Dudes! Double-yoo-tee-eff is up with still not being able to write here on the regular?
Spring semester is officially over and I’m happy to report that I did very well, grades-wise. However, I’m taking a summer class and that started Monday. It’s only six weeks long and it’s the last required course that I have for my MA (just one more elective in the fall!).
The class itself is fine. It’s an organizational behavior course through the business school that is mostly made up of undergrads. I am the sole humanities dork. The rest of those guys are in engineering and chemistry and computer science and iwillmakemoremoneythanyouism.
There are many hilarious bits in this whole thing. Like how someone actually snickered when I stated that I was a professional writing person. And today when we were talking about these principles of human resource management that touted such crazy notions as paying good wages, not treating them like shit, etc. The instructor asked what the overarching philosophy was of the principles and the undergrads were pulling out big words like…uh…”derivative” or something. And I raised my hand and said, “Uh, that employees are people and not batteries?” My classmates got that look of faint recognition on their faces. I hope I didn’t blow their minds too much.
There’s also a vague (so far) anti-union feel to the readings, which isn’t at all surprising. I’m just mostly amused by the language used. Like, “Such-and-such manager was successful because he was able to communicate with the labor people.” I get the impression that these young business students are, perhaps indirectly, taught that people in unions are all barbaric assholes who want nothing more than to harsh your capitalist mellow.
Me, my mom, and my dad, circa 1992
I am not union and, because of my line of work, probably never will be. But many of my family members and friends are and it’s a little troubling to think that their future managers are being brought up with this attitude. I’m not saying that all unions are perfect and I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of assholes in unions. Just…you know…remember that these are PEOPLE (there’s that word again) that we’re talking about.
ANYWAY, I was going to tell you all about this little confrontation that I had with the manager of this bar that the husband was playing records at on Saturday, but I’m almost over it. And, yes, I wrote angry and vulgar couplets about him and his mother and it made me feel better.
We’re going to Detroit this weekend for the music festival and I kind of agreed to take one of the quizzes online at 10:30 on Friday morning, when I will most likely be hungover from our first night in Detroit and post-Penguins festivities, so that should be cute.
Sometimes, mothers keep used Kleenex in their pockets. And sometimes, mothers use their spit to clean the faces of their children.
And sometimes, mothers put their spit on a tiny, clean corner of a used Kleenex from their pockets to clean the faces of their children.
And the wails of disgusted protest that the children emit secretly give us pleasure because, “Haha, twerp, that’s why you should wipe your face when I tell you to. Now you have slobber and possibly boogers on your face.”
If I had written out an itinerary for yesterday, it would look something like this:
8:30ish – 9:30 a.m.: Wake up, swear a little for not getting up a little earlier since the baby has Little League parade in an hour. Rush through breakfast and dressing and whatnot.
9:30 – 10:30 a.m.: Parade through neighborhood with the baby and 200 other cuties in knee socks and cleats. Forget to put sunscreen on. Face, chest, and arms burn quite nicely.
10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: Loiter around ball field for awhile, waiting for LL season opener to begin. My parents, my grandmother, my husband’s parents, and his grandmother all show up for the big day. I am relieved to see my dad looking and acting pretty healthy, despite being in the midst of chemo. Everyone gets along, which is amazing, and I choose to chuckle at my grandmother’s paranoid insistence that my son stand absolutely still to minimize his chances of getting horrifically hurt by running down the hill and climbing the bleachers. Local politicians are politicking, shaking hands, and helping to hand out hot dogs and Little Hugs, including the mayor. I notice that after a certain amount of time spent amongst “my people,” I start to sound like Gina from Greg & Donny.
12:00 – 2:30 p.m.: Play ball! Baby does well in his first real game. Even takes the opportunity to slide into home. Teammate hits a grand slam (the Pirates should consider hiring him) and their team wins. Sweet! Somewhere in this time period, my cat comes across a half-drunk cup of chocolate milk that the baby left sitting in the living room and knocks it onto the floor, leaving a nice brown splash pattern on the rug that will dry and set very nicely while we’re gone.
2:30 – 3:00 p.m.: Run home, shower my dusty kid and send him off with husband’s dad to go bike-riding so I can work on homework.
3:00 – 5:00 p.m.: Half-heartedly work on final project for school. Try not to freak out over how much crap I have to do in the next two weeks.
5:00 – 5:30 p.m.: Cat curls up on my notebooks, gives me a look and purrs. My eyelids start to droop.
5:30 – 6:00 p.m.: I give in to the cat’s hypnotic powers and take a much needed nap.
6:00 – 7:00 p.m.: Get up and shower since the husband will be home soon and we’re going on a date to the drive in to see Adventureland. Husband arrives home and cleans the car, specifically the windshield so we can see the movie, while I’m fighting with a pair of shorts that totally fit me last year but are now throwing up a lot of resistance. My waist, much like the universe, is ever-expanding.
7:00 p.m.: Husband and I set off toward the movie. I’m excited since I’ve never been to the drive in.
7:30 – 8:15 p.m.: Hit horrendous traffic due to a poorly-planned detour taking motorists away from construction happening en route to the airport. We go back and forth on whether or not we can actually make the movie, which starts at 8:10. We finally decide to just drive out there and if we miss it we’ll go to a later showing at a regular theater near our house.
8:15 p.m.: Hear hideous squealing of brakes behind us and then suddenly realize that my head has tried to go from upright to 90 degree angle with my body, somehow without taking any path between the two positions. I say things like, “Oooohhhh,” and “Auuuughhhh,” as I realize that we were harshly rear-ended.
8:16 – 8:30 p.m.: Of course, our new insurance cards are not in the car but we get the other guy’s information. I eventually stop shaking. This is the second car accident I’ve been in. The first was when I was 16 and riding with a newly-licensed friend. That accident was so minor that I didn’t even realize what had happened until my friend tearfully filled me in. This one, while still very minor, was much more frightening and painful and gives me new perspective on how much serious car accidents suck. I burned my foot a few years ago by spilling boiling water on it. It was a small area but was tremendously painful and took months to heal and gave me new perspective on how much it sucks to be a serious burn victim. So, burns and car accidents are officially off of my bucket list because fuck that ish.
8:30 – 9:00 p.m.: We’re definitely way too late for the drive in movie, so we make our way to a theater a few miles away. We have some time to kill, so we go to Sonic and I note that at least we’re getting some drive in experience tonight.
9:00 – 9:15 p.m.: We get ready to make our way across the shopping center to the movie theater and discover that the car won’t start. AWESOME. Husband says, “Fuck it. We’re going to the movie. I don’t care,” and enlists a fellow Sonic patron to help him push the car into the parking lot across the way.
9:15 – 9:30 p.m.: Husband and I walk to the movie theater and get into a quick argument because he says something that I don’t hear, gets mad at me for not hearing, and WON’T JUST REPEAT WHAT HE SAID. GAAAHHHH.
9:30 – 9:45 p.m.: Wait in line for tickets because the theater made the brilliant managerial decision to have one ticketing booth open on a Saturday night. Husband goes in to grab seats while I go to the concession stand, which also has only one register open. I come very close to starring in my own episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm while the young girls in front of me order 60 overpriced items and then have to rethink their entire order when they hear that the Icee machine is broken. A teenager with a pitiable case of acne and a large crystal around his neck opens another register. The people in front of me go to him, while the rest of us stay in one line, wordlessly agreeing to alternate registers as they become available. Except for the guy behind me who goes to the new register, essentially cutting in front of me. I hate humanity.
9:46 p.m.: I angrily shuffle into the theater to find that I’ve missed the first five minutes of the movie. Fucking whatever, man.
9:46 – 11:30 p.m.: The movie is good and very, very sweet and makes Kennywood look even more magical and awesome. I love Pittsburgh.
11:30 – 12:00 p.m.: We wait by our car for the father-in-law to arrive with jumper cables. We study the damage to the rear bumper and the husband says, “I wonder if that will make it hard to close the trunk.” As he says this, he opens the trunk, which makes an alarming THWONK noise. The husband grins at me, because we both know that the trunk will no longer be closing. He tries to get me to stand on the bumper while he jumps on the trunk lid. I fear for my toes and the few people still at the shopping center wonder what the hell we’re doing. The husband and I have to chuckle at the day’s series of events and I give him some kisses because we went on a date, dammit, in spite of everything.
12:00 – 12:30 p.m.: The father-in-law arrives with jumper cables and we’re able to drive home. When we finally arrive at our house, five hours after we left to go see a two-hour movie, I realize that I wasn’t wearing my seat belt, despite being in a car accident just a few hours prior.
Sunday: Hoping absolutely nothing happens today. Edit: Nevermind. The baby is having breathing trouble and is now passed out in bed. Highly unusual. AWESOME.
Still here. Still trudging through the last bit of this semester.
My cat sometimes sleeps on my pillow and half the time he accommodates my head, curling himself around it. The other half he somehow manages to push my head off of the pillow.
This morning saw us in the latter configuration. When my alarm started going off, I started hitting the snooze button. This apparently annoyed my cat because not only was I crowding the spot he wanted to sleep on, but my stupid time-telling thing was making noise.
He let me know of his displeasure by putting a paw on my head and lightly digging his claws into my scalp every time that the alarm went off.
All of that is to say: at least one being is looking out for me (kinda). I’ll be back around here soon.
The husband came home late last night (or early this morning) after playing records at the Shadow Lounge. I was still up because I watched the 12:30 airing of Grey Gardens and had grumpily started watching 300 afterward. I say, “grumpily” because I don’t really like that movie, but it looks cool and I’m a sucker for ripped dudes in capes and diapers. I am human, after all.
The husband plopped on the couch and we murmured half-asleep greetings to each other. “Watching 300?” he asked. “Yeah,” I sighed, just as Xerxes and Leonidas were giving each other their best bitch faces for the first time.
“Dude, you know what?” said the husband. “I had totally forgotten about this but I had this wild dream…must’ve been months ago…that I was holed up in a bar with a bunch of people and Xerxes was attacking us.”
A few seconds of silence followed as my jaw dropped.
“Dude, that was an episode of South Park,” I said, starting to cry with laughter.
“….Was it?”
“Yes! Oh my god. You’re like Bill Murray’s character in Scrooged.”
Still more rough days trying to get through this semester. Yeah, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s some old lawn furniture and a bear and some marbles and a field of sharpened bamboo between here and there.
But obviously, what I have to go through in the next few weeks is nothing compared to what othermamas have to go through the rest of their days. So, in recognizing how very, very lucky I am and how not even the greatest deed would make me worthy of my kid, I want to remember this goofy little moment that we shared earlier this evening that might otherwise be forgotten if I hadn’t gotten that harsh reminder to do whatever I can to relish it.
For Easter, we gave the baby a few books out of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, including the Do-It-Yourself Book. He was filling out the page on his predictions and got stuck on, “In twenty years, cars will run on ________.” The baby thought about this for awhile and finally said, “Cars will run on…sidewalks!”
I feel the need to warn you that this post is kind of potty-humor-centric. Sort of a Farrelly Brothers/Judd Apatow movie wrapped in bacon and deep fried. It’s just a collection of weird/gross/immature things that have happened in the past few days.
Under the category of Boogers
The baby likes to help me cook, which is usually a good activity for us to do together (though the oppressively small kitchen and its tendency to drive me to drink sometimes make this impossible because my dear son if you don’t GET OUT OF MY WAY RIGHT NOW I SWEAR TO GOD!). The other night I was making pizza cobbler and the baby was helping me to put the dough on top.
I’ve had a tough time getting him to remember to cover his mouth when he sneezes and when he does I like to point out that that was a good thing. You can already see where this is heading, right? So, he sneezed and covered his mouth…with the hand that was holding a piece of dough.
“Um, it’s good that you covered your mouth but try to do that with the hand that’s NOT holding our dinner. kthxbi.”
Under the category of Crotches
The baby was goofing off the other night while I was nagging him to do something…probably going to bed or getting a shower or something.
And he just wound up and punched me in the crotch.
Like…
It wasn’t a hard punch, so it didn’t hurt. It was more dramatic sparring with a slightly slowed-down, kung fu, “HHHWWWWAAAAHHHH!” flare. But still. Demoralizing.
But I paid it forward. The husband and I have a tendency to act like brothers; lots of pinching and noogies and wedgies and trash-talking. This recently prompted the baby to ask us why we married each other if we hate each other so much. (Spite.)
This afternoon, as we were heading into the baby’s school to pick him up, we were engaged in an epic battle of Stop-Touching-Me-I’m-Not-Touching-You-See-I’m-Not-Touching-You, when I ended things by punching him in the crotch. PWNED.
Under the category of Pubes
I really dislike stray pubes. They’re certainly my least favorite aspect of cleaning the bathroom and I get really skeeved if I come into contact with them. I just hate how they’re so unapologetically coarse and all, “Nyah, I was on a crotch and now I’m on your towel!”
I was in the shower earlier and as I was rinsing off my washrag I noticed a pube on my hand. Ick. So I stuck my hand under the water to rinse it off…and the spray shot it off my hand and right into my eye. I had to dig a pube out of my eyeball. Like, who has that happen to them? Only me. I’m still so irritated about it.
Back when a dude broke into our house, and after the initial shock wore off, the husband and I had some questions. Like, why would the guy take the cumbersome and not very valuable DVDs and not the lightweight and higher-street-value Wii? (By the way, ne’er-do-wells who may be reading, that is NOT an invitation to finish what that jackass started.) The cop chuckled and shook his head at our naivete.
“You would steal that because you have common sense. Criminals like this guy do NOT have common sense,” he explained.
A lack of common sense is probably responsible for the events that transpired earlier this evening.
The baby’s baseball practices started tonight. The husband and I were chilling on the bleachers, giggling at our scrawny kid rounding the bases. A mom behind me yelled at someone: “GO FIGHT SOMEWHERE ELSE! THERE’S KIDS HERE!” I jerked around and saw two young men, one no longer wearing a shirt, walking toward their cars and continuing to argue. The husband and I shook our heads at their stupidity and went back to watching the practice.
I turned around again to see if they were still arguing and noticed that one of the guys was pointing something at the other guy. Something silver. And shiny.
“Hey,” I said to the husband. “Does that guy have a gun?”
In retrospect, my reaction to this new information was really puzzling. I turned back around and went back to watching the practice, not really concerned that someone was brandishing a firearm just a few yards from where my son was. Luckily, the other parents had their BAD THING thinking caps on and yelled at the coaches to get the kids out of the immediate area and started calling 911.
I turned back around and watched the rest of the events unfold. From what I could gather, the two guys were fighting over a woman and there may have been some custody issues. Other parents went over to yell at the guy, but I tend to stay away from people with guns. Yosemite Sam’s girlfriend became irritated with the confrontational parents and whined, “He put the gun away! Gawd! What’s your problem?”
No common sense. I don’t know who shows up at a kids’ baseball practice to start some shit. I don’t know who brings a gun to a kids’ baseball practice. I don’t know who draws a gun at a kids’ baseball practice. And I really don’t know who asks such a dumb fucking question as, “What’s your problem?” when a gun is pulled with 50 kids, including presumably one of their own, nearby.
Posting is still slow around these parts, I know. I’ve been working my dupa off this semester, this past week in particular, and had a mini-meltdown Wednesday morning. Just one of those, “I…just…don’t want to do all of this anymore! Hwwheeee!” kind of crying episodes that I have at least once a semester. I met with one of my instructors this morning to go over some XML basics and was wildly comforted that she didn’t think that I was a total moron. She has a daughter around the same age as the baby, and works, and teaches, so I think she recognized that, “I’m falling apart,” look in my eyes. I don’t honestly think that I’m going to crash and burn, but I guess I don’t always believe it.
Anyway, when I do have a minute here and there, I don’t feel like voicing anything, preferring instead to retreat to quiet. I spent a few hours the other day looking at the pictures on Shorpy and marveling at how alive the pictures seem and how a little twitch in the universe could send me there.
I love this picture of Pittsburgh in 1941 so much.
rainy pittsburgh 1941
It’s raining, of course, just as it has been here for the past few days. But if you lean in, you can almost hear the drops slapping onto the street and bouncing off the roofs of the cars. I can almost smell the refreshment of an early summer storm and grin because it’s almost here.
Thanks to Facebook, I’m pretty close to collecting every person I’ve ever met in my entire life. The connections that I have to people that add me now are getting more and more fuzzy, like, “Oh, yes, we did have World History together in 9th grade. What have you been up to since that day that we learned about the Battle of Hastings? Harold FTW, right?”
I kind of like it, though. I mean, I imagine I should be lamenting the time just a year or so ago when, if I reflected on so-and-so, all I could do is wonder what they were up to. At best, I could Google them but those almost always led me to pointless genealogy sites. Now I can quickly find out who they married, how many kids they have and, usually, what they’re doing at any given moment.
But I think it’s kind of nice, at least for a social phobe like me, to have that bare minimum of contact at all times. I get to avoid that awkward conversation if I happen to bump into someone on the street: “Oh, hi! Great to see you. How’ve you been? Okay, I’ve got to get going/do something other than this.”
Anyway, my favorite thing to do now is if someone from high school adds me on Facebook and they’ve turned out to be hardcore Republicans, I read their wall back to November 4 to see if they got all pissy.
What? I’ve never made any claims to being sane or mature.
Also, my kid startled me by knocking over a chair in the dining room. I replied, “Yo, what the FUCK?” I’m just going to start apologizing now for how he turns out. He never stood a chance.
