Category Archives: Ma’am, try not to get so worked up.

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From: naptimewriting@grouchy.com

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Go away. Leave me alone. I don’t care about your sale or your pending legislation or your opinion about things or your new address or your recent newsletter. I don’t want prophesies or doomsday or light reading or forwarded jokes. I do not want your daily deal.

I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.

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You may send me good thoughts and joyous greetings that do not hit my inbox. You may smile or nod or wave. In person. You may always comment on my unnecessarily verbose blog. But you may never email me again.

That is all.

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—-This message originally sent by naptimewriting June 29, 2011. Unsubscribe.—-

If it gets me a week off, I guess I’ll take it

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“Parenting is overrated. A secret for child-rearing success: do less http://theatln.tc/ifc4ae #longreads”

The Atlantic‘s tweet makes it sound as though we don’t have to parent, because nature takes care of most of it. In fact, if we try hard, we’re screwing them up. But the article says different. The article says if we do everything we’ll screw them up. If we are perfect, our kids will suffer.

No risk of that here. I’m not trying that hard. And I’m failing with a nice steady rhythm that would back a hot hiphop routine.

But I was all prepared to let up a little. Twitter promised me a parenting vacation, seeing as how all my attention was killing my children’s future potential. I had a lot of reading to catch up on, so I was willing to try lounging and reading and ignoring.

But all Lori Gottlieb argues, really, is that overprotecting children, carefully directing and managing their every moment makes for unhappy future adults. Duh. If you don’t let them feel disappointment, handle their own sorrow, wallow a bit in a stew of lonliness and marginalization, we rob them of coping skills.

Who are these parents who have so much time they can get them invited to every party and armwrestle teachers into better grades? I can barely get three meals and two snacks into them. I can barely get books back to the library within ten dollars of their due dates. I can’t even remember their jackets half the time. How the hell am I gonna micromanage their emotional lives to spare them disappointment? Please.

I’d be happy to back off more, except that if I back up much further I’ll need binoculars to see them grow up. My goal is not to make life perfect for these amazing, sweet, interesting, wonderful little boys. My goal is to give them every chance to figure out who they are and what’s important to them. To offer them what I can and have them make the rest for themselves.

So I felt betrayed by The Atlantic, whose tweet had promised a parenting vacation of novels and bonbons. But I couldn’t hold a grudge because an hour or so later I got really mad at Rolling Stone.

I saw in a Rolling Stone piece that Michele Bachmann was raised by two lifelong Democrats. Too much parenting? Not enough parenting? All I’m saying is that what keeps me up at night is that if we try really hard and parent in earnest, and then wind up with a borderline psychopath for our efforts, I’ll have to explain myself to Rolling Stone. In an issue with a reinvented, 80-year-old Madonna on the cover.

Eeyore by necessity

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Sleep deprivation makes you cranky, fat, and dangerous.

It also makes you gloomy.

Take a look at this finding, reported in a New York Magazine feature that is, as far as I can tell, the same as the third chapter in Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman:

“Perhaps most fascinating, the emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.” (p. 3 in the NYM article linked and p. 35 in the book)

Great. Fat, grumpy, and incapable of retaining joy.

I can’t wait to hang out with me, ‘cuz that’s a winning combination.

(On a related note, how do I not have a category titled “Holy Guacamole, I Need Sleep!”? My first didn’t sleep through the night until he was over Three. The second is not exactly on the fast track to quiet nights, with or without ear infections, teething, and gobs of physical exertion. So I filed this under everything except Yoga. I’m too tired for yoga.)

(Also? Go read Nurture Shock. There are chapters on praise, sleep, race, lying, gifted programs, siblings, teenagers, self-control, social skills, and language; all compelling, well written, clear, thoroughly researched and revelatory.) I’ll leave the superlatives to the cover matter, but suffice it to say I will finish it before I finish The Pale King. That’s huge, given how little reading time I have and how much I want to read DFW’s final novel. Go get it. Library, local bookstore, friend…I don’t care. Read. This. Book.)

Leeches

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Small children, adorable, clever, hilarious, cuddly little humans suck the life out of you if you’re with them 14 hours a day without cease. And when it’s seven days a week, and they’ve sucked the life out of you by Monday afternoon, it’s a long, long, long long long week.

In related news, the debut two-hour stint of our first babysitter is six days away. In other related news, the submission of my novel to the next round of agents will be about eight babysitting sessions from now.

In unrelated news, kale chips are nice. Even better was last night’s Thai sweet potato lentil foil packets. Baked for now, but next time will be grilled. By someone else. From packets I’ve prepped the night before. It took almost three hours to prep a meal that takes someone without small children (who cling, scream, and hit more during meal prep than any other time in the day) about 15 minutes.

And finally, in this abbreviated version of our news hour: people suck. Twice in two days someone turning left almost hit me and my small wards as we were walking in the crosswalk. At an intersection with a green light and a walk sign. No late afternoon glare, no echoing sirens, no tsunami, no excuses. Bad drivers almost killing perfectly decent bloggers and future bloggers.

People suck.
You heard it here first.

Bears repeating

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Peanut went to a birthday party this weekend while I stayed at home and cooked through Butter’s nap. Increasingly, I don’t have time to prep and cook meals so I do it all on the weekend to eat throughout the week.

Though I do this to save time and money, I also do it because I don’t trust most of the prepared foods at the store and in restaurants. Since the 1990s I’ve tried to be more and more aware of how food is made (and of which ingredients). I don’t like chemical tasting food and I tend to buy and prepare foods in their natural states. We try to eat whole, natural, organic foods grown by local, sustainable farms and businesses.

And since I had kids I’ve gotten much more annoying about how careful I am.

So I cook as much as I can. Local, fresh, organic, whole. And I fake it when I need to (we have almond butter sandwiches for dinner at least once a week, not because I’m an About Last Night fan but because we run out of leftovers and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna take my hour of free time during Butter’s nap every day to cook something that might or might not be eaten later.)

On the weekend I try to blend homemade sauces like tahini and hummus, slow cook some vegetarian chili, make lentils and couscous with veggies, pre-layer black bean quesadillas, overcook and mash white bean and sweet potatoes for homemade burgers, prep berry almond smoothies, slice goat cheese and polenta to grill later with marinara, and bake a homemade pizza. The boys will generally eat these things, I have two hands to prepare on the weekend, these dishes don’t take careful spicing or attentive cooking, and most of the items last well through the week. So I sacrifice an afternoon or two to the home cooking gods.

[A friend once joked that a real Top Chef quick fire challenge would be to create something edible in 45 minutes…when you have to leave the prep area every 5 minutes to break up a fight, and leave the cooking area every 3 minutes to remind people about the rules, and leave the food unattended for at least 10 minutes while you run after someone making very poor choices. I would watch that episode a dozen times, were they ever to get that real with their reality programming.]

But making good food for four people is increasingly wearing on me. I’m tired of the work, I’m tired of checking labels, I’m tired of the exorbitant cost, and I’m tired of being such an annoying stickler.

Plus, it’s a pain that my day generally falls into the pattern:
wake to crying…clean a bottom…prepare food…serve food…attend to crying…
clean a bottom…shuffle people into car…serve food…shuffle people into car…
clean up food…prepare food…serve food…attend to crying…clean a bottom…
clean up after food…serve food….clean up after food…attend to crying…
shuffle people into car…prepare food…serve food…clean a bottom…clean up after food…prepare food…fall asleep

I’m getting tired of cooking my own beans to avoid BPA and making my own marinara to avoid BPA and putting everything in washable bags to avoid phthalates and refusing to do disposable to avoid adding to the landfill and buying local and organic at three times the price to avoid pesticides and herbicides and petroleum and child labor.

Then Eric Schlosser goes and writes something new that reminds me why we do this. Pseudofood is killing the planet, killing people, and killing farmers. I want to rip out the backyard, plant a bigger edible garden, write letters to local and national government, run for political office, take on the restaurant and agriculture lobbies, and rebuild the FDA and USDA to serve consumers.

Because what we’re eating now is not food. And the more people who know that, the better the food we get will become. And the less often I will have my kid come home from a birthday party full of modern marvels labeled as food.

[Of this I’m enormously jealous, by the way. I want to go back to a time when a blue tongue was fun rather than a source of stress, and when sugar was fun not toxic. But that ship has sailed.]

Molehill, meet the mountain makers

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Ah, yes, well. J. Crew toenail story. Blah blah blah…marketing photo with Mom and young boy, whose toenails are pink. Both seem to be having fun. Blah blah blah…media makes it out to be erosion of society as we know it, popularization of gender dysphoria, and license to marginalization of pretty much every human on Earth.

What the hell, America? Seriously? This is the cataclysm about which you’re gonna get your panties in a twist?

[Just reading the implication that you wear panties made you question your masculinity? Time for purchase of a life, my ignorant and intolerant non-friend.]

Regular readers know my 5 year old paints his nails with his Dad every weekend. They vary color, they vary number of nails painted. But generally, Peanut paints all twenty digits and Spouse paints twelve (all toes plus thumbs). You also know I think this is a delightful bit of bonding that teaches both of them to do what they enjoy rather than what they’re supposed to do. Because there are enough supposed tos in life, it’s never too young to learn to ignore the lame rules.

And most rules are lame.

Or at least as arbitrary as gender clothing rules.

So now an allegedly large number of Americans are allegedly all frothy and twitching because painting nails gives one a severe case of gender dysphoria? Nails are somehow directly linked to your soul, and said soul can flipflop identity based on social expectation? What if that little boy’s soul happens to know that 60 years ago, boys were dressed in pink and girls were in blue because pink was deemed too strong a color for the allegedly weaker gender?

I don’t know. Seems as though The Daily Show has it covered. If not, I’m guessing Panderbear does.

But I still wonder: couldn’t we pay this much attention to banks and oil companies and food growers and food manufacturers and air traffic controllers instead? (Okay, maybe not the air traffic people. I’m a sleepy human and refuse to judge those who are forced to fight biorhythms for their jobs. Cuz I feel their pain, yo.)

Come on Barbie, let’s go party!

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We at Naptime are doing our best to raise two feminists. Our boys know that grownups do dishes, laundry, sewing, construction, parenting, policing, fire fighting, paying, cooking, driving, and fixing. Both know men with ponytails, boys who wear pink, girls who like mud and bugs…any gender stereotype our society fosters, we fight. Hard.

And one pervasive social pressure I’ve been working to eliminate since I was pregnant with Peanut (honestly, because I thought he was a girl and didn’t want her buying into “should”s) is the oppressive body image issues that American women, especially, are saddled with. I don’t talk about body size or dissatisfaction.

Peanut pointed to my belly about a month ago and proclaimed that I was probably going to have another baby because my uterus was making my tummy pretty big. I shuttered slightly, then smiled and explained casually that after a baby sometimes it takes a while for tummies to get small again, and that sometimes they never do.

He also came home from year two of preschool and asked what “fat” meant because they heard a story at school where fat didn’t seem to mean part of the fat/protein/carbohydrate triad.

I think it’s important that my boys grow up to be men who see people for who they are and what they do, not what they look like or how they can be labeled.

Well, my chickens came home to roost on a run today. I was pushing ButterBaby in a jogging stroller, and Spouse was behind me, pushing Peanut. Halfway up a moderate hill I hear, “Mommy, it looks like two monsters bonking each other. But it’s just your bottom.”

I laughed. Hard. For about half a mile. He seemed pleased.

Look, I have at least double the rear end I did before gestating two kids. But I don’t know what it looks like from behind. Running. And my self worth is not wrapped up in how my almost-five-year-old describes my ass. Maybe it does look like monsters. I asked him later how the monsters were bonking each other. On the head? Side to side? “Of course not,” he answered. “They were bonking each other on the mouth.”

Honestly, that baffled me a bit. But I went with it. It’s his story, not mine.

Because what I realized pretty quickly, is: this is not about me. This is about Peanut’s storytelling skills. He often spins interesting yarns and interrupts himself halfway through to say, “This is only in my imagination.” He gets the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. And is his version, my bottom is two monsters. I can’t wait to hear what they have to say when he gives them voices.

Really? You’re gonna thank them?

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I’d like to thank the ants who came charging into the house today. Thank you for finding whatever it was you found in the silverware drawer. I’ve been meaning to take everything out and soak it in hot, soapy, vinegar water. You’ve given me a reason to do it today and for that I am thankful.

I’m also appreciative of the people who stop in parking lots and wait, desperately, for anyone walking by to identify one of the parked cars as theirs. Thank you for holding up the dozens of people behind you. Without you we might have been able to proceed with our days. But because you made parking take almost 30 minutes, I got to hear the wonderful tricks my 4 year old used to keep my screaming infant from blowing an artery. It’s a good thing you didn’t just drive normally until you found a parking space farther away. Then I wouldn’t know how resourceful my son is. I surely am grateful to you.

Thank you, terrible parent in front of me in line at the store today. Because you bought for your child every piece of crap he whined for, my son is starting to doubt our family’s system. Thank you for encouraging his critical thinking skills. Here I had him unquestioningly following the policy that we don’t buy things unless it’s already on our list; and that special purchases like toys have to be on a holiday list from which loved ones may choose to buy or not to buy. Thanks to you, Parent Making Interesting Choices, my son is interrogating our system and querying into our family’s stance on democracy. Lessons on thinking for himself and governing systems in one day. What a thanksgiving blessing. Thank you.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank the cat for waking me up almost every hour last night. If it weren’t for you, Cat One, I might have missed the beginning of the baby’s crying. All five times that he woke and raged about something or other. Of course, had you not been thumping around and yowling, the baby might not have woken. But then I wouldn’t be able to practice my catatonic calculations about which soothing technique to use on him. Thanks, kitty, for keeping me sharp. Except for the part where waking me every hour dulls my ability to function or think. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, Cat One. That’s why you’ll be sleeping in the garage tonight. And for that I am thankful.

Seriously, Google?

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On a whim, I searched “find the right academic journal for your article.” I didn’t expect much. It was the result of a frustrated, bored, midnight rage about my unfinished projects.

The answer to which journals one should submit to is, of course, trade secret. Academics don’t give away their target journals, and often give advice like “find journals with similar articles and submit to them” or “talk with journal editors attending conferences where you present and ask if your piece would be considered.”

Um, thanks. That’s helpful. I already know that the articles I cite in my own article were published in journals that might like articles on the same topic. And I know that conferences ca be a decent place to talk with publishers. But these can’t be the only two tricks. Surely just researching within my field in two dozen or so journals doesn’t give the whole picture, right?

Of course not. So I asked Google.

The first non-sponsored link was “find the right sandals for your outdoor needs.”
The second was “find the right rawhide chew for your dog.”

I give up.

The industry assumption has been that Google technology is so amazing it knows everything. In this case: that there was no point in seeking out academic journals, but also that since my legs are too big for shorts right now I should focus on my feet.

Also that either I should replace my dead cat with a dog or that I might, in some misogynistic circles of drunk frat house denizens, be unflatteringly compared with a dog.

Shame on you Google. I thought you knew better.

Because it’s too cold for sandals lately.

California is still the Old West

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Peanut: Can we have beets for dinner?
Me: Sure.
P: Raw, please. Or cooked.
M: Which one?
P: Raw. Shredded.
M: Okay.
P: With goat cheese, please. And balsamic. Or I’ll shoot you.

I’m quite over the shooting phase. It has been 10 days, and the boy can make anything into “a shooter.”

He doesn’t know a thing about guns. He only recently learned about bows and arrows. We’ve not shown him any movies with any projectile-firing weapons, and we don’t have any toys that fire projectiles. I was raised with guns, know my way around a gun, and have a terrified-respect relationship with guns. I want to live in a world with no guns. [Shut up with your “it’s too late for that, you commie liberal.” I know that, you jackass. And I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the parents who read this blog because their kids drive them nuts, too. Go pay the NRA to lobby for your Constitution-misreading right and leave my blog alone.]

And yet he’s up every morning at 6, demanding tape so he can attach something to something else and pretend it shoots. Mostly his contraptions shoot me, because I’m the one lucky enough to be locked in a house with him far too many hours a day.

I asked the teachers, who said the same thing all the books do…pretend violence is not real violence. It’s natural and acceptable play. As long as you don’t give him something that fires projectiles, and as long as you don’t make a big deal about it, all will be fine.

So when he points at me, I say, casually, “please don’t point at me because I don’t like it.” And then I move on to something else, distracting either him or myself so we can not focus on the damned shooter.

Nope. 20 hours a day that kid is pointing something at me and bellowing, “soot soot soot!” [We have issues with the /sh/ sound.]

I’d be fine with a finger as a shooter. I’ll play pretend whip cream fight or pretend water hose like any other goofy mom. Heck, I’ll play pretend poop squirter if the mood strikes. But please don’t point construction paper-taped-pencils at me and say you’re going to make me dead. I know you don’t know what dead is. I know you don’t understand why pointing at anything you don’t want to kill is absolutely not okay. I know you need a fantasy life.

Can you please get it somewhere else?

Because you’re the one who wants shredded raw beets with goat cheese and balsamic. And if the other shooters heard you, they’d shoot you just for saying that.

Just wondering

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How is the child abuse rate in this country not higher?

(Seriously, no depressing replies from my social worker friends and family or law enforcement readers on how desperately high even a 0.00000001% rate is. I know that. But the question does not value a higher rate. It marvels at the <100% rate.)

Why can I not watch a film, show, or commercial without composing a critical theory response that involves footnotes and dreams of a research grant? What the hell is wrong with me? Am I missing enjoyment centers in my brain or something?

Where is that box of books I labeled to be first on the shelf after the three moves of a year-plus ago? I need two of those books, man. Where are they?

How does, "you may cut paper and only paper" translate into "try to cut your shirt, the rug, your chin, a bracelet, and the baby toys while I’m right here watching“? Seriously. Taking the whole ‘looking for negative attention’ thing to a whole new level.

No wonder I’m pissed I have absolutely no time to write…the voices in my head are better companions than small children. Why does nobody say how completely not ideal the companionship of young children is?

1950s rap

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Toyota has a viral youtube campaign for their minivan that they think is ever so clever.

I think it’s painfully backward.

In the lengthy ads, a very white middle class heterosexual family expounds on how cool they are in their minivan, which Dad has dubbed the Swagger Wagon. In the most recent ad, the family sings a rap about said vehicle.

How delightful, no?

No.

In the song, Dad boasts how he participates and subverts gender stereotypes by having tea parties with his daughter and her dolls. Mom sings about how facile she is with jello and cupcakes, how she tends the kids’ wounds. While Dad mugs and poses in the van, Mom handles the lunch, the school play, and the song’s bridge—a potty break for their eldest.

Is this rap written for a 1950s audience? (The black and white images are a clue.) Why is Dad helping only with the tea party and nothing else? Why is Mom defined by her baking skills, her cheerleading costume, and her self definition as a former “college chick”?

One of the most difficult transitions for progressive couples who become parents is the reality of how even 50/50 marriages become 90/10 marriages when kids are thrown into the mix. The sheer volume of work mothers do, and the fact that it tends to be time sensitive, repetitive work (meals, tidying, errands, school) contrasts with the paucity of work inside the home most fathers do (and the fact that it tends to be ‘get to it when you can’ weekend, one-time, big project work). And the new division of labor causes marital strife.

Is that what you celebrate in your silly minivan ads? That families can fight in the front seat while the wee ones sit with headphones and DVD players in the back, oblivious to the real work of being a family…the day to day bickering over details, like the fact that I’ll be damned if I’m ever defined by how my baked goods perform at the school bake sale or refer to any of the years I busted my ass in higher ed as the days when I was a college chick.

Thanks for the stereotypes, Toyota. Sure makes me think less about your cars driving unintentionally into oncoming traffic.

Shiny new ‘pooter gets overheated…

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Oh, shiny new replacement computer, what a LOT of ranting you are going to process today.

Let’s begin with the fact that you need to exist. And that the bargain model I bought last freaking year, 13 months ago (which means one month past the freaking warranty expiration) was supposed to be a great deal. But two netbooks, stripped down to fit my pathetic budget bought within 14 months, means there will be no Christmas, no Hannukah, no new shoes—not even to replace all our white shoes after Labor Day—probably ever again. So screw your predecessor, screw you for existing, and screw you for being so much freaking better than last year’s model. And $10 cheaper. Bastard ‘pooter. I already don’t like you.

And you, Mother’s Day expectations…you suck. Because I hate Hallmark holidays and refuse to purchase Hallmarkiness in response to fabricated sentiment, I feel dirty for looking forward to Mother’s Day. I feel dirty for telling Spouse exactly what I wanted him and Peanut to make me. I feel cheap and hypocritical for smiling every time some says Happy Mother’s Day. And I feel really cheated that I didn’t get to sleep in, didn’t get a second to myself, didn’t get a shower, made my own breakfast (which the Spouse and Peanut refused to eat, thank you very much, to pour insult unctiously over injury). Sure, I have two beautiful, healthy, interesting, adorable, intriguing children to share the day with. And I’m finally, finally, finally home so I could spend the day with my mom and her mom. Everyone’s healthy and happy and really freaking lucky all ’round. But the Hallmarkiness of the holiday is centered around well rested and clean moms, yo. And I felt like a dolt for buying into that shite. I don’t sleep or shower or get any chef appreciation any other day of the year, so how dare I expect it on Mother’s Day?

You know what, I’m gonna leave it at that, ‘pooter. Cuz I don’t think you could handle a rant about all the other stuff making me a sourpuss today. And I can’t afford to lose another of your kind, you little technological bastard.

We now rejoin our regularly scheduled rant…

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already in progress:

…and you’d better call the insurance bastards to see if it’s covered.

As for you, Peanut, you are a very interesting introduction to the fine, fine phase that is Four Years Old. Nothing could be worse than Three, it is true. But if Three was all Mr. Hyde and no Jekyl, Four is the maddening experience of discerning what dropped hat sends you from Jekyl to Hyde and back. No, I will not pick up the toy you kicked across the room. You threw one, I took it away. You threw another, I took it away. Most of your collection is on top of the bookcase today, waiting to see which version of you comes out of your room tomorrow morning. So when you kick a toy out of anger, you get to pick it up yourself. No, you do it. Cry all you want; I no longer flip out when you’re in distress. A newborn has made me immune to your terrorist tactics. Butter is the antidote to my occasional Peanut allergy.

Butter, you’d better stop it. Seriously. Knock it off. I followed all your nonverbal cues, I did everything you wanted, and I got you to sleep. Just because I moved the slightest bit does not mean you can flutter your eyes open and start flirting with me. Yes, you’re cute. Yes, you’re still tiny enough that everything you do is precious. Your loud sleeping is delightful, your recent partial baldness is adorable, and your waste products are coo-inspiring. But go to freaking sleep, you little monkey!

And quit suggesting that you want to nurse just so you can gather huge mouthfuls of milk and the spit them on me. That’s not funny, despite what your brother says.

Hey, agents who have my novel and haven’t replied in well past the 6 weeks you promised: screw you! What is wrong with you? All the other rejections came within the appropriate timeframe. It’s rude to set a deadline and miss it without notifying involved parties that you need longer to complete the task. I don’t want your representation, anyway. This thing is gonna be huge, and so will the next dozen or so I write, and you’ll rue the day. You’ll weep, you’ll rend your garments and pull out your hair. You’ll want a time machine to take you back to when you first heard my name just so you can jump at the chance to take on all my current and future brilliance. You will self-flagellate, and you will be correct in so torturing yourselves.
Asshats.

Sure, Peanut, we can go to the playground. Sure you can climb that big ol’ thing you’re always scared of. Sure I can help you down. Just turn around and…no, I can’t climb up there with you. I can’t help you from up there. I can help you from down here. No, I can’t take baby home and come back without the sling. Even if I did, I’d still be short and unable to lift 35 pounds down from well above my head. I will stand here and talk to you gently for 30 freaking minutes, convincing you that I will help and you won’t fall and you can do it. And after that interminable period of patience and goodness and model mothering, during which I have to take two time outs to keep from beating you and one to nurse your brother, I will grab you by the ankles and pull you off the play structure. Yes, you technically fell. I mostly, kind of caught you, though. It was a slow fall. Are you hurt? No? Good. Come on. Time to go make you the dinner you request and then refuse to eat.

Hey! You! Damn you.

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Okay, broken tortilla chips at the bottom of the bag. I’m calling you out. YOU are what’s wrong with civilization. You sit there, all disingenuous, pretending to be cute little juvenile chips. “Oh, baby chips, how adorable and undoubtedly tasty,” we’re supposed to proclaim.

I don’t buy it, broken chips. You’re impostors. You’re not cute or tiny or in other ways deserving of the affection we give tiny mammal creatures, with their floppy heads and ridiculous mewling “et la” fencing cries, “hilp hilp hilp” guliping swallows, big eyes and delicious ears and milk-smelling breath.

No, chips. You are not cute and you are not babies. You are detritus. You are the trash that ought be thrown into a witheringly hot tortilla soup, or reserved for some lame casserole dish that demands crushed chips, not for grownup tasks like scooping salsa or taking the edge off my gnawing disillusionment and anger.

I try not to just throw you in the compost, though that is the fate you deserve. No, I make an effort, you chip-goodwill welfare recipients. I try to select you individually, little crumbled useless shard of corn and salt, to get just a hint of salsa on my palate. Tiny flake after tiny flake, I waste precious time and compulsive eating impulses just to make it seem as though I am responsible with the chip dust that I, in all likelihood, caused to break away from the bigger pieces. I have chip breaker’s guilt, and so I try to eat those lame shards.

But then my rage controls me. I might run out of binge energy at this rate, long before I’m overfull and long before the shards are gone. I don’t want to go through this again next season when I have random chip urges again. Get out of my way, chip gravel!

So I shovel pinches full of the little bastards into my gaping maw. No way to dip them, so now it’s just dry, salty tortilla shrapnel. Unsatisfying.

Finally, I look into the bag. The broken bits of chip, like my life, used to hold promise and endless possibilities. And now they are the uncomfortably dessicated flotsam and jetsam of poor choices (like bagging the chips next to the gallon of milk) lying on the shores of a vast ocean of now impossible possibilities.

So I throw the nigh on empty bag of crumbs back into the cupboard, so they can taunt me and torment me and mock me and drive me into an existential spiral in a few months. Oh, they’ll be there. Because it’s not as though anyone else will eat those little bastards in the meantime.