, it means an inmate has just called me on the phone. They are required to put the salutation in front of our first names, because we protect our last names from these lovely people like our initials actually spell out the secret rocket formula. Since the inmates can’t call my desk from any of the phones inside the facility (this is like that horror movie…”We’ve traced the call, it’s coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!”), it could only mean that this person has either been released or escaped AND that he’s calling me.

Yes, I’m a judgmental person and yes, I did feel a little bad when he began talking and I discovered that he was simply trying to get back into high school and was having some trouble from his guidance counselor. I had even told these people to call me at work if their schools gave them any static. He was just doing exactly what I had told him to do in order to continue his education. I felt very small. For only about twelve seconds.

Because then he ended the call with, “And you make sure to have a really good Valentine’s Day today. You just never know how many you have left.” And he hung up. That was either a warning or (more likely) a stab at my advanced age. You may now be jealous of the adventure that is my life; you got a box of chocolates from Walgreens. I got an aroma wax burner from my husband and a cryptic possibly-death-threat from a convict. Happy final Valentine’s Day.

Taxidermied Animals Scare the Crap Outta Me

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

My family has tolerated my insane fears for as long as I’ve been afraid of things. Random yet paralyzing fears, like my fear of light fixture stores and the ceiling fan aisle of Home Depot. I have a couple of obvious fears, like dolls and clowns, because who doesn’t? And for the record, I’m not afraid of clowns, I’m afraid of people who want to dress like clowns. You know their brain stems don’t go all the way down.

But thanks to Jenny Lawson, aka @TheBloggess, an otherwise extraordinarily funny woman with a host of famous friends like Will Wheaton and Nathan Fillon, I’m afraid of roadkill. More to the point, I’m afraid that someone is going to scrape up some roadkill, preserve it with an unholy expression on its satanic little face, and slap a cutsie hat on its head before standing it up on my doorstep.

I just pissed myself.

I realize the likelihood of someone actually mailing me a dead animal is not that awesome, but apparently it happens to her all the time. It’s really sad, because she’s gotten so used to it that she actually gets excited when a mystery box appears on her porch. She gets all giddy wondering what the hell kind of dead animal might be in the box. And is it wearing pants.

I get it that Jenny lives in Texas and therefore dead animals might just be part of her decorating theme, but I live in Alabama. We’re only seven hours and eight IQ points away from Texas. We hang deer heads in our living rooms. I can’t handle it. I need a ceiling fan to ward off the evil spirits coming out of Bambi’s glassy eyes or maybe a clown in full Ringling Brothers regalia to stand guard at the door. It can’t be as scary as a possessed raccoon staring at me out from under the brim of its straw hat.

Revenge Is a Dish Best Served with a Sippy Cup

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,


Okay, it was funny when my nine-year-old nicknamed her dad “Baldilocks.” I don’t care who you are, that’s comedy gold. It was only slightly less funny when she kept telling her older sister to shave her underarms because “You got peach pits.” Well, she did need to shave and the truth hurts.  My youngest has learned the fine art of the well-timed jab and she uses it constantly, mostly to my delight.

But then she started calling me a geek because I had to start wearing my glasses again. Not so funny. Yes, I totally see the double standard here and I fully admit that the other stuff was funny because it wasn’t dragging me down in flames with it. But I don’t care. Something must be done about this.

All the parenting books have advice for how to handle these discipline situations with love and compassion. Fortunately, I never read any parenting books, as you can tell by the fact that school picture day sneaks up on me every year and my children are immortalized in the yearbook wearing stretched out faded T-shirts from Joe’s Crab Shack.

I’m of the mommy school of thought that says if your child is a biter, there’s a sure fire way to make sure he never bites anyone else ever again. No, biting him back one time without actually breaking the skin is for sissies. I would remove his teeth. Don’t be a monster, start with a tooth that’s already loose and then tell him that’s the first one to go. If he ever bites again, the rest are coming out next. He’ll quit that shit right away, mostly because he now thinks you’re unstable. Oh c’mon, it was already loose.

But even I, vicious tiger lady that I am, can’t bring myself to call my autistic child names to teach her that name calling is wrong, even funny ones and even if it’s just to teach her a lesson about pointing out other people’s uncontrollable flaws. So I took the high ground. I stopped feeding her.

Oh c’mon, that was a joke too! (Like I would ever actually rip teeth out of a child’s head. Sheesh.)

No, I stopped wearing my glasses and pointedly told her I didn’t want to look like a geek. That made her laugh. She even said, “Now you’re not a geek because you have no glasses.” Good. The plan is unfolding, my dear.

Then she had broccoli for breakfast. Things got ugly. Vegetables were thrown. And the whole time that she was crying I kept explaining, “No, that’s not broccoli. That’s cereal. I’m looking at it.” She was mad. But I would squint my eyes and wrinkle up my nose as I got really close, trying hard with my deranged underground mole eyes to see her breakfast plate.

“I’m sure it’s cereal. I don’t know why you’re mad. I’m looking at it and it looks like cereal.” Giggle.

“Mommy has to wear her glasses! I can’t eat broccoli!”

“Is it broccoli? Really? No, I’m sure it’s cereal.”

“NOOOO! It’s broccoli! Mommy has to have her glasses!”

“Mommy can’t wear her glasses, she would look like a geek.”

“Mommy isn’t a geek! I need cereal!”

Lesson learned and no teeth were harmed in the writing of this blog post.

I Might Have Cancer. Or Ringworm. Probably Ringworm.

ME Overly simple thoughts

I have this thing on my face that wasn’t there in October. Yes, I tried washing it off, thank you very much. I also tried putting lotion on it and covering it with spackle. I even tried antibiotic ointment in case it was some kind of flesh eating thing, because you know that a little Neosporin can totally take on Ebola virus. Just as I was about to scrape it off with a loofa, something occurred to me: there’s a good chance a doctor might need to look at it and if I scrub it off with a square of cosmetic-grade sandpaper, the doctor won’t get to see it. So the festering thing and I went to see a doctor.

Hmmmm-ing noises were involved. Bright lights were shined on it. The doctor even called for back-up, asking other people to come look at it, including one person whom I’m pretty sure was just a really nosy copier repairman. In retrospect, it went something like this:

DR: Well, Lorca, that certainly is very interesting.

ME: Oh that’s good. At least it’s not, like, fatally ugly. It’s just at DefCon Interesting. So do I put some kind of cream on it or something?

DR: We can’t do anything with it until we know what it is (this doctor is a member of the royal family, apparently, because he calls himself “we.”). For now, I think we’re possibly looking at either skin cancer or fungus.

ME: Oh, that’s good. Then fungus it is.

DR: What?

ME: You said I could have cancer or fungus, so I vote fungus.

DR: Um, you don’t get to pick.

ME: But you just said I could have either cancer, or I could have fungus. You clearly just gave me a choice.

DR: No, I meant, it could be cancer or it could be fungus.

ME: There you go again! That’s what I just said. So let’s make it be fungus.

DR: We don’t get to choose. That thing on your face has already decided what it is.

ME: How? It’s only about four months old! I hadn’t even decided I could eat solid foods when I was this thing’s age. There’s still time to shape it into the thing we want it to be when it grows up. It’s still impressionable at this age.

DR: I don’t think you’re understanding me. I don’t know what that is.

ME: I don’t either, but I’m going to make it be a fungus.

Now I have to take these pills that have nothing to do with my face but are more likely to stop me from acting weird when I go back for the medical scraping that will help the doctor ask this thing if it wants to be cancer or a fungus when it grows up. And while I still maintain that he was quite obviously giving me options, he may not have actually been meaning to do that. If I did have a choice it would totally be a fungus because I know what to do about that. Luckily, these pills won’t let me think much about anything until I go back to see him for the fungusectomy. Since it’s a fungus and all.

 

UPDATE: Because I’m completely a giver and all, I’m going to let YOU vote on whether it’s a cancer or a fungus. That will serve two purposes. One, I can show the doctor that all these people think it’s a fungus and therefore he’ll have to treat it like one, and two, I can find out which of you are douche canoes who want me to have cancer. Take a look at this photo:

Cast your vote now! Does Lorca have a fungus (yeah!!!) or cancer (boooo)?

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.

Overdone Cliché, Take 53…and ACTION!

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,

Like the rest of the whole country, I wake up every single Monday morning utterly surprised that my alarm clock is going off. It’s like some middle of the night intruder, except it’s actually morning and I told it to come in. But yet, somehow, I’m still puzzled by the beeping noise and not really sure where I am.

Years ago people thought it was funny to wonder why medical science or math people haven’t come up with a cure for Mondays yet. They have…it’s called unemployment. So I’m up, I’m having coffee, I’m going to work, because the alternative is to wake up, not have coffee, and move my cardboard box off the sidewalk before the commuters start heading to their offices. Just because I know it to be true, doesn’t make it any less painful.

People also started suggesting we take our cues from the animal kingdom, that if we were somehow living more like the animals in nature, we would be healthier and more at one with the universe. Do those people even KNOW the average life expectancy of many animals on the planet? Sure, for every tortoise who gets to live to be 190 years old (and who wants to be a freakin’ tortoise?), there are insects who live forty-eight hours. So let’s meet in the middle with something that is at least mammalian. Gazelles live on average ten to twelve years, and all but about thirty minutes of that life is spent looking over your shoulder for a freak lion attack. Who wants to do that? They don’t die from old age or cancer, they die from their hearts exploding under the stress of predators!

Sure...wake him up from a sound sleep and see what happens to your whole face.

So I’m ultimately going to work on four hours’ sleep, but I’m damned grateful to do it since apparently my choices are homelessness or being eaten by something higher up on the food chain. Have a good one.

If I Had Brain Powers, You’d Be Covered in Honey Mustard Right Now

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

I just launched this whole Twitter campaign to make myself influential about time travel on Klout. It’s really not for any real reason other than boredom and to see if I could do it. I basically just have to tweet about time travel a lot and then bribe other people into retweeting my pointless tweets. I don’t really know anything about time travel, so I’ve just been typing “time travel” over and over again and sending that out. My time would probably be better spent reading a book to orphans or exercising injured puppies instead of trying to manipulate the internet.

I don’t really care all that much about time travel, but of course it would be neat to be able to do it. Once. I bet when they invent time travel you’re going to have to book your trip way in advance and then spend hours in line at time travel’s version of TSA just to board. You know they’re gonna make all kinds of regulations about how you can’t go back in time and avoid the line at the time travel security check-point.

Even though I really have no desire to bounce around the space-time continuum (wow, two U’s in that word), there are some other really out-there sci-fi things that would be neat. Like brain powers. Being able to control stuff with my mind would be awesome. Dinner would prepare itself, parking spots at Walmart would just appear, whole governments would topple. Wait, I don’t think I can be trusted with that last one.

Sure, I look harmless. But I'm actually controlling you with my brain. See how my eyes are ALL PUPIL? Like the bad guy in that movie? Yeah, I'm like him.

Unfortunately, if I had any kind of mental manipulation powers at my disposal I would be a total bitch. You so much as forget to hold the door for the person behind you and I’m gonna make your coffee cup crack open like a faulty dam and ruin your shirt. Ketchup packets will explode all over people who are rude to their waitresses and people who road rage on other drivers will die upside down in a Toyota fireball when all four of their tires pop at the same time, sending them careening off the interstate.

I really suck at keeping secrets, though, so I’ll be the one walking up to my victims and saying, “Didja see that? That was totally me. I did that! Wanna see me do it again? Watch this.”

If my brain was useful for anything other than the occasional multiplication problem or reading the directions on the box of Hamburger Helper, I would be unstoppable. And probably in jail. A special jail cell that they had to build just to contain my awesomeness. It would have to be made out of something I couldn’t move with my brain powers, like algebra. But if they ever get time travel down to a tourist industry, I would be totally out of there.