Author: ME

The Silent Killer

ME Overly simple thoughts

Apparently, when wild bears attack you in order to eat you, they are fairly quiet about it. I just read an essay by a man who was woefully snuck up on by a hungry bear who did it tippy-toe style. The author barely survived but was not, in fact, unnibbled by the secretive animal. According to the plethora of scientists and researchers quoted in this article, bears who are just pissed at you or don’t want you in their necks of the woods make all kinds of angry snarling sounds while they dismember you, but the hungry ones just get down to business without all kinds of theatrics. One expert even went so far as to refer to bears as The Silent Killer.

Wait, I thought great white sharks were the silent killer. And heart disease. And carbon monoxide poisoning. And brain aneurisms. And the farts of twelve-year-old boys. Just how many freakin’ ways are there to die without any idea in the world that your end is near?

I wouldn’t be able to agree that dying loudly or with all kinds of alarming noises first is any better than dying unsuspectingly, but it does make me kind of fear the calmness of a quiet house. Of course, I am a mother of two school-aged children and we learn early to fear the silence almost as much as we yearn for it. It is actually kind of quiet in my house right now and I happen to know that the younger child ran through earlier carrying a large bottle of glue. If I cared more, I could stop it.

Having two older brothers, I remember several childhood moments that started out in a house full of sweet stillness only to erupt in all manner of rage and profanity when one parent discovered the that two boys had actually concocted a plan to launch some kind of (occasionally human) projectile and had also built the necessary contraption for the launch. The discovery did not always occur before the would-be test pilot had already been through a trial run. There was usually blood.

My children are girls, which only means that no one was physically testing the laws of physics on a sibling. Usually some colored and/or perfumey substance is no longer contained and is instead staining the carpet, the furniture, the dog, or worse. Industrial cleaning agents and scrubbing will be involved, but hopefully while I’m bent over unstaining something a bear won’t sneak up on me.

Good old American ingenuity

ME Overly simple thoughts

I’m sitting on my couch enjoying the cheapest bottle of Merlot the gas station had, my kids by my feet watching a Christmas special while my husband sings all of the songs from memories of his own childhood watching these same nostalgic shows. The entire scene before me is so perfect that there really should be celestial creatures holding banners above the whole tableau. That is, until I look over and see that my child is using one of my special bamboo chopsticks to reach down inside the cast on her leg to reach an itch.

I would love to scream something very un-Christmas special-y right now. I lean over to my husband and say, “Get that from her and put it in the sink to be washed.” He replies something along the lines of that was the best use for that particular chopstick that he’s ever seen. And he has a point: I only eat with it.

I am forced to admit that it was pretty smart of her to get the longest, pointiest, non-lethal object in the house to solve her problem, namely an unreachable itch. However, when the elves on the show break into song and she begins conducting them with my chopstick, I have to take it all back.

I am not the first person to wax poetic about how stupid our country has gotten, so it’s a relief to see someone actually do something pretty smart. Case in point: I did some holiday baking yesterday. On the back of the bag of Jet-Puffed brand marshmallows there is seriously…wait for it…a recipe for S’mores. If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’. Go to the store and see for yourself. If you are so stupid that you cannot figure out how to make a s’more, you’re probably too stupid to get the bag of marshmallows open so it’s all moot.

The s’more recipe made me remember the second stupidest observation I had regarding food stuffs and their packaging. I picked up a can of Walmart-brand salmon a few weeks ago and turned it over to see if this variety was billed as boneless or not. There, on the back of the can, in large white letters, read the end of the world. It said, “Allergy Warning: Contains Fish.” I swear to you, the can of salmon warns you that this can contains fish.

Supposedly this generation has made more technological leaps than any other generation in history, including those during the Industrial Revolution, but just how smart can we be? We need to be taught how to squish a marshmallow between two graham crackers and throw some chocolate in there for fun? What’s next, the recipe for ice cubes? Don’t laugh, with the advent of installed ice makers, I know people who aren’t sure what that plastic tray with the individual square dents is for.

All we can do is hope for a better future, probably by beginning a worldwide pact to only breed smart people. Or at least letting people who are allergic to fish figure out what’s in the can.

I must go walk my Euglena

ME Overly simple thoughts

I have discovered the ultimate pet for people like me. It’s important to know which character flaws led to my decision. First, I am taken with shiny objects but tire of them quickly. Second, I am entirely too busy for my own good, let alone the good of another creature. Third, some days its enough that my children ate, let alone that the pet was thought of.

So Euglena are a perfect pet. They eat, but if you forget to feed them they can fend for themselves by using chlorophyll to make their own food. Unless you lock them in a dark closet, in which case they cannot access sunlight from in there.

When the water on my Euglena tank starts to look a little murky, that means all is well. Not so a fish tank, in fact the fish can drown in a slurry of their own poo if the conditions are bad enough. You have to be talented to drown a fish. But the more that the Euglena water resembles the sludge on a cow farm pond, the happier they are.

They do have their drawbacks. You cannot train them, except to get them to go towards or away from light, and I can’t bring myself to encourage any living thing to head towards the light. They don’t respond to promises of treats or rides in the car, and it is nearly impossible to curl up with them and watch a movie or take a nap. But if you’re the kind of person who appreciates the concept and illusion of responsibility that pet-ownership gives you, but don’t love the actual work involved in bending over once a day to drop congealed animal by-product in a bowl on the floor for your actual pet, Euglena might be the way to go.

Except that the last time I tried to look at my darlings, through a microscope that is, they were looking a little puny. They didn’t have their usual swamp-green healthy glow. So I took the tank outside and walked around for a while to give them a chance to recharge. Yes, I was the crazy woman in the parking lot taking her fish tank for a walk.

As ridiculous as I felt, the excursion did not inspire me to adopt a more reliant, meaningful pet. I know my flaws and I’m fine with them.

Let the feasting begin

ME Food stuffs

It’s December, so for the past three weeks already food has been appearing at random; it arrives at my house, my workplace, my church. And it’s not just food, it’s special food, the kind that people make from a recipe written down in impeccable looping script by their grandmothers on a 3×5 card that is now crust-covered and stains from years of whipping up a batch on the countertop admist various and sundry ingredients.

I happen to own several of these carefully guarded recipes myself and have found that batches of these decadent national secrets make wonderful gifts during the holidays.

In this life–and probably in twelve previous incarnations–I’m a teacher, and one of the hardest days of the school year is the last day of school prior to Christmas vacation. That is the day that our lovelies show up at school with gifts for us. Sometimes the gifts are truly thought out and expensive, and we feel bad that our students’ parents went to so much effort and expense. Sometimes the gifts are atrocious and hand-made from styrofoam cups, and we feel bad that our students sat up late into the night to make us another pencil holder out of an old soup can with the label only partly peeled off.

Of course, I teach in a juvenile correctional facility, so my students carve me things out of bars of soap or present me with their favorite shanks. But I digress.

As a teacher, let me tell all the parents out there that the best gifts are ones we do not have to store someplace, and dear God please stop giving us things with an apple motiff. I own apple paperweights, apple key chains, apple pot holders, and more. No, the best gifts are edible ones, since we can enjoy the caramel crumb cake then be done with it, or if we’re in a pinch, we can simply carry your inviting tray of pecan pie bars to any number of holiday functions we have to attend; best of all, we will be completely grateful to you because you provided us with the requisite food offering we had to bring but we didn’t have to take the necessary time to make them. After all, from midnight to five am we are just lying there doing nothing.

Here is the closely closeted recipe I give to every teacher every year, packaged nicely for regifting or eating in the car on the way home from school.

Lorca’s Toffee Bars

Line a cookie sheet COMPLETELY with a plastic turkey roasting bag, cut open so that it even hangs over the edge of the sheet slightly. Cover the entire sheet with the cheapest saltine-style crackers you can find. Feel free to get fancy by trying out Ritz, graham crackers, or whatever strikes you.
On your stove top boil the following for three minutes: two sticks of the cheapest margarine available, 3/4 c of brown sugar, 1/4 c white sugar, and a splash of cheap vanilla.
Pour the boiling sugar slurry over the crackers, pushing them down into the lava-like sugar until they scream for mercy or are completely covered. Bake the entire mess at 400 degrees for five minutes.
Once you CAREFULLY pull the even-more-molten sheet from the oven, immediately sprinkle the cracker mess with any flavor of chocolate chips you like. Mix it up, so that some teachers get the creme de menthe topping, some get butterscotch, some get dark chocolate, etc. Avoid the peanut butter chips, as many school are going peanut-free.
It should only take a moment for the chips to melt. Spread them into a frosting with a knife or spatula, and let the pan cool in the fridge until it is all solid.
Peel back the turkey bag (saving it, since you can use it again for the next batch) and break up the bars completely at random. Package the bars attractively, and present it to your child’s grateful teacher.

“Closure”

ME Short stories

“How are you holding up, dear?” the old woman asked, linking a papery-thin wrinkled arm through mine as we crossed the uneven grass. It was less a gesture of camaraderie than it was an attempt on her part to make it to solid ground without going down with a sickening splat.

“Oh, fine, I guess. I think maybe I’m not over the shock, you know. I keep waiting for it to become real.” I stepped carefully on the balls of my feet to avoid plunging the heel of my pumps into the soft grass over someone’s grave.

“It happens that way for a lot of people. But the service was lovely and you’ll have that as your ‘goodbye’. I knew you two were inseparable in school but I didn’t realize you’d remained close all these years.”

“Yes. Anyway, it was really great of you to come all this way. I wasn’t sure you’d even remember him after twenty-two years. Whenever Marc and I talked about high school he always said the nicest things about you.”

Her rheumy eyes brightened. “Thank you for telling me that. I’m aware the majority of my students hated my class because I was demanding, but I always tried to treat all of my students with respect, even if I had to be harsh sometimes.”

“How did you even hear about the accident?” I wondered aloud.

“Oh, I keep up with all of my former students on Facebook, dear.”

The hunched woman shuffled her way to her monstrosity of an old-person car, pausing to reach in her purse for a very large boxy pair of sunglasses to fit over her usual bifocals, leaving me inwardly laughing over the image of this woman sitting in a trendy coffee place with free wi-fi chatting it up with Facebook friends.

I watched her start her car and slowly merge into the light traffic without even looking. I guess that’s what happens when you outlive everyone you know, you either develop a sense of entitlement or a death wish to join them. The outcome is usually the same.

As I turned back to the row of serene graves, cheerfully backlit by the afternoon sunlight, I watched quite a number of mourners staggering away to their vehicles, leaving Marc’s mother standing alone at the casket that was so overloaded with flowers it seemed to actually be vomiting peonies. A small part of me wanted to go to her, to slide an arm around her thin shoulders and just be there for her, but that was a luxury she didn’t deserve. This pain was all on her now.

Letting myself dream for just a moment about what it would be like when she finally left here and returned home to her jackass of a husband was the only happiness I’d felt in four days, but that feeling passed quickly.

Instead of speaking to her I turned down the gravel path towards my own car and slid inside the obscurity of the limousine-tint windows, arching my back spastically as the leather seats seared through my thin linen suit.

“You should have left the windows cracked, then your seat wouldn’t have gotten so hot,” chimed the man lounging in the passenger seat, checking his messages on a brightly colored phone.

“Why, thank you for the advice, Marc, but then everyone would have seen you!” I retorted bitingly.

“Well, it got really warm in here and I could have suffocated,” he whined.

“How suffocating do you think it is in that big shiny box over there? You know, the box you’re supposed to be in?” I asked sarcastically, pointing up the hill to the spot where his mother still stood with downcast eyes. Marc followed my gaze over the lenses of his sunglasses and seemed to soften for only a microsecond before pushing them up his nose and flopping back against the headrest.

“I can’t believe that bastard didn’t come to my funeral. When someone says, ‘You’re dead to me,’ you would think they would at least participate in celebrating the ‘dead’ part.”

“How many years have we merely believed that your dad is an ass? Were you really and truly surprised that he’s actually an ass? The man reads about your accident in the paper and calls me to ask if I have plans for your riding mower, for pete’s sake! Why are you surprised?”

“You know, you’re just irritated because you’re all hot. Let’s go to the house and change your clothes—very smart suit, by the way, and I adore your choice of footwear—fix us some drinks, and see what the made-for-TV movie rerun is. You’ll feel better.” He turned to look out his window, reading the names on the tombstones we passed to see if he knew anyone.

I had nothing to say to that. I had had a bad feeling about faking a death in the first place, but when you took into account Marc’s awesome list of reasons for doing this, it just got worse. The list really only had one reason written (seriously “written,” Marc writes down lists for everything): he was too chicken-shit to break up with his boyfriend.

I had adamantly tried to get Marc to just break up with him. It’s not like this was an abusive relationship and he actually feared for his life. It’s also not like Marc was a firmly sealed in-the-closet homosexual who couldn’t risk an angry former lover writing a tell-all book. In fact, it was actually the boyfriend who wasn’t yet letting his sexual preference be widely known (“that boy’s so far in the closet he can see Narnia,” Marc complained once) and Marc only wanted to dump him because he was tired of never going out in public together, which seemed like a perfectly logical reason to call off a relationship on my part.

“You’re not a gay man in Alabama, sweet cheeks,” he had told me. “It’s not like there’s tons of us around, and when you do find one who rocks your boat you dig your claws in and hang on for dear life. So if I go around humping-and-dumping every gay man within a ninety-mile radius, word will get out and I’ll never get a date again. It’s just easier this way.”

There was absolutely nothing I could say that would sway Marc from this very evil plan. Even though he had the financial means to accomplish this almost-legally, it still wasn’t going to be pretty. This man had even had the sheer audacity to actually call up the death certificate office, tell them what he wanted to do as well as why, and promise them that he wasn’t actually faking his death but rather that he was just staging his funeral and then throwing a big old barbeque party afterwards. Then he goes and invites them all to the event, including the probate judge, who then shows up, wearing all black. I was sure he only made an appearance to make sure that everything Marc had claimed turned out to be kosher, but in fact it was because his position is elected and Marc promised him a contribution come two years from November, as well as the fact that this man would go to Satan’s garden party if it were going to be catered by Regal Events (I’m just as guilty. I swear the head chef there could cook a cardboard box and I would eat it because it would turn out fantastic).

“So explain to me what you think is going to happen when your grieving former boyfriend figures out you aren’t actually dead?” I asked, bringing us to the dilemma at hand.

“He won’t know. He’s moving back home to Nebraska.”

“He’s from Iowa, first of all, and just how do you know his plans?” I asked, completely afraid that I had done all the work of putting on a funeral only to have the dead party member walking around town talking to people before we settled accounts with the person whose benefit this had all been for. That would be just like Marc.

“Sam’s been texting me all the details around town since I’ve been in hiding,” he explained, checking his phone for incoming messages out of habit. I swear he was worse with that stupid phone than a thirteen-year-old girl.

“Why are you texting people? You’re supposed to be dead!” I screamed, grabbing for the phone and very nearly dumping us off the road into a ditch.

“Oh, Sam knew the truth all this time,” he answered, sounding practically bored at having to explain that.

“Well if Sam knew about it, why the heck couldn’t Sam help me? I’ve been rushing around throwing a funeral together, then staying up all night finishing the work I should have been doing while I was actually ordering casket sprays for a person who didn’t have the decency to die before deciding that he should tell a lot of people that he’d died!” I knew better than to be taking all of this out on Marc; after all, I could have washed my hands of the whole thing when he told me about this scheme the first time, but as I recall he was so drunk on Aftershock at the time that I would have agreed to punching a nun just to get him off my couch before he threw up all over it.

“Sam can’t handle funerals. His therapist told him to avoid funeral homes until he gets a better grasp on closure,” Marc explained, his fingers clicking away at the miniscule keyboard in his hands.

“Did you know your tenth grade English teacher drove by herself all the way from her sister’s home in Greenville, South Carolina, for your funeral?”

“Yeah, I saw where she sent that out on Twitter.”

“And that doesn’t that make you feel bad at all?” I pressed.

“Of course it does! If she kills anyone with that giant car of hers on the way back, their blood will be on my hands,” he answered without even the pretense of remorse.

“When did you become this selfish?” I shrieked, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white.

“Oh, I’ve always been totally selfish, you were just so charmed by my wiles that you were unable to resist me,” he grinned.

“This isn’t a joke. I’ve sat on the sidelines of every one of your weird-ass plans since I was ten years old, but a fake funeral is sinking to a brand-new low,” I fumed.

“None of my plans has ever been even close to ‘weird-ass’, thank you very much,” he sniffed, “but I have to say, of all my previous schemes, this one is the least selfish thing I’ve ever done.” Marc turned back to the window, engrossed in the scenery again.

“Seriously? Were you watching the same funeral? All those people who came out to say goodbye to you and you duped them! You don’t even have the compassion to move away, you fully intend to get dressed tomorrow and go walking around, clapping people on the shoulder and saying, ‘Ha, ha, joke’s on you!’”

“Anyone who knows me will not be the least bit surprised, and anyone who read your very well-spoken obituary will think you were just slightly confused by the ‘exaggerated reports of my death’.”

“What about your parents? I fully support you in your hatred of your father, but what about your mother?” Marc had his hand up, palm extended towards me, before I had even finished the sentence.

“She made her choice. When he cut me out of his life, she was free to make her own decisions but she sided with him. Plenty of people in the world have a gay child and still manage to pretend that said child actually exists!” He flounced against the seat again, his arms crossed in front of him, and I knew I had pushed my argument too far; it’s easy to judge when you’re not the one whose parents had erased all traces of you. “What they don’t understand is that I actually did this for them.”

“On what planet is it ever the right thing to do to tell an old couple that their only son was crushed to death by the garbage truck?” Why was I even dragging this out? I’d been this man’s best friend since fifth grade and had never once gotten him to see any reason but his own.

“Because they’re leaving,” he mumbled, looking down at his hands practically crushing his precious phone in his lap.

“What?”

“They’re moving. My sister told me. They’re too ashamed to live here anymore because people ‘know about me,’ as my sister said.” He leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the car window.

I was completely thunderstruck. This isn’t what I had intended when Marc came out. I had seen it all played out in my head from the moment Marc had first told them: his parents would take some time to get over the shock of his coming out (granted it had been almost two years since they had spoken to him, but I think of myself as a patient person), their anger would subside, they would crawl back and beg his forgiveness for all of the completely horrible, evil words they had flung at him, and things would be strained for a while but then their familial love would win out. I could even see the day years down the road when Marc had settled with a dashing, funny-yet-devoted partner and they would all celebrate Thanksgiving dinner together, their new “son-in-law” carving the turkey and calling them Mom and Dad. And now I had just been jolted awake from the pipedream.

“Marc, I’m so sorry! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I still didn’t care for the funeral plan, but at least there was something along the lines of “thinking of others” going on behind this one, unlike the time he left me waiting in the car so he could stay after the mall closed for a quickie with the assistant manager of the food court pizza place.

“I didn’t tell you because you would have marched up to their front door, slugged my dad, cussed out my mother like only a disgraced Phi Mu can, and it wouldn’t have done a bit of good. Not that I wouldn’t have been really grateful to you–assuming you didn’t spurt any of Dad’s blood on one of your impeccable sweater sets, of course–but it wouldn’t have done a bit of good in the long run. Now, thanks to me and my untimely demise, they can leave without having to look back and they’ll honestly believe they’re telling their new neighbors the truth when they say, ‘No, we don’t have a son,’.”

“Tell me what I can do, hun. I mean, besides waste thousands of your dollars and four days of my life pretending to stick you into a hole in the ground in the most classy of manners,” I joked, my earlier anger squashed flat by the news of his parents’ actions. His eyes lit up and he bounced back from the hurt like only Marc can.

“Whip this car right over there into Wendy’s and get me a Frosty. You know how I crave ice cream after a break-up.”

My child is medically evil

ME Living life, Overly simple thoughts

I’ve mentioned my daughter is autistic and I’ve discovered that people with any form of disability or diagnosis seem to feel entitled to a lot of leeway from the rest of the world. I think that’s why medical science is coming up with new diseases all the time; it’s out excuse to get by with the crap that we can’t get by with if we are actually normal. My husband’s not a jerk, he actually suffers from Low T. I didn’t just cut you off in traffic, my foot slipped off the brake due to my Restless Leg Syndrome.

My child learned a long time ago that everything and anything she says is pure gold. Everyone is just so thrilled to death that she talks that she can say pretty much whatever is on her mind. If the thoughts pops in her head it’s bound to come flying out of her mouth. For example, she struggled to tell me that she would like the peanut butter flavor of her cereal bars. I praised her sentence, then told her that we could buy that kind the next time we went to the store. However, I reminded her that she would have to eat them at home since her school does not allow peanut products. She said, “Some kids are allergic.” I praised her again, both for the words and the logic. But then she said, “And they have to die.” Now I was about to correct her by telling her that the word she wanted was could, as in they could die, but since this is my child, I realized she very well have meant that if the genetic freaks who were born allergic to food would just hurry up and die, she could eat her snack.

Of course, the apple didn’t land on its head too far from the tree, since I have only recently developed my own mouth filter. Within the last five years I’ve learned to not call my boss names to his face, to stop telling people my dog has mange (it’s actually just really shaved since I despise dog hair), and to stop making fun of other people’s colleges of choice just because my college is better. At everything. My husband is also afflicted with this same diagnosis, so basically due to poor genetics our children were destined to have absolutely no ability to not say something unintentionally (or intentionally) cruel. Our ten-year-old (the supposedly normal one) got in trouble at school for telling a classmate with a new haircut that she had car-wreck bangs; she tearfully explained to the principal that the term is actually the correct hairdresser jargon for that style of short, Audrey Hepburn straight bangs and it’s not her fault that some idiot in beauty school named them that.

All in all, I can’t decide which end of the spectrum makes the world a better place: complete and total ugly-as-paint-on-a-pig honesty, or filtering every single comment through the Nice-o-Meter. Obviously I’d want to know if these pants make my butt look big, I just don’t want to hear it from you. I’m sure my child will be happy to tell me at some point.

The To Do List

ME Living life, Overly simple thoughts

The only thing better than getting stuff done is making out a really incredible list of things I’m going to get done. I’m not one to slack off by haphazardly going about the house and straightening here and there, oh no, I have supremely, larger-than-life to do lists. Today’s list included running ten miles, repainting a bedroom, unraveling fourteen strands of white Christmas lights leftover from a street fair booth six years ago, learning to use the new fancy corkscrew my husband bought me several birthdays ago, cleaning up all of the Legos that are spread throughout the playroom, and rolling out a pie crust to make a pot pie for dinner tomorrow. I completely figured out how to use the corkscrew to open a bottle of wine and once I had crossed that item off my list I couldn’t get anything else finished. I did drag the bottle of wine and one glass up to the playroom and cleaned up Legos for an hour and a half; it’s amazing how much you can enjoy a task while having wine.

I did accomplish a few tasks that weren’t on the to do list: I accidentally found the charger cord to my cell phone three phone upgrades ago, finally watched two of the movies on my Netflix queue but one of them was a dolphin documentary so I don’t know if that one counts, knit half of the scarf my daughter wants to wear as Hermione Granger for Halloween, and made a loaf of French bread. While I was running what turned out to be only four miles instead of the aforementioned ten, I did think up a whole new fantastic concept for a sock, which I fully intend to patent and become rich from if I ever get around to finding out how you patent something. The day was also not wasted as I took the kids to see the Nanny McPhee sequel, bought a lime green skillet, and found another bottle of wine in the cabinet (nope, I didn’t drink it, just was ultra-pleased to have found it).

It’s amazing how you can waste a day and get so much done. If I only had another four hours left in today, I could have made my own peperoncini vinegar, brewed a cup of homemade chai, and embroidered a throw pillow. Good thing I have some paper to put down a list…

It’s really not funny…

ME Living life, Overly simple thoughts

Wait, I know what you’re thinking…why should I read something that tells you up front how not funny it is? Because it really is funny. Almost everything is. Case in point: I attended my grandfather’s funeral last summer. He ended his life after discovering he had cancer. That was really sad. However, three women who showed up for the funeral and were later discovered to be at the wrong funeral talked through the entire service. That’s weirdly funny. A motorcycle gang wandered in during the viewing to pay their respects. That’s bizarrely funny, too. Then the staff of the funeral home looked at my two slightly pudgy brothers, my senior citizen father, and the one male cousin we had who happens to have a severe limp, decided they didn’t have much to work with, and that’s how I became a pall bearer. That’s completely funny. Like I said, everything is funny in its own way.

I have a child who has autism, which falls under Not Funny. She’s afraid of bananas, which is horrifically funny. She hoards stuffed animals, including ones that belong to other people, which isn’t funny, but she discriminates against her Sesame Street Grover doll because she can’t decide what he is; we find him stashed all over the house, including one time when she threw him in a closet wearing a homemade sign around his neck that said, “I am not an animal.” That’s really funny, even though she’s never seen The Elephant Man or the Robin Williams routine.

I’m also an avid runner, which to other runners, isn’t funny at all. Running is serious business to most runners. I fall down a lot when I run because I have huge feet. While it’s not more than mildly amusing to me, God’s been laughing at it for years. You don’t get to tell God something’s not funny.

So this blog will be all about the stuff that happens that might be funny or might not be funny. If you take anyone’s problems, surely some jerk out there can laugh at it. Of course, I’m ADD (which is not funny) so the blog will also ramble about running, my favorite recipes, and whatever noise my car happens to make that week. Sit back, enjoy, and think to yourself, “I could be reading the posts at shitmydadsays.com instead.”

How to get published

ME Overly simple thoughts

Yup, it’s true. I’m one of the 53,000,000 people you know who has written a book. It’s not a lot of fun trying to get it published, let me tell you. Imagine giving birth to a child and then some funky law requires you to walk up to strangers who may or may not like children and being forced to ask them exactly what they think of your baby, only these strangers do not have the social skills required to lie to you. They are going to tell you up-front just how butt-ugly your baby is. And when they’re done, you’re supposed to do it again.

The great thing is these people invented the line, “It’s not you, it’s me.” No one tells you that you have no ability to string six words together in any coherent fashion, or that your main character is as interesting as watching paint dry. Nope. These people say darling, hope-inspiring things like, “This is a very subjective business, so my opinion may not count,” or, “Your manuscript is intriguing, but I cannot take on a project like yours.”

Fortunately, there are some helpful websites and blogs, such as writersdigest.com, writersmarket.com, and guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog. There are, of course, oodles of sites out there that are helpful, but these are a few that have been kind to me so far.

Luckily, you don’t live close enough for me to snag you in the grocery store and make you read pages from book. If I did you’d never see the light of day again until you had finished it and given me glowing praise on what is sure to be the next great American novel. Or at least help me make my car payment.

I’m a Twit. I mean, a Twitter member.

ME Overly simple thoughts

I read something somewhere that said I can further my writing career if I do more social networking.  Since all of my previous social network hasn’t extended further than letting people with one item go in front of me at the grocery store, I decided to devote today to creating accounts on all of these websites that are designed to get your name out there.  Too bad everyone makes up fake names to sign up with.  Seriously, I won’t believe that your mamma named you AgileRocker6.

So with a fire roaring on this rainy day and a glass of wine in my hand, I signed up for not only Twitter, but Facebook as well, and while I was at it made a whole new Yahoo email account to use for both and a second blog on this website.  I’d hate for potential business contacts to read this blog and think I was an alcoholic.

I spent the most time today on Twitter, mostly because I’d had the account for fourteen minutes before I had my first follower.  I’m not self-centered in the least.  I checked out who was following me so I could decide if I needed to take out a hit on him or not.

I went searching on Twitter for some of the big names in my business, which incidentally, is writing.  If you need anything written, and I don’t just mean written down, I’m ya girl.  So I found one of the first big names that popped into my head and checked her out, reading everything she had Twitted, er, Tweeted, for the last few weeks.  I learned a few things:

Her life is more interesting than mine.  She recently had champagne with another Twit in her new apartment, attended a book signing in Brazil, and sent out loads of work-related network things, probably making her Employee of the Month at her job.

However, I also read that she was stuck in traffic on a place called the BQE and later that week had to get a new car battery.  Really?  I can do this?  I can send out messages that I bought a different shade of hair dye to cover my gray, recently changed the channel, and had to put a new bag in the vacuum cleaner?  And people will read this?

I hate to admit that I spent about twenty minutes cyber-stalking this poor woman on Twitter, amazed that her life in New York City was so amazing, while the coolest thing I did today was cut up some celery to snack on while watching a football game on television.  I felt like a thirteen-year-old girl who just switched soda brands after reading that Justin Bieber liked a different variety.  I was completely engrossed in the life of this woman, simply because she was someone who worked in the field I was trying to break into.  I’m afraid I might be pathetic.

It does make me feel good to know that at some point, if I play my cards right and Fate smiles on me, there will be legions of people stalking me from the privacy of their homes, dying to know what I’m going to have for lunch the next day.  I can’t wait.