Overly simple thoughts

MILF: It Does A Body Good

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

If you'll hate her first, I'll go with you.

I knew that I was never going to become a supermodel, even before the last forty years had its ugly way with me. It’s not like I had a face that could scare roaches, but I wasn’t winning any awards for my looks. Well, except for that time in eighth grade when I was chosen with about a hundred other girls to wear poofy antebellum dresses and wave at cars as townspeople rode through the neighborhoods looking at all the azaleas in full bloom. About ninety percent of the people we waved at were looking at the flowers, but for those of you in the ten percent who were checking out the little girls, I wrote down your license plate numbers.

The attention that older women are getting from pop culture has raised the ire of people who have nothing better to do than complain when someone thinks they’re pretty. Sure, terms like “cougar” do tend to objectify women and portray them negatively, which I think we’re supposed to say is bad. The ones I really feel sorry for are the poor cougars, proud members of the regal family of big cats, for being compared to a sad and frazzled middle-aged woman who dared to let her gaze linger a little longer than necessary on the sweet athletic young man who took her order of sixteen Happy Meals before the peewee soccer game. Trust me, she’s not adoring his boyish good looks, she’s star-struck by someone who made that much food appear without her having to cook any of it.

Recently, I was holding my two kids’ hands as we crossed a massive parking lot while foot-pushing my overloaded shopping cart in the general direction of an eight-year-old minivan whose engine light has been on since Bush The Lesser left office. A twenty-somethingish guy walking past me did that annoying “cough a word into his hand” thing and barked the acronym, “MILF.” By the time I figured out that he was actually trying to communicate something and not out to infect my children with a horrendous disease that would mean I had to keep them home from school for several days, the moment had passed and the magic was gone.

On behalf of liberated women everywhere I should have been totally offended. The fact that my two daughters were beside me means I should have turned on him like a cougar (only this one has rabies AND tuberculosis) and demanded to be treated like a human being and not a sex object.

Instead, I was just freakin’ jazzed that someone thought I vaguely resembled something akin to physical attractiveness. It must have been the clean shirt I had bothered to put on that day.

I’m still trying to figure out when we decided that being complimented for our appearance was a bad thing. Okay, I freely admit that the term he used is a little on the icky side, but it’s not like PILD (Plumber I’d Like to Date) or SAN (Sexy Awesome Nun) or GIHF (Goat I’m Hot For). Crude? Why, yes he was. Violated? Why, no I wasn’t. Flattered? I probably shouldn’t be.

But in my dark moments when I’ve thrown a winter coat of my pajamas to finally get more Cascade because my kids are eating cereal with chopsticks out of my nine-by-thirteen pans, and some weirdo with a thing for bunny slippers takes the time to comment in passing on my waaaay-inner beauty (and I have to say, IN PASSING is crucial to his surviving this little conversation), I won’t use my cougar fangs to bite his head off.

Detective, The Perp Left The Victim’s Wallet Behind

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I had a brief brush with hysteria today. Well, more than I usually do on any given weekday. I rounded up the posse of children I own (there are only two of them, but sometimes it feels like I’ve had to round them up instead of just grab one in each hand) and took them back to school shopping, but while I was there I thought I had left my wallet in one of the fifty-two stores we had to visit trying to find the right kind of three-ring binder. I had a brief panic attack but pulled myself together fairly quickly once I realized there was nothing in there worth backtracking for.

My wallet is mostly a container for crap that I don’t want floating around in my purse, and the occasional thing that the government requires me to have on my person like the typical driver’s license and proof of insurance. Any would-be thief (or the detectives if they’ve found my wallet in the bushes near my body) would probably drive it back to my house and apologize, just out of embarrassed pity.

My wallet contains:

A Lego VIP card, for all those times I need to brush past the little people and make my way up to the oversized bouncer with the clipboard at the entrance to the Lego store. Having a burly man with an earpiece open the velvet rope just for me has never felt so good. Of course, it’s also the only time I’ll get someone to give me exclusive backstage access to anything, so Danish plastic building blocks might as well be the crappy reward for it.

A $4 postage stamp, courtesy of my mom who paid me back for Starbuck’s one day with a stamp. Literally. Like I’m going to mail a really oversized letter to someone and think, “Hell yeah, Mom, that stamp came in so freakin’ handy! You could have been a sucker and paid me in cash but no way! I have a stamp! Suck it, rest of America!”

The phone number for the press secretary to the governor of Florida. Well, at least until the next election, anyway. But the great thing is I never wrote who the number is on the scrap of paper, so it’s all mysterious. If I’m found clutching that piece of paper and the cops call it, just in case it’s a lead, and then the intern who answers the phone says, “Governor Scott’s press secretary, may I help you?” they’re gonna think I’m just AWESOME and involved in some big political scandal! (Okay, I’m actually seriously carrying the governor’s press sectretary’s phone number in my wallet, and there’s an excellent reason for that: I stuck it in there one day while doing an interview with the guy, and I don’t want to throw it away but I always forget it’s in there until the next time I see it.)

Two mostly-stamped customer appreciation punch cards, one to Books A Million and one to the frozen yogurt bar. The sad thing is whoever finds my wallet is gonna know that I spend a lot more time eating dessert than reading.

My boating license. This little piece of paper allows me to pilot any vessel small enough to not be used for transporting crude oil, despite the fact that I live in an almost-entirely landlocked state. It also sets me apart from Spongebob in the fact that I have passed my boating course and he has not.

A fortune from a fortune cookie. Yes, I know fortune cookies are hokey and they’re not even actually Chinese. I also know it stinks of UC-Berkley-liberal-arts-major angst to keep the fortunes from your fortune cookies. But this one said, “Ignore previous cookie.” When am I ever going to get one that spectacular ever again?

My blood donor card. This one is really awesome. I carry it with me because it makes me look like an absolute Mother Teresa since it states in giant letters that I have given over a gallon of blood. Yeah, let that visual sink in. I could throw up in my mouth at the image of a milk jug full of my own blood. Sadly, I am no longer able to give blood because it was discovered that I have probably been exposed to mad cow disease. I really, really wish that was a craptastic joke.

There are a few other random tidbits of uselessness in there, like my debit card, but otherwise it’s a pretty boring panoramic view of my adult life. I think I’m just used to having it on my person, otherwise I’d be just as happy to leave it on the check-out counter of the fourth shoe store I visited in one day looking for sparkly Converse sneakers. Oh wait, I’ve already done that. It’s no where near as interesting as having the would-be serial killer take off with it, but he wouldn’t even want to keep it as a souvenir of his latest kill. It’d be too depressing.

Your Kid Is So Freakin’ Weird

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Every year around this time, the same thing happens. Back to school stuff appears, forms from the school get sent in the mail, appointment reminders from doctors’ offices show up reminding me that it’s time to poke my child again.

And every year at this time, I come off a two-month stint of hanging out with my kids and loading them up in the car to go to really awesome places and see exciting things, and a tiny thought worms its way into my little brain: “If I home schooled my kids, we could do this cool stuff all year long.” I start to resent the local school system for snatching my babies out of my arms, and that makes me start thinking anarchy-type thoughts about how the government is taking too much control over the masses. Then I realize that if the government didn’t mandate education for our citizens’ children, half those kids would grow up to be knuckle-dragging mouth breathers.

About four minutes after thinking I could home school, a different image slaps the home school thought right outta me, and no, it’s not the brutal realization that we would never bathe or put on actual non-pajama-clothing ever again. It is the fact that I don’t know a single home schooled kid who turned out normal. Before you call me on the phone to gripe about that statement, you have to know that I spend a good deal of my day apologizing to various people for the weird-assed stuff I say, but I’m not budging on this one.

I admit it, some kids out there are home schooled for semi-legitimate reasons, like severe allergies to everything including air, and I’m not gonna finger point at those parents. You have to do for your kids, especially the things that keep them from dying. Other kids have mad ninja skills in some kind of awesome talent, like they were playing Chopin on their Fisher-Price pianos before they could support the weight of their own heads, so they get home schooled while they’re on tour. Okay, again, who am I to judge?

I’m even willing to admit that some home schooled kids would have been weirdos even if they had been given the benefit of a few rounds of All Skate through the public school system, but they would have gotten beaten up on a daily basis. I give it to their parents, those kids were gonna be socially inept no matter what you did for them. You might as well keep them home so you don’t have to wash the blood out of their shirts every day.

The ones that actually make me want to drive my car through a crowded play date of eleven-year-olds are the parents who proudly declare that their children are too smart for public school, that their children would have been bored. You know what? We’re all bored in school! I’m a teacher and I’m effing bored! If it wasn’t boring you wouldn’t have a reason to graduate!

Maybe it’s because I’m a teacher that I get so riled up on homeschooling. In my mind, it would be like me deciding that my appendectomy wouldn’t be fulfilling enough if I had it done in a hospital, so I’m gonna do it at home on my kitchen table with some tools I ordered on the internet, just to keep it fresh and unboring. How exactly did you come to the decision that any craptastic human with a pulse can be a teacher? Or can perform appendectomies, for that matter?

So I invite—nay, I urge—all of you to join me in aisle four of the local Walmart where normal parents will wrestle to the death in a retail cage match while trying to buy the last three-ring binder in town. Our kids will suffer through agonizing classes on our state’s history where they will learn useless information like all twelve verses to our state song; of course, there will be a test on this material, and probably a really crappy diorama to build involving lots of glue and popsicle sticks. And yet somehow, my kid’s still going to turn out more well-adjusted than the one you raised in your own private think tank. It’s one of the mysteries of the universe.

Organizational Skills Are Not My Strong Suit

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I’ve been sleeping on my parents’ couch lately, and no, it’s not because I lost my job at Taco Bell for not washing my hands after using the restroom. Dear God, do they have to have that sign in there that tells employees to wash their hands? Are they seriously hiring folks who are too stupid to know that the next logical step after flush/pants-up is wash? Can’t You smite all of those intentionally unhygienic people*? Amen.

(* This is not to imply that people who lack the mental capacity to know better should die. I’m just sayin’ that if you do have the brain cells to read the sign but still need to be told, do us all an eternal favor.)

No, I was sleeping on my parents’ couch because my inability to read my own date book put me going to a two-day conference for work then turning around and going camping for three days before staying at my parents’ house for two more days. If I knew what the little boxes in the date book were for, I’d have spaced all of that out a little better.

That out-of-town mishap has led me to decide I need to establish a better system for knowing what I’m supposed to do every day. You have to understand that I actually get paid to write (Good grief, no, not this shit, no one pays me to write this crap you’re having to read right now) and I mean I actually get paid in money, not in coupons to Dairy Queen. As a writer, I feel this artisticky connection to the universe that lets us writers pretty much ignore all standard conventions like clocks and date books and C-SPAN discussions of that debt cap thing that nobody will shut up about. I come by my vapidity purely by the fact that somebody decided to send me money every time I string 300 to 500 words together on a given topic.

Instead of relying on a completely useless—and possibly homicidal—date book, I’m going to organize my weekly responsibilities alphabetically. You know, Monday starts with an M and Tuesday starts with a T, so I’ll think of like-lettered things to do with those days of the week. Unfortunately for my family, there are no days of the week that begin with C for Clean and/or Cook. I may have to fall back on Friday Feeding Day and Thursday Tidy-up Day, but I’m pretty sure I can get out of both of those. Unfortunately for my husband, there is also no day of the week that goes with the word Naked. Unfortunately for me, there is also no Zombie weekday. Sigh.

For Monday, I’ve decided that’s a good day to start off the week with some reinforcements. Monday is Margarita Day. And Movie Day. Or, even better, Margarita and a Movie Monday! Tuesday can be Typographical Tuesday where I don’t have to re-read anything I write before publishing it for the entire internet to read. I need an intellectual-sounding day of the week, so I’m thinking about Wodka Wednesday…isn’t it like Volkswagen where it’s pronounced with a v but spelled with a w? Whatever, wodka is just a great-sounding word.

That’s about as creative as I can get for now, so I’ll have to think of something to fill in the other days of the week. My date book says I’ve already expended more energy on this project than I was supposed to. Of course, it is out to get me.

I Need A Mojito

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Last night, right before closing my eyes and drifting off to sleep for my usual three hours of shut-eye, I had a stunning inspiration for my blog. The topic ran amok in my mind, weaving its humor and epicosity through my thoughts. I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and begin putting it on the page, and I have to admit I felt a little bad for Hemingway because people were going to start comparing the two of us after reading my post and they would be sure to point out that I don’t drink nearly as much as he did and plus I haven’t killed myself yet.

But Hemingway is safe, for now. I completely forgot what I was going to write about and now you’re stuck with this crap.

So now, instead of being titled, “The Sun Also Rises and Sets and Rises Just Like Every Other Freakin’ Day,” this post is instead titled, “Hush, Mama’s Been Drinking.” Oh c’mon, put down the phone, that was completely a joke. Although, in a perfect world, children would be able to mix drinks as soon as they had the upper body strength necessary to open the fridge.

Picture it. An entire universe where children were actually good for something other than growing up to shove you in a nursing home. Well, joke’s on you, cutie pie, my retirement plan currently involves the Rapture. You want me in a home when I can’t change my own diapers, you’re going to have to pay for it. If you can’t afford to squeal the tires and grind the gears on your way out of the Autumn Cove Home for Decrepit People, I’ll be living with you.

But for now, I really think the country should revisit all of the child labor laws that were enacted in the Dark Ages and by that I mean in the days before television. Yes, working conditions were lousy back then but you have to admit the conditions were lousy for everyone, not just the kids who kept getting their little stick-figure arms stuck in giant factory machinery. The only reason we tossed the little urchins out of the factories was because they kept falling asleep around three in the afternoon for naptime. If Red Bull had been around back then, those ADD little monsters would still be working on the assembly lines.

There are some jobs that I really don’t have a problem with kids doing, like the aforementioned bartending. I really think it would be a good deterrent to underaged drinking. A couple of summers of watching forty-something year old women drink themselves under the table then try to hit on an eighteen-year-old busboy who forgot to zip his fly after his last bathroom break will put these little elementary school valedictorians on the straight and narrow. You want to curb the dropout rate in this country? Let the kids turn that little slow/stop sign on a road construction crew for a few 18-hour days in the summer heat.

Perhaps the greatest moment of forward thinking involving the whole “children are the future” thing happened to my dear friend. They had some extensive renovations done on their home and the resulting legal permits required that there be a port-o-potty on the premises throughout the project. I think at one point neighborhood people were actually coming to use their borrowed portable toilet, just because how do you NOT use one when it’s right there on your street? Suffice to say, one day a giant roundy truck from the portable toilet people came to slurp out the contents with the most bio-hazardous giant hose ever known to pottying man. As my friend’s youngest son stood in the yard watching the man climb down from a truck that hauls sundry poo samples around the community and then suck all of the neighborhood poo out of the poo capsule, he looked up at her and said, “Mommy, I really want to go to college.”

See? It works on so many levels. Let the little snots clock some time at the quarry and see if we still have the worst math and literacy rates in the industrialized world. We’ll have so many kids going to college that we’ll have to shove them off on other countries’ colleges when ours fill up. Hopefully they teach Hemingway in those other universities.

Let Me Help You NOT Be Stupid.

ME Overly simple thoughts

I was watching a Lifetime movie the other day (don’t judge me) and I actually learned two things. The first is that the Lifetime network is actually capable of producing a movie that stars neither Valerie Bertinelli nor Alyssa Milano. But the second is that Amish people actually can use electricity. They just want you to think they can’t. I don’t know why Amish people would want to perpetuate this lie, but I clearly saw them using electricity in this movie. They rode in cars, too. Yup, I checked, it was Amish people I was looking at.

So I had to do some research on the Internet and see what the deal was with these new-age, technologically advanced Amish people. I mean, how do we know it’s not all a front and the Amish have actually discovered cold fusion and a better smart car? What if they’re all sitting in hi-tech underground bunkers, Tweeting on their iPhones? I think my whole world view would just dissolve.

It turns out they don’t use electricity. Like I said, I checked. But in life threatening emergencies, doctors are allowed to use electricity on them. That just sounds weird. I don’t want people using electricity actually on my person. Regardless, as long as they’re not the ones flipping the switch (or driving the car, although they can accept a ride in a car), they’re still kosher.

Speaking of kosher, it’s kind of like certain denominations of Jews—what, you didn’t know Jewish people had denominations, like they’re all one big Jew or something—that have different beliefs about working on the Sabbath. Some Jews believe it’s a divinely ordained day to set aside a little bit of time for communing with God, and other die-hard Jews won’t even turn on a light switch because that’s technically work. I actually have a New York cousin (can you imagine another me, only not required by law to be polite?) who got in big trouble once as a kid when her parents found out she was charging the Jewish residents of their apartment building to come turn their lights on for them on the Sabbath. Ditto hitting the button in the elevator for them.

The really awesome thing about that employment plan wasn’t her ingenuity since her idea of manual labor only involved the pinkie finger, it was that her clients saw no problem with not only paying her to work, but paying her to go straight to hell for violating God’s command. Do you know how much I would be willing to pay to send key people straight to eternal damnation? How much would getting to pick the eternal verdict on Hitler and Glen Beck be worth to you?

I’ve decided on a similar business model in which my clients pay me to point out that they’re doing something stupid. Driving the car with your unbelted five-year-old in the front seat? That’ll be $12 for me to point out that you’re a slack-assed badgerhole, including the discount for getting to call you that to your face. Walking around with toilet paper stuck to your shoe? Costs you slightly less because a) you may not have known about it and 2) we’ve all been there. I could afford to pay for any future experimental full-face transplants if I could just prevent people from drunk texting their bosses ($50 a pop) or their ex-boyfriends ($35, because he was a loser and I really don’t want you two to get back together). Bitch-slapping you will cost extra.

The Great Outdoors

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I’m writing this from the cozy comfort of campsite #32 somewhere in the lesser hills surrounding Chattanooga, Tennessee. More precisely, I’m supposed to be at campsite #32, but it’s dark out there and it’s muggy-hot with invisible bugs swirling around my head and making threatening trash-talk type statements in my ear about how they’re gonna cut me. So now I’m writing this from the air conditioned shower house. No, I’m not sitting on the toilet, don’t be gross. I’m standing by the sink.

My family camped a lot when I was young, except for a few years in which my dad was not allowed to go camping due to one bad experience. Apparently, this one bad camping weekend was so atrocious that it got him banned from camping. By the United Nations. Or by my mom, I can’t remember. My therapist says we’re not ready to talk about that yet. He could just be trying to get me to stop avoiding the big issues like my death fear of light fixture stores for these silly side anecdotes about camping.

I don’t consider myself a purist about much of anything, so when I pitch my pop-up crawl-in Taj Mahal next to a camper with two and a half baths, I’m not too proud to mooch their wireless internet connection without them knowing. See? Already you’re thinking I might be a little bit of a hypocrite since I’m in my back-to-nature mode with my laptop humming. I fully embrace the portability of electronic devices if it makes camping a lot less like…well, sleeping outside without any of the comforts of home.

My girls and I camp fairly often and we rough it, slightly. You may have noticed that the previous sentence doesn’t contain any mention of my husband, since in his mind roughing it means the cable television got knocked out by a storm and he had to put on a DVD; as he often points out, “I have a job and pay a mortgage for the express purpose of not having to sleep outside.”

Yes, we sleep in a tent, but there’s an inflatable airbed between our butts and the cold, hard ground and we’re positioned close enough to the site’s power outlet so the kids can watch their portable DVD player. Yes, we cook over a campfire, but there’s also a mini propane stove standing by for those times when I’d like to eat sometime within the next hour instead of waiting for the fire to be ready. There’s coffee in the mornings, and that is roughing it because it’s Taster’s Choice instant granules instead of my usual Keurig Caribou Coffee pods. There’s wine, but it came in a cardboard box; may you never fully know the extent of my suffering.

Basically, my approach to camping is the same as my approach to probably everything else in the world: why make it be stupid if you don’t have to? At the neighboring campsite, I got to watch a husband and wife argue for the better part of thirty minutes about how to pitch their tent. There was profanity involved, and that’s not even counting the few times I swore under my breath while watching them struggle. They finally wrangled the thing into a tent shape, sat down angrily in their lawn chairs next to it, and aren’t speaking to each other. It’s going to be really funny when they realize that there’s not a single cooking implement at their entire site because they both thought the other was going to pack the car.

I really love going camping and watching the parents who scream at their children to put away the handheld video games because “we drove all this way to enjoy the outdoors!” I wonder if the parents had something in mind other than throwing rocks at trees for fun, because so far enjoying the outdoors looks a lot like sitting in a folding chair with your eyes closed while the kids take turns shoving each other violently into the creek. And Dad, is that a Blackberry I see strapped to the belt of your L.L. Bean Khaki Wader Shorts? While your kids wander the 30 square feet of your designated campsite in utter boredom, don’t let me catch you in the shower house fielding emails from the office. I can’t afford for your device to slow down my wi-fi connection.

They Make Pills For That

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It’s shocking how rampant hypochondria is in this country. It’s so widespread you would think one of the pharmaceutical companies would develop a pill to treat it. Just imagine the commercial campaign:
“Do you suffer from feelings of feeling ill or injured? Are you unable to sit through an evening of television viewing without relating to and developing every single symptom presented on the forty-three drug commercials you will see throughout the evening? Talk to your doctor about Urnotcrazy for the treatment of mild to moderate hypochondria. Urnotcrazy is not for everyone, especially if you suffer from feelings of pregnancy, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, boredom, lethargy, or stupidity. Side effects may occur, including development of actual symptoms of actual diseases.”

Hopefully it will never come to that, but we have started to throw around medical terms without any basis. Of course, we’ve had school children who toss the word “retarded” into everyday conversation to indicate that something is stupid, as in, that shirt is so retarded. “Lame” has been used in much the same way. I never realized it was a problem that your shirt was unable to walk.

But now adults have dragged the medical dictionary into their outlooks on life. I’m more than tired of hearing fully developed adults claim that they are “a little bit depressed today.” Really? Overnight and without warning, you developed a chemical imbalance that is preventing the synapses in your brain from doing their thing? Holy crap!

Now, college-educated people will forget to bring their grocery lists with them to the store and whine, “It’s just my A.D.D. acting up.” Maybe this is why we’ve started building walk-in medical clinics in strip malls, just to encourage these quick-and-easy diagnoses that everyone seems to have.

My favorite, though, has to be the fully-grown and supposedly capable adult I met for a work event. Her bio information clearly stated that she has Asperger’s syndrome. It also states that her ex-husband, her current boyfriend, and her son all have Asperger’s as well. First, let me tell you, if you ever go visit her house DO NOT DRINK THE WATER. There’s something wrong with the well at her house if that many people come to the property and end up with Asperger’s. Maybe Stephen King can write a book about this lady, where she opens up a bed-and-breakfast with the sole intent on genetically altering people with the lemonade.

I met the woman, got one question out of my mouth, and met the real crux of the problem with her diagnosis. Not only had she self-diagnosed, she was also sadly mistaken in her official diagnosis, which even the best of doctors can do when dealing with an inexact science like psychiatry. This woman didn’t have Asperger’s, she was just a bitch. Pure and simple, she’s just a hateful, thoughtless spewing person with absolutely no filter on her mouth. That’ll be $630 for my services. You’re welcome.

I’ve therefore decided if everyone else can lay claim to sundry ailments without any kind of rational basis whatsoever, I am now afflicted with M.A.D., or Multi-Attentive Disorder. Yeah, I totally just made that up. The serious diagnosis of M.A.D. means that I’ve become so conditioned in this environment we live in that if I don’t have two televisions going, my cell phone ringing, a pot boiling over on the stove, and three kids talking to me (which is really weird because I only have two kids), I can’t concentrate on anything. You can’t know the pain I endure of sitting on my porch overlooking my serene back yard in the early morning, hearing only the birds chirp while I drink coffee; it’s brutal. I can’t concentrate on anything that I have to do when I’m sitting there in the quiet. It’s gotten so bad that when I lie in bed in the dark at nine pm, I immediately fall asleep. I can’t even stay awake long enough to focus on my to-do list for the next day. Fortunately, I’ve sought help for this and scientists are creating a pill as we speak.

Are You Stupid Or Somethin’?

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I have lost all faith in my local school system, which is a real shame because a few years ago I packed up and left my paid-off house and moved my family into a nice, expensive, big new house specifically to get my kids into this awesome school. The school hasn’t done anything entirely wrong, per se, but I just can’t trust these people anymore.

They have decided my first born child is gifted. Sure, read that sentence again. Let it sink in.

Yup, I’m a little worried now. If this child is gifted and possibly poised to become the valedictorian of her graduating class, then there’s some real doorpost-type talent in her school or the administration of said school is handing out academic achievement certificates to everybody and his ugly cousin.

Shut up, you know I don’t really mean that, so don’t call child welfare. Yes, my kid is brilliant, and she’s super talented, and she’s even really, really pretty, but every once in a while this massive brain-fart-slash-logic-hemorrhage happens in her world that makes me wonder if maybe I should get a maternity test.

For example, we recently had a brief exchange that made me think I might need to start baby-proofing the house again, just in case:

ME: Sweetie, would you hand me my driver’s license from over on the table?

GENIUS CHILD: Sure, Mommy. (eerie pause) Mommy? Why does it say on this card that you’re an organ donor?

ME: Um, because I’m an organ donor.

GENIUS CHILD: (pained silence) How long have you been an organ donor???

ME: Ever since I got a driver’s license, so…um…well, carry the one…(I’m not a genius either, I couldn’t do the math)

GENIUS CHILD: (sob) Why haven’t you ever told me?!?

ME: Because I didn’t think you needed to know about it until I was dead.

GENIUS CHILD: (pregnant pause, followed by sniffling) What organ did you donate???

The next day…

GENIUS CHILD: MOMMY!!! WHY are the police arresting that dog?

ME: What??? Where?

GENIUS: That dog! They’re putting the poor dog in the back of the police car! WHY???

ME: Sweetie, he’s a police dog. He rides back because the human policemen get to ride in the front. It just looks better that way.

The next week…

ME: Sweetie, why did you decide to take off your belt and cinch it around your little girl boobs?

GENIUS CHILD: Because I spilled ice cream on my shirt and I didn’t want anyone to see the stain.

ME: And you’re really thinking this looks better than a dot of chocolate ice cream on your brown shirt?

GENIUS CHILD: Yup. I’m just glad the stain wasn’t on my back. Then I’d have to turn the belt around backwards and that would just look weird.

ME: Sweetie, how would you possibly get ice cream spilled on your back?

GENIUS CHILD: Duh, in case I walked backwards into someone who was eating an ice cream cone. Sheesh!

But never fear, I have a theory. For my own sanity and so I don’t wake up screaming during the night after dreaming that my daughter lives in my house until I die and then possibly for a couple of weeks after, I’ve convinced myself that not only is my child way smarter than everyone else’s child except for a mildly underdeveloped common sense, it’s also a biological fact (I make those up all the time) that you get stupid when you’re in the middle of a growth spurt.

Yep. I read it on the Internet. Or, at least, I will read it on the internet once I post this blog.

Here’s my theory: as your muscles and skeleton grow, blood flow is diverted away from the brain to keep the growing parts nice and squishy. If there wasn’t enough blood there, then the growing parts would dry out and crumble when they tried to grow.

Right now, re-read that part, only this time imagine the words flying out of Sarah Palin’s mouth and replace the word “brain” with “maverick.”

Fortunately, my child is barely in junior high school and has already topped five feet, so I think I might be on to something with this theory. She’s not actually dumb, she just grows too much; once she stops growing, she’ll be a National Merit Scholar. This theory works in the reverse, as I happen to be an exceedingly brilliant person and there are still several rides at Disney World that I am not tall enough to ride. Therefore, as the resident smart person in my house, I just declared that idea to be scientific fact.

Honey, You Been Lied To

ME Overly simple thoughts

I’ve been eagerly watching the news in hopes that this tragic story would die down and we could all just get on with our lives, but it seems like that’s not going to happen soon. When something this monumental takes place, as citizens we can’t just look for a band-aid solution and put it behind us. We have to investigate every angle and whip that dead horse until it gets up and rides again.

Yup, another famous man was so enamored of his own genitalia that he felt like more people should be allowed to appreciate its greatness. As a woman, I know of lots of other women who are outraged. I don’t think “rage” is exactly what I feel, mostly I just feel sorry for Congressman Weiner because he’s been operating under false assumptions for years.

Many, many years ago, someone, probably his sweet mother, held him in her lap (let’s hope this was a really long time ago) and told him he could be anything he wanted to be when he grew up. Well, she lied. You cannot run for President with the last name Weiner, and one of the sad truths to come out of this scandal was all the speculation that a lot of people in the higher up parts of politics really thought this guy had a chance at the White House. Even if he didn’t look sort of skinny-rodent-like, his last name is Weiner. That’s not a campaign I can live through.

But that’s not the worst of the lies this poor man was told. The real whopper, the one that was his ultimate undoing, has been told to men all across the planet since the dawn of time. Basically, ever since the first caveman looked down and wondered, “What is this extra part for?” and then figured out what it’s for, men have been SHOWING it to people. Sadly, most of the people who end up having to see it either have one of their own to look at or are people who thank God on a daily basis that they don’t have to put up with having one.

And the lie is that men still think other people want to see it. How many celebrities have been caught showing their extra parts to people, often in public restrooms or darkened movie theaters, only to get arrested for it? Why aren’t there more mammas smacking their sons in the back of the head and saying, “If I ever find out you did something like that, I will make you wish I’d never given birth to you?” And Weiner certainly isn’t the first man to not only show it to someone, but to provide permanent, fossil-record kind of permanent proof that he did it by taking a picture and putting it on the Internet.

What men don’t realize about this lie they’ve been told is that women are not enthralled with looking at them. Think for a minute about the meteoric rise in popularity of Playgirl magazine. It hasn’t happened, has it? There’s a reason for that: it’s not that hard to get a man to take his pants off. You basically just have to ask, you certainly don’t need to go pay $4.99 at the gas station on the other side of the railroad tracks to buy a copy. I know men who would proudly show it to you without even thinking sex might be involved, just because they, too, have been told the lie.

If you’ve never had the chance to peek between the pages of Playgirl, let me enlighten you. It’s full of pictures of very rugged-looking, handsome men, lounging naked on porch swings or in various locales like that. Let me tell you something important, men:

The sexy part of that photo isn’t the penis, it’s the porch swing! Pause and re-read that sentence. If you’re still thinking of flashing people, online or in person, read it again.

Women who can appreciate the beauty of a handsome, sexy man are appreciative of his “charms,” but what’s really got most of the readership excited is the thought that just maybe there will be sex but that afterwards there will be coffee and conversation on that freakin’ porch swing, and oh, my, is that porch overlooking waterfront property? Holy hell, does this sexy man own a lake house? Swoon!

And before I mistakenly give the impression that women are shallow creatures who will have sex with someone just to get access to a wrap-around porch with gleaming hardwood floors, I have to tell you men are just as guilty. That’s why Playboy magazine has pictures of women lounging naked in bed or in showers or sprawled across motorcycles, because men are also hoping that after sex there will be something else to do, like sleep, shower, or ride a motorcycle. My favorite was the photo array of a very beautiful naked woman in a kitchen, because you know after that joyride is over he’s gonna want a sammich.

It is still interesting to me that Weiner was so heinously lied to that he’s not willing to step down as a member of our nation’s legislative branch. What kind of career can you hope to have now, sir? All I can picture about this man now is him sitting naked at the family computer at night, possibly using the same digital camera that he and his wife took on their vacation to the Grand Canyon. I can’t let the man who votes on the nation’s healthcare plan be the same man who is one episode of Chris-Hanson-from-Dateline away from being caught by a camera crew in a fake kitchen trying to meet a girl who was planted by a To Catch A Predator sting operation.

In summary, poor Congressman Weiner is the victim here, the victim of lies perpetrated by society and history itself. Slap him on his extra part and send him home in shame. He might actually have a future ahead of him if he takes on a new identity and changes his name. But I would have recommended that in the first place.