Category: pet peeves

silly love songs

silly love songs

some people want to fill the world with silly love songs.

in this week’s new yorker, rebecca mead is wringing her hands over what she calls the percy jackson problem. for those of you who don’t have kids in the house,  here’s some 411:  percy jackson is the wacky protagonist of a series of books by (beloved-in-my-house) rick riordan. percy is a kid who has ADHD and behavioral problems in school — you know, that PITA kid whom every teacher wants to dropkick out the nearest window? percy, we also find out early in the series, is a greek demigod (which is part of the reason he struggles so.) through his adventures, kids (and the adults who read to them) often get their appetite whetted for the magical world of mythology.

so what’s so bad about percy? to paraphrase mead’s argument, between the use of slangy-current pop language and milieus and the less-than-deep storylines, folks in this camp are terrified that books like those in the percy jackson series are a gateway drug to a lifelong obsession with literary dross.  they believe that consuming these sorts of works results in less critical readers. in other words, popular fiction is dumbing down the world for kids.

(for those of you keeping score, this is #25,689 in the ways in which you are screwing up as a parent.)

when i was growing up, my mother took me to the library two and three times a week. no exaggeration here. the librarians knew us at both the ocean county library and the now-defunct bishop memorial library. if there were a 12-step program for bookaholics, my mother would be the queen and reigning champ. any time she has had a spare minute, her nose is in a book. if i woke up at ungodly o’clock a.m. as a kid, i’d usually find my mom,  black coffee and a romance or a mystery in hand. she has always been, and always will be, a book pusher. (ask my kids.) mom always had one rule at the library: take out whatever you want, but you need to actually read it.

now i still recall the day that dennis, the long-haired librarian at the ocean county library, stopped my nine-year-old self trying to take out romeo and julietgod bless you mr. rosewater, and war and peace. he looked at me squirrelly, then asked my mom whether she had actually seen what i was taking out of the library. (please don’t ask me why i had made those selections. it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

are you sure you want wreke taking out these books? he asked my mom.

she looked at me with the seriousness of an executioner. are you going to read them, wreke? she asked. i nodded that i would, in fact, tackle all three within the three allotted weeks i would be granted. she then looked at dennis. let’s take them out, then.

(the only one of the three i finished was romeo and juliet. in high school. kicking and screaming by then.)

yep, mom always let me read anything i wanted to read. there was the phase when i exclusively read partridge family and archie comic books. there was my sue barton, student nurse phase. there was every single book about the beatles phase. (that one is still in progress.) and of course, there was the time in seventh grade where i chose soul on ice for a book report. (i still wonder if my english teacher ever recovered from that one.)

in short, there have been plenty of generations of people reading all sorts of things — and somehow, we still continue to get great literature, great music, and great works of art. we all develop in weird and wonderful ways; and part of that is because we each receive such weird and wonderful input from all directions — from our families, from our friends, from our worlds — and of course, from our books. i know there are plenty of baby boomers who grew up reading all kinds of crap under the covers, and yet here we are. so please, get the hell off the backs of the younger generations. with all the other temptations out there, electronic and otherwise, it is difficult enough to get them to read. there will be plenty of time to refine things once they have caught the bug.

in the meantime (and with sincerest apologies to malcolm x), we need to get kids reading by any means necessary. i am not above enticing my kids’ interest in books however i can do it. i have read any number of silly things to them when they were little — i wanted them to just hear the words and love the sounds. over time, i would read chapter books that i thought sounded fun until they were old enough to make their own choices. i admit, though, that when they are a captive audience in the car with me driving four hours to see family, i break out books on CD that i get from my local library.  and they listen.

meanwhile, back in percy land… while waiting for percy jackson’s book five to come out, jools was jonesing for some riordan to read. we made a trek to central library, where we discovered that riordan has also written books… for GROWNUPS.  the boy borrowed mission road, a novel about a private eye trying to solve a murder. sure, it wasn’t his usual fare. but for a boy who loathes reading, he actually read it. granted, he was especially thrilled because there were CURSE WORDS! and INAPPROPRIATE THINGS! in the book. but you know what? he was reading.

what’s wrong with that? i’d like to know.

oxford comma

oxford comma

clearly, this bullshit did not end in the ’80s. pity that.

recently, i was talking with another parent about college. he was pretty insistent about his child going into engineering. now, nevermind he has no idea whether his child has any interest or inclination toward engineering (and science in general): that is what said child will be pursuing in a few years.  if his child is not interested in becoming some sort of engineer, then said kid can pay his way through school. this parent will not be contributing toward something stupid and useless like an english degree, for example.

(you know, the degree i happen to hold.)

when i was a college kid in the go-go 1980s, it was tough to be an english major, especially when you were child #3 following child #1 (a doctor) and child #2 (computer science dude.) and here i was, in love with language and meaning and, to be honest, writers in the earlyish part of the twentieth century. preferably, but not exclusively, women. oh, and usually american.  and i often answered the barrage of questions which really boiled down into one: what will you do with that english degree?

indignantly, i did what any self-respecting women’s college editorial editor would do: i wrote what ended up being my most popular column in college. who’s afraid of liberal arts? was so popular that it was actually reprinted. (evidently, i was not the only person with this conundrum.) i was tired of people asking me when i was going to get a real major, a pre-professional major. i was tired of people asking me if i sat and made daisy chains, too.  “i am sure,” i wrote, “that somewhere, someone in my family is squirreling away an English Major Fund so that when i’m big and in the real world, i will have a financial supplement.”

didn’t happen.

and, being pedantic in the way only a 21 year old lit student could be, i quoted john henry cardinal newman from the idea of a university noting that education should be for it’s own sake in order to help you grow as a person. education should be:

something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it seeks, which invests it with an idea.

i argued that it was easier to live with yourself when you were someone and not some thing. it is difficult to change gears if you make yourself narrow; but the study of liberal arts broadens you and makes you more of an intellectual utility infielder. in short, it helps you adapt.

decades later, i am glad i chose the path i did. yes, i went on to graduate school and specialized; but when i wanted more than what a career in that specialization offered, i duck and dove into something completely different: i crashed into the early days of the internet. on my interview, my boss showed me how to build something and then asked me, the english major, to build it. i froze at first (i’m an english major, remember?), then slowly attempted to make things happen as he had done.

and i messed up.

but, i took a deep breath, backed up, and tried something else. which worked. (mercifully.) and i got the job.

later, i asked my boss: why did you hire me when i messed up on the interview?

his reply? you backed up and figured it out. i need people who know how to think and who can learn. (it was a new industry at the time.) i don’t need specialists: it’s a new field and there are none.  (in 1995, there really weren’t.)

so yeah. english major here. english major who has developed and built web properties. who has done research studies in education policy. who has performed regression analysis. who has put together several major events, uniting cabinet level secretaries and their entire departments in the process. who masters the world and delivers it daily to her family. (note: i am still a crappy cook. but so far, i have not killed anyone.)  i’ve changed careers plenty, and now, i get to do what i always loved best: writing.

i’m not starving. i’m monitoring my world and changing with it as needed. i can write cogently (most of the time.) i can think. maybe i can’t fuse my identity to some specific career, but actually, i like being stealthy like that. and i’ll be damned if i make my kids tether themselves to a pre-professional course of studies unless it is the course they choose. sure, there are consequences in all choices, but should they be the deciders of their destinies? i think so.

so to that parent who is willing to carrot-and-stick his kid’s future with his own demands? maybe you need to be squirreling away a Therapy For My Kid fund.

oh. and while i am not using capital letters in my blog,  for the record: i do give a fuck about the Oxford comma.

hateful songs: “sherry” (frankie valli and the four seasons)

hateful songs: “sherry” (frankie valli and the four seasons)

those who know me can guess why.

i know that there is a whole world of people who cherish the old time music. you know what i mean by that music: that romanticized thought of young men, standing around street corners, harmonizing instead of swiping hubcaps? during the ’50s and early ’60s, white boys did it, black boys did it, heck, it seemed like everyone and his dog liked to do that (except for the rockers, who were tearing up music when they weren’t tearing up towns.)  the success of the broadway show jersey boys cements that whole musical period into american fabled lore.

i loathe that music.

in fact, i would probably voluntarily sit in a modern country concert before i would subject myself to an evening of doo-wop classics. while modern country music in general (there are exceptions, and i do like alt-country) sounds to me more like rejects from lite 1970s soft rock, doo-wop artists make weird noises in a way that actually makes me physically want to get up and run away from the sound. and no other purveyor of this sort of music annoys me more than frankie valli and the four seasons. it was bad enough that they sang unadulterated crap; but the sound! oh! the sound! between the piercing soprano-like warbles exiting valli’s mouth to the WHINE. you know the whine i mean: as in, big girls…do-won’t CRY-YI-YI. 

arrrrrrrrrgh!

you actually need to keep me far from sharp objects when they come on. i may do myself harm, just to escape his voice.

and the ultimate worst for me? Sherry. when your name (or a name similar to it) gets used in a song, people make fun of you. ask anyone my age named michael whether people ran after them singing:my name is michael, i got a nickel, etc.  unless your name is linda or yoko, you probably don’t enjoy songs with your name in them, either.  and when your then-10-year-old brother runs after you, singing something insulting at the top of his lungs, you tend to hate it. a lot. especially when he alters the words to:

SHERRY…SHERRY’S A BABY. SHERRY. SHERRY’S A BABY.

so yeah. three strikes against the song. 1) i can’t stand frankie valli and the four seasons, 2) i don’t like being teased by my brother with song lyrics like this, and 3) there are only three people on this planet — two relatives and my friend sushma — who can call me sherry and live.

you are probably not one of them.

i want it now

i want it now

(there’s no way on Dog’s green earth i would link to frank zappa’s song on this topic. just so you know…)

can six life-impaired, personality-stunted millenial women from my tribe grow the fuck up and get lives? yes, this is but one of the questions i ponder now that bravo tv, home of such important television productions as the real housewives of new jersey and don’t be tardy, unleashed a new show onto the world: princesses: long island.  they were four men, living all together. yet they were all alone. whoops. wrong show.  it’s what i call car crash tv — so awful, yet i cannot look away from these six glamazons, all vying to be the poster child for a long-standing stereotype of jewish women:  the jewish american princess, or JAP for short.

so may i present to you exhibit a: the ladies, in their late 20s/early 30s — each one more frightening than the next. there’s amanda, who met her smarmy, stalker-like beau jeff on the LIRR. she lives with her divorced cougar mom who seems a little too eager to insert herself inappropriately into amanda’s existence.  there’s ashlee (and i always have trouble with women whose names end up cutie-pie-spelled, like what a double e does here), a very spoiled young lady whose middle name i’m betting is veruca salt, who clearly has daddy issues, and who probably will never be able to function in a life by herself.  (in a rental beach house in the hamptons, ashlee calls her mom, freaked out because she has issues sleeping on sheets other people have slept on. oh. and she has a small stain on her sheet in her bed. can her mom help her via phone?) casey is as close to normal as you get on this show, though she is still crushed over being betrayed by erica (you’ll hear about her in a sec) back in high school. there’s chanel, named for the bag in which she was conceived who may end up banished from her home shtetl, anatevka, as her younger sister is engaged and she herself has no visible prospects for love. erica, who trumpets the fact that she was apparently the biggest slut on long island of her day. her day, unfortunately, has come and gone, and she finds herself surrounded by women whose boyfriends she has stolen in earlier times. (uh oh.) last but not least, there is joey, who lives in the poor area (according to a screeching ashlee who braces for a carjacking while driving through joey’s ‘hood) and, while she lives at home, is attempting something entrepreneurial but who is shaping up to be a little two-faced conniver. (mark my words.)

all of these women still live at home. most of these women do nothing every day except shop (with mommy and daddy’s money), tan, get mani/pedis, drink, and meddle in each other’s affairs. they are waiting for their rich guy to take them away from all this… and then give it right back to them, preferably at an even higher $$ level. this is the prequel franchise, if you will, for the real housewives. they all make marjorie morningstar look like a bra-burning radical. there’s something very sad about women who, in 2013, expect men to take over their care and feeding. there’s something also very disturbing about how entitled these women are: as if somehow, they are deserving of this material wealth; it is their birthright, though they had no part in creating it — and some man needs to come along and pick up the tab from mommy and daddy.

to be sure, it is a bit unsettling watching a show that is perpetuating a stereotype, especially one i know my jewish girlfriends and i have worked very hard to kick to the proverbial curb. i still remember when a friend of mine nicknamed my cousin and i the JAP cousins (when nothing could be further from the truth for either one of us.) clearly, no intelligent person who watches bravo reality TV thinks that this is real life, right? it’s escapist bullshit spun into expensively bleached and teased gold. but because it is called princesses, it brings to mind the concept of jewish princesses; and for those idiots of the world who take this as literal truth in tv, this becomes their absurd perception of the reality of all jewish women.

now, i would be lying if i said i never encountered these sorts before. when i was going into ninth grade, my mom and her friend worked one summer as teachers/counselors at a tony summer camp in upstate new york. this camp was the domain of jewish kids from long island. her friend’s son and i went to camp that summer in exchange for their labors.

it seemed like a good idea at the time.

i wrote about that experience awhile back. in short, though, it was a disaster. i didn’t get on well with the JAPpy girls in the bunkhouse, as i had more on my mind than just polishing my nails. i spent my time with the counselors after hours, as they liked me and loathed the other campers. and admittedly, i carried that bad taste and stereotype around in my head for a long, long time.

fortunately, time has shown me a lot of long island jewish chicks who don’t fit into that mold — and plenty of other women, not necessarily from long island and not necessarily jewish — who do. i wish some of those amazing long island jewish women could get more airplay for the feats they’ve accomplished, as some of them are just stunning. but i guess that doesn’t make for great reality tv. only stereotypes make for great reality tv, apparently, as stereotypes provide a mental shorthand for the mentally weak.

so, for those who require such categorization (and with sincerest apologies to the seven dwarves), we’re stuck with the six dipshits: dumpy, dopey, stunted, old maideleh, slutty and the kvetch. but the twist?

they’re not looking for prince charming. these girls are all looking for doc.

 

watch closely now

watch closely now

is anyone watching them now?

since anyone can remember, the big kids at the elementary school get important volunteer jobs. some are bus patrols. some help inside the school, like BC, who at the time asked to be a music helper because there’s no way on earth i am doing a job where you have to stand outside in the rain and the snow somedays. and of course, there are the kids who work the kiss and ride.

the kiss and ride is a critical part of the morning for a lot of us. sleep-hazed parents and children start to pull up at the designated strip of land around 8:30 or so, where, if they’ve shown up by then, one of six 5th graders opens the door, announces good morning! in a voice suitable for a mickey mouse club audition, waits for various numbers of children to tumble out onto the sidewalk, declares that you should have a nice day! in the next breath, and slams the door (hopefully not on the backside of the last child out. ) they also direct traffic, waving drivers to move up as far along the path as they can be, to accommodate as many cars as possible in a short period of time. it’s actually not an easy job, especially for 10 and 11 year olds.

now, in theory, these kids are supervised, much in the same way the bus patrols are supervised, in theory, by the bus drivers (who have nothing better to do than navigated miles and miles of suburban and urban tangles amidst drivers who really ought to consider valium prior to getting in their respective vehicles.) but as of late, i have scratched my head and wondered why kids are directing traffic without an adult nearby.

maybe it’s because i come on the early shift — usually between 8:30 and 8:40. perhaps the grownups come out afterwards in the height of traffic — the 8:40-8:50 timeframe when, i suspect, all you-know-what breaks loose. (or can. i wouldn’t put it past a lot of these adults, all of whom are so.very.important.people.in.dc.don’t-you-know-who-i-AM?) but i don’t usually see any grownups there supervising the kids. i should note i have been doing this run for six years now. i have a lot of years of kiss-and-ride patrol experience here. and while last year’s crew was head-and-shoulders the worst bunch of patrols ever, this year’s is giving them a run for their money. i have been driving up when one child is walking backwards, as if on a balance beam, on the very edge of the sidewalk, while cars nearly miss him. i have had kids nearly taking out my kid’s leg as they absentmindedly close the door behind him (too bad for my son, he’s not a speed demon every morning.)

and this morning took the proverbial cake. i pulled up behind a car where one of the patrols was holding the door open. unfortunately, there was no child getting out — in fact, the child was already down the sidewalk, turning the corner towards the school building. but the patrol, deep in conversation with the five other patrols, who were all sitting on the fence like little birdies, chirping amongst themselves, didn’t notice. i saw the mother behind the wheel yell something to the patrol. the spell broken, he turned and, realizing his error, closed the door so that she could proceed.

meanwhile, jools, who had by this time undone his seat belt and who had leaned forward to give me a goodbye kiss, had realized that no one was coming to open his door. those little birdies were still yapping away on the fence to the one standing, who somehow didn’t realize that another car had been waiting behind the first. taking the initiative, jools started to open his door and proceed out. the birdies were suddenly awakened — they leapt off the fence and started yelling at me to move my car up. hello — you didn’t get up off your butts to let my kid out, so you can wait until he safely gets himself out of the car. they continued to yell at me while jools made his way. i don’t tend to get into arguments with kids, mine or other peoples’ – but i did announce to them — maybe if you paid attention to your job and stopped yakking, this could have been different.

they were not amused.

but, my goal was not to get into it with a bunch of 5th graders (i do consider myself smarter than a 5th grader, at least most days anyhow) but rather to get my son safely off to school. and i did, though i didn’t get to tell him i love you like i do on most mornings — i just saw him slink sadly down the street toward school.

now, i realize that these are 10 and 11 year old kids. but that is exactly my point. i see the adult crossing guard who really has a time of it up the street from the school, trying to get people to stop so that pedestrians on their way to school don’t end up as road pizza. and she is an adult. and when kids are supervised at the kiss-and-ride, they are on the ball and pay attention to this job which they probably should hand off to grownups in the first place. but. left to their own devices and without supervision, kids will be kids. they will zone off. they will space out. they will chatter. and they won’t necessarily be paying as close attention to a job in which safety is paramount — for themselves as well as for the people whom they serve.

next year, jools has a shot of being some sort of school helper. i sincerely hope he opts to help out the music teacher, like his sister did. i don’t know how much she was supervised when she was a music helper, but my spidey sense tells me that the worst thing that might happen there would be he might drop a cymbal on his foot. i can live with that sort of mistake.

and so can he.

mother

mother

just read this article in the Washington Post. it makes me want to run screaming. with scissors in hand, too.

here you have frugal mama (check out her site.) she has some neat recipes and ideas. she also has some lovely photos of her beautiful children. i’m sure she’s a really excellent mom, and i don’t take issue with that end of things. such a clean, nicely-decorated house! such well-scrubbed kids! and how big of her — she saves money by sending her children to the public schools. that’s what passes for down-to-earth, you know.

there’s this wonderful fantasy moms, especially urban ones, foster: the one about the simple life where they grow their veggies for the kids, watch little to no TV, and have this contained existence over which they have perfect control. this seems to be the idea this mom blogger is perpetuating. la la la — see my house, organized with categorized mason jars, toys all contained in container store containers, my kids eating natural veggies and fruits from the farmers market. pinterest feeds on this sort of thing; i’m guilty of harboring the fantasy myself at times. and who doesn’t want to spend more time with their family? (okay, let me rephrase that: who doesn’t want to spend more quality time with their families?)  however, as a mom (and a blogger since 2002, long before most of these mommy bloggers were mommies, i would add), i find some aspects of this existence head-scratchingly irritating.

for starters, i cannot bring myself to take any sort of financial advice from a woman who has no retirement savings. unless she expects her children to come circle Marmee and support her in her old age, she’d better start contemplating that idea or else hope that these frugal ideas get kicked into high gear for her future blog where she extols the virtues of being a frugal senior citizen (with hopefully no medical issues to speak of.) i don’t know how fashionable it will be to eat cat food while waiting for your social security check to come in.

secondly, life can be controlled (to a certain point) until kids hit their teen years, when pop culture and hormones intermingle in such a way where you may ultimately be making the choice: have your kid conform to your TV-free lifestyle (not that TV is a treasure, but put yourself in the shoes of the average teen) and be ostracized socially, or relent and let those new demons into the home. lady, do you remember middle school? it’s tough enough because everyone is different (and different, as we all know, is so horrible at that age) — but you might be setting your kids up to be sitting alone in the library at lunchtime… well, maybe they won’t be alone. they may have the tiger moms’ kids in there, though they’ll be too busy studying to talk to your kids.

you don’t go grocery shopping anymore; you do all your shopping online with amazon prime. i know that’s a tip that will work well for folks on food stamps.

finally, how freaking frugal are you, really, when you can afford a house in NW DC and afford renovations? Why not move into a less tony area and see how much you enjoy the perks of frugality. not saying that frugality isn’t a noble idea. but I do wonder about this patina of elegance that this sort of idea has gotten these days. it’s a frugality that appears to come straight out of a Pottery Barn ad. like your home decor.

let’s call this all what it is: upper-middle-class fluffy fantasy of slowing down your family life. that’s nice if you can afford it. unfortunately, a lot of people in this world cannot. they are actually working to earn money for things, and not just $1000 tables (which you just had to have. hopefully, you aren’t one of those who frowns on welfare families who buy things that are frills when they cannot even afford the necessities.)

it’s awfully easy to be frugal when you have money.

she’s waiting

she’s waiting

…because her mama trained her properly, that’s why.

no, she’s not waiting in that way. or at least, not what you folks might think. this is a pet peeve of mine, and on this last day of NaBloPoMo, i thought i would end on a cranky note. (cos that is what folks expect of me.)

i am a carpool queen. i shuttle kids here, i shuttle them there, mama wreke shuttles kids everywhere. as a stay-at-home mom, i tend to take on rides in the early afternoon, when a lot of my kids’ friends’ parents are still working or quite possibly sitting in traffic somewhere, cooling their heels.

i don’t mind it, really. i get some of my best material listening to the kids talk.  i’ve learned more about which boys are awful, which girls are snooty, which kids are kind, and which people should just be avoided at all costs. i’ve listened to silly-ass knock-knock jokes, i’ve listened to retellings of some pretty nasty pop music lyrics. sure, i make the kids listen to whatever is on my mp3 player, though anything with NSFW lyrics gets the fast-forward treatment. i don’t care whether my kids hear these things, but i suspect the rest of the world would be upset if johnny or janie listened to some of the finer verbage from panic at the disco. like, say, this:

anyway, my kids are trained from the get-go: when someone is picking you up, you wait at the appointed time by the window and watch for your ride. when they come, you shout out and let me know, and then you proceed directly to the car. people are kind enough to give you a ride, and you need to be kind and not make everyone else late by dallying.

apparently, though, this concept is not common knowledge. i can’t tell you how many times my kids and i have to come to people’s doors and knock and collect them. worse than that, though, are the times when the person isn’t ready, and when i mean not ready, i don’t mean that someone had to suddenly hit the loo before leaving. i get that, and i’m actually okay with that. but i have had situations where the person had to finish homework, finish texting someone, or finish talking to someone on the phone. and, in all of these cases, the people weren’t immediately trying to wrap things up, either; they were taking all the time in the world.

GRRRRRR!

i get that stuff happens, and so when it does, i don’t get annoyed or upset. but i have noticed as of late that there are recurrences of these sorts of events with the same folks. it really burns me up. am i supposed to be teaching the kids that they need to stop what they’re doing and get in the car if they have any intention of getting to point B? then, of course, i will get the rep as the mean-ass mom who scares all her kids’ friends.

then again, maybe that’s not such a bad thing…

get up offa that thing

get up offa that thing

you heard the man.

tomorrow is thanksgiving, a day in which millions of families across the US experience something pretty similar: women cooking and cleaning while men eat and then leave to watch TV (usually football.) when i was young, it didn’t occur to me that my mom spent hours cooking ahead of time and then cleaning afterwards, with little help from any of us save for my aunt barbara. i just thought it was a wonderful day where i was able to eat one of my favorite meals and then go off and do what i wanted.  (in fact, one of my favorite memories is a post-thanksgiving bike ride i once took with my aunt.)

now that i’m older, it all falls into perspective. i am the grown woman around here. a week or so before the blessed date, supermarkets start getting insane. in fact, i hit trader joe’s yesterday to get milk and such because i know better than to go into a supermarket today. a day or two in advance, i usually start getting some of the sides ready. some sides lend themselves to earlier prep, like cranberry sauce. others, however, are better left for game day.

and then, my bête noire — the turkey.

i hate cooking meat in general. and turkey? i can tell you about the year it was crispy on the outside and raw on the inside. or the year i was pregnant and making turkey was a struggle between cooking and barfing. i hit the point where it was a far, far better thing to buy the turkey pre-cooked than force my family to wonder whether they were going to experience salmonella up close and personal.

but then, after all this work, and after a beautiful meal, everyone leaves me to it.

women — it is time to tell the men that they need to do dishes. it’s about freaking time someone stood up for all that is fair. if people expect you to go through planning and cooking hell, the least they can do is help wash things and put them away. post-dinner football watching is not a Dog-given right. sheesh, even some of the most feministically-minded women i know still let the men off scot-free. not fair, i say. hand them a sponge and tell them to get cracking.

and for you guys who actually help out on thanksgiving day, bless you, one and all. the rest of you lazy shits — it’s time to get over yourselves. your spouses and significant female others do not work for you, this day or any other. give them something to really be thankful for — a guy with manners who actually appreciates all that has been done for him.

this year, i wasn’t feeling the love for cooking. and  BS agreed that this year, we could spend thanksgiving at a restaurant. i am looking forward to no cooking, no dishes. yeah, i won’t have any leftovers, either.

i think i can live with that.

big empty

big empty

wow. inboxes can get pretty full.

i don’t often open my gmail account. everything gets forwarded to various places and all is well. but tonight, morbid curiosity had me fire up the old gmail to see what was happening… and what was happening was over 40,000 emails, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. well, not really kissing but merely clogging up my li’l corner of cyberspace.

::insert guilt here::

so i started thinking of the major offenders, to which i have subscribed and never cleared out… places like groupon, for example.  search, delete, search, delete, etc. it gets pretty boringly addictive. can i make it below 39,ooo? can i make it below 38,000?

after about 30 minutes, i am only just about 35,000. how the hell did i get this many emails?

i live in fear for when i finally confront my facebook emails. that may require an intervention.

so see you when i come up for air. maybe when i hit 30,000.

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