Category: Uncategorized
Black Pants
Jackpot!
Finding a pair of pants that fit on the clearance rack!
him: Why do you have ten pairs of black pants
her: I don’t.
him (holding up one pair): Yes you do. I see them all lined up right here.
her: They are not all black.
him: This looks like black.
her: That one is my skinny off-black.
him: What?
her: And this one is my day-before-my-period very-black
him: hmmm
her (pointing to pants one by one): This one is my very-important-business-meeting tweed-black,
sexy-out-to-dinner spandexy-black, nobody-will-see-me-at-the-grocery-store cotton-black . . .
him: ok, ok, nevermind
2012, The End. . . the sequel
Really, there was a movie out about 2012 – y’know the one with my dreamboat John Cusack, where the world ended by literally falling apart. And for awhile there, it was looking a bit like that from my perch here in the ‘burbs.
But we muddled through and we sit in the middle of the road now, looking for the next apocalypse.
The truth is, every year is a whole series of tiny explosions, isn’t it? That is what we call “life” in my world. Welcome to the year of superstition, gun fear, hyper-anti-bullying, litigation for blamelessness, and the coming of the end of the world . . . again and again.
In other words, welcome home.
Five ways to alienate friends and relatives in an election year…or anytime, for that matter
1. Bring up the most controversial subject you can think of. Make it one that affects you personally. Do this preferably at a dinner where there is much wine and beer being served.
2. Become highly offended by a selected word that someone else used as part of the discussion. Choose one that has a big listing in the thesaurus.
3. Make derogatory remarks about jews, blacks, hispanics, asians, or white people or chose a religion to bash (lean toward the categories you don’t fall into yourself).
4. Only allow others to say the first three or four words of each sentence before cutting them off. Assuming what they are going to say with the rest of their thought just saves time.
5. If you perceive that anyone might be disagreeing with you, accuse them of being drunk and/or crazy.
Extra tips to help you along:
– Remember, yelling makes people understand better.
– Having the very last word makes you right.
Birthday Dinner Choices
The boy says, “Golden Corral for my birthday dinner.”
I say, “How about Olive Garden?”
“Golden Corral”
“Taco Bar?”
“Golden Corral”
*sigh* – “Do we have to go there?”
“But MOM! They have a CHOCOLATE FOUNTAIN!”
Pause
“Oh . . .Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
Post Vacation Depression Delayed Due to Havoc at Home
The excitement of travel usually ends with a big dip in adrenaline once you get back home. So much happens in such a short period of time that we feel as if a lot more time actually passed.
“What?” we think, “It has only been two weeks?”
After all, the normalcy of walking into your office and seeing the lady who has worked as the boss’ admin sitting at the same desk, day after day suddenly seems weird. So much changed inside of you! You saw new places. You experienced new people. You learned exciting histories. How could this woman possibly still be date stamping incoming mail?
It’s just depressing. But it’s also totally normal.
In that two weeks, you also worry that since so much is happening to you, there are all kinds of horrible things that might happen to your home in your absence. It might be broken into, burnt to the ground, caved in, or otherwise messed up. Usually, it never is. It is just like the lady at the office
But, this time, my arrival home from vacation was a little different.
We came home a few days ago from two weeks away — a week after a huge storm appeared in the midwest and uprooted trees, blew roofs off of houses, and knocked out the electricity in four states. Our house was NOT in the same order that we had left it. But we were lucky. There was no bashed in roof or anything, just the aftermath of the insipid electrical flatline.
This equaled six days of hot, enclosed rooms where wood floors, brown rice and ivy plants seemed to converge. Then, when the electricity was restored to our neighborhood, our air conditioner did not come back on. We came back three days after that, giving it all time flourish into a full-fledged jungle.
The interior of our home during that time became a tropical biology experiment. New style bugs emerged from the pantry and you don’t even want to know about the inside of the refrigerator. At least it was an excuse to do a total clean out where I inspected each item, thinking, “I should have thrown this out six months ago anyway!”
So, I admit, this is a high class problem: “Help me!! It’s so hot in here! There is a mosquito in the living room! I cannot power up my iPod! I’m in hell!”
Meanwhile, I just came from a locale where most people live in huts with dirt floors and grass roofs and no air conditioning – ever.
After a few days of opening and shutting windows, cleaning, cleaning out, and vacuuming, we are back to the old normal.
This actually turned out to be a good readjustment back into the real world after a vacation. The post-vacation depression is probably coming as the excitement wears off. But I’m ready for it. It’s normal.
When the going gets tough, the tough break out the old world methods.
So, in the suburban family life files, living on one income with the kids, house, and dog, we’ve finally entered into large appliance maintenance hell. This is when you have to pay hundreds of dollars on fixing old appliances and cars because you cannot afford to buy new ones, but you can’t exactly afford to fix the old thing either.
Today’s crisis involved the clothes dryer.
After ten years and living through four household moves, the heating thing-a-ma-jig and the motor finally gave out. So, spousal arguments ensued between the idea of spending money to fix the damn thing or to buy the cheapest new dryer out there and hope it’s not a lemon. The former option would at least give us a few more years of use until I found more paying work and could afford an upgrade to a better dryer. The latter option might have us buying another one in a few years anyway. The math of fixing vs buying gave me a headache, but the bottom line was, either way most of it was going on the credit card.
So, I called the repair guy. Unfortunately, I’ve already developed a fine working relationship with the repair guy over the washer and the oven. His name is Jose.
Jose arrived and took the thing apart. As it was laid out on the floor of the hallway that I refer to as my laundry room, Jose showed me the motor and the drum, which were both in obvious decay.
On his way into the garage to find the gas line, Jose noted that we had a “pony bike.” This is a child sized, but very real motorcycle. It looked like a miniature Kawasaki. This was not the subtle and cute European motorbikes that go about ten miles an hour. This was an actual, mini road chopper. It was a bad idea when they made these things. I mean, really — little kids on real motorcycles, speeding along at 50 mph? And it was an even worse idea when my husband found and bought this one at a garage sale for $40.
“The boy can learn to ride it to school!” he said, referring to our 7 year old son.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
It languished in the back of our garage for two years, until Jose spied it.
“Ah, you have a pony bike!” he informed me, excitedly.
“Yes, we’ve only used it once.” I said.
“They don’t make those anymore.”
I gave him a sideways look. He was enthused.
“Do you want it?” I asked him.
“What?”
“Yeah, are you interested in making a trade?”
He stared at me for a minute. This concept was foreign to him.
Let me interject here that I live on a somewhat affluent street in a somewhat affluent neighborhood in the most affluent county in my state. People don’t generally bicker with gardeners and repairmen over a couple hundred dollars.
I drive an old grey mini-van and have no flowering shrubs in my yard. I wear solid color shirts and capri pants a lot. I appear to most as a rather uninspired middle class, conservative mom. These people don’t know me very well.
The back story is longer than I’d prefer to go into here, but I will say that I don’t have a job at the moment and am trying to write a novel. . . and that I am the descendent of Armenian merchants and traders. I grew up seeing some of the best hagglers in the world in action, namely, my mother and grandmothers. Over the years, my negotiating abilities might have waned a bit, but when the chips are down, we revert to our ancestry.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll trade you your labor costs for the bike.”
I knew Jose was a one-man shop. He didn’t know what to make of this offer. He was still staring at me, doing the math in his head. Brand new, those pony bikes cost around $700. He charged about $60 per hour labor and would be here more than two hours doing the work.
“You order the parts direct?” he asked.
“Done.” I said and held out my hand for him to shake – the old world way.
Now, the dryer works, my credit is good, and the bike is out of my garage.
Last Day of School Rain
My son looked out the window just now and said, “I’m so depressed!”
He has a good reason.
It is the last day of school. A half day. First day of summer. . . . and it’s raining.
The big plan was to get everyone out to the playground near us that is made entirely of old tires. It’s a pretty cool place. The girl scout troop and other friends were all coming and now?
Guess, what? They are coming to MY HOUSE instead.
and now, the boy says, “What a rip off!”
. . . out of the mouths’ of babes.
And this is why you should not take Garine camping
Nobody in their right mind would ask me to go camping with them. . . And this is why many of my best friends, my husband and various scouting groups have done just that. I would not love you if you were not a little bit nuts.
This particular camping weekend was instigated my those pesky Cub Scouts that are always tying knots, waving around pocket knives, and pushing caramel popcorn at you, i.e. my son.
In keeping with the Isassi activity theme of “rain-will-follow-you-everywhere,” there was a tornado watch and warning on the eve of our trip. This cleaned out the campsite of any debris and other various camping wimps.
We arrived in the morning to a sparkling campsite and blue skies. We also arrived very late for the mandatory cub guided hike had left already – bad camper moment #One.
My husband, the allknowing camper who never allows us to forget that he used to “wilderness camp” in the scrub mountains of northern Mexico with nothing but a bottle of Vodka, one match, and a pocket knife, headed up our family hike – not via the wide and luxurious path taken by the scouts, but “Orange Trail” – marked as such for avid hikers. This path included scaling large boulders and tripping over smaller ones. My kids, as mountain goats are called sometimes, had no problem with this. I, on the other hand, had somewhat of a problem with this. I wound up as the baby sister left behind, serially calling out, “Hey, guys! Wait for me!” as they disappeared around a bend.
Eventually, we arrived at a beautiful waterfall called Cunningham Falls. The sign said that people should not attempt to climb the rocks around the falls. As you can see from the photo here, nobody heeded that warning.
My daughters flung off their shoes the second we arrived, saying they wanted to use their toes as God intended — to hang on to the side of rocks for dear life. I said, “Don’t come crying to me when you cut your feet and lie bleeding to death in the killer babbling brook!”
They, in their bare feet, waded across the creek. Me, in my sneakers and socks, tried to pick and hop my way across. I made it . . . sort of.
That is actually me standing in the middle of the above photo. You are not close enough to see that I am holding a sopping wet pair of sneakers and soggy, white socks. The only sneakers and socks I had brought with me on the camping trip. Bad camper moment #Two.
The air was warm. The sky was sunny. The water was cool.
After some splashing and climbing and sunning and dipping, we headed back to the legal side of the creek. The kids found their dry shoes, slipping them on easily before returning to the forest. I rolled on my wet socks and shoes and made squish noises all the way back to the campsite.
Once back, we started up a fire for dinner. I had one of my scathingly brilliant ideas! I put my socks on the fire ring to dry. They were far from the actual fire. They would be dry in a flash and I would have warmth for my feet when night fell and it got cold out. This turned out to be bad camper moment #’s Three through Ten:
My socks caught on fire!
I pulled them off the ring, beating them on the ground, since I could not stomp on them in my bare feet. My family watched with their mouths hanging open. Then, they laughed at me.
I had to call to another scout mom to beg for socks to rescue my chilly tootsies. Good thing we have cell phones for these emergencies.
We Are The Model Bully
There is a big media blitz on bullying going on. There’s a movie coming out. Lady GaGa started a foundation. Radio and TV are filled with horror stories as the commentators act surprised and appalled.
The number one tip for parents to keep in mind when raising their kids is that kids will do what you do, not what you say. Unfortunately, the messages our actions send, as parents and as a whole society, are too often the exact opposite of our lip service.
Why do we expect kids to be all loving and kind to each other when everything they see in society is not? Bart Simpson spends all his time bullying his own father, and we find it funny. Every movie and TV show geared for teens is about how to be conniving, tough, or overly competitive. Batting around insults, usually directed at one unfortunate character is the norm. Or, even worse, we revel in the bad behavior of whichever reality TV star of the day has done something violent or otherwise mean. The fact that there is even a show called “Bad Girls Club” on cable is enough to reveal that we, as a collective, do not promote the concept of getting along.
The current political campaigns are another grand demonstration of how to bully. Each side spends a lot of time and energy directing verbal arrows at the other, designed to encourage public hate. This includes digging up embarrassing history about the candidates to spreading lies that slam the opposition’s dignity. These are vicious and continuous verbal assaults on one individual, backed by some kind of gang (here the political party or Super PAC). I’m sorry, but that is the definition of bullying. And in this case, the one who is the best at calculated bullying, often wins. Few of us in the real world could withstand it.
As a country, we lord the threat of violence over other counties. Basically saying, do what we say or we’ll pound you. Then we wait for countries, like Iraq, after school and screw them up.
Then there is the realities that don’t get broadcast so much until it blows up. Let’s start with the mortgage debacle of the 2000’s. To get what they wanted, people in the banking industry lured in unsuspecting people who should never have qualified for a home loan and gave it to them. First acting all nice and friendly, then turning on them and ruining their lives. Is that not bullying?
In the office, I’ve often seen people – well dressed and educated adults – engage in career backstabbing, rumor mongering and office politics in order to put others down and get ahead in business. This especially comes screaming out when the prospect of layoffs is on the table or you are competing for clients.
So why are we so surprised and when we find out that kids are bullying each other? We act like we were never in school ourselves and that we don’t promote and witness bullying on a global scale.
I think it’s great that people are finally talking about it and actually saying out loud that it needs to change, but I have a hard time seeing how that is going to happen if WE don’t change our own actions. And, I don’t really see that happening anytime soon.
Garinè THE Writer 