Brief Hiatus

I'm taking a brief hiatus to have surgery...we'll be back to our regularly scheduled madness soon. :)

Pop Culture Car Wrecks

My first real job was an internship that my uncle landed for me. (yay nepotism!)  I didn’t have a car of my own though, so I frequently rode to work with him.  I was a night owl by nature because of my college student lifestyle so I was usually out cold sleeping for the morning commute and somewhere between “zombie” and “concussed goat” as far as my intelligence/alertness went for the commute home.
One day we we were on our way home and I caught a flash of movement down the road.  It was a deer standing smack dab in the middle of the road.  However, my sleep addled brain wasn’t coming up with the word deer to warn my uncle.  I knew I had to say something though.  Finally my brain processed that it was indeed a female deer.  
Me: “Doe!”
Uncle: “D’oh?  What?”
Me: “DOE!”
Uncle: “What are you saying D’oh about?”
Me: *flailing and pointing*
Deer: HOLY CRAP, A CAR!
The deer and my uncle apparently noticed each other at the same moment.  My uncle swerved.  The deer swerved.  Actually, the deer’s evasive maneuvers involved a really spectacular leap which involved using the car as a spring board.
And that’s how a communication breakdown created by pop culture put hoof prints in the trunk of my uncle’s car.

Like a Deranged Easter Bunny

I really feel for the kid in “A Christmas Story”.  Not because of the whole Red Ryder BB gun thing, but because of the rabbit pajamas his Aunt Clara sends him.  I understand the look of horror on his face and the complete humiliation of having to show the gift to his family because I’ve been down that road, with what is possibly an even stranger Christmas gift.
Growing up, I wasn’t the most attractive duck in the pond.  I was short and extremely skinny.  My grandmother firmly believed I was anorexic because if I turned sideways you could practically see through me.  I had a hard enough time breaking ninety pounds, and breaking a hundred seemed like an impossible feat (how I miss those days).  My hair was mousey and had developed what was, to me, a horrifying tendency to curl on its on.  
I was also hopelessly flat chested.  When I was young the taunts mainly focused around ant hills and the like.  As I got older they progressed to the formidable “itty bitty titty committee” and “turnpike” (aka no curves).   The only truly original taunt I can recall is “land you could put a tool shed on” as opposed to “huge tracts of land” - see Monty Python if you miss this one.
My lack of assets was a very sore spot for me throughout my teenage years.  And this didn’t go unnoticed by my sweet, well meaning grandmother. 
I remember that Christmas so well.  Sitting around the tree, opening presents, showing each other what we’d gotten.  I went for a squarish box thinking it was about the size to fit a t-shirt in, tore off the paper, opened it up, and discovered...boobs.  Staring up at me were boobs.  Fake silicon boobs.  My mother said, “What did you get?”  I stared in abject horror and shook my head as my grandfather and uncle watched me expectantly.
Apparently then my grandmother snapped to what I’d opened.  “Oh she can show them to us later!” she said.  I stared at her like she was crazy.  “I figured you could really get some use out of them!” she said.  I stared at her with a mixture of horror and indignation.  “And they’re supposed to feel like they’re real if somebody touches them!” she said.  That did it.  I couldn’t take it anymore.  I thanked her graciously, closed the box, and moved on to the next present.
I did try them on later, with an air of resigned disappointment and a mix of other negative emotions, much like Ralphie and his bunny pajamas.  They were very sweaty and felt like wearing a Halloween mask for an extended period of time.  I had no intention of finding someone to tell me if they felt like they were real - I hadn’t even kissed a boy at this point in my life so it seemed like it would be completely throwing the universe out of order.  And the thought of wearing them on an every day basis...well, take the horror of Kleenex falling out of your stuffed bra and imagine a flesh colored silicone lump falling out instead.  My teenage brain couldn’t even wrap itself around the possibility of recovering socially from something like that.
I couldn’t be a complete jerk about it though.  They had come from my grandmother after all.  I thanked her again.  I promised her I would wear them on special occasions.  And I slipped the box into my closet and forgot about it.

Hell, who wouldn't want one?

My boobs were my figurative pink bunny suit.  This Christmas I’m hoping for my figurative leg lamp.

Religious Metaphors

Similes are great.  Well not so much if you’re trying to learn the English language later in life - then they can be a bit confusing.  But for explaining abstract concepts they’re great.  Yessir, nothing explains an abstract concept like a good old simile.  Well except maybe a metaphor.  But I digress.  There is one thing both similes and metaphors seem to universally fail at describing - religion.

Mmm..saviorlicious.

When I was little and went to church we learned a song that I remember very little of except for the line, “Jesus is like a donut, cause there’s a hole in the middle of my heart.”  This made no sense to me.  Even as an adult it makes no sense to me.  I do remember our Sunday school teacher trying to explain it which really amounted to, “Do you guys understand why Jesus is like a donut?”  This query resulted in a sea of little kids nodding confusedly in the hopes of placating our teacher so we could get back to the “Jesus Loves Me” song because at least that one made sense.  However, I sat and pondered this for awhile.  Jesus wasn’t covered in sprinkles.  He wasn’t high in sugar and saturated fats, and as far as I know he wasn’t deep fried.  I also didn’t understand the hole in the center of my heart.  I blame this part on growing up with my uncle who was a scientist.  I knew from him that holes in your heart generally meant surgery and/or death and that wasn’t likely something Jesus would be promoting.

The power of Christ compels you not to shrivel!

This trend picked up again recently when a friend sent me an email with the following text: “Being a Christian is like being a pumpkin.God lifts you up, takes you in, and washes all the dirt off of you. He opens you up,touches you deep inside and scoops out all the yucky stuff - including the seeds of doubt, hate, greed,etc.Then, He carves you a new smiling face and puts His light inside you to shine for all the world to see.”  Yes, well that’s all fine and good, but everybody knows that pumpkins quickly shrivel up, start to smell bad, and are often tossed in the trash.  Again, not a very godly thing to do.  Some people are proactive and take the seeds to plant them, but if this simile is right then those are seeds of doubt, hate and greed and nobody wants that growing in their garden.  Others are proactive in another way and turn their pumpkin into a lovely pumpkin pie, and I’d like to think this is something God would do although the thought of being mashed up and baked in an oven preheated to 400 degrees doesn’t seem to do much to inspire peace of the soul.

The last good simile came from the deacon I work with.  He told me one of his parishioners said that “Going to church makes me like a sponge - I soak up all the good spirit and then squeeze it out bit by bit during the week.”  His point was that this was a poor comparison because if she missed a week of church she’d get completely dried out and start to smell funny.  My point was that after a few weeks of being filled up and rung out she’d need to be doused with bleach and boiling water to prevent the spread of salmonella.

I have yet to hear astoundingly bad comparisons for other religions but I’m sure they’re out there.  I tried to come up with one of my own in a fit of creativity but somehow the best I got was, “Paganism is like macaroni and cheese.”  I have no idea how it’s like macaroni and cheese other than if you leave us in the oven too long we’ll get crusty and burn but that opens up a whole new level of inappropriateness.

I Fail At Math...

The other day at work I had to spend a few hours in Photoshop fixing a stupid mistake I made.  I had managed to size at least five dozen images incorrectly because I am completely and utterly abysmal at math.  I use a calculator for everything, and in the absence of a calculator I count on my fingers.  My kids have learned to avoid me like the plague when it comes to math homework, lest we both wind up in a fit of tears wailing “Oh god I don’t understand this!!”  My only consolation is I can have a beer after these episodes and remember that I’m good at lots of other things and that my husband does our taxes so I don’t have to worry so much about the math.  My kids have no such consolation so they just go straight to their father and save us all the frustration and heartache.

Definitely how I remember it.

I didn’t used to be like this.  I was actually in the math club in middle school.  I went to math competitions.  I was at peace with math.  The first year of high school passed in similar bliss.  Then came Algebra II. I was optimistic.  My teacher was a petite blonde woman that looked a lot like Mrs. Brady.  She seemed so non-threatening.  I knew I was going to do great in her class.  
I have never been more wrong about anything in my life.  
On the first day of class she told us she wasn’t a teacher - she was a facilitator.  Basically, this meant that she would write our assignment down on the board, sit down at her desk, slip her shoes off, and read a book for the rest of the period.  After the first two weeks of class I was thoroughly lost, so I tried asking a question.
“It’s in the book” - that was always the answer to the questions I asked.  “It’s in the book.”  The book was a nightmare.  I’m really not exaggerating this part.  My nuclear physicist uncle, who was a veritable wizard at math, looked at it and declared that at least 80% of the examples were wrong.  Yet I trudged along until I became convinced that the book wasn’t satisfactory.  I needed an explanation.  So I politely asked for one.  I was rebuffed.  I pointed out that the book was wrong.  I was greeted with shock and indignation that the Holy Textbook of Algebra Things could possibly be wrong.  I persisted.

Sort of how I remember it.  Minus the gun.

I swear my teacher grew claws and fangs at this point...at least that’s how it stands in my memory.  In one brief moment she  went from being the sweet albeit completely incompetent Mrs. Brady clone, to being the MTFH (Math Teacher from Hell).  She whipped around and yelled, “BECAUSE THAT’S HOW IT’S DONE!”  The entire class went silent.  “MY GOD.  MY RETARDED SON IS SMARTER THAN YOU!”
I was completely stunned.  I didn’t even know what to say.  I felt sorry for myself.  I felt even sorrier for her son.  I decided to plug along through the year and get it over with.  I got my first C on a report card in my life.  I was mortified...I had fallen from my pinnacle of geekiness.  I came to dread going to school and was seriously considering perpetually ditching math class, but my inner goody-two-shoes held me back.  
My only saving grace in Algebra II was our final project which counted for a huge percentage of our grade.  I teamed up with two classmates and we put together a stunning, really freaking amazing stop motion animation film teaching the concept of advanced square roots.  It consumed most of my nights for almost two months.  In what I felt was a bit of poetic irony, we had to put the clay figure representing our teacher on a plastic donkey that we had on hand for some reason.  It was really because we’d made the model too top heavy to stand but I felt like it was in some way my own biting social commentary on my teacher’s perpetual jackassery.  We got an A on the project, which I freely admit was the only reason I managed to pass the course.  But I had done it.  I was done.  I would never have to see the MTFH again.
And that summer I discovered by some horrible, cruel, sick twist of fate my Algebra II teacher had started teaching Trig and Analysis and I would be stuck with her the next year as well.  This is consequently why I know absolutely nothing about Trig and Analysis.  All I remember from that class was realizing at the get-go that there was no point even trying.  I remember playing some spectacular games of spades and spending lots of time wondering when my slacker best friend was going to stagger in.  I think I passed thanks to the help of more astute friends who were bad at keeping their papers covered during tests.
These cataclysmic events are probably why I went to my first real math class in college and immediately asked our TA if he knew where I could find a good tutor.  He said, “But you haven’t even tried it yet.”
I said, “No, trust me.  This is going to require a tutor.  Or maybe two.  Possibly an army.”
This is also part of the reason, apart from being told by my professor that Computer Science wasn’t a good field for women, that I majored in English.  English was a much better fit for me.  The only math I had to do was figuring out how many Red Bulls I needed to buy while I read “Their Eyes Were Watching God” for the seventh time.

What's that smell?

When turkeys go bad

Thanksgiving is the one holiday that seems to consistently have things go wrong for my family.  With the exception of a few Christmases, I’ve seen more Thanksgivings ruined than any other holiday...including Arbor Day.  The first one that stands out in my mind is one around the mid eighties or so when my mother managed to mostly remove the tip of her right finger with a can of green beans.  Mom went to the emergency room with my grandfather, the remains of her finger mummified in one of his under shirts.  She came home around nine that night with stitches and we had warmed-up, reconstituted Thanksgiving dinner which was on the whole, not very good.  This was also the Thanksgiving on which I learned that much as I was a tomboy and found scabs and scars cool, stitches were icky and I went to bed with my warmed-up, reconstituted dinner in the back of my throat after convincing my mom to show me the remains of the carnage.
The following year, we got the turkey in the oven just fine, but after about an hour’s worth of cooking we had a hearty chorus of family members saying, “What’s that smell?” and we discovered that our turkey was, in fact, bad.  I remember riding with my grandfather to every grocery store that was open looking for a suitable replacement turkey.  I was also a bit too young to grasp the concept of what a “bad” turkey was, and so assumed that my grandmother caught it in the oven swearing and smoking cigarettes, as this is what my conceptual idea of “bad” amounted to at the time. 
Several Thanksgivings then passed without incident, apart from my uncle traumatizing me with his fascinating trick of finding the turkey heart in the giblet bag and making it beat by blowing into it with a drinking straw.  Lots of people throw the word “trauma” around casually but that image is very clearly branded into my mind so I believe its use is justified.
Then when I was a senior in college my roommate and I had a very fancy idea of having a “dinner party” for Thanksgiving.  The turkey was in the oven for about an hour when once again, we had a chorus of “What’s that smell?” and I discovered that I was far better educated at turkey cooking than my roommate, who had left the bag of giblets inside the bird, which was now filled with plasticized burning turkey guts.
The first year I was married we invited both of our mothers over for Thanksgiving and I was exceedingly proud of how flawless the plan had gone.  We pulled the turkey out of the oven, carved it, and realized it wasn’t cooked.  Back into the oven it went for 30 minutes.  We tried again and discovered it was still not cooked.  The in and out of the oven bit went on till eight at night at which point we were all so ravenous we didn’t particularly care about salmonella and ate the darn thing anyway.
Our last true fiasco came when my grandmother bought us a roaster oven.  We (incorrectly) assumed we could put the turkey in a roasting BAG inside the roaster OVEN.  Makes sense right?  But after about an hour, we had yet another heavenly chorus of “What’s that smell?” and discovered the roasting bag had melted to the sides of the pan, and the turkey, and filled the entire house with a delightful aroma of burned plastic - the kind of smell you used to get when the film strips at school would get caught in the projector.
These cumulative events are why we’re taking our mothers to the Thanksgiving buffet at the casino this year.  And if anybody asks “What’s that smell?” I’ll tell them it’s overheating slot machine and to be quiet and finish their cranberries.

Pond of Death

I grew up in the Southwest.  It’s hot there - a good summer day is 113 degrees or so.  There’s not much in the way of greenery apart from trees that everybody’s allergic to and cactii that nobody wants to touch.  My idea of interacting with water was taking a shower.  This is partly due to the fact that we were in a state of perpetual drought and partly because I spectacularly failed at swimming lessons.  But that’s another story.

Yet another concept I failed at spectacularly.

My whole life I grew up thinking of water as a glamorous, unattainable thing.  And at some point during my childhood when my grandmother became addicted to Home and Garden TV I discovered that people had ponds in their back yards.  Not just the uber filthy rich - normal people like us.
I immediately decided we needed a pond in our back yard.  I could sit by it on lazy afternoons, maybe put some fish in it.  Maybe teach my dog to swim since I had failed.  The possibilities were endless.  I knew from science and school that if you dug deep enough in the ground you’d hit water.  So I took a shovel, went into the back yard and started digging.  This was a long and slow process because, as I’ve mentioned, it was probably close to 113 out.  But still no water.  I started to despair.  At some point my uncle came out and said, “Whatcha doing kiddo?  Digging to China?”
China?  No that couldn’t be right.  If you dug down into the ground far enough you hit water.  Not China.  I sat down dejected, convinced that Unknown Chinese People had already used up all the water in the spot that I was digging.  And then my grandpa told me to fill in the hole before our dog fell in it and broke her back (this same phrase, strangely enough, put an end to many of my childhood adventures and I lived in mortal terror of breaking our dog’s back.  Again, this is another story).
So we didn’t get a pond.  I still never learned to swim but I continued to admire water.  Then I got married.  And one summer my husband got an idea that we should each write down one thing we want to accomplish for the summer on a list on the refrigerator.  The kids wanted to go play mini-golf and go to the obscenely overpriced fun center.  My husband wanted to go to a baseball game.  I don’t know what sort of delusion possessed me as I stood in front of the refrigerator, pen in hand but I scribbled down “Build a pond”.
“Cool!” said the kids.  I think they were having similar visions I had as a child of lazing by the pond, only thankfully we didn’t have a dog they could teach to swim.  “Can we talk about this?” said the husband.  I think he was having visions of having his yard turned into an aquatic war-zone.
But I persisted.  I picked a spot under the flowering pear tree that looked pretty and idyllic and was currently full of ugly useless rocks.  I went to Home Depot and bought a pond liner, a pump, and a remarkably tacky plastic waterfall.  And we drove out into the mountains and got some large rocks that we had planned to use in the design.  And after a few hours of hard work, a good deal of complaining, and one more trip to Home Depot because I hadn’t worked out the power for the pump in my excitement, I had a pond.
I was in heaven...I had a wonderful aquatic thing all to myself.  It was my pond of wonder and amazement.  Then the algae started growing.  My pond of wonder was suddenly a pond of stinkiness and greenness.  I researched online and discovered that you could allegedly control algae by putting barley in your pond.  So I did - and my pond went from having algae in it to having algae in it that was participating in an extended hay ride.  So I decided to get tough.  I bought enough chemicals to give every pool in every Olympic village ever built a shock treatment.  The algae went away but standing too near the pond also produced a peculiar burning sensation in the eyes, nose, and every other sensitive orifice.
And for awhile everything was peaceful.  Until one day I went home and discovered a tarantula had drowned in my pond.  I was horrified, partly because I had never seen a tarantula this far into the city but mostly because it was in my pond.  I’m not terribly fond of spiders, so deciding what to do with the expired arachnid took some thought.  I certainly didn’t want to touch it.  So I took a shovel with a very long handle and gently scooped it up.  It may have been the wind or my imagination but at this point I think the tarantula twitched.  I shrieked (which I’m not prone to doing) and jerked the shovel and the tarantula carcass sailed over the back wall into the neighbor’s yard.  I silently prayed that my neighbor wouldn’t go into his yard any time soon and if he did that he’d be astounded by the prey that the extremely large crows were dragging in.
Then came another period of relative peace wherein my pond returned to being a beautiful, idyllic, chemical filled oasis.  Then the kamikaze lizards arrived.  We’d always had lizards in our yard, but never any with suicidal tendencies.  Yet every day for almost a month I would come home to find a drowned lizard in my pond.  I was much less squeamish about the lizards, so they would be scooped gently into Walmart bags and thrown away.  I wasn’t pleased and began to think of ways to deter the lizards from meeting a horrible, chemical filled demise.  Apart from posting very tiny “No Diving” signs I was stumped.  Then the coup de grace came.  I went out to scoop out the day’s lizard and found a dead bird in my pond.  I’m very fond of small animals.  The lizards were on the borderline of upsetting, but the finch was too much.  

I vaguely remember Eddie Izzard doing a bit about a “Pond of Death” in his discussion of British films and that was exactly what I had created.  A Pond of Death.  My beautiful idyllic liquid thing was now a mechanism for murdering the neighborhood animals.  The tarantula had been worrisome.  The lizards disconcerting.  But an adorable, fluffy (strikeout) feathery thing?  This was too much.  I think somewhere in my mind I expected to come home and find puppies or bunnies floating in it next, although that was highly improbable.  I believe at this point, I called my husband in tears because I was convinced I had become some sort of genocidal pond owning maniac.
That winter we drained the pond and dug it out.  When we dumped it over in the grass we found the body count not only amounted to what I had previously found, but countless lizards, unidentifiable bugs, and the largest and ugliest slug I had ever seen.  I apologized to my husband for the gaping hole in his otherwise pristine yard and resolved to reduce my home beautification projects to things that wouldn’t result in mass murder.