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

Evolution, science, and ignorance

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If you have a PhD in science, you may speak about science curriculum and theories. If you have a PhD in theology, you may speak about religious curriculum and doctrine. People who fit either or both descriptions are welcome to talk with each other. If you are some schmuck without an advanced degree in science or religion, you may sit down and shut the frack up. And listen. Because you do not have the science or theological knowledge, nor the critical thinking skills, to be in this debate. Shhh. Listen.

Now Texas is joining the group of states that should be told to “feel free to flee” the Union if they insist on devaluing education and science. Mobs don’t determinine curricula; those who know what the hell they’re talking about do. In science class we teach science. In theology class we teach theology. In English class we teach English. If you want me to teach computer programming in my English classes, I will. But code ain’t in English, and science simply isn’t subject to the same principles that faith is. Whole different ball of wax.

Texas isn’t going all Kansas on us, but it’s not looking good, either…

Pissing me off

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We thought we were lucky that Peanut potty learned pretty early. Started using the toilet regularly around 15 months and took himself out of diapers at 21 months. Did it all himself, the little control freak, which was great. Except since it was all self directed and all about control, when he’s mad at one of us he pees in inappropriate places.

I’ve been trying for a month to break the peeing in the cat box thing. Tried reasoning with him, tried empathy (would you like it if they peed on your toys or in your bed?) Tried making a hard and fast rule. “In this house, we pee in the toilet.” He told me, as you know, that this is not his house, and at his house he and his dog pee in the cat box all the time. Why he and his dog even have a cat box, considering the disdain they have for cats, is beyond me.

Anyway.

Today he pees in his pants. I ask him if he can tell me why. He says, “Yes. Okay. One reason I just feel like it. One reason it just easier.” We talk about that one. If it’s just easier to pee in your pants, that’s called a diaper. If you just feel like it, I feel like ignoring you and working on my book, but it doesn’t work that way. So I reiterate where we pee and why.

Later, I walk in the bathroom and find a dustpan on the floor, full of a supsicious yellow liquid. It’s near the cat box, so either they got pissed at his piss and chose a new target, or he just tried a little something new.

M: Peanut?
P: [running in] What?
M: Can you tell me a little about what this is in the dustpan?
P: And on the floor.
M: [biting tongue] And on floor…
P: Yes. I pee, pee, pee in dustpan. And on floor.
M: Hmmm. You know peeing on the floor makes me frustrated bcause it’s slippery and dangerous and stinky and germy. And you know we only pee in potty. Mommy pees in potty. Daddy pees in potty. Can you tell me why you did this?
P: Yes. One reason I pee on floor in sweeper I just want to. One reason [and he looks me dead in the eye for this one] I just no like your rules.

We talk about why there are rules. Tile floors with urine on them are slippery. People fall and get hurt. Also pee is germy and we don’t want to get sick.

Also, and this is just for you who can read—I’m really f—ing tired of this. My cousin says floating targets will make the toilet more appealing. My aunt says move the cat box (and now, apparently, the dust pan). Our pediatrician says blue food dye in the water so he can make it green.

I say there are a few rules you don’t get to not like. Seat belts. Teeth brushing. No hitting, biting, kicking, scratching, pinching, or hurting anything that breathes. And seriously? Seriously. Seriously. There’s only one place to pee.

At Daddy’s office. Is it Take Your Daughter to Work Day? I’ve been asking that for three years and it has never been take your daughter to work day. He has long, curly hair and wears pink shoes. Please take him to work.

Pouring your heart out through nasal passages

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I had a really clever post lined up at dinnertime, but once toy cleanup and bath and jammies and teeth and light show and stories and songs and all that jazz wound up I drew a blank.

And in my mentally weakened state, I’m pondering this deep bit of uselessness:   can we compost snot?

If you toss used tissues, they end up in a landfill. Bad. If you flush used tissues it uses valuable water and expensive waste treatment. Bad. If you flush used tissues only when there is other, less savory solid matter in the toilet, too, the sewage treatment involves straining out the wood pulp and the mucus and the white blood cells and the microbes to make pure biosolids, which are composted.

So if the water treament facility composts my kid’s snot, can’t I?

And there you are, ladies and gentlemen. No bottom to the housing market, but the bottom of my intellectual development. The lowest I’ve sunk in my brain dead tenure as a stay-at-home idiot. I could have been a contender. I had game in all twenty of my previous careers. I was a fundamentally bright person.

Now I’m contemplating disposal methods for green Kleenex. Summa cum laude.

John Hughes, we need you!

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Mr. Hughes, could you make a few movies for the dorks and dweebs and losers amongst us, who, at mid-life, still haven’t figured it out, and who were holding out hope that the popular and not-nice people in high school would turn out painfully unattractive (pockmarked with the reality of their blotchy souls or at least saggy and droopy from the ill-advised production and subsequent ignoring of their spawn) and unemployed (or at least pursuing some morally turgid career like RNC strategist) and perversely alone, but who facebook now shows us are all toned and tanned and really rich and by no means socially ostracized as we had so hoped they would be? One, ideally, that shows us how we might still have a chance at making a difference and being loved by the people who are beautiful on the inside and who really will, soon, shun the same shallow and vapid people they were *supposed* to have shunned by graduation, at the latest?!

Kind of like a Thirty-Eight Candles or The ‘Why Bother with Breakfast When My Life is in the Toilet’ Club or something?

A darned good trip home

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Our US Airways flight didn’t go anywhere near the Hudson, so A+ flight.

Our return flight attendants were about 3000 percent nicer than the outbound flights.

When *someone* forgot to leave us the car keys and *someone else* later left the car seat in the rental car and then thanked *their* lucky stars that the flight was late and *someone* noted to another passenger that a connection in Phoenix is always easy because it’s a relatively small airport and then, later, that same *someone* had exactly 19 minutes from wheelsdown to haul ass from the absolute farthest gate in one terminal to the absolute farthest gate in another terminal (on crutches and cheering on a three-year-old functioning on vapors a full three hours past bedtime and with no food in him to run at full tilt with his frog backpack [I know it’s heavy baby, and I know you don’t like running encumbered, but you’re doing a heckuva job!] and trying not to laugh at the hilarity of a three-year-old let loose in an aiport and told to run as fast as he can, wobbling a bit when the crutches hit the moving walkway and when the three-year-old stopped dead in front of her to ask if this was an escalator or something different, and just a little after she smacked the kiosk toadie upside the head with her crutch when he asked her, as she all but ran a three-legged race with the aforementioned toddler and packmule Spouse who carried everyone’s carry-on and personal item and carseat while running at helf-tilt, whether she could spare 30 seconds to hear about a special deal with MasterFuckingCard) made it with, no joke, two minutes to spare only to find that that *someone* had lost our boarding passes but that a certain airlines that can land on water or tamac can also replace a lost boarding pass with, like, no problemo, well then *all* those someones relaxed into their seats with a sigh and forgot even to bemoan the fact that you don’t even get pretzels anymore, let alone beverages on these flights home. Or that airport freaking restaurants close at freaking 9:00 pm when your flight is scheduled to land at 8:55pm and your three-year-old and your crutches conspire to keep you away from a different burrito—not the burrito they refused to serve you at 8:55am, noting that they didn’t serve bean and cheese burritos until after 9:00 am, and yes they’re sorry that your flight leaves at 9:06, but that they can’t make a burrito so early unless it’s a breakfast burrito, yes, ma’am, even if you’re willing to eat it cold andyes, ma’aam, even if you’re willing to order a breakfast burrito without the filling and substitute rice and beans, sorry ma’am; or the burrito that the wonderful airline who replaced your boarding passes refused to let your husband dash and purchase because even though their plane was late and even though they don’t have food on the plane and even though your three-year-old will probably lose it if he has to subsist on clementines and raw almond slices for *another* flight after being promised a burrito, they have a firm four minutes before takeoff door policy, and you’ll just have to eat at your destination. That’s three burritos denied, just this trip. If I weren’t still achy from the hilarity of  watching the three-year-old drop to his hands and knees in the airport, pretending to eat the floor, I might write a strongly worded letter.

It’s good to be home.

F—ing Sony copy protection

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So sony wants so desperately for me not to copy their DVDs (as if…I can barely get them into the drive slot in my computer and I barely have time to watch them let alone copy them) that they’ve made newer discs unplayable in my computer.

Somene who knows more than I do, and who has a better system (like a television and a DVD player made by…you guessed it…sony) explains their dick move here. And here.

I was all happy that I got my draft novel to KDT and Netflix delivered Stranger than Fiction the same day. So Spouse and I got Peanut to bed and loaded then crashed then loaded then crashed then loaded then crashed the f—ing copy protected DVD.

But for people who know better, this was news in 2007. It’s 2009 and Netflix is still sending me this. Today.

With whom shall I be more angry? (hint: the answer is not me, for having a seven year old computer and DVD player therein.)

Now I have to go back to my tape flags, damnit!

Little Lord Fauntleroy

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Someone found my blog by googling “how to change toddler clothes for nap.”

Several things. First: boy, did you find the wrong blog. I’m lucky if my kid wears clothes. When he does, they’re usually stained clothes because we don’t care, at all, and do laundry thusly: take clothes, throw in washing machine, add soap, wash, and leave for two days until you remember to dry them. Seriously. We don’t separate for color or size or fabric or any of the nonsense that other people seem to separate for. We don’t pretreat or chemically treat or trick or treat. We just freaking wash.

(Little secret: you know why we’re totally cavalier about laundry? ‘Cuz I don’t do it. Spouse does. And he could rub them in acid and douse them with lye and I would wear them with a smile on my face because it’s the one freaking thing around here I don’t have to do. Other than compost. So it’s the first of two things I don’t have to do. Yay me, yay Spouse, yay stains.)

But asking how to change toddler’s clothes for nap begs two rather obvious, if facetious, questions: what the hell is your kid wearing that it needs to be changed for nap; and how did you manage to get the one toddler in the world who tolerates costume changes? I have a kid who would rather sit in his jammies at home, running in small circles than actually don outside clothes to do his running in the sunlight. (Never stops moving, this one, so it’s a shock when he offers to stay in just to wear jammies.)

It’s not like our kid’s outside clothes are binding or rough or chosen by anyone but him. He just doesn’t like changing clothes. And he likes control. And I’ve just described 99% of toddlers, so who the hell is this googler parenting? How does his or her kid dress willingly in whatever breeches and bowtie Little Lord Fauntleroy costume they’re making him wear, AND willingly change again? (Notice how I pretended there was even one iota of a chance that the google dude is a guy? Please. What guy would even think to change clothes for nap? There are some awesome dads out there, but they attend to emotional, physical, and mental needs. Not weirdass bullshit. This is one of those moms who scrapbooks and crafts and bakes and sews curtains and makes furniture and color coordinates. All before dawn.) Does this jammies-then-clothes-then-jammies kid get to wear his jammies, then, for the rest of the day? Or do they (see, I did it again) change him a third time, and again for nighttime?

I’m all confused. I mean, it takes everything I have to be allegedly responsible and change my kid into clothes in the morning. I sleep in whatever I wear, and I often wear it again the next day (much to my mother’s try-to-keep-it-under-control-but-really-abject-and-borderline-screaming horror). So I’m pretty proud that I’m trying to be all socially acceptable and force my child from one comfy outfit into whatever creative combo he chooses in the morning (or afternoon or ten minutes before dinner when “Mommy, I HAVE to go outside”).

Now that I think about it, and just to make the world a bit more balanced after crazy google lady revealed her tidy little secret to the world via my 60-hit-a-day blog, maybe I’ll start letting my kid wear jammies all the time.

Wait, something just occured to me…are you one of those people who has a toddler in party dresses most days? Combed hair? Barrettes that match her shoes? You know what? It’s the holiday season, so I won’t judge. But I totally just lost 97% of my respect for you, oh random person who googled about changing a toddler’s clothes for nap, and forgot the possessive apostrophe and ess. So needless to say, there wasn’t a whole lot of respect left to lose. But you just wiped it all out, in one frilly crinoline and satin flourish.

Now I’m totally making tomorrow jammies day.

It’s too easy to screw up contemporary English, so now you’re butchering Shakespearean English, too?

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Sign painted on outdoor shopping mall of upscale shops: Feel not shame for thou (sic) love of shoes.

Thou love? No, you dunderheaded idiots. (I know, I know. I taught critical thinking. If you insult the party to whom you’re talking, you generally have no point. But this is a collection of stores who would sell me (if I had that kind of money or cared what I looked like) a $150 sweater and $200 pair of shoes while befouling my sensibilities and dainty editor’s eyes. Shit like that makes our retinas BLEED, y’all.)

Who is hiring these writers, and who is hiring these advertisers?

Thou is a pronoun. It’s Elizabethan “you.”  Thy is a possessive pronoun. Sixteenth century “your.”

So your big marketing push this holiday season reads: “Do not be ashamed of you (sic)  love of shoes.” Take it from me: you meant “thy” love of shoes.

And you painted it on the wall. Like your nudge-nudge-wink-wink lame attempt at a joke is supposed to get me to swerve off the road and into your dank, dimly lit parking garage in the unholiest of all consumerist greed-fests: December. You think classing up being elbow-deep in polyester and perfume-reeking humanity makes shopping somehow more appealing? Well, you’re entitled to your opinion. But you’re not entitled to your own version of Elizabethan English. Use a dictionary when you’re writing. Or an editor. Or stop letting the boneheads in the strategy department write your advertising.

***

On an upbeat note, I’m pleased as always to congratulate Trader Joe’s for being one of the few stores in the nation to have a sign reading, “12 items or fewer.” Kudos. Your “unique grocery store” image remains credible to the educated but underpaid masses who traipse into your store for an affordable selection of organic, sugary, and obscure. Thank you for having hatch green chili bread, organic egg nog, and Jack Daniel’s all ready for me, btw, so that my trip down the twelve-or-fewer aisle is particularly sparkly this holiday season.

Holiday cards: public service announcement

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I got this note from a neighbor, who is a raving, foaming-at-the-mouth English professor. She patted my hand as she turned it over, reassuring me that, of course, she knows I know everything in the letter. It’s for other people. Of course. Not me. But just to be thorough, she’s handing them out to everyone on the block.

“Dear friends,

I know this is a busy time of year for you. From the looks of last year’s holiday card, you start around now with the drafting of your family’s newsletter and photo-taking. I do love the updates. And the pictures. Whew! I can’t believe it’s been another year, but there’s the proof: pictures of kids I’ve never met and never agreed to be friends with, and not so much as the hint of your presence anywhere in your own family. Keep ‘em coming!

Anyway, here’s the reason I’m writing: I can tell from the obvious time and energy that goes into your holiday extravaganza of correspondence that you send cards to a lot of people. And in so doing, you’re perpetuating a bit of a linguistic problem. So many look up to you that I’m hoping you can help me turn the tide back in favor of correct and precise language.

The thing is, your name and your family’s name fall into a certain category of words–those that take an “s” to become plural. And they take an apostrophe-ess when the singular becomes possessive. But, and here’s the kicker, when the plural of your name becomes a possessive, it takes an ess-apostrophe. I know that sounds like silly book-learnin’ talk, so let me break it down for you. I won’t use those pesky Smiths as an example. We’ve all had enough of them. They are just trying to keep up with the Joneses. But that’s another letter.

If your name, for the sake of argument, were Harkin, then you would be Sally Harkin. You know that, I know. Here’s where it gets trickier. If you owned a pencil, it would be Sally Harkin’s pencil. If, let’s be bold here, you had a family tailing behind you at some or most occasions, they would be Sally Harkin’s family. But if we’re talking about the whole family, you are The Harkins. And if your whole family has something tailing behind you at some or most occasions, like maybe a dog or a car or a genuinely wrong-headed political view, it would be the Harkins’ dog, Harkins’ car, and Harkins’ political ignorance.

So your holiday cards should not say The Harkin’s. Or From the Harkins’. They should say The Harkins. From The Harkins. Apostrophes are just not necessary. In fact, they’re kind of out of place in a family as full as yours. You have enough creatures roaming around within the confines of your family home that you don’t need extra apostrophes cluttering things up.

Now, don’t get me wrong. This isn’t as egregious as “10 items or fewer,” which none of the markets in my area seems to choose, favoring instead the “10 items or less” that is ruining our society. No, no. Your extra apostrophe is only problematic because, as I mentioned before, so many look up to you as an example. They, to be more like you, are adding apostrophes to their names, too. It’s similar to the phenomenon where someone, somewhere, saw CDs and DVDs and thought they looked too bare without punctuation. So every company and catalog starts listing CD’s and DVD’s, neither of which is really what they mean. Unless they are speaking of the CD’s songs and the DVD’s menus. Then, sure, bring on the apostrophe. But a spindle of CDs and a collection of DVDs? Plain, please, without the apostrophe a la mode.

Please forgive my trespass on this one. But if you don’t mind, please, let your friends the Traxes know about that whole superfluous and really rather appallingly incorrect apostrophe thing, too. Because Annie Trax thinks that when her family gets together they are The Trax’s. And I just know I can’t send her this letter. She’s not as evolved as you. She couldn’t bear to know that The Traxes’ winter mailings are taxing our circle’s good nature. For that matter, she couldn’t bear to know that her family’s good qualities, fine china, and dreadful children, should be labeled Traxes’. I’m sure you can convey it, with your usual wit and charm. Maybe something in your massive December 1 mailing?

Have a great week, dearie. I’ll let you go, for I’m sure you have to pick out your Thanksgiving decor AND start making the New Year’s favors this month. All my best!

Your friend,

Millicent Fussbudget”