How to become an adult in 6 easy steps

The Drive.

2011-03-16T20:05:00.000-07:00

Since becoming a full-fledged adult, with an important job downtown that involves an office with a view in a remodeled historic district, which requires an elevator to access, I’ve discovered the five o’clock rush hour commute is a strange and magical period of metamorphosis and self-honesty.

I get into my Jeep Liberty, the pink car seat in the back still empty, and I head west on Washington. The cars are bumper to bumper, as the up and coming suit kids from downtown head home to suburbia. We drive past the beautiful west central houses, some restored to their original beauty, which we have abandoned with our hipster early 20’s, and drive due west to the 04 zip code. The established side of town. Where houses all look the same, built by the same contractor, the lawns look the same, and everyone knows about IRAs and stocks and bonds and other fancy grownup terms like colonoscopies.

But we haven’t picked up the kids yet. We haven’t gone home to spouses, to pick up the house and cook dinner (or pick up takeout). Right now, we’re on a 15-minute period of total honesty. No kids, no office where we’re required to keep up this insane charade of adulthood. Just us, in our cars. The windows are rolled down. The iPods are switched to our music that we don’t dare play with our precious snowflake children in the car, played at a volume we wouldn’t dream of blasting into precious little eardrums.

And for 15 minutes, in our tiny little pods, driving down Washington Boulevard to the safety of suburbia, we are ourselves.

The lady in the Caravan two cars ahead? Followed Nirvana on tour and held vigil after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, before she became an accountant. That guy over there in the Mercedes? Smoked more weed than you could imagine in his heyday. He might have a baggie in his sock drawer that he breaks out after the kids have gone to sleep, after swim practice and lacrosse games.

And the girl in the Jeep Liberty, blasting the Strokes and drumming furiously on her steering wheel? Was once thrown out of three different bars in one night and arrested for peeing in a Taco Bell drive-thru. Before the expensive but modest dress slacks and high heels and portfolios and vendor phone calls. Before the pink princess EVERYTHING and swim lessons and gymnastics lessons and “for-the-love-of-fucking-god-I-said-it-is-bedtime” eruptions. She was pretty fucking sweet.

We all know this is each other’s Zen time. This is Me Time. I am not How To, Official Grown-Up With An Office Full of Family Pictures and Important-Looking Folders. I’m not Mommy. I’m just How2. Crazy, sarcastic, ridiculous, falling down drunk, dancing on tables, drumming along to the Killers How2.

We recognize it in each other. With a polite nod or sidewise glance, a sheepish smile that says, “Yeah, I was really fucking awesome about 6 or 7 years ago, too,” we see kindred spirits, we see ourselves reflected as the ties are loosened and the heels come off. Sometimes literally – traipsing around the office in 4” heels wears on the arches.

Then we pick up our kids. We go home. We feed them dinner, put them to bed, quietly settle onto the couch with a glass of wine, watching mundane prime time sitcoms and going to bed at 10, because that’s when we’re exhausted now, to wake up at 6 to do it all again, the same tired act of adulthood for 9 hours a day.

But we’ll reconvene again at 5. I’ll bring the Black Keys.

Come on, get Happy.

2011-02-19T21:42:00.000-08:00

I know this may come as a surprise to many of you, but I was a melodramatic kid with dreams of grandeur. In the 80’s, some kids dreamt of superstardom on Star Search or Double Dare. But that was for chumps. I, on the other hand, had plans that would take me through the back door and right up to the main stage – I was going to capture the hearts of America on Bozo the Clown.

But alas, Bozo was clear in Chicago, some far away fantasy land that apparently only granted admittance to idiot children with absolutely no hand-eye coordination, so the next closest thing for those of us growing up in Fort Wayne was Happy the Hobo.

Happy the Hobo was a congenial raggedy gentile who lived in the WFFT Fox 55 studio with his pal Froggy – who in case you’re confused, was a frog who sounded a lot like my mom when she started smoking again and tried to hide it from us. The show aired every weekday after school, and any kid in the broadcast area whose parents loved them made their television debut on Happy the Hobo.

Similar to Bozo, Happy featured games that pitted select audience children against each other. The winner would receive vast prizes and fortune, including Pop Weaver popcorn and Archway cookies.

Also, each kid on the show was “interviewed” by Happy, with some question of the segment, and you had two seconds to give your answer.

Most answers were, by my estimation, lame. Some kids cried. Some were shy and didn’t talk. But more than that was the lucky kid who would be the last one “interviewed” before a commercial break who got to say “We’ll be right back.”

In my five-year-old mind, I NEEDED to be this child.

So when my parents announced we would be going on Happy’s Place, my mind went into overdrive preparing for what was surely going to be my fast track to stardom. I schemed ways that I could get to be the kid to say “We’ll be right back.” I would sing it just like Paula Abdul would. Happy would be so floored by my panache, my “it” factor, and people watching the show would be so taken by this talented and precocious child with the huge white permed fro that stuck five inches off her head, that I would be destined for greatness. It was inevitable.

And so came the day, and I could scarcely contain myself as I sat with the other children in the audience. Happy came out juggling bowling pins and telling jokes, and I made it a point to be AMAZED by every trick, to laugh louder than ANY other kid, to show just how clearly outstanding I was. The time for the interview came, and the featured question was “If you could be any kind of animal, what would you be?”

As we lined up, I gauged how long it would be before a commercial break. I was too close to the front of the line; I knew my turn would come and go before I would even have the chance to say “We’ll be right back”. So I began letting kids in front of me in line, under the guise that I was A.) the benevolent line saint, and B.) very shy.

It’s on tape somewhere, which I think my parents still have if my father didn’t tape Lethal Weapon over it and I didn’t tape N Sync videos over it in junior high, the abnormally tall child in the line, wheeling and dealing on camera letting kids in front of her. Nobody knew my ulterior motive but I was going to tell the world we’d be right back, and I would have ARRIVED.

Then Happy asked me the question. My answer? A fox. I’d like to say my skill for marketing and PR shined even then (the station was called Fox 55), but the truth was I was just sort of obsessed with Fox and the Hound and all the lame kids were saying stupid shit like horses. Horses! PFFT!

And I stood and waited after Happy noted what a great response that was.

And I was motioned to step aside.

That was it. That was my chance. And I blew it on “fox.”

And then he asked the little boy behind me to say “We’ll be right back.”

OH THE DEFEAT. The kid had been picking his nose the whole time and Happy picked HIM? WHAT THE HELL HAPPY?

I proceeded to go cry to my parents, who were in the parental section of the audience off-camera, so very, very disappointed with how things had turned so very much against me.

Maybe because he saw me crying, maybe because I trampled the other children when he asked for a volunteer, but Happy later picked me to be a contestant in the GOOFY GAME-O-RAMA.

THIS was it, guys. THIS was my moment. This would be where I would shine. Would it be throwing your shoes in a pile to see who could pull them out first? Oh I hoped so.

Again, cruel fate turned me to the cold.

Happy pitted me against a huge girl, who, in my mind’s eye, was like, 16, but in all reality was probably like, 8. And the game? Hula hoop contest.

I have a secret confession to make. I can’t hula hoop. I can’t now, and I sure as shit couldn’t when I was 5. I also can’t jump rope – which, contrary to what my middle school gym teacher told me, you CAN get into college and become a successful adult without being able to do, like climbing a rope to the gym ceiling and putting mind over matter on menstrual cramps (whatever, if you’re mad, you’re just mad YOUR mom didn’t write you a note).

But I couldn’t risk giving up my one shot at stardom, since I had blown my interview, so instead of saying simply, “I can’t hula hoop,” I proceeded to hurl the hula hoop around my mid-section and do what wasn’t much unlike seizing. Happy, unfooled by my tomfoolery, kindly escorted me out of the game and picked some other kid to participate. My Achilles heel of competition, and he had found it.

Not long after this embarrassing, shameful turn of events, Happy "retired" and let his cousin, "Happy's cousin," take over the show, a move I never understood. I personally would never let my cousin take over my job; mostly because he's a convicted felon whose claim to fame is that his prison cell is in the same block as Maurice Clarrett's (something any red-blooded Ohioan would be proud of, really), and if he tried to take over my job, he'd probably just work for cigarettes and stab someone in the break room before the day was over. Moral of the story: your cousin shouldn't take over your job.

And really, he's my step-cousin. But anyway.

To this day I can’t hula hoop. I can’t eat Archway cookies without feeling like I didn’t earn them, and I am fully prepared to belt out “We’ll be right back” while doing a full song and dance number. Mr. Hobo, I am ready for my closeup.

No really. Please?

Uphill battle.

2011-02-06T18:28:00.000-08:00

Let’s just get one thing straight right now: I am not a cyclist.

I am so NOT a cyclist that I initially typed “cycler”. That’s how non-cyclist I am.

So you can imagine what a foreign experience it has been for me to actually partake in a spin class. I’m not out of shape by most definitions – at 5’10, I’ve never really seen the other side of 170 lbs. (with the exception of pregnancy), I don’t smoke, and my drinking habits only lightly cross the line of “crippling dependency.” But since embarking on my new employment a few months ago for an organization that A.) stresses health and wellness and B.) gives me a free gym membership, I figured, what the fuck. Let’s get on a tiny pretend bike.

My first venture into spin class happened to fall on a day on which I was getting past a nasty cold, and had a lingering cough that would flare up if I inhaled, let alone huffed and puffed through spin class. But illness be damned, I had committed myself to doing spin class that day. So I chugged half a bottle of children’s Dimetapp before leaving for the gym, and hoped for the best.

It’s bad enough to be known as the new person in a spin class. It’s worse to be known as “the new girl who puked purple nightmare all over spin class.”

Moral of the story: don’t do spin class after chugging half a bottle of children’s Dimetapp. You will puke. I don’t care how good of an idea it may seem; you will puke. And terrify all the children coming out of swimming lessons. Just sayin’.

More than my faux pas, however, is the fact that the majority of people in spin class are, in fact, insane – if for nothing more than the fact that they are getting on a tiny pretend bike and pretending to go up pretend hills on their pretend bike, and are insane competitive assholes while doing it.

Somehow every time I go, I wind up next to the triathlete who is training through the winter and thinks we’re in some sort of race. Chill, dude. I am not going to race you up a pretend hill. I am not going to sprint faster than you. I am just trying to keep this tiny pretend bike’s tiny and very-real seat from breaking some unknown second hymen because CHRIST these things aren’t made for an ass like mine.

And even if – and when – you DO beat me up the hill…way to go. You beat the chick who puked purple all over the place last time and then pretty much crawled away from the class like Lucille Ostero in the vertigo clinic. (+2 to anyone noting that Arrested Development reference.)

Going into an established class is like being Forrest Gump on the school bus on the first day. Everyone has their assigned bike, officially or not, and everyone bikes next to the same person. Everyone knows all the bikes and all their tiny nuances. So I don’t know who I’m going to piss off by getting on this bike here. I don’t want to step on any toes, clad in tiny little shoes that snap onto the pedals all like whatthefuck. So I’m just going to stand by this bike here, all noncommittal, and see if anyone comes and looks especially annoyed by it before 9:15 when the class starts.

Or one day I came in, and lingered by a bike, put my tiny backpack down and put my entirely-insufficient water bottle in the rack when the girl next to me said, “Careful, that one’s finicky.” Like this means shit to me. I mean, is this a horse? Does it have a stubborn streak? Is it easy-going? I don’t know, I don’t even know what she means by this, but I nod solemnly like I know what this means, and I go stand by the bike over there in the corner instead in my non-committal pre-class bike considering stance.

When I don’t vomit, I spend most of the class cursing the instructor, who for all intensive purposes is probably a delightful woman, but for those 45 minutes she can GO STRAIGHT TO HELL ON HER TINY LITTLE BIKE. The instructor, the stupid uncomfortable seats and my crushed pelvic bones all say, “Stand with the class as they go to position 2!” and my glutes – and my mouth hole – are screaming, “JESUS TAPDANCING CHRIST NO!!!”

Ricky Martin’s pelvic thrusting “Living La Vida Loca” is not going to make me get off my ass and try to stand while pedaling for 5 minutes. It’s just not. So I sit in the remedial corner of the cycling class and pedal the entire time, pretending to increase my resistance along with the class while we go up this so-called “hill,” when really I’m just pedaling slower so the instructor stops yelling at me.

I am not a cyclist. I don’t know why I keep going to spin class. My vagina hurts.

I just keep repeating that to myself the entire class. I think it makes the triathlon guy next to me uncomfortable.

But still I press on, up the hills and down the hills, increasing resistance and decreasing resistance, because I love the thrill. I love the challenge. I love the wind in my hair and I love being yelled at and berated in front of a group of people.

No, no I don’t. I’m just an idiot on a tiny pretend bike with a bruised ass and an apparent case of Tourette’s, because as long as I claim that, they can’t throw me out for “unwholesome language.” SHITFUCK DOGBALLS.

Alone.

2010-12-30T21:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve always loved this poem and this video.

I know a lot of things have probably changed in your life since I last posted; a lot of things have changed in mine, too.

I’ve learned how to be alone.

It’s a strange feeling, walking through the rubble of consequences to your actions and choices and forcing yourself – despite the very natural and human response to ignore it, or blame others, or dwell in excuses – to admit that you have nobody to blame but yourself. It is hard, gut-wrenching, to look at the carnage of what once seemed like such a happy, full life and know that this smoking, empty rubble is of your own doing.

The people you hurt. You have to look at them, like a long hallway of morose and accusatory faces. Your partner you failed, your partnership you abandoned. Your child you have let down, whose life you have forever altered because of your own decisions. They all stare down at you as you pass by, and you have to look at them.

On the long walk down that long hall of regrets; decisions made and choices chosen. The long walk down the long hall as you learn to be alone.

You go home to a quiet apartment. Gone is the house full of laughter and memories but instead it’s a new place, that you decorate to your heart’s content in a style you like without worrying about what a partner will think. A hot pink and black bathroom where you take long hot baths with a beer and a good book. Butterflies splashed across the wall’s of the little girl’s bedroom that you try your hardest to make homey for her, to ease the transition and the uprooting that is inevitable.

You cuddle up with your dog in bed, your only bed partner besides the ghosts of your past that come to take up the other ¾ of the queen sized bed you picked out for yourself, with the damask-print bedding you chose without worrying if it was too girly or ugly or the wrong color.

Those ghosts take up more of the bed as time goes on, it seems.

You have nobody to answer to anymore. You have an apartment, though hardly a home. You have a child you love more than your very own life, though you know your choices have altered her own life path. You have regret, and loss, and pain. There’s lots of pain.

You take your long hot baths, eat small meals for one – if you eat at all, there’s nobody to really notice if you eat or not and what the hell, you could stand to drop a few pounds, you watch the TV programs you want and go to bed watching movies like Sex & the City and The Devil Wears Prada and shows on DVD like True Blood, and you fall asleep sprawled across the bed with nobody to complain about it the next morning.

And you mourn.

You mourn long, and hard, because this happy, autonomous façade is just that – a mask for the intense agony of accepting the repercussions for your own actions and decisions.

You look at yourself in the mirror and say out loud, “You did this.”

“You wanted this.”

You mourn the loss of a partner, the loss of what you dreamed it could have been and what you thought was possible at one point. You mourn the pain you’ve caused and the people you’ve hurt. You mourn this apartment that has nothing but hurt in it, even despite your best efforts and pink Christmas trees. You mourn the death of the family your little girl deserves, the death of a dream that died by your own hand.

You did this.

You mourn because this is what you wanted. Right?

The days blur after awhile, a combination of hurt and pain and regret. You learn to sleep without the warmth of that body beside you, the one that was next to you every night for so long, and you wake up to the quiet apartment and the dog at your feet. It starts over again. From the moment you wake up to the moment you get back in that intimidatingly large and empty queen sized bed with the damask comforter set, you fight through the day with regret and hope, sadness and optimism.

Maybe your redemption will come someday. If you beat yourself long enough for the sins you’ve committed against the people you loved, eventually the pain dulls, like a long and complex tattoo. Eventually you learn to live with the pain and the regret.

You feel hope for the future sometimes.

You feel remorse. And regret. So much remorse and regret. You’re so, so sorry. You did this.

And you are alone. And it’s okay. You’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. She’ll be okay. You’ll all be okay. It will be okay.

And that’s what you learn from being alone.

Been a minute

2010-12-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

Okay. I get it. I haven't updated in...uh...forever. Let me survive Christmas and we'll talk. In the meantime, I've been shopping for things that are neat, because I generally have neat people in my life, who enjoy neat things. I also like to buy love because I'm really lonely and dead inside.

Then I kind of got obsessed with Skin AT on eBay, and basically realized that any gift I ever give anyone else, ever again, will be in vain, because these things are awesome, and great for the Mac jerks in your life who think that they are superior when they're not, and clearly you are still the favorite child, and SCREW YOU CAMERON AND YOUR STUPID MACBOOK...

Er, I mean. Check them out. This stuff is cool.

Christmas shopping tip from me to you.

SHAH UP.

2010-06-16T20:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, everyone stop being sad assholes for a minute. Stop being sad, stop crying, and above all:

SHAH UP.

You heard me. You shah up.

Much to my own surprise, Punk hasn't picked up as much of my foul mouth as you'd expect. I've caught a "shit" on a couple occasions, but not recurring. But the one thing she HAS picked up, and I swear it's been from the kids at the babysitter and not me...probably... is "shut up." Or "SHAH UP" if you are fluent in the Punk dialect.

It's gotten me more than a few dirty looks and become quite the favorite phrase of hers. The more I try to correct it, the more she insists on screaming it. It was originally an inside issue until one day when we were in line to check out at Target. In front of us stood a young mother with a very tiny baby, obviously stressed as the baby cried and she waited to check out. It was obviously her first time at this rodeo.

It wasn't that long ago that I was in the same position. I recall it well... Punk was maybe two months old, I was trying to check out at the U-scan while quietly shushing the screaming Punk (unsuccessfully). There was a tiny old woman behind me, and while I was trying to do it all by myself, she swooped in to my salvation and talked so quietly and sweetly to little Punk, allowing Punk to hold her fingers while she diverted her fury long enough for me to check out.

So two years later, I hoped I could pay it forward, so to speak, as I smiled at this young mom empathetically and smiled at the baby. Then Punk intervened.

"SHAH UP BABY!"

This is where the dirty looks start.

So I tried to descend upon the behavior, quickly shushed her as I lectured (loudly enough that everyone could see that I don't encourage this behavior, I AM A GOOD PARENT, SEE?!), "No, no! We don't say that! No, not cool! We don't say 'shut up'! We say 'shhh'!"

Punk furrowed her brow further. Looked at me. Looked at the baby, and put her finger to her lips as she uttered, "Shhhh....

"...AH UP BABY!"

This was the point where we decided to go to another line.

I was really hoping after another lecture, after this incident, that we'd squashed the behavior. And really, I thought we had. I hadn't heard it out of her in awhile, and all seemed well in the world, where we could freely express ourselves around each other without a toddler screaming at me to SHAH UP.

Then I put her to bed last night. After another long day of work and toddler wrangling, it was none too soon that I got her to bed (in her big girl bed, have I mentioned we upgraded? Well we did and now you know). I shut the door and all was silent for awhile til I heard her jibbering in her room. I muted the TV for a minute and listened, and finally I began to make out what she was yelling.

"SHAH UP BIG GIRL BED!"

"SHAH UP ZUZU!" (her pet rat. We got a pet rat, if you didn't know that.)

"SHAH UP TOY BOX!"

"SHAH UP DIAPER!"

"SHAH UP CLOSET!"

"SHAH UP ROCKING HORSE!"

She was listing, individually, everything in her room. And telling it to shut up.

It's something I'm working on, on top of all her other issues, including cooking babies, taking off her pants in public, smearing poop on the walls, and killing other children. In the meantime, I'll just take it for what it is; my household's own obscene and inappropriate version of Goodnight Moon...

SHUT UP MOON.
SHUT UP AIR.
SHUT UP NOISES EVERYWHERE.

Uncharted territory.

2010-05-22T21:48:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of things people don't tell you about being a parent. The first three months suh-huuuccckkk. Your boobs will never, ever be the same, even if you're *ahem* lucky enough to dodge stretch marks. Your kids will do things like this:

And this...

Oh, and don't forget this:

But one thing nobody adequately warns you about -- because if they did, you'd immediately rip out your reproductive organs and throw them in the garbage disposal -- is toddlerhood. "Terrible Twos" barely grazes the surface of this dodecahedron of sanity deprivation. So here, let me put it to you in ways that nobody else -- or at least, nobody with any interest in furthering the human race -- will tell you: sometimes, two-year-olds are real assholes.

Nobody tells you about the brain-shredding whining noise they make or that shrill scream that comes the minute the word "no" pierces into their tiny little cognitive process. In one morning alone this week, in the 90 minutes between when Punk and I wake up (when Punk wakes up and incidentally, wakes me up by alternatively screaming and shrieking "MOMMY NOW! MOMMY WAKE UP!") and when we leave for daycare/work she had six -- SIX! -- meltdowns. These meltdowns, which involve huge tears streaming now her face, banshee screaming, and flailing, erupted over:

Sternly telling her to stop kicking me, after she aggressively connected foot to cheekbone, while I was changing her diaper.
Telling her she could not have cookies for breakfast.
The Imagination Movers being on TV.
Not allowing her to bring her entire stuffed animal collection to the car.
Not stopping the car to retrieve her Sophie Bear, whom she had chucked -- by her own crazy toddler free will -- into the cargo area of the Jeep. This created a screaming meltdown for 3/4 of our drive to daycare, while I cranked up Dead Kennedys and stared straight ahead at the road, ~~wondering just where my life went so horribly, horribly wrong.~~
Sternly telling her, before releasing her from her car seat, that today we are going to be a NICE GIRL at daycare (that's another topic I will discuss here shortly).

Seriously. For the love of tapdancing, menstruating CHRIST, kid, cut me a break. By the time we got to the daycare I was about two seconds from opening the door, kicking her out and screaming "TUCK AND ROLL, KIDDO!"

She's not just being a pain in the ass for me, either. The sitter's damn near had it with her, and I don't blame her, either. This past week, every day I went to pick Punk up, it was a new story of hitting (Monday), biting (Tuesday), taking toys and slapping (Wednesday), attempted homicide (Thursday) and pushing (Friday).

Did she just say "attempted homicide"? Yes I did. Punk's apparently working at thinning out the herd by pushing a fellow toddler OUT OF THE TREEHOUSE, where he fell five feet to his doom. By "doom" I mean a bruised cheek, some sniffling, and a lot of profuse apologizing by me to said child's mom. But I mean... really, kid? We're now ATTEMPTING TO KILL CHILDREN?

She's a little girl! She isn't actually trying to KILL kids! Oh I'm sure she is. She wanted to drive the steering wheel in the tree house and fuck anyone who stands in her way. I'm not fooled by her big brown eyes and deliciously nommable cheeks. The kid's a sociopath. A baby-cooking, child-killing, meltdown-throwing sociopath. I love her with every ounce I have in me, but sometimes.... sometimes my kid's a real asshole and you regret inviting her to the party, if ya know what I'm sayin'.

But all you can do is charge forward. There's nothing else that can be done. All I can do is buckle her, thrashing and screaming and biting, into her car seat and repeat over and over to the sitter's our daily mantra of, "We will not BITE. We will not HIT. We will not PUSH. We will be a NICE GIRL." Most of that's for me, especially if you understood my boss, but it's applicable to her too, I suppose.

And all I can do is buckle myself in, thrashing and screaming and kicking and biting, and keep on driving.

She called the shit poop!

2010-03-16T20:25:00.001-07:00

I apparently offended the delicate sensibilities of some reader in Columbus, Ohio last go-round because I deigned to talk about poop, MY POOP, coming out of MY ASSHOLE on MY BLOG... which apparently, someone made this reader in Columbus, Ohio read at gunpoint, perhaps at the end of a bayonet, or maybe this assailant was about to drop Columbus's children into a vat of acid or something. Because that's about the only rationale I can provide for why someone would be so viciously offended and disgusted that they had been so very brutally forced to read what I've chosen to write about on my blog.

I hope you and your children are now safe and your fragile notions are at ease, Columbus.

So... in recent news, I have shit only in appropriate venues. But I am still going to talk about poop...

Next order of business: other people shitting places that they shouldn't be. By "other people," I mean my daughter, because apparently she's been learning somewhere... probably the TV... that it's perfectly acceptable to shit anywhere you please.

My friends... I think we're on the cusp of potty training.

She now announces pooping before it happens. This either means that I have a child who is becoming more aware of her bodily functions, or she's some sort of Poop Psychic... and if it's the latter, I need to totally market that shit. (Literally.) Her disdain for dirty/soggy/slightly damp diapers has escalated to the point of furious screaming at me if I hesitate for the slightest second after I've been alerted to the problem. She's like the ADT of diapers.

So I think potty training is coming. We have a training potty, which has become her favorite seat in the house, and also a lovely bowl that she eats her afternoon fruit snacks out of. I'm aware that toilet confusion is a little bit of a genetic thing in this house. She's a big fan of her new "Let's Go Potty" book...

...which, I have read ad nauseum, at her request, and have realized that "potty literature" for toddlers kind of...um... sucks. What these kids need is the cold hard facts. Things their parents are forced to learn the hard way, like "Don't hold your pee in for an entire 12 hour Greyhound trip, because even though that potty looks yucky and that hobo may try to rape you, it's not worth the worst urinary tract, and eventually kidney, infections of your life." or "If you only knew the horrors that await you if you don't go poopy in the potty RIGHT NOW."

I guess I'm okay with it being potty training time. I always said I'd wait til she made indications that she was ready, and really, she is. So let's rock this out. Flying Spaghetti Monster, Vishnu, and all other deities I have screamed obscenities to are all aware that I'm really tired of cleaning poop off of walls and cribs and blankets... since she loves to take her diaper off and go all sorts of Pollock on every reachable surface. (In case you ever see her nursery and wonder why there's a roll of duct tape on the changing table.) So really, I'm okay with this new development in child rearing.

Especially because I can't wait to lock her out of the bathroom when SHE has to take a shit, because seriously, that's just hilarious.

Again.

2010-03-07T21:20:00.000-08:00

There are some things that a rational, mentally competent adult should never do or say. One of these things is the phrase, "I pooped in a Wal-Mart shopping bag." But perhaps even less acceptable is following that preceding sentence with the word, "again."

It's not like I set out with a mission to poop in receptacles not intended for feces -- or anything aside from toilets. And this time around it wasn't really my fault. Okay, it wasn't my fault at all. The only mistake I made... okay, the TWO mistakes I made... was eating buffalo wings for dinner in a sauce I hadn't previously tried, and leaving a toddler unattended.

So I set forth one morning recently with my intention being to have a very normal day, filled with toddler wrangling, laundry, and pooping in toilets. Shortly after waking up -- after a night with friends in which I ate aforementioned wings -- I changed Punk and set her free to terrorize the dog and my otherwise tranquil house while I set out to make breakfast.

I heard the bathroom door slam shut. Punk's newest fascination is opening and closing doors. So when I heard the door slam shut, I didn't apply much thought until about two minutes later, when, as I stared at the bowl of oatmeal making its rounds in the microwave, I felt an angry, unhappy turn in my stomach. This is the point where a rational adult would walk herself to the bathroom and take care of necessary business. And while I'm hardly rational...or an adult... that's what I did. Then I got to the bathroom door.

I turned the handle.

The handle did not turn.

My daughter had locked herself in the bathroom.

The only bathroom in the house.

There is no actual key, just a series of tricks with a bobby pin and patience.

And dear god this horrible concoction in my intestines is not waiting for this.

It's at times when you really have to take a shit that you find yourself utilizing problem-solving skills that would make the Pentagon green with envy. It's like a mental Jenga as you try to weigh out your options as efficiently as possible, all the while praying to whatever deity will listen that maybe... just maybe... you won't shit your pants.

I mean, really. What do you do in this situation? Run to the neighbor's house? Yeah, hi, my daughter locked me out of the bathroom and I'm about to erupt with explosive diarrhea all up in your business if you don't let me use your bathroom. Nope, doesn't happen that way. So I called upon past experience and I sprinted to the kitchen, grabbed a couple Wal-Mart bags out of the little dispenser my grandma made me in college, double bagged, and no sooner had I completed that, did the full components of my bowels explode into it in just the knick of time.

Yes ma'am, Helpful Hints from Heloise. In a pinch, you can recycle your shopping bags as a quaint solution for when your toddler locks you out of the bathroom and you're suffering from mercilessly explosive diarrhea.

Sometimes I feel like an asshole for not buying one of those reusable shopping bags when I go to the grocery. Then I think about things like this, and my seeming avoidance of actually shitting in acceptable receptacles, and I think... I'm recycling anyway, right?

Cop out.

2010-03-03T20:09:00.000-08:00

Yeah, not a real post right now, but here. Go ask me stuff. And I'll answer with stuff.

Do it. Do it immediately.

One missed call.

2010-02-08T19:30:00.000-08:00

My mother is insane. I love her dearly, she is a caring grandmother to Punk and she is one of the most intelligent, interesting people I know. But dear god this woman is crazy. One thing she absolutely lacks is the ability to leave a voicemail message. Don't get me wrong. She leaves them. Flying Spaghetti Monster help me, she leaves them. Long, rambling, each word more crazy than the last and each thought less coherent than the one before it. Sometimes it's ranting. Sometimes it's just the conversational, one-way equivalent of a small child wandering around lost in a store. But it's always crazy.

So it's been awhile since I transcribed an authentic Mom Voicemail on the blog - not since the Pants Party days. So I guess it's about time I brought her legitimate, clinically diagnosed mental dysfunction back to the blog. This time, she believed I was supposed to be at the Casa de los How2 Parentals. I was not, primarily because I was on the other side of the state for the weekend. Like I'd told her. Repeatedly. In detail. And still she called...and left me this voicemail:

"Hi How2, it's your mother. Your car isn't here, so I was just wondering where you were...(At this point she yells for my father, without taking the phone away from her mouth) Hey, babe! BABE! Is How2 here? (Father in the background: "No, why?") I'm talking to the answering machine on her cell phone! She's not here? (Father: "Is her car here?") Well no, that's why I was calling her! (Father: "I'm guessing not then. Are you still making something in this crock pot?")...yes, I was going to do a roast, leave it out please (Father: "Well do you want me to start it?") ... no, just leave it, I'll get to it... no, leave it alone...[Father's Name], I will get to it... I'll call you back, How2..." *click*

Yep. My mom should never be allowed near technology. Ever.

One more excuse.

2010-02-03T23:09:00.000-08:00

Wow. I kind of slipped some big news into my last post and you people are freakin' sharp. I guess first and foremost, in a candid kind of moment, I want to thank you all for your ridiculous amount of support. Some of you I know personally, a lot of you I don't; but regardless of the case, I can't thank you guys enough for your support, your kind words, your shout-outs on the Facebook fan page, etc. I am truly blessed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster to have such amazing readers and friends.

So thank you, thank you, thank you.

That being said, I guess it's time to let a much happier cat out of the bag (as happy as a cat can be for being shoved into a bag)...

I got a job.

Nay. I got a career.

I know, like I need one more excuse to throw out at you people for why I am neglecting my blog.

As I've mentioned a lot, I put my career on hold -- and by "on hold" I mean, "failed to launch" -- when I had Punk, mostly because I succeeded in getting surprise knocked up no sooner had the ink on my college diploma dried. So I spent two years perfecting the fine art of parenthood. Or trying really hard not to curl into the fetal position every twenty minutes. Whatever. So after two years off from being a functional human being working girl, I have been offered and accepted a marketing position.

It's been overwhelming to say the least. I don't know if I'm ready to go back to work. I thought I was, and then I started touring daycare centers and had, for lack of a better word, a complete and total meltdown in the parking lot of a daycare. It's a lot to consider and it's overwhelming. It's terrifying. This is my baby...

But for so long, my career was my baby. I spent most of college being a complete alcoholic workaholic. I didn't need a man, I didn't want children. Speed bumps in the successful public relations and marketing career I was destined to conquer. Then I met A. Then I met vodka and cranberry juice. Then I met his far-too-determined sperm. Then I met Punk. Then I met vodka and cranberry juice. It's funny how things come full circle, eh?

I had been going 150 mph toward a goal I'd held as long as I could remember. And with one double-lined pregnancy test (...or six), I had to slam on the brakes and pray I wouldn't crash. I didn't, surprisingly enough. But I'd really like to get back up to speed.

I love motherhood. My daughter is absolutely, without a doubt, my life. But sometimes, as I sat up late at night with a colicky baby and maybe wondering if it was a horrible idea to invite her to the party, if ya know what I mean... I started to miss my career. I felt like not only did I have to leave the party early, but I had to leave before I'd even gotten up the driveway. I watched my friends from college go on to have these outstanding, exciting careers, and I'd get (and still get) the polite smiles as they'd tell me about these insane cocktail parties and taking off on random getaways to Vegas and Colorado and California, and my biggest contribution to the conversation was, "Hey, my kid cooks her baby dolls in the oven! Baby baby baby baby kid kid kid blah blah blah baby!"

So here it is. My career. I took this bizarre detour off the interstate of my life, somewhere along the line a car seat go tossed in the back and the dreamed-about Mazda RX-8 became a much more practical crossover SUV, but I'm back on track for the life I'd wanted for so long. So you modify plans a little. You improvise. But I wouldn't change my life for anything. I mean this, even if it sounds cliche and hippy-dippy: I am so thrilled and excited for where my life is and where it's going. I am in a really great place.

Now the next question is, how do I warn daycares that she likes to cook babies?

Weirdo.

2010-01-23T23:09:00.000-08:00

I hate rambling on about my kid constantly on the blog because I have this constant, nagging fear of alienating my friends/readers who don't have kids. Because all through my pregnancy I set out refusing to become "THAT" parent -- you know the type. The ones who all they talk about is their goddamn kids, and when you don't have kids... and even when you do... you JUST. DON'T. CARE.

But inevitably you do become that parent because it's just so all-encompassing. I have nothing else to talk about. What I believe could very well be, finally, my career is launching off, so hopefully soon I can at least discuss the hilarity of my work environment (because you know there's always a Dwight), but for the last two years, all I've really had to talk about is my kid. And to the hailed inner circle, what a dbag I married. But besides that? Pretty much all spawn talk, all the time.

So anyway, I have this deep-seeded need to constantly show that I'm more that just Punk's mom. I am me. And apparently this means that I, the Individual, poop while driving and barely pass remedial driving because of my similarly-deep-seeded need to be a complete and reprehensible smartass. So I guess we're all overdue for some solid Punk-related dialogue.

Apparently -- and nobody ever told me this -- the overwhelming theme to being the parent of a toddler is that you constantly find yourself wondering what in the big blue fuck is going through this kid's mind. It's like having your life and your home invaded and overrun by a crazy foreigner from some faraway land, who has no concept of social skills or graces, or personal space, or grooming. I don't know if anyone here ever watched Recess on Saturday morning cartoons, but the savage caricature of the kindergartners? Pretty accurate from about age 2 on...

And more and more often in my daily life, I find myself saying things like:

**"No, we do not cook babies in the oven!"
Punk's grandparents got her a full-on, pimped-out kitchen for Christmas. She loves to play house with it, and makes lovely delicacies in the microwave, boils eggs on the stove, washes the kitchen counter frequently and fervently with bleach wipes (hey, if having an OCD mother teaches her anything...) and, of course, COOKING HER BABY DOLLS IN THE OVEN. I mean, guys. Guys seriously. This isn't like she just discovered this random little niche and thought, "Hey, a neat cave for my babies!" No. No, she puts them in the oven. Closes the oven. Turns the knobs. And makes "Tsss! Tsss!" cooking sounds. SHE IS COOKING HER BABIES.

And somehow, I could even ignore these bizarre Dahmer-esque tendencies were it not for the fact that after she sets her babies to the appropriate time and temperature, she will go and grab the hand of anyone within reach and sweetly, innocently lead you to the oven like some incontinent and language-deficient Martha Stewart. And then she will crouch down in front of the window of the oven, point, AND LAUGH. Yes. She knows exactly what she is doing, and she is not only so unashamed that she will show it to you, SHE THINKS THIS IS HILARIOUS.

So this raises two very important points that I have learned about my daughter:
1.) Probably a sociopath.
2.) Probably destined to be an only child.

** "Your pants are not a food storage facility!"
I like to think I keep my kid pretty well-fed. She's huge for her age (often mistaken for a 3-year-old, and a retarded one at that because she doesn't talk in full sentences, because she's like, you know, not even 2), she's healthy and happy. My boobs look like two saggy and depressing balloons from the savage beating they took from her for over a year. The kid likes to eat, has full access to food throughout the day if she asks. Which she does. Frequently.

So would someone please, please, PLEASE explain why I'm constantly having to check her pants for -- and discovering -- food shoved down there like she's an Auschwitz prisoner storing bread crumbs? Seriously. I pull all sorts of food out of her pants. Crackers. Chicken nuggets. Bananas. Grapes. It's rare that I even actually SEE her put this stuff down her pants. Hell, 80% of the time I don't even know where she GOT it. ("California roll? When have we even gone out for sushi?") But damned if I'm not constantly pulling food, of both likely and mysterious origins, out of this kid's pants.

But anyway.

It's a strange and foreign world, living with a toddler. She's growing up so fast that it scares the bejeesus out of me at times. I remember shortly after having her, filled with postpartum dread and sleep deprivation, I'd frequently be told by ~~nosy old bitches who need to shut their traps~~ lovely and well-meaning elderly women to "enjoy this time because it flies by." And of course at the time I ~~screamed like a crazy person~~ smiled sweetly but thought to myself, "You shut your lying fucking mouth." But it really is true. She turns 2 in less than three weeks and I couldn't tell you where that time all went.

I used to walk into Wal-Mart dragging this huge behemoth of a car seat with this tiny, pink, pissed off crying baby, battle loudly trying to get it to snap into the cart, and then pray that she'd sleep while I sprinted through the store in an attempt to get some semblance of groceries -- which inevitably would become a pack of Snickers, an apple, and a box of taco shells. Now she walks into the store holding my hand, beaming at what a big girl she is to be walking by herself, and sits in the cart while pointing out colors and shapes and things to me like she's an actual freaking person -- it's ri-goddamn-diculous is what it is. She's so big now, and so smart and funny and sociopathic and wonderful.

Every night I put her to bed, after we change her diaper and put on her pajamas, and we feed her fish Frank Stallone and Albert Fish, and we tell them sternly, "Eat your food, you fish!" and then I rock her for a few seconds before she melts into me and says in her tiny, tired voice, "Bird song Mom. Bird song." And I quietly sing "Three Little Birds" by Bob Marley to her, every night, until her eyelids begin to get heavy. It's the little moments like that that make all of this worth it. The unexpected, life-altering pregnancy. The custody fights. The frustration, the sacrifice, the tears, the stress. Every single ounce of every bit of it is so worth it as I hold my baby, who won't be a baby much longer, and quietly, in my out-of-practice mezzo soprano voice, sing her to sleep. She is my absolute everything, the reason I get out of bed every morning, the reason I breathe, the reason I fight...

But seriously. The baby cooking thing. We need to work on that.

Remedied.

2010-01-09T11:51:00.001-08:00

Okay. So I'm not the greatest driver in the world. I'm not the worst. I maintain I'm a decent driver, I just happen to drive sort of fast. Okay, just because I do things like poop while driving does not mean I'm a bad driver.

Anyway, I had a rough patch this past fall that resulted in three speeding tickets in one month -- two of which were on the same day, in two different states. Yeah, it was an expensive month for me. And in the fabulous State in which my driver's license is issued, if you have more than one traffic infraction in a 12 month period, you get to go through a fabulous little process known as:

Remedial driver's education.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I got my notice from The State letting me know I would have to take the class or have my license suspended. Especially because this would be my...ahem...third time taking the class. I'm like the Van Wilder of State Remedial Driving. I could move on with my life, learn my lessons and become a prosperous individual. But what fun would that be?

So I put off taking the class til the last minute -- my license would have been suspended this week, and I had like three months to take it -- so I finally ponied up my $49.95 and took the stupid online class. Four hours of my life wasted. By wasted I mean I would ignore the timer on the computer and only come back to the computer and take breaks from marathons of Dead Like Me (excellent show, by the way) to take the chapter quizzes. I wonder why I've had to take this shit three times now.

Anyway. Part of the quizzes involved "reflection journal time," which yes, is exactly as pointless as it sounds. It was like a flashback to my high school honors classes, where we were "above" grades and could basically smear shit on the wall and receive an A, because we were gifted children who couldn't be held back by something as menial as grades. So I've become used to this method of thinking, and when presented with essay and short answer questions, I generally take it upon myself to be a merciless, shameless, self-congratulating smartass and see how far I can push the envelope. I know, you're all absolutely shocked.

So thanks to the wonder of copy and paste, I present to you, my essay questions throughout the course of my four hour remedial driving class:

Q. Think about the route you normally take when driving to work or school. What are the hazards you usually encounter along this route? What strategies have you used to stay safe?
A. Sometimes when I drive to work, I pass through neighborhoods in which I fear I may be shot at by rival gangs. My strategy to stay safe is to reinforce my car with military-grade protective metal and to drive defensively, scanning the streets ahead for potential hazards, such as a Blood with a Glock aimed at me and my child.

Q. Of the road users discussed in this chapter, which ones do you normally encounter on a daily basis? Examine the route you take and list the areas where you most frequently encounter pedestrians and bicyclists.
A. I encounter pedestrians most frequently near the old mill. Oftentimes, a wandering child, who is also a pedestrian, will fall into a trapped mine within the mill, and people will come from far and wide to come and help./ Because they are so concerned with saving the child from the mine, they often do not pay attention to traffic. It's my job as a motorist to be aware of my surroundings, and watch for potential samaritans who May not necessarily be paying attention to the cars on the road. Sometimes people ride bicycles to come help too.

Q. When was the last time you had the following vehicle components checked or replaced: Motor Oil, Tires (tread and pressure), Brakes, Engine Belt, Air filter, Windshield wipers, Vehicle lights, General maintenance?
A. Most likely never. I have no idea how cars actually work.

Q. This chapter lists six examples of field sobriety tests that are commonly used by law enforcement officers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has approved the use of just three of these tests: the balance test, walking in a straight line, and the nystagmus test. What do you think makes these particular tests effective?
A. The balance test is important because if you are incapable of maintaining your balance, you are too impaired to be driving, either because of alcohol consumption or by a crippling case of Vertigo. In either case, you should not be operating a motor vehicle. This also applies to the balance test in weeding out drunk drivers and the equilibrium-challenged. The Nystagmus Test helps to determine ocular abnormalities associated with alcohol impairment. Also, it may help the officer determine if the operator of the vehicle is blind.

Q. This chapter discusses one way to prevent driving after drinking – using designated drivers. Consider some other ways in which you can prevent yourself or people close to you from driving after drinking. List the preventative measures that you think are practical in your journal.
A. To prevent someone from driving after drinking, you could perhaps disable their vehicle, by either disabling the ignition, locking the doors and taking the keys, or setting the vehicle on fire. All of these methods would be effective in preventing an intoxicated person from driving. Also, if they are intoxicated enough, you could perhaps convince them that they are a deer, or another type of animal that lacks the ability to drive a car, and deter them from the urge to drive their car. However, I would advise against telling them they are any kind of ape, because with opposable thumbs, an ape driving a car is both interesting and silly.

Q. Some experts recommend carrying a camera in your vehicle that you can use in case you get involved in a crash. What are some of the benefits of taking your own pictures of a collision scene?
A. I would like to take my own pictures because generally, I am a very attractive person, and taking my own pictures of a collision scene will ensure I have the hottest pictures on my Facebook, perhaps even a profile picture, in the event of an accident.

Q. Which of the moving violations listed in this topic do you think is the most serious and why?
A. I think hitting the Popemobile would be the most serious violation, Because not only would you injure an elderly gentleman, but also incur the wrath of Catholics worldwide. It would also be very serious if you were involved in a moving violation with a clown car, because nobody enjoys clown-related tragedies.

Q. Is it ever legal to exceed the speed limit? Why or why not?
A. The only time it'd be legal to exceed the speed limit would be if you were in the car with a bear, because a police officer probably would be too frightened to pull you over. I know I would be.

Q. Statistics show that you are less likely to be killed while traveling on limited access roads such as expressways than on city streets despite the higher speed limit. What are some factors that help to limit the number of deaths on expressways?
A. You could limit deaths on expressways by enforcing posted speeds, as well as lining the highways with pillows or perhaps inflatable bouncy walls. While this may not be the most cost-efficient method, and may not necessarily guarantee fewer deaths on highways, it would limit the number of people driving on the highway, as undoubtedly many people would want to pull over and jump on the walls. Based on sheer statistics, this would decrease the number of accidents and deaths. Unless the people had accidents while jumping on the bouncy walls; however, this would not affect traffic statistics, as they would not be driving, so this is also a moot point.

Q. Is it legal to make a “rolling stop” at intersections that have stop signs? Why or why not?
A. No. Rolling stops are illegal because I have received violations for them and that is why I have spent the last four hours of my life doing this class. You should come to a complete stop, because you never know when oncoming traffic may jump out from behind a large sign. By "oncoming traffic" I mean "police officer who is going to write you a ticket."

On top of my so-very-considerate essay answers, I also present to you, notes taken during the class....

When the instructor said “homicidal” I thought he said “homosexual.” We are on a HOMOSEXUAL COLLISION COURSE WITH DEATH, my friends. I hear Death likes glitter and Liza Minelli.

Apparently being a good driver means looking like a total dbag if these instructional pictures are any indication.

Airbags complement seatbelts. Hey Seatbelt, you’re looking sexy today!

The no zone? Isn’t that where you’re supposed to tell an adult if someone touches you there?

ACTUAL QUIZ QUESTION:
Cars are designed to _______ in a collision.
a. explode
b. bounce
c. evaporate
d. collapse

Listening to the varying stages of alcohol impairment just sounds like the progress of a typical Saturday night for me in college.

Now for my next trick in remedial driving: DRINKING DURING CLASS!

Ladies and gentlemen, I present myself to you, a changed and rehabilitated woman...

... I am so going to get arrested for those essays, aren't I?

Missed Connection.

2009-12-20T22:28:00.000-08:00

Ya know, I know and acknowledge that I'm not exactly what people would call "desirable". My looks have faded, I'm usually carting a kid, who while adorable, screams "HEY, BAGGAGE!" (also, "HEY, I PUT OUT!"), and I'm mostly completely and utterly socially repugnant. But just once -- just one time in my life -- I wish I could be the subject of a Craigslist Missed Connection.

I'm not looking for romance. Quite the opposite. It's been so long since I was socially active that I basically step out my doorstep and hiss at sunlight and scurry back into darkness. But it'd be nice to know that just once, I was worth noticing, and not because I was apologizing profusely to some random stranger for my kid spitting on them (yes, it's a new phase I'm enduring right now, and yes, it's awesome to deal with in public -- almost as great as her concurrent anti-pants stance).

Someday, mark my words, I'm going to log onto Craigslist, peruse the Missed Connections, and there's going to be one waiting for me. It'll be perfectly written, observant and witty, and I will melt in response...

TO THE SUPERMOM IN THE MALL...
"You were wearing a sweatshirt with stains and crusted-on food of questionable origin. Your hair was pulled up in a meager attempt at a ponytail, most likely your closest excuse for hair styling, and the shimmering grease screamed out that you hadn't had an actual beneficial shower in a couple days. But despite the hurried attempt at makeup, the smeared eyeliner and the smudged mascara that you clearly had no time to look in the mirror at yourself and notice, it was apparent you at one time might've been sort of attractive.

"You looked kind of really tired, but with the authority that you used as you quickly U-turned that stroller out of mall foot traffic and lectured your toddler on spitting, I'm sure you'd be a wildcat in the sack. The way you sternly and aggressively stuck your finger in her face and told her, "NO. SPITTING IS NOT OKAY." assured me you were a woman who abides by her own standards.

"So if you ever take that shower and blow dry your hair out, most likely for the first time in three years, respond to this email."

Rawr, fellas. The line starts on the left.

Get back in the pool, whores.

2009-12-13T20:34:00.000-08:00

I really, really, really hate this commercial:

You wanna know why? Because I used to use the Nuvaring. You know what happened when I used the Nuvaring?

Yeah. That.

(Disclaimer: I love my daughter more than life itself, no matter how completely, totally, and utterly unplanned her conception was.)

So whenever this commercial comes on -- and it's on all the fucking time -- I damn near lose my mind. I just want to scream at those stupid bitches to put their yellow swimsuits and swimmy caps back on and GET BACK IN THE GODDAMN POOL because when you decide to be all swanky in the hot tub in your slutty two piece bikini, that's when you get babies. That's right, THERE ARE BABIES IN THE NUVARING HOT TUB.

That's all.

Grinch Shield Down...

2009-12-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

I don't like Christmas, primarily because my family hasn't really been into it for years and I sort of lost out on the whole "family gathering" warm fuzzies that most people have. My grandparents died when I was pretty young, and the natural course of events resulted in that the different "factions" of the family splintered off and did their own thing. It happens, but when you're not even quite into adolescence, you grow up feeling like you missed out on something.

Anyway, boo hoo for me. I don't like Christmas season. Whenever I tell people this, I'm usually met with shock, disgust and confusion. I've been forcing myself to feign enjoyment and involvement for Punk's sake, but I'm a Grinch at heart.

But my favorite Christmas memories involve my grandfather. After my grandmother died when I was 9, he kind of (as I best understand it as an adult) tried to take over both roles, which for an old Navy vet was no easy feat. Every winter before Christmas I would go to his house, and we'd make chocolate buckeyes together. (For those poor souls who are unfamiliar, or not lucky enough to be from the great state of Ohio, you can find out what you're missing here).

My dad and grandparents, ca. 1967

We'd cook them over his gas stove and listen to Christmas music and he'd talk about Grandma, and get teary while he did it. When you're about 10, it's kind of awkward and uncomfortable, but I really miss hearing him tell stories about her, about as much as I miss her.

While we were waiting for the chocolate to melt on the stove, I'd go dink around on Grandma's old organ in the back room of their house. I took piano lessons from ages 6-15, and I did pretty well for my age, I guess. I was doing more advanced stuff by the time I was 9 and 10. And I remember, as the house started to smell like chocolate, he would come back and show me on the keyboard, hen pecking with one finger, how to play the opening line of "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas".

He'd teach me the same opening line every year like it was the first time I'd ever been shown what a piano keyboard was. Maybe he forgot he'd shown me before, or maybe he was unaware I could play piano, and pretty well. But I think he just liked having that chance to show me something, on Grandma's organ. For a little bit, it was like we were hanging out with her again.

Looking back on my childhood and adolescence, I sat through hundreds of hours being instructed on the piano how to play nocturnes and overtures and everything in between by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Debussy, and Gershwin; and my most missed memory of lessons is Grandpa leaning over my shoulder, hen-pecking those eight notes, and so proud to be showing it to me.

All through college and even still, I make buckeyes every Christmas season, and I'm looking forward to Punk being old enough to "help" me in another year or two. It's just what I do. It's my communion with two people that I really, really miss, and feel like I got robbed of a lot of time with sometimes.

So yeah. I'm a bitch about Christmas. But it's just because I think about memories like this and I just really, really miss them.

Social network attention whoring

2009-12-02T23:38:00.000-08:00

So the blog now has its own "fan page" on Facebook. And I swear to Flying Spaghetti Monster and upon everything I hold dear that I am not the one who made it, nor did I request that it be made. No. Really. I didn't.

Anyway, if you want to go be my blog's fan (you don't have to be MY fan, though hey, I might be a fan of my own blog and that fan page, because I'm a total narcissist), just search for "How to Become an Adult in Six Easy Steps" and go be a fan. Please be a fan. Discuss the blog, discuss how much I suck for never updating, I don't know. Be a fan and I'll be your friend, okay?

Photobombing

2009-12-01T23:35:00.000-08:00

I did a lot of asshole things in college, most of which I was drunk during. A lot of things were broken, sinks were puked in, people were punched in the face (sorry Pagel), and drive-thrus were peed in. I've never claimed that I was the pinnacle of class and elegance in my early 20's... okay, maybe I have... but one of my favorite pasttimes of my college days was a hilarious trick known as photobombing.

What's photobombing, you ask? Well, I could give you a long, over-detailed and drawn-out explanation, or I could just copy and paste from the Urban Dictionary:

"The act where one or several persons ruin (sometimes improve) a photo by performing funny acts in the background which may include a dry gangbang, holding stick like objects up to your crotch or raising your clothing."

And then I could see you an Urban Dictionary definition and raise you a link to, and example from, This Is Photobomb:

So is the whole class clear of what photobombing is? Yes? Okay. Moving on.

And so, following my preceding statement and summary of asshole things I did in college, one of the few things I am extremely proud of was a school-year-long declaration of Greek War. For those who don't understand the intricate political workings of university Greek life (that's sororities and fraternities, not our gyro-loving friends from the Mediterranean), every sorority is different. You have the Stepford Wives, you have the bleach-blonde barbie doll sluts, you have the stoners and fat girls and the misfits.

I was Queen of the Misfit sorority. Don't get me wrong. We were fun girls. Hilariously fun girls. But we weren't your typical peroxide Malibu barbies. No, I rushed the Malibu Barbie sorority and wasn't offered a bid. Which is what sparked my long-running grudge -- like the awkward, dorky girl who held out hope for the head cheerleader to invite her to the class sleepover and that invitation never came (not that I'd know what that was like, *ahem* I had something else I had to do that night, so whatever), I declared war on the snob sororities, and with my army of misfit minions, I made the most amazing strategic move ever known in college Greek politics:

I declared a yearlong photobomb war.

By "war" I mean that most likely they had no idea what we were doing, and were probably completely oblivious at the time. But Flying Spaghetti Monster as my witness, when they developed their pictures (this was before digital cameras), there was someone mooning the camera behind the Barbies at the bar, or flying-lead-face-making behind them at Dance Marathon, or flipping off the camera in a recruitment picture.

I photobombed. I dropped the mothereffing Hiroshima of photobombs. For an entire year.

It got to the point that we could do it without even communicating to each other that it was photobomb time. I would just spy a group of AZD's gathering together, forming into your stereotypical sorority girl pose (no, I don't mean on all fours presenting to a frat guy...or passed out spread eagle... I mean the group pose in which the girls in the front row all bend down, hands on knees, boobs out, and everyone behind them leans forward), I would instantly running to leap through the background, or throw up a middle finger, or just look retarded/lost/confused, and I would find a fellow AOPi standing beside me looking equally retarded/lost/confused. It was like an unspoken call to sisterhood.

This, THIS, my friends, is why my sorority dues were worth every penny. Because for a split second, despite all the drama of who hit on whose boyfriend and what certain chapter president was desperately in love with a Lambda Chi Alpha, who said what and who stole whose shoes/boyfriend/whatever, we were united in our hatred and disdain. Loyal forever, Alpha to Thee, ladies! (Side note, I wonder if this is going to cause me to get another shitty email from headquarters about "image" and "sisterhood" and "saying fuck too much".)

It was kind of like Where's Waldo, except I was even dorkier than Waldo, usually much drunker, and much more self-congratulatory. Somewhere, in a sorority scrapbook somewhere, damn near every photo has myself and several other members of my sorority making obscene faces, gestures, looking lost, or flashing random body parts in the background. (Note: I don't mean my sorority's scrapbook -- no, we do it front and center as the object of the photo in our own sorority scrapbook.)

And today, those Delta Gammas may feel nostalgic and flip open and look through those scrapbooks, and they'll furrow their perfectly groomed and waxed brows, and they'll curl their perfectly manicured fingers into little fists and raise them in vain to the sky and they'll curse those damn photobombing AOPi's. And they'll rue -- RUE! -- the day they refused to give me a bid even though I was a legacy, and they'll wonder what kind of god would forsake them in that he would allow the AOPi's to ruin every single group shot they took, for an entire year.

It's the Curse of the Photobomb, my friends, and it was glorious. And you may be expecting that years later, now that I am more mature and have grown as a person, that I would apologize to the Delta Gammas and Alpha Xi Deltas and Kappa Kappa Gammas for ruining their lovely pictures.

And you're wrong. Fuck you, we were hilarious. The end.

FAMOUS!

2009-11-21T13:45:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned The DP Show on here before, and it's a podcast I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically encourage everyone to listen to. And like female trailblazers before me in history, I have accomplished new heights for womankind through nagging, whining and boobflashing -- and I am now the first female co-host to serve on the show. So go CHECK IT OUT, BITCHES...

Confessions of the Cocktail Queen

2009-11-19T09:48:00.000-08:00

I’ve waited a lot of tables in my time. There are a lot of different tables you can wait on, and the people who sit at them are as different as the tables themselves. High top bistro tables. Banquet tables. Booths. Alcove tables. Bar rails. I’ve waited on them all, and all the different breeds of patrons who have sat at them. They all have stories, from the hilarious to the depressing. But the best stories I have, in my career as a waitress, come from the round tables with the cushy lounge chairs on wheels.

I was a strip club cocktail waitress.

It’s not the noblest profession, I’ll admit – I wasn’t curing cancer or formulating a functional plan for world peace. And it’s not really something my guidance counselor had pointed me toward (instead, I was pointed toward journalism; because I’m convinced he hated me). But it was a functional employment for the time – I was a senior in college, broke off my ass prior to working there, and it paid the bills while still allowing me to go to school during the day. The job served its purpose, which was to pay my bills and allow me to eat.

So with that introduction in mind (I’m really bad about long-winded intros, sorry), I’m entering into a whole new domain of stories here at How2, ones that get filed under the “Stories My Children Will Never Know” tag.

One thing you don’t see often in strip clubs is patrons in wheelchairs. However, it happens, because contrary to popular belief, cripples are people too. I don’t know how paraplegics’ penises work, I’m pretty much convinced they’re like robot penises that go all BEEP BEEP BOOP and have “engage” and “disengage” buttons, but I can assume that just because your legs have been rendered useless by whatever arbitrary tragic life circumstances doesn’t mean you don’t like seeing leggy blondes with big fake boobs and series of poor life decisions rub their crotches in your face.

So anyway. Wheelchair patrons, while rare, aren’t completely unheard of. So while we all briefly noted the bachelor party when it came in, complete with a blushing groom in a wheelchair (like I said, they’re people too!), it really wasn’t a huge spectacle. The party took up camp in the VIP room, and as their waitress, I was a soon providing full bottle service with Jose Cuervo and shots of Patron. They were, for the most part, polite, and just having a good time celebrating their friend’s wedding the next day (because let’s be honest, who ever thought he’d actually find love?).

It was one thing for the dancers to give this guy a lap dance in his chair. No big deal. But after a good deal of tequila, the party thought it would be hilarious to sprawl their homeboy out on the VIP couch for a more intense session. So they picked him up out of his chair, which he went along with because, well, he was very drunk. And so, we had Wheelchair Guy being carried and posed in the VIP Room like it was Weekend at Bernie’s.

After paying for a private dance, the bachelor party decided to go walk (walk) up to the bar and get more drinks to give their comrade some alone time with Destiny, Crystal and Treasure. In that time, I’m sure he had the time of his legless life, nobody may ever really know – especially him. He was black out drunk. (Which may have been my fault.)

After an unknown amount of time, the bachelor party realized that The Groom’s private time was over, seeing the dancers wandering the club back on their usual routes, and went back to the VIP room.

This is when things get even more bizarre than they already were.

One of the partygoers comes up to me after they had disappeared back to the VIP Room.

“Hey, have you seen my friend?”

“Um, which one?” I ask, since there were probably a dozen of them. I scan over the floor to see if any of the guys were at the stage, or getting another drink at the bar. No luck.

“Uhhh, the guy whose party it is. He was getting a private dance and now he’s gone. His wheelchair is still in the room.”

Oh. You mean the GUY WHO CAN’T WALK? Is that what you’re telling me right this second? Did you LOSE THE GUY IN A WHEELCHAIR? Is that what you are asking me? Have I seen your friend, what, army crawling on the floor?

So this then begged the question: how do you look for a guy who can’t walk, and isn’t in a wheelchair? This is why I think they need to be tagged like cattle. Because you have no idea when your cripple is going to just roll away.

We put a notice out among the dancers and waitresses. The girls who’d been with him during his private dance said he was there when they left the room, albeit very close to passing out. So contrary to what his friends were suggesting, they did not carry him off. We then began scanning the floors, looking like someone had lost a contact more than lost their bachelor party honoree.

We wound up having to turn on the lights to look for him. His friends – all drunk out of their minds at this point – were convinced someone had carried him off. I’m pretty sure paraplegics have a pretty high mark-up value on the black market. It’s like the elephant man’s bones. Someone out there, probably some creepy Japanese businessman or Dubai prince, probably has like a whole collection of them. The entire club is at a standstill as we are looking for, and I repeat again, a lost paraplegic. No legs. He cannot walk. And he is lost, without his wheelchair.

Finally, I hear his friends yelling from the VIP Room, “We found him!” We all breathed a sigh of relief. The apparent story was that after the private dance, our bachelor drunkenly rolled off the couch. And being too drunk to understand which direction to crawl in to pull himself back up on the couch, he proceeded to roll/crawl under, waaayyy under, the VIP Room couch. (Which I’m not even going to begin considering what was under there…uggghhh.) Out of sight, out of mind, our Bachelor then passed out.

The entire club – patrons, servers, dancers, bouncers – applauded as he left. And I maintain that they really need tracking chips.

I'm awfully sorry.

2009-11-17T20:06:00.000-08:00

And now, a message from Pee Wee Herman…

I’ve been a total serious downer lately. Sorry guys. My life is one gigantic shit show right now in ways I can’t even really begin to divulge. So my writing has started to show it – and I totally bailed on NaBloPoMo. I’m sorry. After comments on the Deleted Post (if you saw it, you saw it; if you didn’t, don’t worry about it… I decided it’s best to confront the issues in another way), I feel obligated to state (the obvious) that I really have the greatest readers, and friends, a girl could ask for. Thank you for your continued readership and support. It means the world to me and keeps me going.

In a Word Document at this very moment, I have an actual, substantial, hopefully funny and interesting post in the works. So please have faith in me. And it involves BOOBIES! Stay tuned…

Paper jam.

2009-11-09T20:07:00.000-08:00

Besides being my #2 favorite song of all time (second only to this song), The Who's "Baba O'Riley" has always hit a deep resonation with me because of the opening synthesizer. If there could ever be a musical embodiment of how my brain works, it would be this. Constantly moving. Constantly frenetic and frantic and oftentimes incoherent. My brain never, ever, ever shuts off. I wouldn't go so far as to call it ADD -- I can pay attention quite well to things. Maybe too well. But it's always processing.

This is great in certain circumstances. Right now, I'm watching Monday Night Football, listening to music, writing a blog post, answering questions for my text-service query job for the place that I won't actively name but you probably know, and texting on my cell phone. I can multitask with the best and with terrifying accuracy and agility.

Sleep is difficult for me. My brain doesn't shut off to sleep. I've turned to remedying this with TV (I almost always require a TV on when I fall asleep, much to the anger/chagrin of many roommates and boyfriends), and oftentimes a combination of legal and illegal substances. The thoughts don't stop. The obsessing, the constant organizing and processing and analyzing, it never turns off unless I drown my brain with pointless late night television, or chemicals. Even then, sleep is difficult. I have, and still do, frequently go 2-3 days without sleeping. It doesn't come. It usually can't.

I tend to alienate people because I oftentimes get quiet. I can be the life of the party, loud and obnoxious, but often, I get quiet as I think and process the situation surrounding me. I move the furniture around the room in my head. I consider the amount of cream cheese on the bagel. I obsess on the pile of pillows over on that couch that are askew, and I'd love to straighten them, or refold those blankets on the back of the couch. People think I'm not listening; I'm listening. I'm just also running five or six other programs on the insane processing system that is my brain.

Even with that, I can function fairly well (although mildly socially retarded). But sometimes, there comes a glitch in the system. I start to think about a particular thought -- usually something unnerving, upsetting, or depressing -- and everything gets stuck. Whereas a normal person would probably think about it for a minute or two, decide to themselves, "That's too bad, oh well," and move on with their day, the paper jam continues. I obsess. I can't let it go. I fixate on it and it consumes me. It pulls me under.

I compare it to printing a 1,000 page document and the printer jams on page 2. The processing can't happen, but the damage can, and does. I become toxic as I continue to sink into this downward spiral of poisonous thinking. What follows is a predictable series of events for me -- I begin desperately grabbing for things that are stationary, things that are constant. Relationships are a big indicator. And if there's even the most remote sign of volatility in a relationship (whether real or imagined), I pull it into the spiral with me. I can't stop myself. I know what I'm doing and I can see it, even predict it, and I can't stop. The paper jam continues.

Things get dark. I get dark. I continue to fixate on what was once a minor problem and it is now an all-consuming black hole. I draw into myself. I alienate friends and family, particularly if I've pulled those relationships into the fray too. I turn off. I turn to sabotage, I make stupid choices and decisions in an attempt to cover up the downward spiral, but not necessarily stop it.

I can't stop.

I medicate. I drink. I draw further in. The lights get darker and the tornado gets bigger. The diameter of the damage gets bigger, and unless you know how to get me to stop -- which is essentially a solid, angry bitch slap, literally or metaphorically. The paper jam doesn't stop until you beat the shit out of the printer.

Oh, I get furious. I kick and scream. I lash out harder and more angrily, but the spiral stops. The machine has been turned off and groans to a stop.

I stop. I breathe. I think.

I breath. I surface. The fever breaks. I can think clearly again.

The well-oiled machine that is my processing ability fires up again. I go back to the frantic pace that is my mind, and all is well again.

But there is always the possibility of kinks in the system. I'm just always a little scared, after another "incident," that the people who clung on through the storm, may not have the patience to stay around to weather another one.

Routine, Remix.

2009-11-07T17:42:00.000-08:00

In the almost two years since I became a parent, the mundane routine of my life sometimes takes me down a dark and depressing road. But one of my favorite parts of the day is bedtime and immediately after. There's such a finality to the day, the first point since about 8 am that I've been able to inhale and exhale in the same second, and can stop and look back at another day down -- good, bad or ugly, it's done.

The bedtime routine itself is predictable and set. Diapers are changed, fish are bed, last call bottles are dispensed (yeah, she still has a bedtime bottle... we're working on it). Sophie Bears are summoned and snuggled into and last kisses are doled out. I turn on Nine Inch Nails on her boom box in her bedroom, a gift from her beloved Uncle Ham, and I shut the door behind me.

Then I breathe.

That's when my last routine of the day begins -- picking up her toys. It's something I find extreme comfort in. The blocks go back into their box. The blankets get folded up and put back on the chair. The babies go in specific order in her little chair, which she will go to first thing in the morning and kiss them good morning. Her little kitchen is lined up with the decorative boxes along the window, which store DVDs (and I replace the DVDs she's become obsessed with plucking out throughout the day). Her ride-on car is placed in the threshold of her kitchen. The dishes and big wooden spoon she uses for snacktime are rinsed off and replaced in the sink of her kitchen.

The dog hair is swept up and vacuumed. The baby gates are set to Security Level Green, which means they're open and I don't have to keep smacking my shins against them as I hurdle over them. The stereo is turned off as I throw up a middle finger at the thought of listening to Kidz Bop one more goddamn time. The TV is set off of Nickelodeon and onto E! or VH1 or whatever random mindless crap I plan to stare at and zone out to shortly.

The day's done. She's gone to sleep. The toys are picked up. It's done. I've survived another day in a job I never thought I wanted, let alone would be able to successfully complete every day. I live to fight another day.

Bring on the liquor.

Auntie.

2009-11-06T22:05:00.001-08:00

As of November 5, 2009, I am now officially an undisputed, self-declared AUNTIE...

WELCOME TO THE WORLD, JACK JACK! I love you already and can't wait to meet you with your "cousin" and sure-to-be-partner in crime!

Jack Scott D.
November 5, 2009
2:17 pm, PST
20 in., 7 lbs. 14 oz.

Queen Bee.

2009-11-05T21:20:00.000-08:00

I've been going through some yearbooks and stuff stored at my parents' house, since they've finally committed to moving out of the house I grew up in, and I met the ghosts of my past as I unpacked a box full of trophies from my youth. I wish I could tell you the trophies were from Cool Kid Contests, and sports, and Most Blowjobs for the Football Team, and other highly-contested titles, but unfortunately, my biggest congratulatory bling came in the form of spelling bee trophies.

I was awkward at best through my junior high years. I was made fun of mercilessly, called “Stinky Tuna” because I sat with my legs open (I was a tomboy, lay off) and wore baggy clothes to hide the fact that I had boobs because when I wore things that showed them off I was accused of stuffing my bra. The only time I ever felt like I fitted in was when those aluminum chairs were lined up, the microphone on the stand was hot, and I could out-spell even Hicksville Middle School’s brightest.

I was the Spelling Bee girl. It was my niche. It’s what I did.

I remember my first taste of spelling bee victory. Fifth grade. I beat out Tyler Turnbull, the teacher’s son, with the word “soothsayer.” He cried. I gloated. And I got a cool trophy that immediately made me the object of mockery on the bus ride home. But hey, the bus driver said I did a good job and that’s all that mattered.

Subsequent bees were inconsequential. I spelled. I won. I gloated. I was reminded I didn’t have boobs and wasn’t pretty and didn’t wear clothes from American Eagle. Time passed and I continued to be the most mocked female in the class, but on spelling bee day, God have mercy on all of them. I wasn’t invited to your birthday party. I was shunned from your sleepover. You asked me to be your girlfriend just so I would accept and you and your friends could laugh at me. But dammit. I was going to out-spell all those little shits.

And I did.

Pretty kids don’t win the spelling bee. The quarterback who will eventually get a bigger scholarship than you goes out in the first round. The weird stinky kids are usually in the top 10, but rarely win. The spelling bee isn’t made for the winners of the world like those who joined a sorority or became a CEO. (Okay, I became a sorority girl but that was a completely different story.)

The spelling bee is awkward. The spelling bee is braces, bad acne, scoliosis and coke-bottle glasses. The spelling bee is the kids who get paper wads thrown at them and get tripped in the hall.

For two or three hours, we were better than them. We were the cool kids, if just for a little bit.

Some of my best friends I maintained through junior high and high school were weird kids I met at the county spelling bees. Kids who were made fun of and tortured like me. If the spelling bee is good for one thing, it’s a place where all those weird kids could be weird together. Then it turned into a complete bloodshed once those stage lights were on. But it was glorious geek blood, and it just made us into an ordained blood order of nerds.

The popular kids had their slumber parties and sports practices. They had their intimidating cliques in the hallway. They had their gaggle of hyenas in the backs of classrooms. But us? We had the spelling bee. It was ours.

And last night, I remembered being one of them. Being as tortured and awkward and misunderstood. And knowing that while on stage, those weirdos and dweebs and nerds felt like they mattered, felt like they had something special that was just theirs.

The other kids had plenty of opportunities in life to feel superior. But for us, the geeks and dweebs and mockeries of junior high, we have the spelling bee.

Routine

2009-11-04T06:51:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when I'm feeling especially resentful of being a parent and really feel like I hate my life, I feel consumed by the mindnumbing routine of my days. I miss and long for the days when I'd sleep til noon, go get lunch where the whim threw me, hang out with friends, maybe go to a bar, maybe not; take time to study or something equally unlikely.

Parenting is routine. Sure, she may decide to take off her diaper and smear a Poop Pollack on her bedroom wall again, and that might break up the day, but really, every day is achingly the same. I feel like I'm trapped in Groundhog Day but I don't even get the benefit of Bill Murray's humor.

Every morning, I wake up to a cheerful little voice babbling in the bedroom. I ignore it for another 15 minutes before she becomes irate, screaming and kicking the wall, and I come in to get her out of bed. She has thrown all the blankets and stuffed animals and Sophie out of her bed, and upon coming into the room, she points at the floor as though to let me know, "NOW look what you made me do."

I toss the blankets and stuffed animals and Sophie back into the crib and before she can argue this turn of events and toss them out again, I pluck her out and change her diaper, which is soaked, along with her pajamas, because this child is a pee machine. She screams and thrashes because it's cold and I have to do a move that is not unlike a full nelson as I wrangle the first Huggies of the day on her. I usually get kicked in the face at least once, usually twice. And she laughs. Then I dress her as we go through the different clothing items and body parts. She has them down at this point. "HAM? (Hand) SOCK! CHOOS? (No shoes, kiddo.) SHIRT!"

Then I hold her for a minute and she hugs me. Her tiny little body melts into mine and she pats on my back with her tiny little nugget hands. She gives me a kiss on the check, and I stand and I savor my "good morning" from my sweet little girl. I hug her back and squeeze her little body into mine until she spies her goldfish, Anna Nicole Fish, and we feed Fish her breakfast and then Punk wags her tiny little finger at it and sternly tells it, "EAT YOUR FOOD, YOU FISH." (It's really just a series of angry sounding vocalizations, but that's the sentiment.)

Before the fish food can even sink, she's asking for breakfast. "BITE? BITE? JUICE? BITE?" I set up her little chair and table in the living room and I turn on Handy Manny on channel 172 (Disney Channel, I think... I don't even know, I can turn on Channel 172 without even being conscious anymore). I get her juice (V8 Fruit Fusions, because it's one of the few ways I can pile vegetables into her), which I pour into her sippy the night before, and I break up a Nutri-Grain bar into four pieces and put it in a bowl, and I deliver them to her to she can watch her morning TV, eating her breakfast and drinking her juice, as I get around for the day. I prop up the Great Wall of Baby to corral her in to the living room and I quickly dash to my bedroom, because if she realizes that I've left the room she will tear down door frames to follow me.

I'm not a morning person. Anyone who has ever lived, crashed, worked, or had one night stands with me can easily attest to it. (I'm kidding about the one night stands. No, really.) So the routine has become burned into my mind and my subconscious to the point that I really have gone through it with my eyes closed. The day continues at a similar pace of routine and predictability. And a lot of the time I really miss the chaos that was once my child-free life.

But then there's always that first hug of the morning. That tiny little body melting into me, the little hands gripping my back, a soft little breath on my neck. That's the point when I realize I don't really miss it. No. This is good, too.

Pork poke.

2009-11-02T19:10:00.000-08:00

Like a good American, I've been in a mad panic over the clear and impending doom of the H1N1 (or the "hiney" flu as it's become known in Casa de los How2). I'd meant to get Punk vaccinated a few weeks ago, but the day before her appointment she came down with a nasty cold. So plans were put on hold, and by the time I was confident she was no longer a vat of Toddler Tantrums, Snot and Fail, the vaccine had run plum out.

So you can imagine the moment of panic and hysteria when I got word that a high school about 45 minutes away was hosting a free H1N1 Flu Shot clinic for children. Oblivious to just what I was about to get into, I piled Punk into the car and drove the 45 minutes to the school.

This is what I saw as I pulled in:

(Forgive the shitty quality, it was taken with my cell phone.)

That, my friends, is a line. That wrapped around the entire goddamn school.

But I had driven that far. And I was being guaranteed the line moved quickly. So I stood there with my toddler beside me in nothing more than a light jacket, since I'd assumed we'd be ushered into a gym soon, and I smiled and thought to myself, I'm an awesome parent.

Two hours later and we were still outside waiting. In the end of October in the midwest, where the minute the sun sets it instantly gets cold. Punk was a trooper as much as a toddler can be, but she was bored and tired and cold. So after two hours of standing and waiting, I no longer had my sweatshirt on and was standing in 45 degree weather in a t-shirt, with my sweatshirt wrapped around my tired, pissed off child, who I then held -- all 32 goddamn pounds of her, dead weight -- for another hour.

We got to the front of the line, through the doors of the school, where there was a gigantic flourescent sign awaiting us:

"[Insert County Here] RESIDENTS ONLY. HAVE IDENTIFICATION READY."

This is the point where I got a lot of hostile looks from parents around me as I said (unintentionally out loud), "Oh you have got to be FUCKING KIDDING ME."

I had been waiting 2.5 hours to find out that I couldn't get my kid vaccinated. I was cold, she was cold, we were cranky, we were half an hour late for her dinner time at this point, and we were both exhausted, and my biceps felt like they were about give out. No. I was not turning around. Fuck that shit with a big strap on.

So as I got to the front table to fill out the necessary forms, I got creative. I made up a fake address in the town we were in, and I lied through my teeth when they looked at my ID and I said we'd just moved to this town, and I hadn't gotten my driver's license changed yet.

I have never once in my life claimed to be a role model or an example for ideal moral compass. But I challenge anyone in that situation to just turn around and take your pissed off, cold child home. No. Oh hell no I wasn't turning back.

Punk finally got her Pork Poke, and I struggled to keep myself from having a complete nervous breakdown when they told me she'd need the second dose in a month. "Just go ahead and wait in the bleachers for 10 minutes to be sure she doesn't have a reaction," the nurse said.

Now, my daughter's welfare is constantly a priority for me. But at that point, after over three hours of waiting in the cold with a pissed off, hungry, cold toddler, I'd had it. Fuck it. She might have a reaction, but she probably won't, and that was a risk I was willing to take.

I walked out the gym doors, walked half a mile back to my car, and strapped Punk in. And what followed was something that my kid(s) will one day know is a situation where we don't talk to Mommy for a good long while, as I drove with Battle of Los Angeles on irresponsibly loud and stared blankly at the road, without muttering a word.

Mommy was done.

NaBloPoMo

2009-11-01T22:53:00.000-08:00

I've been a serious asshole about this blog lately. It feels like every other post I am whining that I have nothing to write about and apologizing like a little bitch for it. Sorry, I'm busy, my life's a wreck, I have nothing funny to say, blah blah blah... you know the routine at this point.

So it's National Blog Posting Month again. I figure my G's are in so I may as well jump in -- if for nothing else but to challenge myself to get back into writing and stop being a dick to my blog and the few people who actually keep coming back to read. I can't promise it'll always be quality, or funny, or pretty, or even coherent, but at any rate, yeah, sure, I'm in.

So hey, let's kick this shit off with a Punky Halloween Picture. Because my kid's teh win.

Discovery Zone: Darwin's Law for Kids!

2009-10-21T22:18:00.001-07:00

Every year in America, an average of 7.2 million children are born. In 1985, the year I was born, I was just one of 6,438,239 fertilized embryos. Of those six million plus, there are currently 5,166,952 of us. So what happened to the missing 1,271,287 that knocked off between 1985 and 2009?*

Two words, my friends: Discovery Zone.

Some children had Chuck E. Cheese (or Showbiz Pizza, for you old schoolers). Some children had the local playground. Some had Parcheesi. But for many of us, particularly in the greater Fort Wayne, Indiana area that I grew up in, there was Discovery Zone, which, according to Wikipedia, can best be described as having been “a chain of entertainment facilities featuring games, elaborate indoor mazes designed for young children, including slides, climbing play structures and ball pits.”

But for laymen, Discovery Zone was more accurately, Darwin’s Law for Kids.

Ask the scarred, crippled 20-somethings of today about it and many will shudder in terror at the simple memory of the horrors of Discovery Zone. It was impossible to leave the large building of tubes, ball pits, slides, and arcade games without some form of head and/or internal injury.

My brother has a considerable crook in his nose that I can’t help but credit to the time I kicked him in the face somewhere within the tubes.

Within the tubes, the social hierarchy was similar to Lord of the Flies. It wasn’t uncommon to find corpses littering the tubes. And naturally, if you were an especially agile child, you could move through the tubes with considerable ease -- until you came up behind the notorious Fat Kid who never moved at the speed you wanted him to, especially in a rousing game of tag, at which point you would either A) trample him, B) maneuver around him and then kick him in the face, or C) push him to speed him up until he kicked you in the face.

Children can climb through the tubes with relative ease, but parents could not, which was especially to my 11-year-old advantage when it was time to go home and I knew damn well my 6'8" father couldn’t possibly come in after us. I was lucky, though. Usually you’d see one or two especially irate and lost parents screaming for their children and these children could usually be identified as the ones pushing/trampling Fat Kid out of the way. Or, there was a worse fate…

The ball pit.

To this day, I still remember the feel of young, nimble, rigamortic bodies under my feet in the ball pit. There was always that special breed of children who didn’t really like to play and instead thought it a good plan to lounge in the ball pit. (Often this was Fat Kid, crying after having his nose broken for the fifth time that day.)

Physics is but a cruel mistress in the ball pit. Ball Pit Kid eventually sifted to the bottom where he was either trampled to death and never seen again or simply suffocated.

There was another breed of child within the depths of the ball pit — Scary Kid. This was usually someone on the outer cusp of the acceptable age for Discovery Zone, probably 13 or 14, and utilized his age and size against the other merry children enjoying their time. He did this by hiding in the balls and then jumping out and scaring people. This was also usually the kid that peed in the ball pit — the weird kid your parents wouldn’t invite to your birthday party because he might poop his pants or pee in the pool. That kid.

Injuries were Discovery Zone’s beloved concubine. It was to be expected that you would return home with third degree burns on your elbows and knees (because nobody wore the optionally provided knee and elbow pads unless you were the Hypochondriac Child, who was also usually Fat Kid).

Broken noses and concussions were common, too, especially if you were Idiot Kid who would go into the obstacle course and try to do it backwards. I for one remember the rolly-slide -– a horrible torture device that consisted of rollers, which was great unless you were a kid like me, a little bit bigger than most kids. My skin would get caught in the rollers.

Discovery Zone, or at the very least the concept of it, is simply the corporate way of executing nature’s will. Because Fat Kid, Scary Kid, Lazy Kid…let’s face it, it was probably for the best that they were trampled to death or died of asphyxiation or massive head injuries. It's that kind of people who grow into our president of the idiots of society.

I survived multiple trips to Discovery Zone and I am an intelligent, productive member of society. And my brother, well, I was forced to keep an eye on him once lost in the maze of tubes, so he slid by, by default.

Discovery Zone went bankrupt in 1996 with debts raking up to $366 million, which, when you consider the assumedly gargantuan amount of liability lawsuits, makes sense. Our grandparents survived the Great Depression. Our parents, well, they made it through the 60’s and 70’s with enough brain cells left over to reproduce us. But for the 20-somethings of today, we survived Discovery Zone.

* I completely made these figures up.

Singing that Desperate song

2009-09-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

I cannot tell you in words how much I love Felicity Huffman as Lynette Scavo on Desperate Housewives. On the season premiere this past Sunday, she had a soliloquy to an expectant mom that made me slosh my vodka and cranberry glass in the air in victory, a jubilant choir singing behind the preacher. I just had to share it again.

“[Your husband will be hands on?] Yeah… that’s not going to happen. Oh, he’ll be there at first, maybe even change a diaper or two until the novelty wears off, but those 4 a.m. feedings he said he’d help out with? Forget it. Does he have boobs? Then you’re the only bar in town. That baby can scream into a bullhorn and Johnny won’t budge. I’m not done. You’ll never wear a bikini again. You haven’t seen me naked. My stomach looks like Spanish stucco and my breasts resemble two balloons you find behind the couch a week after the party.

Most women are liars. My mother was a liar and her mother was a liar and your mother was a liar. It’s a lie every generation tells the next so they can get grandchildren. You need to hear this, you have to be prepared. Your children hate you and steal from your purse. Your husband will begin to buy your birthday presents at the car wash and the kicker, for the rest of your life there will be so many moments when you feel lonely, but you will NEVER. BE. ALONE.”

Pending news...

2009-09-25T23:43:00.001-07:00

No. I'm not pregnant.

Since clearly you haven't read enough of my obscenity-laden rants, soon you'll be able to actually listen my manly voice as I harass you and insult your mother and make attacks against your personal integrity. It'll be just like you're one of my best friends, who regularly receive such voicemails from me!

It's an idea that's sort of been in the making ever since I first listened to, and eventually become a hapless groupie of, The DP Show, and now the ideas are finally coming to fruition. How quickly, I don't know. I'm terrified of change and technology, and whenever faced with the decision between anything or masturbation in my free time, masturbation usually wins.

But hopefully within the next two weeks, I will have this podcast thing up and running, and yelling obscenities at you thanks to the wonders of technology!

You've been warned.

Down here they all bounce.

2009-09-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

I was traveling by myself with Punk on a 4-hour cross-state drive this weekend and realized it is an effort far more difficult than originally thought. Don't get me wrong, she's a superstar about traveling. She keeps herself amused -- pop on a DVD of her in her infancy and the kid is enthralled in a narcissistic trance for hours, toss her a Magna Doodle and a sippy cup and it's a pretty quiet drive.

Unfortunately, 2 hours into the drive and she was losing her shit this time around. So I pulled the Jeep into a rest area. I unleashed the Punk, grabbed her hand, and together we walked/toddled through the food court. But I sometimes forget: this is my child, and for reasons I should've foreseen a long time ago and gotten a tubal ligation before I ever had a child, she is fiercely independent and stubborn.

Which is a really nice way of saying, she's a massive pain in the ass sometimes, often in public.

So as I was trying to hurry along our exciting leg-stretching break, complete with a Cinnabon purchase, she decided she was over holding my hand. In a public area like a service station food court on a Saturday morning, I'm not letting go of this kid. This is a cute white kid with chubby nom-able cheeks and cute pink tennies -- she's worth her weight in gold on the black market, and damnit, after four stitches in my taint to get her here, I'm not down with that unless I'm getting a cut of the profit.

But she resisted anyway, and with almost 30 lbs. of heft behind her, she threw herself backwards onto the floor, her clammy midget hand slipping out of mine as physics threw her center of balance off and backwards into the wall. With a thud that only the gigantic and disproportional huge head of a toddler can create; one that everyone in the surrounding area heard.

So there's that moment where time stands still, everything is frozen except for your thought process as you try to evaluate the scene, as you see your child recoil and suck the air in and prepare to let out that god-forsaken, ear-piercing, stare-and-judgment-inducing shriek.

Fuck. Oh fuck. Did she hit that hard? Or is the wall hollow? Fuck, is she okay? Is she going to get up? Please don't scream. Please don't scream. Oh fuck she's going to scream. What the fuck do I do with the Cinnabons? Can I get to the vending machine or is she going to be wailing? Stop staring at me lady, I'm trying here. Oh god, she's screaming....

... and then you snap back to reality and snap into Mommy Mode. You spot a nearby bench and put your Cinnabons down and you crouch down and analyze the damage, and you pick her up and snuggle her into the same warm bosom she's come to love in her 19 months, not just because it's comforting but you're praying to whatever gods you haven't denounced that your Victoria's Secret-enhanced boobs will muffle that scream because OH MY GOD THAT SCREAM.

And as everyone was staring and I was trying to gather a toddler and a gigantic mom purse and her stuffed elephant and the Cinnabons (because for the love of god, child, Mommy needs a sugar fix), the kindly grandmotherly woman running the information desk comes scurrying up offering me a bag of ice. And while it was a genuinely sweet gesture, and I know she meant well, all I could think of was, "How in the big blue FUCK do you expect me to hold a bag of ice onto the back of a toddler's skull while driving?" (I mean, REALLY?)

The fact of the matter is, Punk really didn't hit the wall hard. It was a baseboard that was hollow, and the thud sounded far worse than the fall itself. Plus we were two hours into the trip and approaching naptime hard and fast, so basically anything would piss this child off at this point. Top that recipe off with falling down and smacking her head? Hello MELTDOWN!

So all I could spit out -- while attempting to speak over the screaming toddler -- was, "Thank you so much, but really it isn't as bad as it sounded." Which made me look like insane negligent mother of the year. Really, the only worse things that I might have said were, "I hit her far harder at home" or "As long as they bounce, GAME ON!"

And so I scuttled out of the rest area carrying my huge purse, the Cinnabon, and my change I'd hastily tried to gather for a Mountain Dew from the vending machine (only to discover I had $1.50 and all the 20 oz.'s were $1.75, seriously, what the FUCK?!?), and the furious, screaming toddler, and briskly headed back to the Jeep, where I crammed her, kicking and screaming, into her car seat, slammed the door shut, tried to look away from the stares -- most sympathetic, some bewildered, some leering (hey, it was a truck stop) -- said a silent prayer to Our Holy Mother of Vodka, and got back on the road as quickly as I could.

She fell asleep pretty quick after that. Don't worry, it wasn't a concussion. She woke up. She's just kind of cross-eyed now, no big.

Birth control, kids.

Writer's curse.

2009-09-17T21:41:00.001-07:00

I haven't written in awhile, in case you haven't noticed. Which you probably haven't, because anyone who's been a regular follower of my blog has probably died, or left long ago, because it's been like what, three weeks? I don't even know. For-fucking-ever.

I have identified myself as a writer for a long time. I have the Chinese symbols for "writer" on the bridge of my right foot, so clearly it must be true. Also, I was 18 and retarded. But the curse of being a writer, or at least for me, is the crippling insecurity I feel every time I write something -- even on "my" blog, a place where I'm in charge, and if you don't like it, whatever, I can delete comments, I can disregard, I can basically call the shots. I am terrified of feedback. When I wrote for student publications, I was absolutely stone-cold-petrified of conflicting feedback.

There's a reason for it, though. When I was in college I made a really stupid, though very large (in the context of the time), journalistic mistake. The specifics don't matter, if you know the story you know, if you don't and really want to know, I can tell you, but the end result of it was the worst hate mail I have ever received. It got to the point that I was making my friends check and screen my email for me because if I read anymore of it, I was quite possibly going to kill myself. I'm not being dramatic. It was that bad.

So even now, well over four years later, I approach writing like a beaten dog who has an inexplicable unconditional love for its master. I love writing. It's what I feel like I am destined to do; in what capacity, I don't know yet, but it is what I feel happiest doing. But as such, I am constantly filled with doubt, loathing, self-questioning, and dread. I never think my stuff is good enough. Ever. I've mentioned it on here before and I swear I'm not approaching this like a 100 lb. teenage girl saying she's fat in search of contrary remarks -- I just really don't think I'm good anymore.

Was I ever "good"? Sometimes, I believe I was. I've been out of the "game" so long. I haven't even been published in what, three years? And I haven't even sought out freelance gigs in that time because I've come to doubt everything I write. Nobody would hire me. This shit is horrible.

I'm being honest here. I don't know why I write this blog. Sometimes I feel like I'm overflowing with delusions of grandeur, like I'm some gifted, brilliant writer with this hugely popular blog. One where people see it update in their Google Reader and instantly flock to it. One where people tell their friends, "Holy shit, this girl is hilarious." One with links to it from sites far and wide. I don't know. I think I know of like five people who actually read this, and at least two are related to me, the rest are personal friends or friends of personal friends. So I don't know who I'm writing for. Me? I don't know. I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Writing, for me, feels like a hopeless one-way love affair that I am never going to win.

Even when I was writing regularly, to see my stuff in actual ink, it was a temperamental process. People who worked in the newsroom with me, or random friends who would be witness to my writing process, were used to my full-out tantrums while I would write. I'd get two paragraphs, furiously delete, scream obscenities and threaten to change my major, storm off and smoke a bowl, write six more paragraphs. Rinse, repeat. It took me hours to write simple columns and blogs. I was, and am, that cripplingly insecure about my writing.

So why do I do it? Why am I so masochistic? And I think the better question is, aren't we all? Aren't all writers a little masochistic? I have never met a truly egotistical writer. Find me a writer who truly thinks everything he/she writes is golden and epic, and I will find someone who is completely and utterly full of shit. We're a self-loathy bunch, we writers. And I guess I can't count myself too far out of the game when I still consider myself to be one.

Someday it'll make sense, and someday I'll actually keep up with this blog and make it entertaining, be it shitty posts, insightful posts, or funny shit that keeps you coming back for more. But in the meantime, bear with me while I'm pissy and writer's blocky.

Momma's alright.

2009-08-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

My mother doesn't get a lot of credit on this blog. I know that, and she never really has been given much credit on any of my blogs -- often, she's the butt of jokes; such classics include her angry, ranting, crazy voicemails transcribed and posted to the world wide web for everyone to read, along with the rest of my blogs that generally embarrass and outrage her.

She doesn't know about this blog, which hopefully it will stay this way; not because I don't want to hurt her feelings, but it's more comparable to not wanting to poke a grizzly (or gristly, per Matt Pagel) bear with a stick. You don't really care if the grizzly bear doesn't want to get poked, or if poking will hurt the bear's feelings, but mostly because you just don't want to incur its crazy wrath and have the crazy bear rip off your arm and shove it in its crazy mouth.

To be fair, my mother is crazy. She is a raging bull in a china shop of emotional stability. She is politically and socially ~~ignorant~~ conservative, she is narrow-minded to the end and she has pushed every known button I have for as long as I can remember.

But as another school year begins, this is now the third consecutive end-of-August in which I am not going back to school. So sometimes I get a little wistful. I could tell you about moving into the dorms my first year of college, and watching my father's face turn a brilliant shade of crimson as we drove past the frat houses with sheets hanging from the porches that said, "Dads, Thanks for Dropping Off Your Daughters!" (and that was relatively tame... and I did pass out in a few of those frat houses later on). But instead, I'll tell you about my college orientation, and the night I realized, as a pseudo-adult, that my mom is okay.

College orientation took place about a month before the school year began for freshmen. It was a two-day process, day one being placement tests and day two being scheduling, and random pointless orientation and icebreaker shit in between. Because I lived about an hour and a half from my college, my mother and I stayed overnight in the accommodations provided by the school -- which was in a dorm room.

I went into this thing expecting that I would share a room with my mom. Lame, but whatever. I didn't want to be there; a tornado ripped through campus earlier in the day of my first day of orientation and basically wrecked the campus, and I missed my McDonald's manager boyfriend back home. I was in the gifted program and all the other kids I had to mingle with at the gifted orientation were too smart and didn't talk to me, and I just plain didn't want to be there. Then I found out my mom would be staying on the "moms floor," sharing a room with another mom, whereas I would share a room with another female orientee.

My mom and I are cut from the same cloth in that we are not social people. I'm just not. I'm sorry. So there was a look of panic that shot over both our faces when we realized we wouldn't be sharing a room, and would have to actually *gulp* socialize with strangers. But it was what it was, we accepted our lot, and bid each other good night as we went to our separate rooms on separate floors.

My "roommate" wasn't in the room when I got there, and the only indication I had that I even had a roommate was a duffle bag with size XS Abercrombie and Hollister shit all over the other bed. There was no TV, I didn't know anyone, I didn't feel like going out, so I called my boyfriend to whine about how much it sucked and tried to fall asleep. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up eventually by what felt like an earthquake. My twin sized bed was shaking. I laid stone still trying to figure out what was going on, until I heard the moaning and, after I tried to convince myself this was not happening, realized that my "roommate" (whom I had not met, nor seen, and couldn't pick out in a 2 person lineup) was having sex AT THE FOOT OF MY BED, while I slept.

Again, may I pause to say, there were two beds in this dorm room. She had her own bed she could have done this on. Furthermore, it begs the questions, 1.) Who gets drunk and picks someone up at college orientation? 2.) Who fucks on another person's bed while they're asleep?

I laid there for a minute listening to the giggling and moaning til I realized that I couldn't do this. I flew out of bed, turned on the lights, saw two very naked strangers having sex across the foot of the bed I was just sleeping in, and grabbed my bag (which, conveniently enough, was packed), and stormed out the door while snapping at her, "YOU ARE FUCKING PATHETIC!" I didn't even hear a reaction, perhaps because they were too busy HUMPING ON MY BED, and stormed to the common lounge of the floor, with my duffle bag, and slumped onto the stiff industrial-strength couch. And I sobbed. Fucking. Sobbed.

I hated college. I didn't want to be here. This place sucked. And I just had two strangers fucking on my bed. I hated college. I wanted to quit and I hadn't even started.

So I did all I knew to do. At 3 am, I called my mom's cell phone, and prayed she would answer. She did.

In the end, my mom came, sat with me on that ridiculously stiff couch, held me while I bawled my eyes out and promised me I'd love it here eventually, she had loved it here (yeah, she had also gone to school here), and it would be okay. Knowing I couldn't go back to my room, I begged her to let me sleep with her in her room. She shook her head solemnly as she explained that her roommate was asleep and she didn't want to wake her up. I figured my entire night was shot all to hell when she told me to wait a minute, went and got her stuff, came back, took my still-hysterical ass to the car, and then, at nearly 4 am, checked us into a hotel for the four hours we'd be sleeping before I had to be back on campus to schedule classes and finish orientation.

And to her credit, she was right. I (amazingly) returned to campus later that summer and would come to have some of the greatest experiences and memories of my life there.

That night I shared a king size bed with my mom in a hotel room and slept knowing that my mom, despite of all her insane tendencies and instability and rants and raves, loved me.

The only thing that would give me more satisfaction than I had that night would be knowing that girl got a raging case of genital warts. Which the STD rate of that campus is something like 50%, and I know I made it out of college clean as a whistle, so by law of statistics, and in the name of karma, I bet she did.

Pause for Cuteness.

2009-08-19T23:26:00.001-07:00

I now take a break from my virginity-losing stories and tales of toddler tantrums to remind you again that I have a kid who is, ahem, fucking adorable.

Things Punk has been taught recently that I may or may not condone:

● Cheerfully chiming, "Don't get raped!" instead of "Good-bye!" as she waves furiously when we leave a place/situation, which includes but is not limited to grandparents' houses, Target, and kind passersby who smile cheerfully at her in public. I guess it is pretty sound advice.
● Openly referring to her dirtiest baby doll as "Dumpster Baby" -- to the point that you can now ask Punk where Dumpster Baby is and she will bring DB to you.
● The appropriate response to a vacuum cleaner is to scream, sob with huge, gigantic tears, and hide. I wish I could too, kid, I wish I could, too.
● The fluid motion of flipping people off by flicking off under your chin. I did NOT teach her this, that was my 19-year-old brother, her beloved Uncle Ham. But I can't de-program it from her, for the life of me. Thanks Uncle Ham.

Tantrum

2009-08-12T07:03:00.001-07:00

Punk has become a huge fan of the Temper Tantrum, and it is making me want to kill someone.

Her tantrums don't just involve yelling and crying. They involve this shrill, banshee scream, one that I'm fairly certain has led the neighbors to believe I routinely kill her. You take away the scissors she's magically attained, or re-adjust her baby gate, or tell her no, and the screaming begins. And when you ignore that much, that's when she sprawls out on the floor and continues to scream while writhing. If you ignore the Tawny Kittaen-on-a-car-hood writhing, she then proceeds to assault you, smacking with tiny hands and biting if she's able to get a good grip.

My friends, I have a toddler on the cusp of the Terrible Two's.

What's the return policy on this thing? Usually at Wal-Mart, I know even if I bought something beyond the return policy, if I'm super nice to the customer service rep, and mumble something about "I know I've got the receipt somewhere" while pretending to shuffle through my purse, they'll let me return it as long as it's not too beat up. Can I do that with this child? Is it too late to say, "Ya know, thanks, but turns out we didn't really need it, and it's still practically new?"

Things that have spurred tantrums in the last 48 hours:

● Punky wanted to put her shoes on. However, with the futility that is Toddler Motor Skills, she was unable to do so.
● I had the audacity to offer to help her put her shoes on.
● I then attempted to take her shoes away so as to STOP THIS FUCKING MADNESS.
● Not putting the right kind of juice in the sippy cup.
● Having the audacity to expect her to eat a granola bar.
● Taking away a spatula that was being used to beat the dog
● Stopping her from stabbing herself with scissors.
● Idiotic and narrow minded conservatives spreading false panic about Obama's healthcare plan
● The cashier at Target looking at her
● Vacuum cleaner
● Diaper change
● Drew Carey on the Price is Right.

Dear God. I'm seriously, seriously going to lose my goddamn mind in 4...3...2....

Cherry.

2009-08-06T07:03:00.000-07:00

If you're sitting there wondering if I'm really going to discuss what you're afraid I'm going to, based on the title, the answer is yes, yes I am. Sometimes in life, you stumble back upon people from your past who bring with them memories you've tried to forget/drink away/kill with lots of drugs/talk out with your therapist. Within the last month, I've been remembering my first real boyfriend in high school, J. Ah, young love.

I was a sophomore and J. was a junior when we dated. He was on the football team, drove a Chevy S-10 and could take me to prom, so based on these qualifications alone, I decided not only was he boyfriend material, but he was also the dream boat that I wanted to lose my virginity to. I came to this conclusion, however, while watching Carson Daly announce the newest Backstreet Boys video on TRL and sat in smug satisfaction at the sheer uniqueness of my belly-button piercing, so, you know, good judgment was really all in context.

I lost my virginity to J. in the cab of a Chevy S-10 while Creed was playing on the CD player, under the stars, parked in the middle of nowhere on a Tuesday night in August after a CYO Dance at St. Mike's (because church dances make me hot and bothered, apparently). I had a seat belt thing in my back the entire time and kept hoping we'd finish up in time for me to get home before curfew. It was what it was, and about what you expect for the situation. I gave him my class ring, he gave me his, and while listening to "With Arms Wide Open," we swore we'd spend our lives together.

A few days later we were at the county fair when those damn teen hormones kicked in again. J. had met me at the fair with one of his friends, with whom he had ridden over. He asked the friend if he could borrow the keys to his car, as he wanted to go get his sweatshirt for me, which was in the friend's car. What ensued was us going at it in broad daylight in the backseat of a 1990-nothing Chevy Cavalier at the county fair. I was smitten with this Romeo.

The kink in this hose is that apparently my hymen didn't break on the first go-round. It did, however, on the second. So there was now an unavoidable amount of blood on the backseat of his friend's car.

Like some sort of virginal squid, I'd left the backseat looking like a homicide scene. Which I was unaware of until the entire school knew about it, because said friend told everyone. EV-ER-EEEEE-ONE. So not only did the entire school in my conservative Christian town know I'd had *GASP* sex (SIN!), but they also knew (or believed) I'd lost it in this guy's Cavalier at the county fair and had bled all over everything in sight. It's funny and makes good writing material now (if you have no shame, which I don't), but at the time, it was devastating.

Sometimes, when I think it'd be nice to go back to my roots, I sit, and remind myself that my "roots" are basically two dueling banjos shy of Deliverance.

Though I'd say the fact I could have sex in a Chevy Cavalier, while not a testament to my classiness, does speak volumes for my flexibility.

But had it not been for those initial acts of teenage promiscuity, I wouldn't have embarked on the series of chain events of self-loathing and poor decisions that would eventually lead up to my 22nd birthday, where, drunk out of my mind, I became pregnant with the shamelessly adorable embryo that would become the shamelessly adorable Punky. So I wouldn't change a thing. It's like a slutty version of the Butterfly Effect.

Tired.

2009-07-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

I made the rookie toddler parent mistake of walking out of the room for about two minutes yesterday, to deign to do something as absurd as urinate, and came back to the newest page in the long epic novel that is "Holy shit my kid is the antichrist I need an exorcist what the fuck have I gotten myself into?"

She had found a 3/4 full can of Mountain Dew. Was holding it, marveling at its shiny exterior and the sloshy, surely-illegal-to-toddler inside. Looked at me as I entered the room. And what ensued was one of those slow motion moments where you hurl yourself -- slowly, and in futility -- at your child and the can of Mountain Dew while moaning, "Noooooooooooooooooooooo..."

Then she proceeded to look at me, smile, and pour it all over herself.

That's when my world snapped back to regular speed. "WHAT THE HELL, KID?!" I yelled, taking the Mountain Dew away from her. "ARE YOU IN A DAMN RAP VIDEO?"

People joke at the Terrible Two's. And we all laugh and roll our eyes, and we say, "Oh, my kid wasn't as bad as people say they get!" And we act like we don't have bruises up and down our legs from stopping impending doom multiple times a day, or pounds of makeup to cover up the massive dark circles under our eyes. But they're there.

Chapters in this ongoing novel shall be titled as such:

"No, Punk, stop ripping shit off the shelves."

"I said stop beating the dog with the spatula."

"The dog's water dish is not where Mommy's memory card reader and digital camera go." (R.I.P., Memory Card Reader.)

"If you don't stop screaming I swear to GOD I will sell you on CraigsList."

"Why does this room smell like pee?" (And the follow-up question/chapter, "How did you manage to get pee all the way across the room?!")

"Poop on wall is not an appropriate medium for expressing your inner angst."

"Seriously? In your hair?"

"Trying to carry that disproportionately large bucket of water is going to end badly for you, and you're going to have no one to blame but yourself."

"Going Headfirst Down A Slide: Why You Will Regret This Choice"

"Oh really? That's what you think? Yeah? Well BOO-YAH, mandatory naptime, motherfucker!"

"What plane of reality do you live on where this is okay?"

"I recall with a relatively high degree of certainty that I said no."

"Jesus Christ. I've become my mother."

Def Leppard.

2009-07-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

One of my strongest, and maybe favorite, memories from my childhood was my mom's music in the car. She was big into the 80's hair bands, and being the late 80's and early 90's, they were still remotely relevant. I could differentiate between Def Leppard, Poison, and White Snake by three, and could sing along to everything from "Once Bitten Twice Shy" to "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" before I was in kindergarten. I still remember the different album covers, as they appeared on the cassette tape cases. My mom would pop in a cassette tape, and we'd sing along happily to the bands that were clearly evidence of her youth.

While I really enjoyed this memory, it wasn't something I necessarily thought of until recently, when I was cruising through traffic with the windows down, blasting Rage Against the Machine (one of my all-time favorite bands) and caught Punky sitting in the backseat, bopping her head along to the music and giggling as I rapped along with Zack de la Roca and air-guitaring along with Tom Morello (one of the best guitarists in the history of rock, IMHO).

I listened to Rage long before Punk -- and driving while blasting it entirely too loud takes me back to a place before Punk, before marriage and Stepford Wifery and my achingly boring, mundane life. Back when I was ME, before How2 and before Mommy. And that's when it struck me: my mom was B. before she was Mom.

While brief, I had an entire lifetime before I became a mother. Like a past life, I was a totally different person; one that sometimes I miss being, one that sometimes I'm glad I've shed. And while Punk can dance and enjoy the music of my past life, she'll probably never know the stories behind it.

She'll never know that before it was just driving music, I sat and debated politics with friends in dorm rooms while "Battle of Los Angeles" blared in the background.

She'll never know that before I danced around the living room with her to The Wiggles, I danced on bars.

She'll never know that before I stayed up late with her when she was colicky, I stayed up late in coffee houses with good friends, talking and laughing about current events, politics, sports, and life.

She'll never know that before I let her draw on me with washable markers, I had two tattoos done to symbolize two different yet significant parts of my life.

She'll never know the life and career I gave up, and the pain I still feel for doing so.

Before sippy cups of apple juice, there were flasks of whiskey.

Before unconditional love for my child, there was the agony of loving someone I couldn't have.

Before I stayed up late, covered in baby vomit and weathering the flu, I stayed up holding back friends' hair while they prayed loudly, and with regurgitated Jager bombs, to the porcelain gods.

She will never know the complete detour that her very existence caused me to quickly and begrudgingly take, or the fact that she quite possibly saved me from myself -- or that I will forever be grateful to her for it.

First.

2009-07-17T07:03:00.000-07:00

It's a monumental day in the Casa de la How2. A day that has long been in the making, long in preparation, and much anticipated. May I have silence for a moment while I present:

MOTHER-EFFING PIGTAILS.

Okay. So it's probably not groundbreaking to anyone but me. God knows she is definitely no Gigi in the follicle department. (Yes. Look at that picture. Gigi's a week younger than Punk. Can we all join together in a "No fucking fair!"?). But it has taken 17, yes, SEVENTEEN, months to get to the point that Punky finally had hair long enough to constitute a puny little piggytail.

Considering she spawned from two individuals who each have INCREDIBLE hair -- thick, shiny, strong -- and throughout my pregnancy I had worse heartburn than Pavarotti after an Indian meal, I fully expected her to come out with Rapunzel-length locks. Instead, Punky came out bald as a cue ball. Which made my parents especially nervous since they were concerned she may be a "ginger" like her father.

Okay. Babies are bald. That's expected, I guess. But then what little whisps of hair she DID have, she lost. So then she was like Homer Simpson without his little lines of hair. And it stayed that way. No hair. Zero. None. Til she was like six months old. And now she's been blessed with the rate that my hair grows -- which is, um, not at all -- so it has been an agonizingly long waiting process as I've stared wistfully at the pony-o's and barettes that I had in anticipation of styling my baby daughter's beautiful locks.

Even with the hair finally here, however, the dream was also shattered by the fact that I had to rassle her like a greased pig to get them in. It's okay; I mean, spinal damage heals, right?

New Kids on the Blog List

2009-07-16T11:34:00.001-07:00

New on the blog list and my current obsession is The DP Show -- double teaming, slamming, ramming and pumping today's most penetrating issues and never calling them back. Just a good time all around and my guilty pleasure for the part of me that has a penis (I mean hypothetically, not the crotchal part of me) that obsesses over sports. And I don't care what the health clinic at BGSU says, that Matt Pagel is a nice boy.

So unless you like to rape ponies, and especially if you do, you should probably check them out. And subscribe to their iTunes podcast here.

So there you go guys -- I've got the snarky, sarcastic stay-at-home-mom market cornered for you. You're welcome.

Scapegoat.

2009-07-15T07:57:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the magic that is Facebook, I'm able to ~~stalk~~ keep in touch with old friends from high school ~~without actually having to talk to them~~. I've been feeling especially reminiscent lately, and was thinking about the dynamic of the "old gang." Looking back, I think I feel most sorry for Mary*.

Mary was what you would call the group DUFF. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, that would be the Designated Ugly Fat Friend. Every group of high school girls has one. If you don't think your group does or did, guess what, you were the DUFF. Sorry. I was the smart one. Jennifer was the funny one. Kylie was the bitch. Mary was the DUFF.

Remember Piggy from Lord of the Flies? That was Mary. She was large, she was anxious, and she was always paranoid we'd get in trouble. Mainly because we usually did, often with the law, and her mom was the 911 dispatcher in our tiny town, so any trouble we incurred (and then dumped on her), she would be punished way worse than the rest of us. So, being 16, 17 years old, we usually used Mary as the group scapegoat, usually because she was slower than the rest of us and unable to run from the cops and jump fences and not cry when being questioned.

Sometimes you just have to sacrifice the slowest member of the pack, and in our case, it was Mary. And we left her to the wolves pretty frequently.

The most blatant and obvious case of this was one night during a sleepover when we decided it would be funny to go toilet-paper (or TP, if you will) the house of an especially cute guy in our class, we'll call him John. Kylie had a huge crush on John, so when you're 16 and you like a guy, naturally the best way to address this is to throw toilet paper all over every tree in his yard, shaving cream his and his parents' cars, and take a shit on his front doorstep. Well, I didn't particularly like him, also he was my second or third cousin, so I shit on his front doorstep. Whatever, he wasn't my crush.

We couldn't drive yet, so we had Mary's older brother Nick serve as our chauffeur in exchange for beer money and a joint. We piled into Nick's Ford Escort and drove to John's house, where Nick sat in the car while we TP'd the trees, giggling and shushing each other and running around like the idiot 15-year-olds we were.

Then the living room light turned on. We saw a silhouette pass through the living room and knew our shenanigans were being thwarted. So we screamed, because that's what idiot 15-year-olds do, and ran to the car. Mary was the furthest from the car at the time so already had a longer way to run. This proved to be her downfall. That, and the fact that she was morbidly obsese.

It was John's dad. The front door swung open and out he came, in nothing but tighty-whities and tube socks, and came charging out after us into the yard like a madman. (John's dad was also sort of known for being a little imbalanced.) We threw ourselves into the car, screaming in terror because there's a 40-something-year-old man in his underwear chasing us and screaming at us. We screamed at Nick to drive off as Mary was leaping headfirst into the backseat of the car.

Mary only got the top half of her body into the car, and I still remember her grabbing onto me as the car sped off... and John's dad ripped her out of the car. It was sort of like those horror movies, where you see the girl getting pulled under the bed by whatever beast awaits and you just see her fingers desperately grabbing in futility?

Yeah. It was like that.

And we yelled at Nick -- MARY'S BROTHER -- to keep driving as we slammed the door shut.

To this day, I remember watching out the back window as John's dad SHOOK HER, screaming (we later found out), "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! WHAT IN THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?!" and as she was being violently shaken, Mary managed to stammer out, "WHAT...ARE...YOU...DOING?!?!"

John's dad called the police, and then Mary had to wait at John's house for her mom to come pick her up. We left her there to die, more or less -- especially once her mother got ahold of her. In the meantime, Nick took us to the late-night gas station and we got ice cream.

Mary didn't talk to us for a solid week. Mostly because she was on parental-imposed house arrest. "Grounding" never really did justice for the degree of punishment her parents would put her under.

We were assholes back then, sure. But then the year after we graduated, John's dad died of colon cancer, so really, karma won out after all.

* - Names changed to protect... well, basically just for my own amusement, really.

Toddlaerobics.

2009-06-24T20:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, people read celebrity gossip sites like Perez Hilton (despite the fact that he is a hypocrite and a horrible human being), and sometimes these blogs, so I am told, feature anorexic-looking celebrity moms, who apparently poo-poo the notion that they're anorexic and just say, "I have children! That's how I stay trim! Chasing after them!"

I have never been to such sites, because I am a serious journalist, but I know if I were to go to those sites, and if I stumbled upon such a statement by a celebrity whose personal life I know nothing of... oh, say, Posh Spice, aka Victoria Beckham.... I'd probably have rolled my eyes at them and declared, "What a load of shit. It's coke and anorexia! DUH!"

Yeah. Um. Apparently it's pretty true. Because having a toddler? Fucking exhausting, dude.

I had a brief conversation with another young first-time mom in the Wal-Mart check-out line today, her angelic 6-month-old sitting serenely in the car carrier seat, our conversation broken up every 40 seconds by my child pulling all of the magazines out of the rack. Then, as I bent down to pick everything up, took off running across Wal-Mart like she was being chased by El Chupacabra. Then thrashing angrily as I tried to detain her with my withering, exhausted arms.

I remember when Punky was at that stage. Sitting in her car carrier, batting away at whatever random toy I'd managed to strap onto the handle. Contained. Immobile. And A. and I would watch her and dote on her, and dream of how wonderful and magical it would be once she could walk!

Uhhh... yeah. We were retarded.

It seems like a novel idea til you have to chase your child out of the Chipotle kitchen, when you swear to god you just let go of her hand long enough to get your wallet out of your purse because for the love of christ, kid, mommy just wants a fucking chicken taco OKAY? Not so fun anymore when in the blink of an eye, she tears across the front yard into the street while you're fishing for car keys.

And in a new and super addition to her Mobility, Self-Mutiliation and Death Initiative, she's learned to climb up onto the furniture. Cute and fun when she's on the couch, sipping on her Sippy Cup and watching TV peacefully. Not so much when she figures out how to get onto the glider rocker and then decides to STAND UP. I started up a pool among my friends as to just how soon she'd manage to injure herself with that new trick. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm actually a pretty attentive parent, but there comes a point where you have to let go and let Darwin.

Congratulations to Kellie, by the way, who won the pool with her Tuesday entry. Glad to see someone can make financial gain on my child's suffering. Really, I'm like a minor-league Kate Gosselin. (Oh no she didn't! Oh I did, I just did.)

Combined, my Plague and Toddler Diet has resulted in almost 20 lbs. lost since early May. I guess I should change the name of the diet, though, so as to not convey the false idea of eating plagues and toddlers. That's just ridiculous. You can't eat a plague.

Happy Father's Day

2009-06-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

If only every little girl could be so lucky...

The New War at Home

2009-06-14T22:53:00.001-07:00

So all that crap I wrote not too long ago about not having any waged wars with the neighbors? Yeah, apparently all that was needed to resolve that was some new blood in the neighborhood.

I briefly introduced you to Jabba the Slut, my new neighbor, last week. Since I stay at home all day, I've been able to learn a little bit more about her by observing her habits: her apparent favorite habits are smoking on the front porch, yelling at her 2-year-old son Nehemiah (whom I am convinced does not own any clothes since any time I see him, he is running around in a diaper, regardless of weather conditions), eating, and loudly partying with gentleman callers on her porch. All of the above are done loudly. She is nothing but an absolute joy to live beside in my previously-quiet and serene neighborhood, even if it is overrun by the Feline Minions.

At this point, I'd like to pause to mention that despite ongoing wars with Creepy Cat Guy and Kidney Boy, I actually do get along with the majority of my neighbors. My favorite neighbor is Fred. Fred is my guardian angel, in the form of a tattoo'd, gruff, Harley-riding ex-trucker. Whenever I'm in distress, he magically appears -- whether it's being locked out of my car (arrives with slim jim in hand), fighting with the lawn mower (spark plug and a little luck and he had it running again), or help pushing a comatose car out of the street (that was a fun winter). Fred's a good guy. He's abrasive, but I'm not exactly smooth as silk myself. It's hard not to like Fred within five minutes of talking to him.

It's at this point that we teleport to yesterday afternoon. A warm June afternoon, I had my windows open when I hear men yelling at each other in angry voices, accompanied with a slew of curse words. I look out the window, and there's Jabba the Slut's current booty call/baby daddy/pimp/provider of McDonald's, this tiny skinny white guy, all thugged out, screaming at Fred to get off his (mind you, SHE rents the house, I have never seen Skinny in my life) lawn.

Fred is yelling back, obscenities are exchanged, I got called a skinny bitch in the whole mix. (Again. Confidence levels = all time high.) Fred goes back down to his house and I go inside. I come back out a little later and Fred's talking to Sharon, my other next-door neighbor (Kidney Boy's mom... she and I are cool).

BASICALLY. The story is, Fred was walking past Jabba's house, stopped to introduce himself and chat, and she referred to me in conversation as "the skinny bitch next door." Fred interjected that I and my husband are good people, and not to talk about me like that. Somewhere in this the fight escalated and Skinny pushed Fred, conflict ensued, police were called. Drama, drama, drama.

So basically, the neighborhood is quietly rallying to evict Jabba as efficiently and swiftly as possible.

Wars are fun when you have an army that doesn't consist solely of your blog and message board friends. Don't get me wrong, guys, you all rock, but this is going to be an amazing summer, full of calls to the police, filing complaints, calling her landlord, and who knows, maybe I'll get drunk and egg her house. Because THAT will solve the problem.

Hold onto your panties. This summer's gonna get interesting.

The new baby

2009-06-11T21:33:00.001-07:00

So it's official. A. and I are now really, truly, officially, totally married.

We were married October 31, 2007 in a Las Vegas quickie wedding, after I had waddled my 5.5 month pregnant ass around Vegas to get to the license bureau and then threw up in the license bureau bathroom (pregnancy-related, not nerves). We were really married when I gave birth to our daughter, whom we had created while consumating our relationship (for the umphundredth time). We were reeeaaally married when we bought a couch together. But now it's official:

Meet our new baby. We bought a car together.

Yes, as of today, A. and I are the proud owners of a 2002 Jeep Liberty. She's beautiful. And I feel hot as hell driving it. Which really is the most important thing. Gas guzzling be damned -- I'm sexy in my Liberty.

It was a day I never thought I'd ever see. After the worst winter ever, when both of our cars took a shit on us, my grandmother gave me her car to get us through the winter, fighting with the Lumina every other week, and getting A. to finally admit that his Honda Prelude is NOT family friendly... followed by months of us fighting and arguing over what kind of vehicle to get.... it's here. It's in the driveway. It's mine and he can't take it away from me, namely because my name is on the title, too.

First, A. saw the car at a dealership. Talked to the dealer (I was not around for this), liked what he was hearing. Told me to go test drive it, which I did the next day. I fell in love instantly. Then I told A. as much, at which point he rambled on for awhile about the impracticality of it, and how it's a gas guzzler and.... who cares, all I heard was "Blah blah blah, I don't love you and you can never have a car you want, blah blah blah".

What ensued was a tantrum that would make even the most spoiled three-year-olds stop and marvel at the skill of my game. My tears are magical, ya'll. My bodily fluids in general are sheer magic. My breast milk makes a consistently 98th percentile baby, and my tears make a grown man buy me a car.

Don't think I am not without my match. After waiting 2 hours at the bank to get the car loan (after being told it would take 20-30 minutes), A. had the bank branch manager calming him down, offering him everything from water to her own private stash of Diet Pepsi to donuts from the Wells Fargo employee break room. I wasn't around to hear just how it reached the point of the bank manager groveling and offering donuts, but I don't doubt he was epic. Gotta love being married to an Irish man with an Irish temper.

But now it is mine. And I am content. The How2 has spoken.

You know your weight loss is paying off when...

2009-06-08T22:06:00.000-07:00

... you hear your trashy fat blob of a neighbor on the phone on her front porch refer to you as "the skinny Stepford bitch next door."

Yes, we have a new neighbor. The idiot elderly couple who own the house next door, which has been empty for almost two years, have found someone to rent to again. I don't know what her name is, but I do know she has a little boy named Nehemiah James. I know his name because she screams it at him, along with random strings of obscenities, about every five minutes.

She seems delightful.

Skinny bitch.

2009-05-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

Since I had not one but two rousing rounds with The Plague in the past month and a half, I've lost quite a bit of weight. I didn't really notice it until I looked at pictures from our zoo trip on my birthday last week:

I'm looking a bit gaunt. And it looks hot, I'll say it. (And OMG *gasp*, an elusive How2 pic... it's okay, you can't see my face.)

I've always been leaning toward the tall and lanky side thanks to amazing genetics, but I think this is a new record in the skinny bitch dept. I'm still working to get my appetite back from the aftermath of The Plague, but ya know, I really kinda dig the new weight, whatever it is. (I'm not allowed to have scales in the house... as someone who's battled with weight/body image issues, I will weigh myself every hour on the hour if there is a scale in this house. So we don't own one.)

I know I keep talking about running a half-marathon, or a sprint-triathlon, or I don't know, getting off my ass, but this time I mean it. I really kinda want to maintain this weight without getting some virus that has me pleading with my husband to mercy-kill me. We have a treadmill in the basement I haven't touched in, oh, say a year. And it's beautiful out; the evening weather is perfect for running.

Then I start thinking about taking Punky running with me, because wouldn't that just be something, me, jogging along all MILFy like? But then that requires me to get a jogging stroller, and that's just an added expense on something I have a sneaking suspicion will turn out like the treadmill. But you just can't go jogging with a baby in a regular stroller, because then you just look like you're intentionally running away from something.

I mean really, think about it. You see a woman running down the sidewalk pushing a baby in just a run-of-the-mill stroller? Your first instinct is to look behind her and see if there is a rapist or a monster behind her. You see a woman running with one of those three-wheeled, sleek jogging strollers? You think, Hey, she's really in shape!

And let's face it, once I start running, I'll have to keep it up so A. doesn't accuse me again of "never following through"... and there's also the simple fact that running sucks. Running really sucks. I'm sorry. I know people do marathons like I drink (as in, they do it to function), and I had friends who ran cross country in high school and college, but ya know, I think these people are, for lack of a better word, stupid. Running sucks, it's boring, there's nothing fun about it. I lost all interest in running a half-marathon, not because it seemed hard, but because running 13.1 miles would bore the living shit out of me. I would detour off after like half a mile, or whenever I found a pub or bar. Because seriously. Fuck that shit.

So basically, in the course of this blog post, you've witnessed me go from "YEAH! Skinny is AWESOME!" to "Enh, fuck it. I'm going to go get a martini." Which is a good mindset to have, because it's 9:45 am and I still haven't had a glass of wine yet.

ETA: Problem solved.

Won't you be my neighbor?

2009-05-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a good feud with the neighbors lately. Cat Guy has kept his minion army mostly at home base, Kidney Boy stopped parking in front of our house, and I've actually befriended a couple of our neighbors, namely Lonely Lady (a 50-something woman who lives by herself), Formerly Fat Guy (aka FFG, who plowed our driveway and sidewalk all summer for brownie compensation), and Ram Guy (whose name I do actually know, is Fred, and always randomly appears when I'm in distress). So I've been rather bored since I haven't had anyone locally to take out my passive-aggressive rage on.

It's not that I actively seek out conflicts with my neighbors. I just have a zero-tolerance policy for bullshit, and it's especially so when it infringes on my living space. I learned the hard way, from my early days as an innocent and naive college student living alone in her first "big girl" apartment, to the long, embittered journey that brought me to this house.

My first apartment was actually really nice for a first go at independence. It had a beautiful view of a "lake" (it was a big pond, but it was beautiful nonetheless) on a nice side of town. Unfortunately I got herded into the same building as some real nutjobs that quickly transformed me from the sweet little college girl into a shiv-wielding, trust-no-one hermit.

On the day I moved in, I met Kevin. On my first encounter of Kevin, he seemed nice enough besides an inherent creepy vibe. He wore a light gray t-shirt and light gray sweatpants and black socks with Birkenstocks, and this apparently was his uniform, as he wore this every single time I ever saw him, like some sort of cartoon character. He was quiet. He avoided eye contact. And whenever I walked past his apartment door, on the rare occasion that it was open, it was obvious this man was a packrat. Newspapers, boxes, computer parts, plants, weird things that I don't even know, piled from floor to ceiling in his dimly lit apartment. On the rare chance that I walked by and he was coming or going and I peeked into his apartment, he'd quickly the shut the door and stare at me like I'd mortally offended his mother.

Kevin was creepy and I soon decided that he was a serial killer. He would talk on his cell phone outside -- maybe better reception, I don't know -- but he'd walk around the apartment building on his cell phone, smoking cigarettes, and giving you dirty looks if you glanced his way while he was talking. I stopped looking at him after awhile because I was pretty sure that if I continued to give my obligatory half smile, he was going to kill me and make a suit out of my skin.

Directly above my apartment was the Somalians. I was never sure how many people lived there. It seemed like they switched people out like Swatch watch covers. But they were always African (like "click click" African), and always had a shitload of children. And they were loud. God, they were loud. And perhaps they wanted to take their dysfunction outside away from the children, or maybe they just wanted to share with the rest of us in the building, but they always went out on the balcony to scream at each other in whatever their native tongue was. I think it was angry yelling. I was never really sure. But they'd scream and fight and throw ceramics off the balcony (which hey, I got a really cool free pot with only a few minor chips that way). Then they'd have sex later.

And because I lived in the apartment directly beneath them, I was the lucky winner of several used condoms on my balcony. Which is a little surprising, considering how many children they had running around. Maybe they learned from past mistakes. I don't really know.

Also above my apartment, and one over, was a young college couple, Matt and Ashley, who were my age. Initially I thought they were pretty cool -- Ashley had family in my hometown, Matt and I had a lot of really similar music tastes. After a while, I found myself up in their apartment, or them in mine, about every night, having a beer and watching TV or movies or playing games. Pretty normal stuff. Then I began to realize Ashley was bipolar. Really bipolar. Like we went out to IHOP one night and when she didn't get her hash browns with her meal, she had a complete meltdown. And was completely inconsolable.

After I realized Ashley wasn't exactly stable (but I mean hey, who of us really is?), I started to realize that Matt and Ashley fought a lot. I could hear them screaming at each other frequently. Then one day I caught an argument where she believed he was cheating on her with me (no). This insecurity turned into resentment and pretty soon it became really obvious that she didn't want me hanging out with them anymore. Combine that with the fact that on a crazy day, Ashley asked if I'd have a threesome with them... our friendship kind of dissolved after I discovered I don't have a high tolerance for Crazy.

Some of the craziness wasn't even from residents, necessarily. I quickly encountered a nemesis in the form of a very obese woman on a motorized scooter who would come and pick through our trash. She was accompanied by what I was never quite sure was either a child or a midget, and they'd rifle through the dumpster beside the apartment building, collect their treasures, and then escape down the road on the motorized scooter. Where they came from and where they went, I don't really know, but I saw them booking down the street on more than one occasion. The woman wasn't exactly pleasant; she screamed at me that I was a slut on more than one occasion, but I never responded, namely because she saw me getting out of my car once and I really didn't want her to do anything to my car. I started leaving expired groceries and canned goods beside the dumpster, after I figured out her patterns, and hoped that maybe she'd appreciate my good deeds, and not scratch my car, or maybe even stop calling me a whore. She never did stop calling me a whore and a slut, but I'm fairly certain my car made it out of that lease unscathed.

Eventually, my lease expired, I moved to another apartment, and then into A.'s house, and neighbors have come and gone and battles and feuds have been fought, some won, some lost, all passive-aggressive in their own right. But I'll never forget that first apartment and the creepy serial killer, the horny, angry multiplying Somalians, the Schadenfreunde, and the insult-screaming obese woman on the Rascal and her pet midget. These are the people that fate brings into our lives to make them interesting, and to make us appreciate deadbolt locks.

2009-05-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

It's so convenient that my current age is also the same number as some popular TV show I've never seen. (No, really. I've never watched Lost either.) But yes, just an FYI, because it's my blog and I can attention-whore if I want to (because that's basically all this is here) -- today is my birthday, and I am 24. Today also marks the two-year anniversary of Punky's conception... so provided my good buddy Mirena doesn't fail me, we can make it the second consecutive birthday in a row that I don't get knocked up! Woo woo!

Though, in the birthdays since the notorious 22nd, I haven't gotten falling down drunk and writhed around on a pool table or danced on a guitar amp in the same night. The two may or may not be directly correlated.

Anyway. It's my birthday. And I am old.

Motherhood quote of the day

2009-05-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

The setup: Punky has three foam blocks: one is a 4'x4' square block with a circular hole through it. The other two are round blocks that can fit into this round hole, individually. Punky has put one round block into the hole, and is furiously, determinedly trying to cram the second round block in the hole.

Awesome Mom Quote:
"Punk, that second block doesn't go in there and it's not going to fit. Except once in college when you're really drunk, and then you never speak of it again."

Style, baby.

2009-05-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

After witnessing from afar as my good friend, superstar, and now LAW SCHOOL GRAD (*ahem* I should mention surviving the second half of 3L while concurrently enduring first and second trimester of pregnancy) Laynie suffered the initial loss (and subsequent, thankfully, recovery) of her son's "special moments" outfits from his infancy.... I'm sorry, I got lost talking about how awesome Laynie is, where was I?.... Oh. Anyway. Laynie thought she'd thrown away all of her son's clothes, including the ones from those huge moments in a baby's life, and I completely and totally felt her pain and mortification. Thankfully, as I said, she found them, but in the meantime I got all kinds of colors of paranoid and wound up rifling through all 8 gigantic tubs of Punky baby clothes to pull out her important first outfits.

It's strange, how fast 15 months seems to have flown until I look at her earliest outfits and her shoes (OMG the tiny newborn SHOES!!! Not that she ever wore them, but OMG) and I realize how much she's grown, and how far we've come. From the tiny little onesies that I dressed her so carefully in to the frilly dresses I thought were a great idea when I bought them before she was born and then realized...okay, back to onesies.... and holy shit, TINY BABBY!... *cuteness coma, please pause... coherence to follow shortly*

I think it's important to stop every so often as a parent to stop and reflect on the path you traveled. I can't believe she's 15 months now, walking, and talking, and abusing the dog willingly and willfully speaking her opinions. And sometimes it just seems like such mindnumbing routine and such a pain in the ass to tell her again, DO NOT STAND ON THAT SCOOTER CAR, YOU WILL FALL, SIT THE FUCK DOWN....when I look at her little nightgowns from 15 months ago and remember that tiny little blob.

The outfit selection was small in the end -- only maybe 4 or 5 dresses (and her Bears cheerleader outfit), mostly from portraits, including these:

4 month portraits

The dress she wore to A.'s cousin's wedding, which will always be a favorite dress of mine.

The Bears cheerleader outfit

First Christmas, 2008

Also making the cut is her prolific Misfits onesie, because seriously, how badass is a kid in a Misfits onesie?

And, while I don't have a good picture of it, her Winnie the Pooh nightie, complete with Pooh mittens. Which was also her going home, um...outfit.

In my defense, when it came time to bring Punky home from the hospital, I knew all of three things about babies:

1.) I had just had one.
2.) They are tiny.
3.) They cry a lot.

So it wasn't my wisest parenting choice, 72 hours postpartum, to dress her in a Winnie the Pooh nightie and swaddled in a shitton of blankets, in February. In Indiana. (To be fair, it was unseasonably warm that week.) But look, when it was time to go home, she was completely unconscious, and I didn't want to wake her up, just to dress her in a ceremonial outfit, drive 15 minutes home, then dress her in something similar to, if not the same thing as, she was wearing before we bothered her to get her dressed in a going-home outfit. So, it was a Winnie the Pooh nightie and it served its purpose well.

The outfits continue to circulate through the closet and dresser, some have already been passed on to friends with baby girls and the rest have had a hand-me-down freeze put on them pending the newest addition to the family (not mine, I swear, my uterus is empty!), the days continue to turn into months, and the little blob of mush continues to turn into a precocious, hilarious little girl. And mark my words, she will have the most awesome outfits for all of the major events along the way.

Added for KL... yeah, that's right.

Daddy's socks can also double as leggings.
MAKE IT WORK!

Mother's Day

2009-05-10T23:06:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to be a mother.

Ever.

It wasn't just youthful selfishness. I just never imagined myself as a mother. When other little girls were playing with baby dolls, I was reading and riding bikes and motorcycles and playing sports. When our second grade class was giving the assignment to describe our future career, a lot of girls wrote they wanted to be mommies. I wanted to be a professional skydiver. I asked for a tubal ligation for my high school graduation present. Some people just feel destined to be parents, ready from the minute they exit the womb to nurture and raise their own young.

Yeah. Wasn't me.

So needless to say, I felt the glass of my carefully-sculpted world crashing around me in June 2007, barely a month after I had wrapped on college and was working my way toward a successful career that I had worked my ass off for to that point, as I sat on the bathroom floor staring at six different pregnancy tests all telling me the same thing: FUCK YES, BITCH, YOU'RE KNOCKED UP! Some digitally read "Pregnant." Some had two pink lines. But they all said the same thing:

My life. Was. Over.

I took a shower and sobbed until the hot water ran out, then I sat on the bed and stared into space, wondering what to do. I resolved that I was going to have an abortion. I was 22 years old and in no way prepared or ready to have a kid. No fucking way. I was barely dependable owning a dog. I was working on moving in with my boyfriend, who don't get me wrong, was a good guy, but a father? Shit. Neither of us were there. Considering the night I conceived was the night of my 22nd birthday, and the grand event was the culmination of entirely too much alcohol and other recreational substances to figure out the mechanism of "pulling out", this was pulling the plug on a party that was far too loud and far too exciting to stop.

Then I told A. I was planning for the same, "FUCK. FUCK. FUCK" reaction that I had had. He didn't want to grow up either. We were two big kids who enjoyed our days in bed, our concerts, our dive bars and our hard liquor. We were not parents. And then he smiled. That son of a bitch was happy. Overjoyed. Ecstatic.

And when I said, "I'm not sure I'm ready for this. I'm thinking about...." I saw the horror in his eyes. The hurt. The shame. The sadness. And I knew what I had to do. And I knew what I couldn't do.

So I spent nine months preparing to be a mother, when my friends and peers from college were moving to LA and New York and Chicago to be journalists and PR reps and teachers in Spain, and on February 15 I gave birth to a beautiful, health baby girl.

I felt nothing when she was born.

I felt nothing for almost two months. I wasn't postpartum, I just still wasn't grasping this new life, my new life, her new life, our new life. In nine months I'd gone from a drunk college grad to a wife and mother. I resented a lot of it. I tried to be happy and express how wonderful it all was, but I didn't like this squirming baby and I didn't like her crying. I didn't like waking up all the time and never sleeping, and I didn't like changing diapers. I had to Google how to change diapers.

Then one night, around 3 am, when we were wide awake yet again, I was playing "Just What I Needed" by the Cars and singing quietly to her when I realized that I loved her. It just sort of hit hard and fast, and in that moment I realized that this little baby was the love of my life.

And now, fifteen months later, I can't imagine life without my Punky. She is my joy, my everything, my world. Everything I do in life is for her, without a second thought. She makes me smile and laugh, she makes me cry at how beautiful and wonderful and downright hilarious she is. The other day, I went to McDonald's and got an orange Hi-C, stuck it in the cupholder and was driving off to run our errands, when from the back seat I hear in the tiniest whisper... "Peez?" And there she was, holding out her little hands and scrunching them open and closed. I turned around and looked at her again. "Peez?"

When I was sick last week, I wanted to die. And yet this little girl, my little girl, came up to me, laying on the couch and praying for death, and would give me kisses, and nuzzle her head on my side.

Things like that. She is amazing. She is absolutely everything I never thought I wanted. She is my life. She makes me strive to be better for her and for myself; I fall in love with her as I watch her discover her world around her, point at the birds and laugh, or sit on the grass just because it feels funny. Things I never thought I'd realize or understand, things I never even cared about, I see it all in her and I fall in love so much that it hurts -- goddamnit it hurts -- and I realize and I know that this is where I am supposed to be. With her.

Happy Mother's Day to all you moms out there. And if you're not a mom, know your mom loves you this much too.

Taint.

Crap. They grow.

2009-05-05T22:21:00.001-07:00

A. and I are members of our local zoo -- dating back to the Pre-Punky days -- so we wind up at the zoo just about every other week during the summer. Every time we go with Punk, we take a picture of her on this bronze orangutan statue. Our first visit of the season was earlier this week and true to tradition, we got the Orangutan Picture. And holy crap. My baby, my little blob that I had to hold for the picture (and Photoshop my arm out of later), is a toddler, happily sitting on the orangutan herself. And so, the Orang-Montage....

FOUR MONTHS:

FIVE MONTHS:

SEVEN MONTHS:

14.5 MONTHS:

Holy crap.

Also, now that she's a toddler, she's also eligible for contracting bacterial diseases from the goats at the petting zoo:

So if in a few weeks you hear of a goat flu pandemic... you're welcome.

Little accomplishments.

2009-05-04T22:08:00.001-07:00

I feel like more often than not, I'm writing excuses here apologizing for never writing shit, even though let's be honest, I'm really freaking boring and do boring things and ramble on about my kid. But honestly, I got in a good writing mood last week and it quickly died off once I was UNABLE TO CONTAIN ANYTHING IN MY STOMACH. I don't know if I had swine flu. Maybe I did. I don't know. Whatever it was, it sucked, it sucked hard, and I never want to do it again. I had e. Coli back when I worked for Petland (oh yes, yes I did, with the medical records to prove it), and this wasn't as bad. Very close. Equal suckage. But not as bad. So ever the optimist, I kept telling myself, it's not as bad as e. Coli.

Because it's about being sunny, ya know? Glass half full type shit.

I don't know what the hell my bowels are doing now, seeing as I haven't pooped in like, a week. It was like I went from peeing out my butt to *flick of a switch* nothing. I guess it's better to be constipated than incontinent, but still. The intestines and I really need to get on the same page before I keep sending things their way; which I'm doing more and more now that I can finally hold down solids. And liquids. Hell, anything.

Some highlights of my bought with Mystery Flu included laying in the bathtub with the water running on me until the hot water ran out, then continuing to lay there in the cold water because I lacked the energy to get up and turn off the water, so I yelled for A., equally weak, to come turn it off. When he didn't respond, I tried yelling for, in chronological order, Punky, Bodhi, Lassie, and Kidney Boy (our next door neighbor). Somewhere in that process, I also shit myself. Oh well. I figured the water would rinse it off.

(Note to anyone reading this who visits my house: I have since pretty much soaked the entire house, tub included, in bleach.)

After the first 24 hours passed, I decided I was absolutely STARVING. RAVENOUS. So I drove to Subway and ordered a sub, then inhaled it in the parking lot. Still hungry, I drove down the street to McDonald's and ordered a double cheeseburger meal, then gorged that on the drive back to the house. Then as soon as I got through the front door, I went and threw it all up. Basically, I paid about $10 to rent some fast food for a little bit.

Even our goddamn fish were sick. The goldfish, Redrum to be specific, have some weird disease that I can't figure out. We lost OJ Cadillac and Albert Fish, two of our four fish, to the Mystery Swine Fish Flu, and Redrum looks like he's barely clinging on depending on the day. Ironically enough, despite all of the fish drugs and adversities thrown into that tank, Anna Nicole Fish is still thriving. Sometimes life is funny and interesting.

Anyway. I'm alive. I think we're all finally rebounding. So I offer a hearty FUCK YOU to the Swine Flu (H1N1, whatever) and raise my hand victoriously. And also, I lost like 13 lbs. I fit into my skinny jeans today. Who wants a vile full of this stuff?

PS: Kayla Linzy tagged me in a survey thing. Don't think I am ignoring it; I'm just waiting til I'm feeling particularly witty to answer it, because my life and my responses are THAT BORING otherwise.

Yep.

2009-04-28T14:15:00.001-07:00

Yep. That's my kid. She's pretty cool.

2009-04-28T10:26:00.001-07:00

Shaken Mama had a really great post about life happening in a house, and it really got me thinking about our house, and how much living we've done here in such a short amount of time. Ferris Beuller said life moves pretty fast, and you never really realize how fast it moves until you stop and watch it for a minute.

This was A.'s house before I came into the picture. It was his bachelor pad. So much so that, when I came inside for the first time on our third date, he kept the lights off. We hooked up on his old couch, that was so decrepit that I got a nasty bruise up my spine from the boards that stuck up from the cushions. There was a big Hank Williams poster on the wall; that was the lone wall decoration. He had a picture of Jeff Goldblum staring at you in the bathroom. Everything was sticky. There was a pile of tires in the living room that somehow constituted a coffee table. The kitchen table was buried under mounds of clothing. He kept his laundry in the dryer and pulled things out as needed.

Not too terribly long after we started dating, the lease on my apartment was up. I started looking for a new apartment and A. suggested I move in with him. I thought he was joking. I signed a new lease for six months, which I had planned to coincide with my college graduation so I could be free to chase job opportunities without being pinned down by a lease.

Six months later, he asked me again to move in with him, and I agreed. After all, I'd been paying about $500 a month for an apartment that was basically a storage unit, since I was crashing at his place every night anyway. I started moving my stuff in, bit by bit, during the last month of my lease.

On June 14, two weeks before my lease was up, I sat in the tiny bathroom of his house and stared at a pregnancy test that was blinking "PREGNANT" at me. (Yeah. I needed the fool-proof digital read.) I took a shower in the tiny shower, which we've since remodeled, trying to wrap my head around what it all meant. I stood in the dining room when he came home and we stared at each other, trying to wrap our heads around what it all meant.

He proposed to me as I sat on the same couch we'd hooked up on the first time, the same old couch where I'd sat up late writing final papers and studying, where we'd drank beer and played video games. The same old couch that my water broke on.

The second bedroom was the "guest bedroom," with all of A.'s guitars on the walls and a bed, where our friends passed out after insane nights of drinking and rocking and belligerence. It was gutted and is now a pink and green rose garden-themed nursery. Our daughter's crib sits where his amps once were. The room we rarely went into is now home to our greatest joy.

The hardwood floors where I passed out so many times now reverberate the plat-plat-plat of little, still a little unsure, feet. The trash that was once filled with beer bottles and fast food bags now sits with diapers and boxes from whatever random brightly colored toy she's brought home from the grandparents this time. The old couch where we fucked, loved, studied, drank, and smoked eventually got sold to a college student for $50 (with a matching loveseat), who didn't ask about the weird stain on the middle cushion, and we bought a new couch, and the living room that I'd originally so carefully designed in marroon, sage and tan is now mostly "primary color" themed with toys everywhere.

About a year after the date where he reluctantly brought me into his house that was embarrassingly dirty, A. carried me over the threshhold of our front door when we came home from Las Vegas after getting married on Halloween 2007. Yes, he picked up and hauled my orca-whale-fat, 5.5 month pregnant ass over the threshhold. Now I catch our daughter standing at that storm door, giddily, furiously pounding on the glass and giggling at the sunshine outside.

The porch where we used to get drunk with friends and play guitar, much to the neighbors' chagrin, now has a primary-colored plastic swing on it, complete with flower boxes full of "pretties." The lawn that we used to mow only when we were being threatened with violations from the city now stays pristinely mowed, as Punky follows behind with her pink Little Tykes mower.

But she keeps a good amount of distance, because the sound of the mower scares her a little more than she'll openly admit.

It's been almost two years since I moved in, since we found out I was pregnant, and life began changing at rapid pace. And it'll continue to change and morph until we eventually move to a bigger house and start over, and someone else will move in here, most likely completely oblivious to the furious amount of life that's happened in this little house.

But in the meantime, I'll sit on this couch (the new one, where the only stains are from sippy cups, and there aren't any potential injuries waiting to happen) and smile at the changes that have come and continue to come.

Welcome to my cult.

2009-04-27T23:24:00.000-07:00

Apparently, your husband may take things the wrong way when you start excitedly telling him, "Oh my god, I have two new followers!"

Considering my strong (borderline militant) aversion to religion, it really shouldn't be put past me to start a cult, which he's convinced I've done following my message board exodus (HOLLA at the 9th!). That, and hey, I WAS a sorority president. Which is basically the same thing since it also involves robes, candles, secret rituals, drinking essentially toxic substances and puking a lot.

Or it could mean that I have followers on Twitter. Which let me say right now: NO. I have absolutely no interest in Twitter. I think it's ridiculous. I have MySpace, I have Facebook (and I had Facebook when it FIRST came out, when it was just for college students, and all of my aunts-in-law couldn't find me, friend me, and then cluck their tongues disapprovingly while I use the F-bomb freely and describe my bowel movements in far too much detail). I refuse to get Twitter. If that makes me an old fogey, fine. I don't get kids today, I guess. I'm old and out of touch. (For the record, I am 23. Jesus Christ, I'm almost 24.... I'm getting old.)

Okay, so the "followers" I was referencing were the followers of this blog. It makes me happy. I'm a tempermental blogger; I am pissy about my op-ed writing, always have been, and just about every post you see has gone through a rigorous routine of, "Shit. That's not funny. That's stupid. Why in the fuck would anyone read this? God, I'm retarded. Why do I even blog? Who even cares?"

But apparently two new people care, which is pretty cool. So hi. You guys rock. The people who read this blog regularly, whether or not I actually know you and/or am related to you (which constitutes approximately 50% of this blog's readership), make me SQUEE with narcissisic glee.

One of the new followers is a kickass chick by the name of Kayla Linzy, and holy balls, I wish I was as cool as this chick when I was 17. (Which was all of, like, six years ago?) So her blog is cool and you should go there.

Anyway. For the people who stop by and read, thanks. For the people who comment, thank you thank you. I suck at responding to comments, but I do read them and appreciate all the commiseration and advice. Sometimes it's nice to know I'm still entertaining people, besides my husband, who is usually more embarrassed by my latest ventures into screaming at fast-food employees (only the rude ones), vandalizing neighbors' WRONG political opinions, and dancing like a 21-year-old club slut around the house.

I don't know what I'm saying. I'm still vomiting out my mouth and out my butthole, and apparently verbal vomit is also included. Also, I'm really dehydrated and probably hallucinating.

Quarantine.

2009-04-27T09:16:00.001-07:00

I woke up at 11 o'clock on Saturday morning, amazed that I had slept so late, and moreso, amazed Punky had slept so late. This brief rested amazement quickly transitioned to concern that my child may actually be dead, so I tiptoed down the hall, peeked into her bedroom, and was met with what would become the general household theme for the next three days.

It was sort of like the end of Apocalypse Now -- peeking into her room and seeing my baby girl laying in her crib, looking up at me miserably... and then the puke. Oh my God, the puke. It was everywhere. The quilt. The sheets. The bumpers. The blankie. The carpet. Everywhere. Curdled milk from her late-night bottle. Everywhere. (We won't get into the stench. But trust me on it.)

I didn't have long to survey the damage before I heard her tiny little body beginning to retch, and I realized that hey, human beings need to be TAUGHT to puke in the toilet. So I was quickly in a race against the devil to run with my gagging child and get her over a toilet or similar receptacle. That's when the Exorcist came to mind.

I've never really dealt with baby puke. I can count on one hand the number of times Punky has thrown up. She wasn't a spit-uppy baby. She's never had the flu. So I had no idea what I was dealing with. I was dealing with a lot of puke. After the third outfit change, I just let her roam the house naked (besides a diaper), because in a stroke of sheer awesomeness, the flu also hit while the weather has been in the 80's and we have no central air, which is just great. And ya know, any and all regard for laundry instructions on bedding just goes straight out the window of the priorities list when you're dealing with puke. Cold water only? Nope. Line dry? Fuck it. There's puke everywhere, I just want to throw this in the washer right now and not have to see it ever again.

But of course, being sick, she is also still The Punky, and in sheer Punky form, was needlessly adorable through it. I could almost deal with it better if she'd be a raging, screaming asshole through it all. Instead she was content to sit on whatever lap was open to her, and look adorably pathetic:

Sunday she seemed better. Still a high fever, still miserable, but the puking had been traded for diarrhea, and at least she was able to hold down some Pedialyte. I thought we were clear.

Then Sunday night came around. And right about the same time, around midnight, A. and I were each on our respective computers and almost synchronized, looked at each other and muttered, "Oh God, I don't feel so good..."

And so began the spread of the How2 House Plague, and a long night of two grown adults puking and laying around miserably, looking at each other and wondering if maybe we tried TWICE as hard, together, death would come for us quickly and stealthily.

We really need to move soon, because one bathroom doesn't cut it when there's two adults vomiting and shitting in a horrible, furious storm of bodily fluids being expelled at forcefully high speeds. In a particularly classy move that I'm sure bode well with the neighbors, I wound up vomiting off the front porch because A. was doing the same thing in the lone bathroom.

So today, Punky is running circles around us while A. and I ro-sham-bo for who gets to watch her while the other lays miserably praying for death. I tried to be a good wife and run to McDonald's to get us Powerade (because they have a drive-thru, thus allowing me to stay in my car)... and then I puked in the McDonald's parking lot. I have done far worse in fast-food drive-thrus, thanks to the horrible demon that is Jagermeister, but it seems so much worse when you're coherent enough to understand what you're doing. And it's lunch rush.

In light of everything though, at least it's a rapid weight loss, as the benevolent and awesome Anna has pointed out to me (from her safe location far far away from me, protected by IM and thousands of miles). I'm frankly a little disappointed that this didn't hit before the sorority reunion. Because once I'm able to stand for more than two minutes without vomiting, I'm going to look FABULOUS.

Ya Gotta Eat.

2009-04-26T09:38:00.001-07:00

Last night I pretty much ensured A. and I can no longer go back to the Rally's downtown (Checkers for you Southern folk).

Okay. I went there late last night for late night snacks and ordered cheese fries. NO chili. NO onion. Just cheese on fries. Go through drive-thru. Check the box since last time they still made it with chili. There's chili on it. So I go back through and explain there's chili on it, I asked for no chili. Go through again.

This white trash nasty old bitch takes it from me like she didn't believe me, and gives it back to me after a couple minutes. I assume that since I brought the error to their attention, surely it's okay now. I check really quick and it looks right.

Get home, A. opens it up, and basically they just put more cheese on top of the chili. It was the SAME GODDAMN THING I'd given them, except they heaped on cheese so you couldn't see the chili.

A normal person would've probably chalked it up to a loss. Oh no. No no no. I take the cheese fries and drive the 15 minutes BACK downtown and go through the drive-thru again. (I wasn't going through the walkup because I wasn't wearing a bra and trust me, I'm not getting out of the car like that.)

The drive-thru and the walk-up were both packed and there's this poor girl running both registers as best she can, while being bitched at and screamed at by this white trash bitch I dealt with previously. The girl rang me up before, and to her credit, the receipt DOES say "cheese only." I know it's not her fault. She just rings the order in and hands me the bag, which she can't even get that done right now without getting bitched at. I pull up to the window and I can hear her saying (pretty politely) to White Trash Bitch that, "She asked for just cheese, no chili."

"WELL IF YOU HAD RINGED IT IN RIGHT WE WOULDN'T HAVE THIS PROBLEM!"

And you could tell the girl just didn't want to get yelled at anymore so she didn't argue. She peeks out to tell me it'll be a minute and I smile sweetly and say, "It's okay, it's not your fault. You rang it in right."

The White Trash Bitch comes to the window and practically throws the fries into my car, "Here's your cheese fries." No, "I'm sorry," nothing like that, all while still bitching at the Register Girl. I open the bag to check my order and White Trash Bitch hollers, "Ma'am, you need to pull forward."

Uh-uh. That's when hell breaks loose.

"NO. I have wasted enough of my time tonight because YOU can't make an order right. YOU can wait ONE FUCKING MINUTE while I check and make sure that YOU didn't fuck up my order AGAIN."

"Don't you swear at me [she had been cussing up a storm at the poor girl the whole I time I was in drive-thru], I made it myself. There's just cheese on it now pull forward."

"NO. Obviously you have shown you are incapable of making an order correctly, on top of that you LIED to me the last time I came through. So you can hold the fuck on. I'm sorry YOUR life is so fucking miserable that you have to work nightshift at Rally's and get wet by yelling at this poor girl, who as far as I can tell is the only one here capable of doing her job right."

I checked my fries. They were just cheese.

"Hey, just cheese. THANK YOU."

Speed off.

And so. I can't go back. But I DID wait until I got the food before I started yelling. And I didn't eat any of it, A. ate it all... just in case there WAS spit.

And now a shameless plug.

2009-04-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

You may or may not have noticed, but my parenting style is a little "off the beaten path" in terms of baby nursery music (she dozes off to Nine Inch Nails at night), child nicknaming (Punk) and theme selections (punk rock skulls, hot pink and black plaid, etc.). So combine that with the fact that I get extremely bored and stircrazy, and the end result is me sewing a lot of stuff and creating my own Etsy store.

And so, I announce the opening of my very own store...

Punk E. Laine. Conventional necessities for the unconventional baby.

Right now I'm specializing in crib sets, and currently moving into baby car seat covers:

(a current prototype I'm working on, currently being tweaked before hitting the store)...

And probably clothes eventually. The Etsy baby market is pretty much swarming with baby clothes, though, so that'll be later, once I get rolling on everything else. But yeah. There ya go. Go buy my stuff, plzkthx.

Sorority Reunion: A Review

2009-04-18T19:03:00.001-07:00

When I was in college, quite possibly the most defining experience of my matriculation was my time as a sister in a sorority. I held a number of offices in my sorority, most notably of which was chapter president. My time in the sorority was filled with ups and downs, uppers and downers, best friends, bitches, beer bongs, water bongs, date parties, scholastic requirements, highs and highs and lows. It was an awful, wonderful, exciting, depressing experience, but it largely shaped who I am and defined my college experience.

That being said, this weekend was my chapter's anniversary, and so, I made the trek back to Ye Olde University (sans Punky, thanks to the almighty Grandparents!) to hopefully see my old friends (whose lives I have faithfully stalked thanks to Facebook), relive some old memories, and spin my tales and wealth of knowledge for currently active members. I packed bags, I planned, I coordinated my outfit, I spent an hour on my hair, and I looked hot.

I arrived for a brunch this morning, which I paid $25 for, and arrived to realize that it was pretty much the same atmosphere as a timeshare seminar (which I have also done). It was a call to alums to come and donate money to the chapter.

I can understand the need for alum support in a chapter. I really, really do get that. And I wouldn't really necessarily have a problem donating a bit here or there to the chapter if I knew it was going toward a beneficial cause, i.e., scholarship. Who am I kidding, I wouldn't really care if it was spent on a keg for a date party.

My issue, however, was this: there were no more than five current members at this brunch. Five. Out of a chapter of 70+. Five. The rest of the chapter couldn't be bothered to show up to a brunch where the plan was to appeal to alumnae to fork over some cash. I mean, shit, even Jerry Lewis gets some of the muscular dystrophy kids on his telethon. And as I sat there eating my $25 muffin and drinking my coffee, I found myself wondering: if the actives don't care, why the hell should I?

The whole thing was really irritating me, as I sat there listening to the presentation of how "in need" they are for alum support, when I looked down at my Dolce & Gabbana shoes, Express jeans, Tiffany bracelet, and Coach purse, all of which I'd carefully selected for status symbol purposes among people who would recognize it, and I realized.... this isn't me. Had I been six years ago, the person I am today, I would have run far and fast away from sorority rush that fall. I munching on my $25 muffin and realizing, "This is fucking lame." By "this," I don't just mean the begging and soliciting, I mean the whole damn thing.

Whenever I mentioned I had a daughter, there was the brief pause for a "SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE!! A LEGACY!", and by the third or fourth time, as I was standing and thinking how ridiculous the whole thing and the whole institution was, I realized I really didn't care that my daughter is a legacy. If she goes to college someday and comes to me and tells me she's not interested in joining a sorority, I'm really okay with that. If she does want to join a sorority and not mine, I'm okay with that too. I almost really wish she wouldn't join one. Already at 14 months, I think she's above it.

I guess really, what happened today, was the closing of a chapter in my life. I came home, took the "SORORITY ALUMNA" license plate frame off my car, and tossed it in the same box in the basement as my Big Sister paddle and quilt of my old sorority t-shirts. I slammed the door shut to the storage room and to that chapter of my life, and scrambled back up the basement stairs to escape the bad memories, feelings of guilt, and spiders.

Mostly the spiders.

Neglect.

2009-04-07T21:47:00.000-07:00

My poor little blog has fallen by the wayside as of late, ever since I got a job.

(*GASP!* Did you hear that? She got a job!")

Okay, not real job in the sense that it requires me to show up for 40 hours a week, smile politely at people while writing passive-aggressive notes and sticking them in the breakroom, or wearing a bra, but a job in the sense that it's something to break up the monotony of saving my kid from smashing her head onto the hardwood floor YET AGAIN, or smearing fingerprints all over Daddy's VERY EXPENSIVE LCD TV, and I get money for it.

I can't tell you where, per se, but I am a "guide" of sorts for a text-messaging service where people from all over the country text in random questions and guides such as myself answer them. I'm a professional Googler.

I've been doing this for about a month now, and it's addictive. Every question I answer, I make about 15 cents (some categories are worth more than others, 20 cents being the highest). I gotta say, it's not a bad rap, considering I spend a good four hours on the computer, and it's this or I sit and read Perez Hilton for hours on end. And you can only look at pictures with cum paint-shopped onto them for so long before you start picturing it on the faces of everyone you encounter throughout the day.

For the most part, I keep busy answering sports scores (because I'm a sports guru and it's one of my specialities), but for some unknown reason, I am also frequently bombarded by questions from adolescents wanting to know how to deal with the awkward relationships that create the cruel joke that is the pre-teen years.

Which really, I'm hardly one to give advice on. My pre-teen years were awkward at best, hell on average. I had one boyfriend in that time frame, Cory Jones, whom I dated most of seventh grade and he broke up with me in health class the same day we were doing our CPR certification tests, so I was choking on snot and tears while trying to revive a plastic dummy. No amount of alcohol swabs could clean that dummy off for the poor soul forced to use it after me. But yeah, he was the new kid in school and basically I nabbed him up before he could realize that I was a pathetic loser who was obsessed with the Spice Girls and stuffed her bra. (He never did discover the latter. We never rounded first base, thankyouverymuch.)

So now here I am as a 20-something, trying to pass myself off as confident and socially adept just because I got married and spawned, and trying to give relationship advice to 13-year-olds. And really, the only way I'm capable of dishing out such advice (and being paid for it, no less) is with a couple glasses of wine, or shots of rum, in me. Because 13-year-olds are so horribly awkward and socially retarded anyway -- the best advice they can receive should come from a 23-year-old recluse drinking herself to a sunny buzz while sitting on her couch wearing the same clothes for a third day in a row. I KNOW BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN THERE, DAMNIT.

My favorite question I was asked, which I must say I was pleasantly swimming in my third glass of wine, was, "What do I do if my parents catch me fingering my girlfriend?"

I pondered this for a minute. Sat and swirled my cheap box chardonnay in its glass, pondered life for a minute, then responded, with my sage wisdom: "Remove your finger."

This is pretty much the norm for what I get asked. Lots of relationship questions, such as, "What do I do if I just had sex with my father?" (Answer: "Incest is illegal, and if you are under 16, it is also child molestation.) and explaining every sexual position from 69 to the Wobbly H. Wanna know? Because I know and I will tell you. So help me God, I will get drunk and I will tell you.

Other questions that I have saved in my top 5 for this week:

Q. Can a 13 point 5 in dick kill a girl?"
A. Most vaginas are only four inches in length, so chances are the girl may feel discomfort, but will not die from it

Q. Where can we buy 7 pounds of weed in Orem, Utah tonight?
A. The Orem City Police Department is located at 95 East Center, Orem, UT 8407. Phone number is (801) 229-7070.

Q. What if I'm a girl with a penis?
A. If you are a female and have a naturally grown penis, you may have questions beyond what I can answer.

Q. Can I have a line to make me sound smart?
A. I just sent a text to a complete stranger asking them to make me sound smart!

Q. Is it possible to get more than one penis lengthening surgery?
A. Men with penile dysmorphic disorder were particularly likely to be dissatisfied with the surgery's results.

Look for this to become a regular feature of the blog; at least as long as I remember to do it, or until I get legal action threatened, which is how past regular features on my blog have ended.

Death stare.

2009-04-02T23:27:00.000-07:00

If there's one thing I've become far too accustomed to as a parent, it's the disapproving death stare I receive from ... well, just about everyone when I go out in public. It's not always an immediate death stare. It actually starts out as a happy smile, accompanied by a little sigh and a gutteral, "Awww" in the back of the throat. It's especially common with the geriatric breeds. But then the smile falls, usually as a result of something I do, and you're left with the death stare.

Things I have done in the past week that have warranted the death stare:

1.) Telling my daughter in the middle of JoAnn Fabrics, "Dude, I have to take a MASSIVE shit right now."

2.) Driving through a busy parking lot with a tantruming baby in the back seat, and, with the car windows down, yelling, "Shut up and ENJOY RADIOHEAD!" while concurrently cranking up, yes, that's right, Radiohead.

3.) Getting cut off in traffic, slamming on your breaks, and yelling in front of a busload of schoolchildren, "Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?"

4.) Walking past a douchebag old lady trying to back into a parking spot and loudly saying to your child, "Punky, that's called double parking. That's what douchebags do."

Do the Helen Keller.

2009-03-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

I need to write another post, and I've got one brewing like a hearty bowel movement after a Taco Bell binge, but for now, I have to state that I'm shamelessly, wholeheartedly in love with this song right now...

So much so that I've been bouncing around the house singing it and forcing my daughter and husband to dance with me. Needless to say, 2 of the 3 members of this household are tired of it. Apparently I'm a 15 year old inside.

Bow-chicka-wow-wow...

2009-03-23T20:18:00.000-07:00

Why is the official musical instrument of cheesy porn the saxophone? I mean, really. Who was sitting around the Big Meeting Table at the Pornography Summit and decided, "You know what puts me in the mood? Brass woodwinds. Saxophone man, whoo, that revs my engines!"

Personally, I think the trombone is sexy. The trombone exudes emotion and passion. And it's just downright fun to play, not to mention one's mouth position on it is much more conducive to sexual innuendos than the saxophone, which, from my experience in high school pep band (oh yes, that's right, don't hate), involves teeth in very uncomfortable positions.

Though as far as the sexiest members of the high school marching band went, the drummers were always the hottest, albeit the stupidest. It's like they randomly picked out the 10 worst ADHD cases in the class, gave them a snare drum and drumsticks, and said, "Have at it." Although, back to the saxophone, my high school crush played the saxophone, until he dropped out freshman year. But up til then... whoo buddy, I liked watching the saxophone section.

I digress.

Anyway. I have been pondering the intricacies of porn lately because my husband seems to be fascinated with it. By "fascinated," I mean, he turns on Cinemax, hoping I'll get the hint, when all I want to do is lay and read my book and drift off to sleep, and instead of harrumphing back to his side of the bed and turning on Speed channel, he falls asleep and leaves the porn on. So I'm listening to bad, overdramaticized sex -- complete with, that's right, the saxophone, ohhh the saxophone -- while I'm otherwise content reading my snarky sarcastic book dujour.

I'm really regretting agreeing to the Cinemax package. Sure, I knew what I was getting into, but I didn't realize that by wanting to see the best new movie releases on my satellite, I was also signing up for my husband turning it on, then edging toward me and poking at me while excitedly grunting, "Enh? Enh?" And as if it's not bad enough that it's constantly on from about 11 pm on, he Tivo's it. My current Tivo line up includes Desperate Housewives, Handy Manny, Little Einsteins, and Co-Ed Confidential. God help us all that first time I'm trying to put on an episode of Tivo'd Imagination Movers for tantrumming Punky and accidentally turn on Passion Cove. We may be having the "Where Babies Come From" speech way sooner than anticipated. Or she'll just get really hungry. I don't know. I haven't thought this far ahead in terms of "important talks" with Punk, since our most important talks right now involve me chasing her while yelling, "No no no, do not LICK the electrical outlets!"

(And seriously -- what is it with toddlers and death wishes? I swear to god every day, every hour, I'm saving Punky from an all-new potentially self-mutilating, debilitating injury.)

I can appreciate the need for porn in the bedroom; I've still been pretty averse to sex ever since I pushed 7 lbs., 7 oz. of child out of my vagina. So intervention is understandable, but it's hard to put yourself in the mood after your toddler gets into the toy box on the nightstand. One minute, your kid is playing with her stuffed puppy on the bedroom floor while you're getting dressed. You turn around and next thing you know she's beating herself in the head with a vibrator.

I mean, that happens to everyone... right?

Brain droppings.

2009-03-19T14:12:00.001-07:00

con⋅sti⋅pa⋅tion

[kon-stuh-pey-shuhn]
noun

1. a condition of the bowels in which the feces are dry and hardened and evacuation is difficult and infrequent.

That's what my brain is like right now. I have nothing good to write.

Sometimes Punky gets constipated and I have to physically intervene and help her work it out. I may need that for my brain, for the sake of my blog and the four people who read it.

Panache.

2009-02-28T10:52:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to write my daughter's "Young Citizen" entry for my hometown's newspaper. The weekly paper features a said young citizen, and in a town as small as mine, it's the kid of people you know, or at the very least, you know the grandparents. It's usually a trite, insipid little piece of, "My mommy and daddy are the greatest, and I love spending time with them and playing with my dog!" along with name, location, and who the parents are, whom surely you know, because... well, it's a town of less than 3,000. Surely you know the parents and you probably know both parents' life stories -- whether the parents want you to know them or not.

So anyway. My mother's been nagging at me to get this done because god knows she needs to see her Grandbaby on the front page of the town newspaper, so the whole town can see just where I ~~put out and got knocked up~~ had a small detour in life plans. I just can't stand to write the usual form-letter style Young Citizen intro. I just can't. I moved out of that town to go out into the big world and become a writer, damnit, so I best deliver so everyone will be talking for months about that ol' rascal How2 -- remember her? -- and how her baby's Young Citizen was the most hilarious (or absolutely disgracefully inappropriate) thing they'd ever read.

I need SPARKLE. I need Liza Minelli PIZZAZZ. RAZMATAZZ, folks. JAZZ HANDS. I've just typed entirely too many Z's for one paragraph allowable by any English language rules.

So the question is, what to mention? The typical article goes like this:

Hi! My name is SUSIE ANN WHATSHERNAME, and on Saturday, I will be 2! My daddy is Jim Bob and he works as a machine operator for The Big Factory Here In Town. My mommy is Bobbi Jo and she stays really busy at home taking care of me, my big sister, TAMMY, 8 1/2 months I am really lucky to have grandparents who live in This Godforsaken Town and spoil me. They are Harry and Mary Whoknows and Joe and Peggy Whatshername. All of my aunts and uncles think I'm ornery, but really cute!

So yeah. You see what I've got to work with here.

I've thought of mentioning such things as:

"My mommy and daddy are exhausted."
"My mommy drinks a lot, and her happy juice makes my nose feel funny!"
"Sometimes my mommy and daddy shake me and it makes me giggle."
"I enjoy eating mandarin oranges whole, and then pooping them out in a mess so foul that people think I am possessed."
"I enjoy self-mutilation with whatever I can get my hands on, nearly falling to my death off of chairs and couches, chewing on electrical cords, eating fistfulls of dog hair, and attempting to slam my hand in doors and drawers."
"I am not your monkey."

As you can see, the options are limitless. Though maybe I should try to write this thing when I'm filled with more love and adoration for my daughter and less sheer and utter exhaustion and exasperation. Maybe I'll write it when she's like, 25.

No Tooties.

2009-02-26T21:35:00.000-08:00

After three years of driving the car my parents gave me while I was in college, they are finally kicking me off the insurance and cutting ties with the car, gifting it to me and A., and thus requiring me to register and title it -- two grown-up actions that, while pretty mundane, I've never done in my entire life. And hence, today was my initiation into the world of car ownership.

Because I was receiving this car from out-of-state, state law requires that I have a police officer do a Vehicle Identification Number inspection. So I bundled up and lugged along the Punky and we were off to the police station -- which by the way, in our fair city, is in the ghetto. I don't mean, oh hey, a few ramshackle buildings, it's cute and quaint. No, I mean fucking ghet-TO. Like, I seriously am pretty sure I drove past a drug deal going down. And even though my car was parked in the gated lot across the street from the station, I locked it and took anything of value with me, and clung on to Punky tightly for fear that she might be snatched and sold into slave labor, or for drugs, or something.

Setting things up with the receptionist wasn't anything noteworthy. She took my information and directed me to sit in the waiting area and an officer would be with me in a minute. Okay, cool. So we sat. And waited. And waited. And waited. It was in this wait time that I began to watch the people around me, and casually listen and figure out their stories.

The most notable -- and the most dramatic, not only in the story itself but the dramatic display -- was a young mother come to "spring" her 11-year-old son out of jail for, and yes, I'm serious, allegedly selling cocaine at school. She was understandably distraught, hugging herself and rocking back and forth in her chair, loudly moaning into her cell phone, "Oh LAWD, oh LAWD... I done TOL' Tootie not to bring his drugs an' shit into the house! He keep doin' that and I'm gon' lose my babies!" Further inconspicuous evesdropping led me to believe Tootie is Mom's boyfriend.

Whatever, I mean, sometimes my kid takes her diaper off and smears her poop everywhere. Nobody's kid's perfect.

Then the Mom started giving me childraising advice. "Don't ever let yo' baby grow up, next thang you know she gon' be sellin' drugs and you gon' be here too." I smiled tersely and thanked her for her advice. I silently made a personal note to keep Punky away from Tootie, whom I believe is a bad man.

The Mom was also wearing a sweatshirt with Tupac and Barack Obama airbrushed on. I'm not sure what the collaboration between the two of them is, nor did I realize such merchandise existed, but I guess considering I was an ardent supporter of Obama throughout the election, I should just be glad she had some sort of propoganda on. Whatever. We won, yes we can, ya'll.

By the time the officer came out and helped me with the process -- which took all of 30 seconds, in the end -- I was apparently so completely and utterly out of my element and frightened-looking that I was advised that you can call and have an officer dispatched to your house to do the VIN inspection. Which is convenient since it's actually a pain in the ass to go through this process of police station-to-DMV while lugging around 25 lbs. of sheer uncooperative toddler. Shoveling goldfish crackers and cheerios into them only works for so long toward staving off a fullblown "FUCK THIS SHIT" baby meltdown. How long? Til about halfway through the DMV experience, when you're to the point you need to sign paperwork and shit -- in case you were wondering. So I think I'll take the "put my tax money to work and have an officer come to my house" route. It's a route I wholeheartedly plan on pursuing next time.

That, and keeping my baby away from drugs and Tooties.

Oops.

2009-02-26T21:13:00.000-08:00

So while I've been discussing my farting in public and how I pretty much pressure-sprayed my daughter's face off, I've totally neglected to post birthday pictures. So here ya go....

And that last one, my friends, is what we call a motha-effin' sugar crash.

Priorities.

2009-02-24T12:19:00.000-08:00

I've realized that since having a kid, I'm much less reluctant to fart in public, especially the silent and deadly ones, because if anyone smells it, they can just assume my baby has a dirty diaper.

I'd rather have complete strangers think I am a negligent parent than have them think I'd fart in public.

Priorities and such.

Road to child abuse: paved with good intentions.

2009-02-20T20:58:00.000-08:00

Punky has apparently been eviscerated and had all of her innards replaced with snot by some maniacal fairy intent on totally and completely fucking with my sleep schedule. I had a happy, smiling baby that I put to bed on Wednesday evening. By 2:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, I was up comforting a screaming, hyperventilating baby (who was so worked up from crying, she couldn't breathe, on top of her nasal/bronchial passages being filled with snot).

So I've been chasing down any remedy I could to help her feel better. This kid has a river of snot coming down her face all day. She's weezing and coughing and it's pathetic. Really, really, pathetic. And the snot. Oh my god the snot.

In one of my plots to make her feel better, I made a warm, steamy bath. I fed her dinner in the bathtub, and all was well. She was content to play with her bath toys, splash, and generally be the cheerful and chipper trooper she is. A. and I sat beside her on the bathroom floor, watching her revel in the attention and the comfort that the steamy bath brought.

This is such a situation where a good mother would let things be. The baby is happy, after all, right? Let's just let her play and bask in the adorable nature of our family.

No. This is the point where I have to take it a step further and think, I bet she'd like the shower! I bet she'd find it funny, like rain drops! Yes, rain drops dropping on the Punkin in a happy and beautiful shower.

So I turned the water on, and pulled the plunger to turn on the shower. Here is where things went awry:

1.) We were out of hot water. I'd used it all to create a steamy hot bathroom atmosphere/bath. So the water was freezing. (Probably should've checked the temperature before I turned the shower on.)

2.) The adjustable shower head setting was set on "OMG CAR WASH PRESSURE WASHER SHEER FORCE PEELING OFF MY SKIN" setting, which A. uses, for some unknown, masochistic reason, and he was the last to use the shower. Again, a little bit of forethought would have prevented this.

3.) By sheer luck, Punky was looking at the shower when it turned on. So she was hit in the face by freezing cold water coming at her at a skin-peeling speed, knocked over in the tub, and promptly began to inhale the water.

What resulted was me jumping, fully clothed, into the shower to rescue my daughter from my own imposed death by shower. I was wet, she was hysterical, and A. was at a loss for understanding my logic (which is the norm in this house). And I'm pretty sure we're never going to get her in the tub again.

I meant well. I did.

That guy I live with.

2009-02-19T20:28:00.000-08:00

What are your middle names?

A's is Aaron. Mine is my grandmother's name, and that's all you need to know.

How long have you been together?

TOGETHER together, like a couple? Almost 2.5 years. We started dating in November 2006, and we were married 11 months later. (It doesn't count as a shotgun wedding if you're on the other side of the country from said shotgun, right?)

How long did you know each other before you started dating?

A few years. We worked together at Old Navy for awhile and were just friends (and flirt buddies) for awhile. Then we both quit Old Navy and full out of touch for awhile, and we rekindled our interest in one other after running into each other at a strip club on Midget Stripper Night. I know, we're so romantic.

Who asked whom out?

He asked me. He so asked me. Can you blame him? I'm adorable.

How old are each of you?

I'm 23. A's 29 and a dirty old man.

Whose siblings do you see the most?

Um, that's a toss up. Probably mine, but the most interaction is with A's brother and sister, since my brother is 18 and too cool to acknowledge me, let alone engage us in conversation that doesn't involve the phrase, "Hey, can you pick me up a case of beer?"

Which situation is the hardest on you as a couple?

Finances, currently. I would say parenthood, but we seem to kick parenthood's ass together.

Did you go to the same school?

We went to the same college but not at the same time, and I graduated, A. did not.

Are you from the same home town?

Nope. I am from Ohio, making me, by nature, a superior being.

Who is smarter?

I don't know. It depends what you're talking about. I'm smarter with words and shit. He's smarter with... I don't know, money things. Me girl, me no understand moneys.

Who is the most sensitive?

Probably me, but he can be a gigantic sopping vagina some days. I'm the one that randomly calls old women "pathetic failures at life" at Wal-Mart, so really, it's probably a toss up.

Where do you eat out most as a couple? 

We actually rarely eat out. It used to be BW3's, back before we had a child. Now I guess Steak 'N Shake, maybe? I don't even know. We aren't exactly the kind of people who should be out in public. You know the stuff I write about on my blog? Yeah, I talk about that in public. And I have issues moderating the volume of my voice.

Where is the furthest you two have traveled together as a couple?

Las Vegas.

Who has the craziest exes?

I think we both have our fair share of nutters, though his ex did leave a four-page-long menacing letter on my car in the early days of dating, and showed up on his doorstep telling him she was pregnant and that it was his. (It wasn't, there was no way it could've been and he has scientific lab tests to prove it.) Yeah... ya know, I think he wins this one.

Who has the worst temper?

We both have insane tempers, though I'm much more apt to go off on people in public, he's more apt to be an asshole to me in private.

Who does the cooking?

I do the majority of it, though he is known to cook on occasion.

Who is the neat-freak?

Oh Christ, that's me. Let me tell you about the first time I came to A.'s house -- he kept the lights off so I wouldn't see the house. Once he got comfortable enough to turn them on, we had a huge poster of Hank Williams taped on the wall (the only wall decoration), a stack of tires in the middle of the living room, ash trays filled with cigarettes everyfuckingwhere (God I'm glad he quit smoking), everything in the house was sticky, and a print-out picture of Jeff Goldblum positioned to watch you on the toilet in the bathroom. It was bad. I've been living here for 1.5 years now and I'm still working on it.

Who is more stubborn?

We are both stubborn but I usually give in because while I'm stubborn, I'm much more laid back and just don't care. I know in the long run I'll get my way. Isn't that how being a wife works?

Who hogs the bed? 

I can, but A is much more persistent about it. I can at least be coaxed back to my side of the bed, though it sucks sharing a full-sized bed. Really. It does. A lot.

Who wakes up earlier?

A., usually, but only by about half an hour. We're both capable of sleeping til 2, 3 in the afternoon if we're left alone. Damn children.

Where was your first date? 

We went and saw Borat in the theater and had IHOP afterwards, where over dinner I discussed with him how I got E.Coli at my last job. Yeah, I'm slick and socially aware.

Who is more jealous?

Him. Totally him. The notion of him cheating on me makes me giggle at the absurdity.

How long did it take to get serious? 

Considering we got married less than a year after we started dating... or that we were more or less living together within a month (I was paying $500 a month for an apartment that was more or less a storage unit)... not long.

Who eats more? 

A. The end. A.

Who does the laundry?

95% of the time, me. But A. can do a load when the need really arises. And I offer promises of Blow J's.

Who’s better with the computer? 

Me, just because I am supreme being of this household.

Who drives when you are together?

Majority of the time, me, because if we're together, it means Punky is with us, and that means we take my car. And I hate listening to him bitch about how much he hates driving my car. So I drive for the sake of shutting him up.

525,600 minutes.

2009-02-14T17:15:00.000-08:00

What a crazy, loopy, lovey, sleepy, nutty, wonderful, amazing year it has been.

One year ago, the culmination of nine months of worrying, crying, fretting, and anxiously awaiting finally came to head as my water broke while I was sitting on the couch eating popcorn and dicking around on the computer. What would follow would be 24 hours of labor, drug-induced Cheez-It begging, and swearing that would make a sailor blush. But the end result was beautiful.

That's when you were born, my sweet, beautiful Elaine Louise.

You came into the world at 4:19 p.m. on February 15, 2008, a Friday. When you were born, you didn't cry at first, which while it scared the shit out of me (well, pushing during labor had taken care of the majority of that issue), it just served as a testament to who you would become: cautious and intelligent, content to take the world around you in before making your screaming, joyous conclusions.

The nurses put you on my chest, still warm and gooey and covered in things I care to not think about, and the first thing your father said was, "Look at that little butt! It looks like a Punkin! Heya Punkin Butt! Heya Punky!"

And so you became Punky.

I had planned on calling you Lainey, but Punky you became and Punky you remain today.

In that split second, I knew I had met the love of my life. Your dad's alright sometimes but you, my little lovey, were what love at first sight is all about.

The first months were a blur of cold, sleepless nights and frustrations. I was young, had no experience with children or babies, and didn't really know what I was doing. We were both sort of playing it by ear. Thanks for sticking with me -- I'm sure I was probably a huge, clueless pain in the ass, and motherhood's not exactly one of those things where you can stand stammering in front of the paper copier, mumbling things about, "I'm new here, I didn't know any better." Thankfully, you survived, and I haven't been reported to Child Protective Services yet -- mostly because this blog is anonymous.

Seasons changed, days turned into months, and you morphed from this screaming tiny blob (sorry, I loved you, but that's what you were). Even from an early age, you were opinionated and outspoken. Things were -- and have been -- done on your terms. You were dropped a couple times. You tried foods. You traveled places.

No matter where I went, I was stopped by complete strangers who marveled and commented on what a beautiful baby you were (and are). For reasons I still don't know if I understand, you are the result of some amazing genetic lottery in which you are spectacularly beautiful. You have your father's dark brown eyes and smile, set on my bone structure, with a sparse topping of light brown hair. You're beautiful. When you smile. When you sleep. When you cry. When you're you. You are my beautiful, wonderful, perfect baby girl.

Not all parts of you are beautiful, however.

The older you got, the more fun you became. Always sunny and cheerful and ready for adventures, carrying your beloved Sophie Bear everywhere. You loved car rides, and I loved them even more, mostly because they put you to sleep. Now you love to look out the window, singing your own songs and talking in your Nelle-like personal language, commenting on the world around you as it unfolds. In one short year, you've become my best friend, favorite travel buddy, naptime cuddle partner and exercise catalyst. (Because seriously, kiddo, you're exhausting some days.)

You're smart. God, you're smart. You ooze intelligence in ways that would make a lesser mother start hatching plans for publicity tours and prodigy classes. You're fiercely independent, content to play by yourself rather than with anyone who attempts to join in. But in the same breath, you love to bring books up to anyone in your vicinity, hand them to us, and cuddle up on our laps, eager to be read to. You LOVE to be read to. Whether it's Clifford the Big Red Dog, Thomas the Tank Engine, or the latest issue of Star (sorry, Mommy needs her celebrity tabloids), it doesn't matter to you. You cuddle and drift off listening to me or your dad reading about Thomas passing by the farm, or the latest Lindsay Lohan/Samantha Ronson gossip. Because that's really what's important.

It was a strange and crazy adventure, the story of how you came to be and how you came to us. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was rough, but the end result is you, and us. And there are no words to ever tell you how much I love you, my lovey-dovey, my Punky Pie, my Pickle. The world is a strange and scary place right now, but inside our warm little house, there is so much love that you have created and reverberate and echo. You are the greatest thing I have ever done, the biggest adventure I have ever embarked on in my life.

Happy Birthday, Elaine. I love you forever and always, to the moon and back.

OHMIGODYOUGUYS.

2009-02-12T08:43:00.000-08:00

I got a call back for an on-site interview for that job I phone interviewed for last week. And I'm psyched. That's all. I shall rely on the ecstatic glee of the Delta Nu's to properly illustrate how I feel now.

In addition, though, I should describe how I almost blew it all by being a douchebag. (I've been using that word a lot lately -- seriously. Say it with feeling. DOUCHEBAG!) So I'd been waiting a week to hear back from The Firm. After prompting from friends, I finally was working up the courage to call them and do the, "Hey, it's me, the Fat Girl, did you forget to invite me to prom?" (Because I compare this whole thing to waiting to be asked to prom.) So I picked up my cell phone and look and see the "New Voicemail" icon.

Wha-wha-whaaaaa?

So I dial up my voicemail, figuring it's another message from my mother that I quit listening to halfway through because good goddamn that woman rambles in her voicemails -- and the phone just kept it saved as "new." But it wasn't my mother. Instead, I heard,

"Hello, Ms. How2, this is Jane from The Firm. If you could please call me tomorrow [the call came in yesterday evening] at blah blah blah, we would like to set up an interview with you for the Position..."

This is the point that I was doing pirouettes around the house like a madwoman.

So I quickly dialed the number and called The Firm, giddy and excited and OHMIGODYOUGUYS. The receptionist answered and I asked for Jane. Who? Jane. I'm sorry, there's no Jane that works here.

I immediately began doubting myself, and realized that maybe I misheard the name from the caller while I was...um....leaping and doing moves from Bring It On through the house. I apologized and said I must have the wrong number, and hung up and hid under the covers. Thankfully I never said my name. I went back and re-listened to the voicemail, and lo and behold, I was needing to speak with June. (This is all for the sake of the blog -- I'll say now that the real names were even more similar than "Jane" and "June." Easy mistake to make when you're dancing around like the spazzy kid at the 2nd grade ballet recital gone off her ADHD meds.)

So then. THEN!!! I didn't want the receptionist to think I was some retarded douchebag who can't get names straight, because who would want to hire a douchebag like that. So I sat agonizing for an hour, hoping that my faux pas would be forgotten in the hustle and bustle of the day. After an hour, I called back, disguising my voice as much as possible without sounding completely demented (because surely someone not demented wouldn't have this problem in the first place). I was sent through to JUNE'S voicemail, left a cheerful and appropriate voicemail, June called back, and an interview is scheduled for Monday.

Anyway. I'm a douchebag but I'm a douchebag with a job interview, so whatever. It's official because it's written on our family calendar, with "FUCK YEAH!" written in multi-colored gel pen next to it. Serious shit, guys. Serious.

OHMIGODYOUGUYS.

Competitor.

2009-02-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe that in just over a week, Punky is going to be a year old. Where the fuck the last year went is beyond me, but I'm guessing it went up in smoke somewhere with my sanity and sleep. Time flies when you are suffering from sleep-deprived dementia.

Though that issue has improved. I've learned not to brag about such things on the blog because that means The Blog Mommy Gods will hear it and punish me for such prideful thoughts. But I'm just sayin', if Punky was sleeping through the night besides one small wake-up around midnight, which isn't a huge deal since we still aren't in bed yet, and besides that sleeps through til 9 a.m. consistently, and that for the last week or so I have received eight blissfully uninterrupted hours of sleep nightly... if that was the case, I wouldn't mention it on my blog. I'm just sayin' *nods at you knowingly*.

Besides that, Punky has entered this really hilarious "Monkey See, Monkey Do" stage, where she is working in her clumsy way to imitate things A. and I do, and slurring her way through things she hears us say (which, um, ~~fuck~~ uh-oh!). And may I tell you how absolutely thrilled I am that she is hitting everything with her mallet, like an Olde English judge on a power binge? Yeah, I'm so glad A. taught her that. Poor Mimi has been mercilessly beat to a pulp, though apparently Punky finds it more satisfying to hit hard things, like her big plastic kitchen, our hardwood floors, or A.'s head.

Tomorrow, A.'s store is participating in this Children's Expo downtown and somehow I got wrangled into attending with Punky (oh yeah, because if I'm going to put it on my resume that I'm his marketing director, he's insisting I at least pretend to market). Somehow Punky has been signed up for this crawling race, which may or may not be a good thing, considering how fiercely competitive I am. So keep your eyes on the news, if you hear of some Children's Expo gone awry by a mob of angry mothers attacking each other over a crawling contest. If you hear about that, you can probably be rest assured that at the heart of the matter, I probably said something uncalled for and inappropriate, because really, that's what I do.

But seriously. Punky is almost a year old, comfortably (almost snugly) wearing 18-month clothes, and still not walking. Her size and determination may prove to be an advantage in this competition, since babies can't be walking yet. So she's going to be going up against clearly inferior, smaller babies, most likely. That, or huge 2- and 3-year-olds with developmental disabilities who can't walk yet, and their parents are really desperate for diapers so they enter them in the contest. But in that case, while she may be at a size disadvantage, I would hope we'd have the edge based on the fact that she would probably have the comprehension to GO, for the LOVE OF GOD GO, or MOMMY WON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE.

See, this is why I'm confident that somewhere along the line, some angry mother is going to try to punch me in the face.

Jitters.

2009-02-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

I have an interview tomorrow for a marketing position that I want. Like really want. I know, I know, all of ye faithful Stay-At-Home-Moms (I refuse to use the insipid "SAHM" abbreviation), I'm a horrible person for jumping ship, and it's a joy to be a mother and blah blah blah blah blah... but fuck, ya'll, I want a career. It's something I never got the chance to get around to, since nine days after graduating college, I so very gracefully managed to get drunk out of my mind, along with my husband, and created the little zygote swimming in hard liquor that we now know as The Punky.

It's a phone interview, which means I get to run and hide in a corner of the house, far away from potentially angry baby, while I stick her in the Octagon UFC practice ring play gym, turn on Winnie the Pooh and drop a few toys in and pray for the best. It also means that I plan to drink a beer while I'm interviewing, and probably not wear a bra, because if it's anything like my college term papers, that's when my best material comes out. And I don't mean my floppy, pathetic, used-up funbags.

I'll say it now without being too arrogant -- I interview like a champ. I'm funny, I can carry conversation, and I know how to answer interview questions with thoughtful, intelligent answers. (And the answers I don't know, I've been impeccably coached by friends with "real jobs.") But without fail, the night before an interview, I totally break down and fill with self-loathing and doubt. My design portfolio could be stronger. I haven't had any solid clips in over two years. I don't have exact numbers for events I've planned. Oh my God, did I even go to college? WHO AM I?!?!?!

I'll be fine. I'm sure what's meant to happen will happen. But in the meantime, I'm going to sit here and question my existence in pure Matrix style, and keep you posted.

PWN3D!

2009-01-31T16:22:00.000-08:00

I was seriously working on a post about this exact topic when I came across this article from the "Tell Me About It" column by Carolyn Hax of The Washington Post (home to such awesome writers as my friend Michael J. West), and I had to post it, because ummm... yeah, it's about right.

"WHY FRIENDS WITH KIDS DON'T HAVE TIME?"
Dear Carolyn: Best friend has a child. Her: exhausted, busy, no time for self, no time for me, etc. Me (no kids): Wow. Sorry. What'd you do today? Her: Park, play group . . .

Okay. I've done Internet searches, I've talked to parents. I don't get it. What do stay-at-home moms do all day? Please no lists of library, grocery store, dry cleaners . . . I do all those things, too, and I don't do them EVERY DAY. I guess what I'm asking is: What is a typical day and why don't moms have time for a call or e-mail? I work and am away from home nine hours a day (plus a few late work events) and I manage to get it all done. I'm feeling like the kid is an excuse to relax and enjoy -- not a bad thing at all -- but if so, why won't my friend tell me the truth? Is this a peeing contest ("My life is so much harder than yours")? What's the deal? I've got friends with and without kids and all us child-free folks get the same story and have the same questions.

Tacoma, Wash.

Dear Tacoma: Relax and enjoy. You're funny.

Or you're lying about having friends with kids.

Or you're taking them at their word that they actually have kids, because you haven't personally been in the same room with them.

Internet searches?

I keep wavering between giving you a straight answer and giving my forehead some keyboard. To claim you want to understand, while in the same breath implying that the only logical conclusions are that your mom-friends are either lying or competing with you, is disingenuous indeed.

So, since it's validation you seem to want, the real answer is what you get. In list form. When you have young kids, your typical day is: constant attention, from getting them out of bed, fed, clean, dressed; to keeping them out of harm's way; to answering their coos, cries, questions; to having two arms and carrying one kid, one set of car keys, and supplies for even the quickest trips, including the latest-to-be-declared-essential piece of molded plastic gear; to keeping them from unshelving books at the library; to enforcing rest times; to staying one step ahead of them lest they get too hungry, tired or bored, any one of which produces the kind of checkout-line screaming that gets the checkout line shaking its head.

It's needing 45 minutes to do what takes others 15.

It's constant vigilance, constant touch, constant use of your voice, constant relegation of your needs to the second tier.

It's constant scrutiny and second-guessing from family and friends, well-meaning and otherwise. It's resisting constant temptation to seek short-term relief at everyone's long-term expense.

It's doing all this while concurrently teaching virtually everything -- language, manners, safety, resourcefulness, discipline, curiosity, creativity. Empathy. Everything.

It's also a choice, yes. And a joy. But if you spent all day, every day, with this brand of joy, and then, when you got your first 10 minutes to yourself, wanted to be alone with your thoughts instead of calling a good friend, a good friend wouldn't judge you, complain about you to mutual friends, or marvel how much more productively she uses her time. Either make a sincere effort to understand or keep your snit to yourself.

Awake.

2009-01-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

Since my early teen years, I've endured crippling insomnia. For a long time, I functioned daily on about four hours of sleep or less. Then college hit and I was introduced to the wonders of prescription drugs and illegal substances to keep me awake for days on end (I was president of a sorority, section editor of the campus paper, and taking 21 credit hours -- do you honestly think I ever slept that semester?).

Then I had a baby, which was the perfect valid reason to stay up nights on end. Then the baby started sleeping through the night (mostly), and now that I'm no longer in college and no longer tending to a newborn, I'm stuck being the weird lady who can't sleep.

Since A. is one of those people who have things to do in the morning, like work, he goes to sleep, with apparently little/no trouble, and I'm left wandering the house at 1 a.m. with nothing to do, so my OCD goes into overdrive and I wind up furiously cleaning the house. Hey, any mother can agree -- it's rare to have two hands free and nothing else to tend to so that you can actually clean. And then I start finding new things to do. Like change all the pictures in all the frames around the house. Yes, this is a good idea.

It should be noted that Kinko's (or whatever the hell it's called now) employees who work the 3 a.m. shift are not hired for their interpersonal skills. I arrive at Kinko's, chatty and cheerful, and why yes, it's 3:30 a.m., and I swear I'm not on the nose candy right now, and... oh. You aren't amused. Okay then. Yes, just print my PDFs please.

When you're out driving around at 4 a.m. on a Friday night, police tail you very closely, because pretty much the only people out that late are criminals, drunks, and sad housewives who pray for sleep but still it won't come. I drive like an epileptic monkey most days anyway, so I pretty much had a police escort from Kinko's to home.

And of course, in the cruel joke that is fate, my bitter resentment of my neighbors gets rolled up into one big shit sammich when I finally started feeling sleepy and had laid down with my newest David Sedaris book. I've mentioned how our next-door neighbor, Kidney Boy, parks his car -- complete with overpriced, obnoxious sound system -- in his driveway literally five feet from my slumbering daughter's bedroom window, right? Well, now, because we live in a neighborhood of such high crime rate (I've left the house unlocked by accident multiple times, and I rarely lock my car, with absolutely no burglary or theft -- either we're low-crime, or our shit isn't worth stealing), he's installed a car alarm on his late-90's Alero.

A very sensitive car alarm, that goes off whenever one of our other neighbor, Crazy Cat Guy's cats jumps on the car... right outside Punky's window... at 4 a.m....

You can imagine the hilarity that ensued there.

So after rocking Punky back to sleep after she was startled awake by the ENH ENH ENH ENH WOOOOOOOOOO! WOOOOOOOOOO! of the neighbor's car, it was 4:30 and I finally went to sleep next to my still-happily-slumbering husband, knowing I will get to repeat it all again tomorrow night.

At least my house is spotless.

Thwarted. Soaked. Fail.

2009-01-18T22:31:00.000-08:00

Punky's closing in on her one year birthday in less than a month now, and still is not sleeping through the night. No, really, I'm serious. So that means that since I was about eight months pregnant -- over a YEAR, people -- I haven't had a full, uninterrupted night's sleep.

I've convinced myself that it's okay and I don't mind. At the very least, she's pretty regular about when she wakes up -- usually around 4 and again at 7 -- and it's a quick fix. This kid doesn't cry it out. I tried it. (Great, now the Crazies are going to put a Grand Blogging Ban on my blog because I'm an advocate of crying it out... just not with my kid because have I mentioned she is fucking stubborn, and hell if I know where she got that?) Punky stayed up wailing, nonstop, for THREE HOURS. After three hours, I finally trudged into her room, defeated, sleep deprived, and frustrated, boobed her, and watched her drift back to sleep. After that point she and I reached a silent, mutual agreement that we wouldn't do this again.

So A's mother, the Christ of Childcare, suggested giving her a bottle of warm water -- the idea being that she'll realize all she's waking up and wailing for is water, which sucks in comparison to formula, and will decide it's not worth showing up to the party if nobody's bringing the keg, so to speak. I regard this woman as a wise sage of childbearing (not holding it against her that she raised A., which...eeeeehhhhh...), so I tried it.

Punky loved the water.

Chugged 8 oz. of water in record time without so much as a breather.

Can her stomach even hold 8 ounces? I don't even know. Along with my stubbornness, outspokenness, fabulous dark brunette hair (yes, Shaken Mama, she's finally getting some hair), and insane lung capacity, she's also inherited my ability to imbibe at a fascinating, inhuman rate. Baby bongs. There's an idea. To the patent office!!!

Anyway. She wasn't even phased by the water, and the end result was a very soaked diaper, baby, set of footie PJs and velour sheets in the morning. It looked like the New Orleans levies had broken all over the crib. Pretty sure I saw Sean Penn floating by in a boat with a camera crew.

So after cleaning up , we're back to the drawing board. Someday I'll sleep. Someday.

(PS, the official talk has taken place and, pending we don't have anymore statistical surprises *ahem, Hello Punky, goodbye Nuvaring*, we will begin trying for Spawn #2 in about 2.5 years. So that gives me 2.5 years to get maybe, MAYBE, one good night of sleep in.)

Get off the bus!

2009-01-09T17:27:00.000-08:00

So yesterday I wrote about my harsh introduction to the rambling, roving world of Greyhound buses. Being the eternal fountain of optimism that I was (you can tell that's been quashed over the years), I hoped maybe I just had a rough start. In the great adventure that lie before me, surely there would be interesting people, stories, and completely safe and clean bus stations along my route. Right?

Um... well, in a word, no.

I quickly learned that the safest way to maneuver through this horrible idea was to stick with the buddy system. Your selection of "buddies" are limited, however, when the majority of people on the Greyhound bus are the sort of people that don't drive cars -- mostly because the state won't allow them to have a license. Of these people, I huddled close by the safest of these groups -- the elderly. The majority of these weren't so bad -- at the very least, I could run away and be sure I could outrun them. These were people who still thought it was a grand adventure to ride on the bus and see the country -- they dressed in their Sunday best while carrying their khaki green suitcases, talking to me about their grandchildren and their medications. I just sort of clung to this group as long as I could, like a scavenger fish on the back of a slow, old, dumb whale.

Unfortunately, I lost my cover in Cincinatti. Three hours doesn't seem so long when you're looking at a bus ticket in the comfort of your dorm room. It does, however, seem like forever when you're sitting in the middle of a ghetto, in a bus station where you are warned by the bus driver to stay inside the terminal, at 2 a.m. So I did. I sat on a bench with my luggage all closely huddled around me, reading my Stephen King book (it was Salem's Lot, by the way) while continuously glancing around me, glancing at the clock, and trying to figure out just where the aroma of urine was coming from.

When it came time to board my bus -- four hours later -- I was trying to shuffle all of my luggage along with me when a homeless man came up and asked for change. I declined, stating I didn't have any cash on me. At this point he flashed me. Yes, I can honestly say I have seen an old wrinkly 70+-year-old black man's penis. As he pulled down his zipper and shook it at me menacingly, all I could think was, once again, "This was a really, really bad idea."

I didn't sleep between Cincinatti and Indianapolis -- despite the fact I was going on 23 hours without sleep -- because I was afraid the man talking to himself across the aisle from me would try to kill me. At first I thought he was rapping along to music on headphones, until I realized he didn't have any headphones on, and he wasn't rapping. (This was before bluetooth headsets were popular.) When he reached a stanza of silence in his soliloquy, he'd stare at me. By "me" I mean my breasts. Once I realized this -- and this bus, like the original bus, was packed, so I had nowhere to go -- I got out my college sweatshirt and bundled up like it was January, despite the fact it was actually late August and still really hot. And those buses get really, really hot, really, really fast. And with the heat comes the smell.

Greyhound buses stink. It's not a noticeable, detectable smell, like urine, or feces, or body odor. It's this strange mutated hybrid stench that is a combination of all of the above, every possible odor and fluid the human body can put out, plus an intangible element to really punch it up a notch, like sadness or desperation or hate. It's not a pleasant smell at all, and on my initial leg of the trip I thought maybe it was the people I was sitting beside (or sitting on me), but I quickly realized the terminals and all buses smelled like this.

I'm pretty sure I was almost raped/robbed/pillaged in the Indianapolis terminal. I mentioned last time that I didn't go to the entire bathroom the entire trip. It wasn't for lack of trying. In Indianapolis, despite my better judgment I decided to go use the ladies' room. Carrying all of my luggage with me, I went to the back corner where the bathroom signs were, and as I rounded the corner I heard someone walking behind me. Ignoring it, I went into the bathroom and as I was headed into a stall, I saw a man standing in the bathroom behind me.

He was probably about 6'5, tall and skinny, with a long rat-tail in a braid. His eyes were black and dilated and he had a small smile on his face as he groped himself through his sweatpants.

I screamed bloody murder at the top of my lungs. I may have peed myself, having had to go so badly. A security guard who looked to be in his mid-70's came ambling into the bathroom with his hand on his baton, looked at the man who surely was about to murder me and steal my Vera Bradley luggage, and said -- more exhausted than actually threatening -- "Damnit Ernie, I told you to stay out of here."

The security guard then helped the gentleman out of the bathroom the same way you'd see an orderly escort a senile geriatric. I didn't know if I was safer in the bathroom -- where the stalls, as I figured out, didn't have locks -- or taking my chances out in the main area, where there was possibly "Ernie," or a homeless man trying to show me his penis, or who knows what else. I didn't know. I didn't want to know. I was a nice girl, from the middle of Jesustown Midwest, USA, and I just wanted to see my boyfriend, whom I didn't like that much anyway, and my mom was right, and oh... oh, this was bad. This was really bad.

I wound up sitting bythe concession counter, curled in a ball with my luggage around me like some sort of protective designer shield, watching week-old popcorn pop and trying not to cry. In 24 hours, I'd been sat on by a large black woman, I'd been referred to not-to-quietly as a "stupid cracker bitch," I'd been panhandled at and flashed, and I'd narrowly escaped all sorts of wrong in a bus station bathroom. And I hadn't even reached my destination yet.

Get on the bus!

2009-01-08T20:49:00.001-08:00

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my college days was thinking it was a good idea to ride a Greyhound bus from Ohio to Missouri to visit my then-boyfriend, who was in the Army and stationed at Ft. Leonard Wood. (You could also file "Dating a chauvinist Army pig" in this file folder of "Bad Ideas.") I didn't have a car at the time -- my parents had made me leave it at home because they (rightfully) assumed that I would take it and drive down to Missouri myself. So in an act of defiance, I bought a ticket to go see him over Labor Day weekend.

There's probably a whole thick chapter of my life I could write about lessons learned on the road, albeit much more terrifying than anything Kerouac wrote, and more depressing than anything Hunter S. Thompson could provide. But for the sake of time and the sake of my attention span, we'll go with the early impressions...

My roommate went with me to wait at the bus stop, which actually wasn't a bus stop at all, rather it was an alley behind a Circle K, in front of a cigar shop where old men sat and smoked and leered at two college girls, one with her bags packed. The bus was late. I was already full of anticipation and excitement to see my boyfriend, whom I hadn't seen in two months. The bus finally rolled up and I looked giddily at my roommate -- who mostly looked terrified, mostly because the old men in the cigar shop were loudly discussing the rotundness of her ass, and now I was leaving her to walk home from the cigar shop alone -- as I passed off my bags to the bus driver.

"Hi!" I said cheerfully. He was a black gentleman, probably in his 60's, with his crumpled Greyhound uniform sporting sweat stains in the armpits and chest. He looked at me, unimpressed by my chipper demeanor. He held out his hand. I shook it. His reaction would indicate he was asking for my ticket rather than a cheery "How d'ya do?".

I waited while people got off the bus. A couple hippie looking people -- this was a college town after all -- got off first, followed by a dirty looking man muttering to himself. I sidestepped to get out of his way and after making sure nobody else was getting off -- and that all multiple personalities had left with their respective owners -- I got on the bus. I was off on an adventure.

What ensued was kind of like that scene early in Forrest Gump, when a young Forrest gets on the school bus. The bus was packed to the gills. My excitement was quickly fading into panic as I realized that I'd have to sit with someone... a stranger. But who? There weren't even any seats. As I was frantically scanning past faces and looking for an empty seat, I spotted one near the back of the bus. The only open seat on the bus was smack in the middle of a large group of large, black women.

You have to imagine the scene. Sweet little country girl taking off on her first solo cross-country adventure, walking down the aisle of the bus trying to mask the sheer terror that was inevitably spreading across my face. I looked at the woman sitting in the aisle next to the window seat that would become mine.

"May I sit in that seat?" I asked as sweetly as possible.

I was met with a long silent stare from her and her group. I looked frantically back toward the front of the bus, hoping I'd missed a seat. I hadn't. In that time the bus started up. I lurched against the side of a seat and against a man in an Army jacket and a long, straggly gray ponytail.

"Fucking WATCH IT!" he sneered at me. I looked desperately back at the woman next to the seat again, my eyes pleading with her. Look, I want to sit there as much as you want me to sit there next to you. But please, please don't make this difficult, I pleaded in my mind. She leaned back, smashing her fat into the seat and pulling her purse up into her bosom, indicating for me to squeeze past her (impossible) to my seat. I thanked her and got into my seat by more or less leaping over her into the seat and squishing myself as close to the window as possible. Even then, her fat spilled over onto my side.

I have a thing with touching people. Especially strangers. Especially fat parts. Especially sweaty parts. My phobia has gotten worse since then.

I settled into my seat and took out a book, feeling the eyes of the group around me narrowing. As the bus cruised down the interstate, I tried to read -- it was a Stephen King book but I don't remember which now... it was the one that had Rob Lowe in the movie -- but I kept watching the road and glancing at my watch and realizing that I was going to be on the road for a full 20 hours before reaching my destination. And realizing perhaps this was a mistake.

So I did the only thing that I could at 19 when I was in a self-imposed bad idea. I called my mom.

"I just wanted to let you know I'm on my way," I said as cheerfully as possible. My mom had been adamantly against the idea, citing that Greyhound buses were only for "rapists, retards, child molesters, and the clinically insane." I was pretty sure I'd passed all of the above in that long walk down the bus aisle looking for a seat, and all things considered, maybe it wasn't so bad that I'd wound up next to a very large woman who only resented me sitting next to her, rather than wanting to rape/kill/molest me.

"Well I hope you have a safe trip!" she chimed back. At the time I thought she was trying to be as optimistic about the situation as possible, since there was nothing she could do to stop me by this point. But I realize now that she knew that I knew that this was a huge mistake, and there was nothing I could do about it. She quickly got off the phone and I stared down the interstate.

This was a very bad idea, I decided. This was my declaration of independence from my parents, it would be an adventure, I would see my boyfriend soon and... hell, this was a horrible idea. And I have to pee.

But I wouldn't pee. I wouldn't pee on the bus. I wouldn't pee in the stations. (That's another story entirely.) I didn't pee, despite reeeaaaallllly having to, for over 24 hours. The end result would be a raging urinary tract infection that would land me in the student health center two weeks later, crying and pissing needles every five minutes. The urinary tract infection had graduated into a full-blown kidney infection, but I somehow wound up getting tested for every STD imaginable. It came back as a clean bill of health on the STD front, though it was great to get that phone call from my parents when the labwork showed up on their health insurance.

In the first hour on the road, the trip I'd greatly romanticized in my mind was revealing itself for what it was -- a massively, incredibly hugely bad idea. I considered taking a bus back to school from Cincinnati, the first stop, but I couldn't give up so easily. Looking back, I probably should have.

I'm new here, I don't know any better.

2009-01-02T20:33:00.000-08:00

New discovery? Crock pots: much harder than you'd initially think.

Case in point? Don't put all your dinner-related shit in a crock pot, turn it on high, and then go take a nap. Because that shit will burn. It will burn hard.

We'll put this lesson in our little mental locked boxes, along with other valuable grown-up lessons I've learned along the way. Greatest hits, like, "Shower liner and shower curtain: not the same thing," "Don't try to go down icy steps with a pot of boiling water," and "That funny little lever in the chimney? Pull that before lighting a fire."

Man, that was a lesson learned, pre-How2in6. There's a good story I can tell for tonight. Back when I was a young whippersnapper, and was living on my own in my first "real" apartment (that wasn't a dormroom or a bedroom in a sorority house), the centerpiece of my one-bedroom apartment was the fireplace. I was broke, so all winter (midwest, shit-freezing-in-your-rectum cold kinda winter) I kept the temperature at a solid 60 degrees and wore multiple layer. Finally, I got the grand idea to start a fire in the fireplace. In an apartment this small, surely a nice big fire in my big fireplace will heat us all nicely!

So I stealthily went around the complex, stealing peoples' newspapers to use as kindling for my fire. I hoarded them back to my apartment, stuffed them in the fireplace, and lit a corner with a Bic lighter from my purse. I rubbed my chapped, freezing hands together like an old timey hobo and waited for the flame to light up the stack of newspapers and magazines.

It did. Quickly. Then the smoke came.

Lots of smoke.

Lots of smoke and lots of tiny fiery bits of burned, ashy paper that snowed down upon my apartment as I began to panic and realized I'd done something horribly wrong. Then the smoke alarm went off. I had no idea I even had a smoke alarm, let alone where it was. It was on the ceiling, and I was faced with the predicament of: Do I turn off the smoke alarm, or do I stop the fire?

What ensued was this frantic (and I'm sure, hilarious) dance of running to the kitchen and filling a pot of water, and running to the smoke alarm and jumping up and down frantically while punching it, running to the kitchen to get the pot and dumping it on the fire, then running to punch the smoke alarm -- still beeping -- some more.

The end result was a drenched fireplace, a smoky apartment with ash everywhere, and a broken smoke alarm hanging from the ceiling by wires.

That's when I heard the fire engines.

My elderly downstairs neighbor, who was used to me never being home, assumed something had gone horribly wrong in the apartment, and since I probably wasn't home (and because the alarm had been going off so long before I'd punched it to death), surely we needed the fire department to intervene.

So you can imagine how annoyed the firemen looked when I answered the door, covered in soot and still panting from my frantic punch-water-punch-splash dance, and had to explain what had happened. Then one of the very annoyed firemen came in and showed me this nifty thing called a "flue". And if you pulled on this little lever right here, it opened up the flue and little accidents like this didn't happen.

And so, after apologizing profusely to the firemen, apologizing profusely to the landlord, who came storming down to see why the fire department had been called, and spending the rest of that freezing January night with my windows open to air out the smoke, I chalked it up to a valuable lesson learned.

I haven't lived anywhere with a fireplace since.

2008-12-31T23:10:00.000-08:00

Happy 2009, one and all! You know, it's crazy how things change. Two New Year's Eves ago, A. and I were at a dive bar and I got so blitzed on shots of Rumple Mintz (and hell, whatever the waitress, who went to high school with A. and decided she liked me, was handing to me for free) that I wound up locking myself in the bathroom and passing out on the floor. Last year, I was obnoxiously pregnant, had worked at the restaurant until 11:30 p.m., and watched the ball drop sitting by myself on the couch eating leftovers from work because A. was deathly ill and passed out on a cocktail of cold and flu medications.

This year we watched the ball drop, kiss with tongue at midnight, then watched MTV Cribs til we decided to go to our respective computers and we'll probably go to bed soon. My, how things change.

So to celebrate the new year, I'm stealing a survey from All & Sundry as I reminisce on the insane ride that was 2008. Because clearly the countless surveys I fill out on MySpace aren't enough for me.

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
A.) I became a parent.
B.) I actually liked it.
C.) I didn't screw up too badly doing it.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't believe in them. I know myself well enough to know that if I have some sort of stipulation put on me, I'll inevitably grow to resent it and quit.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Not anyone really close. A few old friends and acquaintances.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Nope. I got pretty lucky on that one.

5. What countries did you visit?
Next...

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
The discipline and motivation to finally run, at the very least, a mini-marathon.

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Giving birth to my daughter on 2-15-08, and holding her for the first time, looking at my husband, and thinking, "Holy shit, what are we getting ourselves into?" And knowing in that moment that the little girl in my arms was the greatest love of my life.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
See above.

9. What was your biggest failure?
I don't think I had any real failures. I fell short in communicating sometimes, I fell short in containing my temper and frustration. But I don't consider any of that failure by any means.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing major. Sliced a finger open. Scalded my legs. But I'm okay with that.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
My husband's grill I got him for Father's Day, because holy shit that kid's amazing on the grill.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Seconding A&S -- Barack Obama.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Pretty much the federal government in general. Our piss-ass excuse of a President. (Sorry, you won't see me get political on here much, I promise, it's okay, come back, come back.)

14. Where did most of your money go?
Um, how about the $4,000 we dumped on a new boiler? Suck.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Watching the world through my daughter's eyes.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?
"Yes We Can" by Will.I.Am.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder?
b) thinner or fatter?
c) richer or poorer?

I am immeasurably happier. Definitely skinnier since I'm not 7.5 months pregnant. And I guess we're a little poorer, but we get the bills paid and we love each other.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Relaxed and taken a little time for me.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Quit stressing out about things or getting frustrated with Punky, because as much as I hate admitting that others are right -- damn they grow up fast.

20. How did you spend Christmas?
Surrounded by family and friends and having a grand old time.

21. Did you fall in love in 2008?
With my daughter, more and more every day. And I fall in love with my husband over and over again. *Puke.*

22. What was your favorite TV program?
The Office.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I hate our President more.

24. What was the best book you read?
Anything in the Twilight series. Yeah, I'm a nerd.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
The Bird and The Bee

26. What did you want and get?
A new laptop -- I love my husband.

27. What did you want and not get?
Sanity. But I don't miss it much anymore.

28. What was your favorite film of this year?
Forgetting Sarah Marshall was pretty good.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 23, and A. took me out to dinner while we left Punk with his parents.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
I don't really know. I was actually very satisfied with the year, besides a few minor meltdowns.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
Sweatpants chic.

32. What kept you sane?
Alcohol and writing.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Barack Obama. I'm in love with him.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Gay marriage (SOOOO for) and reproductive rights (fiercely pro-choice).

35. Who did you miss?
I miss a lot of my friends from college, who have moved away to pursue fabulous and glamorous careers. Le sigh.

36. Who was the best new person you met?
Punky

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
Don't try to carry a scalding hot pot of water down icy steps.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
"They're all WASTED!!!!" -- this doesn't really sum up my year for any reason, I just love "Baba O'Reilly."

Redux

2008-12-26T12:06:00.001-08:00

So I may or may not be writing this from somewhere in the depths of a diabetic coma, but Christmas was of the utmost awesomeness. Punky got spoiled rotten by her grandparents, aunts and uncles (not us yet -- me, A. and Punky will quietly celebrate tonight) and my living room is now filled with the most obnoxiously loud and huge of toddler toys. There was a point in my life where I decorated our living room, carefully choosing the perfect combinations of sages and plums and burgundies and tans in the color coordination process. Now our main color scheme is PRIMARY. And SHINY. And LOUD.

But here is our Christmas (thus far) in photographic highlights:

Chatted with cousins...

A., his brother "Otto" and I got really drunk waiting for Santa.
Brother-in-law had a drunk Hasselhoff moment with the Christmas ham.

God, my kid's cute.

The annual running of the Naked Christmas Baby.

The cousins... Punky's hand is bordering on inappropriate touching.

We spent the night at A's parents' house over Christmas Eve, despite my wariness due to Punky's inability to sleep anywhere but her crib and in the car. And hey, guess what, I was right. I netted maybe two hours of sleep that night as Punk thrashed in the pack and play screaming, then thrashed and punched and kicked when I tried to keep her in bed with us. Somehow the gigantic black circles under A's eyes the next morning spoke far louder volumes than me saying, "I told you so."

But I so fucking told him so.

But anyway. Christmas was good and we still have my parents' this weekend. I can't wait to see what obnoxiously huge, loud toys we'll be Tetrissing into the car after that.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

From my godless house to yours, have a wonderful holiday...

Love,
How2in6, A., and Punky

It was a leg-scalding kind of day.

2008-12-21T20:36:00.000-08:00

Punky met Santa today. I wish I could provide you pictures to show the sheer cuteness of the moment (rather than being terrified, she was baffled by Santa's [real] beard), unfortunately, we presently don't have any.

It was a bad trip.

Here, I'll tell you.

After much debate, A. and I finally came to the conclusion that we really should take Punky to see Santa, being her first Christmas. She's generally pretty sunny with strangers, rather than pictures like the one I google-searched and posted (again -- not my kid in that picture), so what the heck. Let's do it.

We agreed to take her on Sunday, A.'s day off, first thing as soon as the mall opened to beat the lines. All was well until Sunday morning rolled around. First, someone at A.'s record store no-call-no-showed (apparently such thing is wont to happen when you hire 17-year-old stoners, whose integrity and basic work morale is surprisingly low). Being Christmastime, it is not a time to be short an employee, so A. realized he was going to have to go in and work.

I was not doing this bullshit without him. Oh hell no.

So I was already pissed, disappointed, sad, whatever. But alas! A. said we could go now before the line got long, get it over with, and he would go to work. Okay, that's great. Unfortunately, there's been a fabulous accumulation of ice here in the middle of BFE, and my car was coated in about a solid foot of ice. Try as I did to scrape it, defrost it, etc. -- it wasn't moving. It would take a good half hour of scraping and defrosting in the subzero windchill to get this car road-safe. And we didn't have half an hour. So A. had to go to work, and Santa was put on hold.

I was so frustrated by this that what ensued was me going completely PRIMAL, sheer rage on the windshield with my little $1 scraper, and I ultimately broke the scraper and slashed my hand in my fit of rage. Sometimes Mommy just needs a release, kids.

Then after he left, I decided I was sick of all the ice, and in my sheer brilliance, decided to boil a pot of water to dump on the windshield. THAT will melt the ice! God, I am SO FREAKING SMART! So I boiled a huge pot of water. I carried it carefully to the porch. I carefully, so carefully started down the porch steps, and...

WHOOSH!

My feet go flying out from under me, and in a strange singular motion, I dumped the pot of scalding water on my legs and slid down the steps flat on my ass with my feet over my head... all the while SCREAMING at the scalding hot water on my legs, and the only thing I could think to do was throw myself into the snow and thrash violently to make my legs stop burning.

Yeah. It was THAT kind of day.

Eventually, A. was able to get out of work, and came home. It was then we decided to resume our plan to see Santa at the mall. We arrived just in time to realize Santa had left to go on his hour lunch. So we wandered the mall... on the weekend before Christmas... for an hour. Did I mention that we hate crowds, people, and generally being outside the house? We're not social animals, my husband and I. Finally we made it in time to get in a half hour wait line to see Santa. And we waited.

We humored the baby, we juggled her, we danced with her, I got into a passive-aggressive fight with people who thought that if you put your THINGS in line, that counts as BEING in line (it doesn't, and you're a bitch, and your punishment is looking the way you do after three kids because if my ass was that big, DAMN, I'd kill myself). Finally we got to the front of the line and were met with a poster advertising picture packages.

"Hold up," I said, remembering the dozens of Santa's lap polaroids in my parents' photo albums. "You have to actually pay for pictures?"

You do, it turns out. An insane amount. Like, $15 for a 5x7 and that's the cheapest one.

Fuck that noise.

That's when I noticed parents taking pictures with their digital camera.

"Did you bring your camera?" A. asked.

"No. I thought we'd get a free polaroid or something. That's how they always did it." (Apparently they don't even make polaroids anymore. Whatever, I never leave the house, how the hell am I supposed to know this?)

I wasn't going to spend $15 on a goddamn picture. No. I'm not.

So after 1 hour and 45 minutes of waiting, Punky met Santa for the first time, gazed in wonder at his beard and then smiled and giggled happily, and this is the best I have to document the entire debacle, courtesy of A.'s cell phone (yeah, we were THOSE people):

Fuck it. I'll dress her in the same outfit and go back tomorrow with my camera.

Crossing enemy lines.

2008-12-17T21:53:00.000-08:00

Well... after ten months, it's been a good fight. My beautiful 36C's have served faithfully, and have surrendered themselves to a lifetime of floppy pancakes (unless A. decides he really loves me and gives me a new set). And now, it's time to raise the white flag.

I'm drying up. Fast.

And because Punky still likes her morning and nighttime boobing (and occasionally middle of the night boob when she absolutely won't go back to sleep), it looks like I'm going to have to cross enemy lines into Formula Territory. The enemy has been identified, and unfortunately, we're going to have to join forces:

Yep. Punky's jumping on the Formula Wagon.

My right boob is completely dried up. Nothing but Sahara Desert happening in ol' righty, who never could keep up with her assymetrically talented Lefty sister, but even Lefty's failing us now. I thought maybe I could gimp along on one boob til Punky hit the one year mark in February (and ultimately by-passed cold and flu season with Mommy Immunities), but I don't think it's going to happen. So I'm going to jump on formula while I can still transition her.

Hard to believe I'm as disappointed with this as I am, considering nine months ago, I fucking hated breastfeeding. I was constantly leaking, my nipples were chapped and sore, and I just had this whiny little THING constantly demanding I rip my shirt open. I had to wear a bra to bed, I couldn't wear a normal bra (since in about an hour, whatever bra I was wearing would no longer fit), and did I mention leaking?

But after a while, I realized the practicality of it all. Punky was tired? Boob. Hungry? Boob. Pissed off? Hurt? Scared? Boob, boob, boob. And I'll even give into the Boob Nazi ridiculousness of mother-child bonding... because in those quiet moments of me and Punky (okay, not all were quiet and peaceful, occasionally I was popping a squat in a Wal-Mart bathroom stall, whatever), I realized that GOD, I loved this little kiddo attached to the teet. Sometimes I felt like just an object for food and nothing more, "BOOB" rather than "Mommy", but eventually... shit, I'll say it, I really enjoyed it.

So there's the end of that. Within another month or so, Punky'll be fully on formula (not for long, thankfully, before we're moving on to regular milk), my boobs will return back to their rightful owner, and A. can enjoy them as he pleases without getting splashed in the face.

Which is far creepier and weirder than you'd initially think. I'm just sayin'.

And now, an open letter

2008-12-16T17:31:00.000-08:00

Dear Motorists in the God-Forsaken City I Regretably Still Live In,

It's snow. We saw it last year. We saw it the year before that. Roughly 95% of us have spent every single year of our lives from November through March seeing, playing in, being exposed to, and driving in this mysterious white stuff called snow. So please, I'm begging you, consider driving more than FIVE GODDAMN MILES AN HOUR the minute it falls from the sky. I swear, you will not swerve off the road and die a horrible fiery death if you get dangerous and up it to say, of, 15 mph.

With Love,
The Crazy Bitch in the Lumina

I'm a real classy broad.

2008-12-10T16:59:00.000-08:00

So maybe you've noticed, maybe you haven't, but I added a little sidebar doodiebopper that features what book I'm presently reading. And considering my reading list in the past three months has included the entire Twilight series, Chasing Harry Winston, and now, presently, He's Just Not That Into You, I'd just like to tell you now: I'm embarrassed by my reading list. I swear I'm deeper than this.

I swear there was a time pre-child that I used to have philosophy study sessions with people while we waxed Nietsche and Kant. I drank chai and I read things like Steinbeck and Tolstoy. I used big words and my deepest question of the day was significantly more insightful than, "Jesus, kid, WHAT did you eat to produce THAT?"

Unfortunately, I only get time for myself in increments of about an hour at a time and damnit, I just don't have the time or emotional involvement to wrap myself around real books. But I swear I used to be classy and real sophisticated like. And I swear that I have Of Mice and Men and Atlas Shrugged on my reading list. No. Really. I do.

Right after I finish reading this book and this week's Star magazine and perusing Perez Hilton for the umpteenth time today.

Why I don't like metal detectors.

2008-12-07T11:54:00.001-08:00

I've been having this strange itch to write -- maybe some post-NaBloPoMo effect -- but since my life has been mostly depressing and/or horribly mundane, I'm pulling out classic hits from the volumes of "Embarrassing and Humiliating But At Least I Can Sort of Laugh About It All Now" stories that have riddled my life.

So I'm going to tell you the story about why I have a strong dislike for metal detectors, the Transportation Security Administration, and sadistic airport security officers.

I'm not sure if you've quite picked up on this yet, but I was a bit of a wild child in college. I was sort of notorious for my drinking binges, and for doing insane things that would become stories of legend that I would have absolutely no recollection of. One thing that always vexed me about living in a college town was the fact that directly next to my favorite bar was a tattoo/piercing studio. I know most studios have signs (and laws) about refusing service to the intoxicated. This particular studio, however, apparently had a really lax policy on these things, because I have photos of people quite literally carrying me into this place, and waking up the next morning with metal shoved into places that I really had best not say.

Basically... you name it, I've had it pierced. This includes -- especially includes -- places that would be covered up by a bathing suit.

Going hand-in-hand with my four-year stint of alcoholism was my sorority membership. A year after I was initiated, my charm, charisma and ability to drink loads of alcohol without dying led to me being elected chapter president, and along with the title came various necessary cross-country trips to the international headquarters, to conventions, and to weekend leadership retreats.

It was a muggy summer when it was time for the international convention. Along with the chapter president of a nearby chapter, I was traveling along with my sorority advisor and several women of the alumni chapter. These older "sisters" were old school -- we're talking, classy and shit. Would get uppity if I said the Lord's name in vain, would lightly dab their foreheads with their kerchiefs, and would declare things in Southern drawls like, "Why I do declare!" They were uppity. And it was important, for my chapter's sake, to stay on good terms with them, so I arrived at the airport to meet them in a nice, crisp pressed cotton skirt and a cardigan set, kitten heels, and pearls. Shit you not. I don't even believe I did it. But relations and good-standing were important, so I had to dress -- and act -- to impress.

It came time to go through security, and I didn't even think twice as I put my adorable carry-on bag, shoes, purse and earrings through the scanner. And I passed through the metal detector without even a bead of sweat of concern.

EENH! EENH! EENH!

Oh. It might have been my necklace. Here, let me take that off. Back through the gate.

EENH! EENH! EENH!

That's when I realized what it must be. I thought it wouldn't set detectors off? Seriously? Is this happening? By this point, the stuffy old ladies are looking curiously behind me in line as I giggle nervously about what on earth could possibly be setting it off. I tried one more time in vain...

EENH! EENH! EENH!

It was at this point, in front of the sorority elders, that I had to quietly explain to the officer -- who looked quite unamused -- that I had some piercings that I wouldn't be able to take out right here and now. I still remember the completely unchanged expression as he guided me to the side where a female officer was waiting, and he said very loudly, "She has some piercings, she says."

Then, in front of the sorority elders, who were aghast at this point, the female officer patted me down and scanned the magic metal detector wand over me as it BEEPED tellingly as she passed it over my breasts, belly, and yes, my crotch. The elders were making a deliberate effort not to stare, but it was obvious they were looking out of the sides of their eyes, as I fought the urge to just scream, "YES, I got drunk and pierced my nipples and my clit, OKAY?!"

Things were quiet and awkward when we sat on the plane, until the one advisor I would have never expected sat down next to me, as I was fighting back tears, and said, "Well, that was embarrassing, eh?" I nodded solemnly. And then she pulled down her refined, obviously-expensive Neimann Marcus sweater (despite being July), and showed me the rose tattoo right smack on her right breast.

So much for being a martyr.

2008-12-05T14:23:00.000-08:00

After our exhilarating experience of going three days without heat, but limping along thanks to space heaters provided by our amazing HVAC company, and with the sheer joy of Christmas-time finances as it is, A. and I have come to the definitive conclusion: we're broke.

Not broke like foreclosure, out on the streets, feeding my baby scraps from the trash and wearing really mismatched sweats. But things are definitely tight, and I have to cut back on my "extra" spending (read: spending $80 to color my hair when I have nobody to impress but a 9 month old, who is more content to rip it out of my scalp than admire the subtle yet amazing face-framing carmel highlights, or my designer purse collection that on its own raises our home equity).

But we have heat. Praise Flying Spaghetti Monster, we have heat and our house is currently 68 degrees without fear of the boiler dying again. So Merry Christmas for that.

Anyway. Because A. is completely incapable of keeping a secret, he accidentally slip that he was getting me a new laptop for Christmas. It's definitely a gift that I need, but I don't NEED need it. The same day we got the estimate for the boiler install, he told me that he was expecting "a package," and was unable to get a refund on it since it shipped before he could cancel it, so to refuse shipment when it arrived. Okay, specifically what he said was, "Just bring it inside, don't look at it, and I'll ship it out when I go to work."

Disheartened and really disappointed, I assumed it was because we are poor and the last thing we need to spend money on is a new laptop when mine works alright, despite being 4 years old, randomly turning off because something needs soldered inside, and the wireless connection blows. I accepted it for what it was, told him I would refuse the shipment, and moved on.

So we fast forward to yesterday afternoon when Fed Ex arrived. I knew that box. I knew the shape. I knew what it was. And the surly Fed Ex delivery woman (understandably surly) was holding out the signature pad to me when I got the genius idea that I would save A. the extra step in taking the package back to Fed Ex, and I would just deny it right here. Business handled. My God, I'm a fucking genius, and such a caring, considerate wife!

It sucked, dude. Turning away my Christmas present, that I know exactly what it is, and I really, really want it, but we're poor now. I can't have it. No thank you, Fed Ex lady, take it away. Take it away before I sob uncontrollably, holding onto your ankle as you drag me, kicking and screaming, to your truck to take my beautiful new laptop...er, I mean, present... away forever. Because we're poor and I can't have nice things.

Immediately after the truck left, I texted A. to tell him I'd just denied it at the door. To which I got this response:

"R U fuckin serious?"

Um... yes?

So basically, to paraphrase the panicked, angry phone calls that ensued -- A. had ordered two of these "things" (okay, laptop, I spoiled Christmas for myself here). One on purpose, but the credit hadn't appeared on his statement so he thought it hadn't gone through. This first one apparently had special discounts and special custom things for me, but he thought he'd lost the transaction. So he bought another "thing", more expensive but without the custom stuff, because he thought the first purchase never happened. Then it turned out the first purchase DID happen, it just didn't turn up on the statement right away. (You still following me here?) So he tried to cancel the second "thing" but it had already shipped. It was too late to refund. HENCE... why he'd told me we'd have to send this "thing" back.

I didn't know there were two "things". I didn't know there was the good thing and the unwanted thing. I just knew I had to send my thing away. This was one of those points where A. exasperatedly asks me, "Did you actually listen to me?", to which I exclaim with wounded, huge anime eyes that OF COURSE, I did, I just didn't understand... and in the back of my mind I know all I heard that night was, "Blah blah blah send your pretty new laptop back because we're poor and I don't love you blah blah blah" and oh hey, is that a marathon of America's Next Top Model?

So there have been frantic yet sugary-sweet phone calls to Fed Ex, basically saying, "I'm sorry, I'm dumb and I don't listen to anything my husband says and I didn't mean it, I really swear I didn't mean it, please please please can I have it back, pleeeaaaaassse?" Luckily we caught it in time that we fixed my mistake and they said they'd drop it by the next day. (Today.)

And figures I waited all day (signature was required), and finally ran to the store, came down the street on my way home just as the Fed Ex truck was pulling away. So now I'm waiting for 6 p.m. to roll around so I can go and pick up my mysterious present, and have it safe and sound at home. Where I will stare longingly for it for another two weeks while I sit on this laptop praying for its death.

Cold shit sammich.

2008-12-02T15:04:00.000-08:00

It's been one of those weeks where the life in general shits the bed. I have a raging urinary tract infection, which I'm sure you wanted to know all about, and even more irritating, our ancient furnace died in a blaze of glory that has left our house without heat in Indiana December. And we won't have heat again until Thursday, when an HVAC tech will come and install a new boiler and all the trimmings for the princely sum of $4,000.

Merry Christmas, ya'll.

You'd think they'd knock some sort of discount off after the show the tech caught today when he came over to do an appraisal. I'm just putting on a show left and right these days. I mean really, if you haven't figured it out by now, my life is pretty much one woefully embarrassing situation after another.

I knew we were off to a bad start when I showed the HVAC repairman our boiler, which was corroded beyond recognition and obviously dead, and I could just hear the air suck in through his teeth and before he even opened it up, said, "I'm going to bet this is going to need replaced."

Embarrassed by the sad, pathetic state of my basement (still soggy from the boiler's wet, heat-sucking death) and the obvious state of disrepair of the boiler (apparently you're supposed to service them every year? Go figure.), I went upstairs and left him to do his job. I heard him tinkering around downstairs, so I let Bodhi out of the bedroom, where I'd unceremoniously tossed him to keep him from assaulting the repairman via ear-piercing YIP YIP YIP's and frantic laps around the house. That's when my UTI reminded me of it's pleasant presence, and I had to pee. Punky was down for a nap, Bo was content to lay in the sunshine on the dining room floor (pretty much the only warm spot in the house), repairman was busy seeing what a mess A.'s and my neglect had created, so I went to the bathroom and settled down for an agonizing piss.

I've discovered it's always when you think you're in a position to slow down for a minute, that's when life kicks your ass and catches you bare-assed on Life's toilet. Some cases are more literal than others.

The repairman came upstairs from the basement, setting Bodhi, who didn't know he was here, into a maniacal frenzy. Bo will never work as a guard dog, because when he is confronted with strangers in the house, he runs laps, runs up walls, barking and going crazy. He went into one of his crazy lap races around the house as the repairman rounded the corner of the dining room where there's a clear shot down the hall -- where the bathroom is at the end of the hall -- and Bo's lap took him down the hall.

Bo took a running leap into the bathroom door, which has a crap latch anyway, and the door went flying open. And in a split second that took what felt like eons to process, there I was, sitting bare-assed on the toilet, doubled over in pain and scrunch faced as I was trying to piss out the blades of the UTI, and there was the repairman, with a full, albeit very brief, view of me sitting on the toilet.

Somewhere on our quote there's a $200 credit. I wonder if that was for the ass shot. In which case, it's good to know I've still got it.

The End is Near.

2008-11-29T09:03:00.001-08:00

They're collaborating. It's really just a matter of time til the Baby-Bodhi Takeover begins. All hail our incontinent overlords.

At least someone got a cheap thrill.

2008-11-28T18:40:00.000-08:00

After mulling the idea over for awhile, I finally decided to try the whole "Site 2 Store" shindig that Wal-Mart's rocking out. I hate Wal-Mart. I hate the parking lot. I hate the aisles. I hate being there. It ruins my entire day, and I actually arrange my entire week's schedule to arrange for a Wal-Mart visit at the lowest traffic time possible. (Which is now impossible thanks to Christmas.) So hey, if I can shop for shit online, pay for it, and make one quick in-and-out deal out of it, I'm game.

It's confusing. And embarrassing. And I think I gave the sad, lonely Wal-Mart worker a hard-on.

Okay, so those of you who have dogs understand that panty crotches are like a magnet to dogs. Bodhi somehow finds ways, ways that defy physics and logic, into the hamper, where he proceeds to violate my dirty underwear and chew out the crotch. Earlier this week he got into the hamper YET AGAIN and destroyed the last of my non-granny panty underwear. So I took a chance and I ordered Wal-Mart lace hipsters and thongs. Because hey, Mommy needs laid, kiddo.

It was later in the evening (read: empty) when I went to pick up the order. First, there was nobody at the counter. I rang the doorbell, and I waited. And waited. And waited. About the point I nearly decided, "Fuck this shit," a hefty, red-faced, and obviously overstressed and overworked assistant manager came shuffling to the counter. It's Christmas time, at Wal-Mart. Poor guy was probably damn near at his wit's end. I can jive, turkey. I told him the name on my order. He took forever to find it -- but I'm sure probably a ton of people took the route I have. So I can't get mad.

My frustration is not at the process at all. It's really a sanity saver as long as you don't order panties. And here's why.

He found the package. Which, despite the 12 items on the order slip, it was a really small package. (Obviously.) Note: in the time I was waiting for him to find my package, a kindly little old couple got in line behind me to pick up their own package. Cute as hell. So he comes out with the package, looking a little confused, and says, "I'm not sure it's all in there."

I was sure it was all in there because lace panties, thongs, and hipsters don't take up much space. But I didn't exactly want to blurt out, "It's my sexy time panties!" So I smiled tersely and despite feeling my face get red, muttered something along the lines of, "I'm sure everything is there. Really, it's okay. I trust you guys. (I don't.)"

Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. In the name of quality assurance and thoroughness, and much to my horror, he proceeded to cut the opaque shipping bag open. Out came the panties tumbling onto the counter. He then went on to pick them up one by one and shake them out, so as to separate them, and lay them out to count and make sure every. single. lace thong and panty was accounted for. I could hear the old lady behind me gasp and I felt every blood vessel on my face popping wide open as I sunk further and further into mortification.

Sure, it's just underwear. And hell, with my low-cut jeans that I still insist on waiting despite the fact that it is no longer 2002 (and yes, I still wear my jeans from high school, BOOYAH bitches!), my underwear is usually hanging an inch or two out the back anyway. But still. My sexy britches are not to be on wide display on the counter to the giddy glee of the Wal-Mart clientele.

I hope he enjoyed it, though. Maybe the little old guy did, too. I do what I can. Community service and such.