November 10, 2007 · 1:27 pm

Things He Thinks About

Do you remember those commericials that went something like “It’s 10:00 p.m.  Do you know where your children are?”

Well, my son is six, so I pretty much ALWAYS know where he is.  If I can’t see him I can hear him.  Like right now, he is upstairs complaining LOUDLY about something having to do with his LEGOs.

His dad is upstairs in the kitchen making bagels because:

a) he found a recipe

b) they are the easiest thing in the world to buy already made, but nooooo…..

c) he feels a need to dirty more bowls and pots and pans

d) we already ate pancakes and bacon at 7:00 a.m., and

e) he’s tired of playing with LEGOs

But back to my son.  Like I said, even if I can’t see the child, I can hear him. He does nothing quietly.  He’d make for a terrible cat burglar.  He even thinks out loud.  So here, for your amusement, are some things my son thinks about on any given day: 

How did people go to the bathroom a long time ago when they were locked in the stockades?

What if people didn’t have butts?  How would they go to the bathroom?  I guess they’d have to poop out of their penis. (I gather this would be painful, but at least the guys would be able to eliminate.  Women would be out of luck.)

Where did people go to the bathroom in ancient Egypt?

What did they wear in ancient Egypt since they didn’t have clothes?  They only had that little thing that covers their butt and their penis.

I’m going to take a trip to ancient Egypt!

Why can’t you marry your cousin? How will they know if you marry your cousin?  Who is going to tell the marrying people that it’s your cousin?

I’m off to grab a bagel and climb back in bed.  The kid woke me up way too early to try and come up with answers to his questions.

7 Comments

Filed under humor, life, Snags, thinking out loud, thoughts

November 8, 2007 · 2:15 am

When the Dark (When the Clocks Change, Part 2)

I cannot get the beginning lyrics to Ben E. King’s song Stand By Me out of my head. The part that goes:

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we’ll see
No I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

Because not only did I miss out on that lovely extra hour of sleep that most people get to enjoy at the change over to standard time, but I battle against a nightly panic when I step outside after work to head to my car and find that it’s pitch black out. 

I should be used to this by now, considering it happens every year.  But I am not.  Every evening, now that it’s dark before 6:00, I feel very suddenly and extremely rushed.  I feel a need to hurry home, to be home ALREADY, to draw the blinds, lock the doors, and batten down against the night.

It doesn’t make sense, really.  If I look at a clock I can easily see that it’s 6:00 p.m. and all is well.  We’ll eat dinner when I get home, around 6:30, like we have all summer and early fall, like we did when it was still light out.  But this sense of urgency, of the day being OVER, of it being too close to bedtime, of me not having had enough daylight to spend with my son, I can’t shake it.  It will repeat itself nightly until some time in the Spring, when the clocks jump forward once again and the sun still lights the sky when I climb into my car to drive home after work.  But right now, as soon as the sun sets, I feel like the day, the ENTIRE day, not just the work part, is over. Finis. And like I missed it. 

The feeling evokes anxiety of the kind I feel on Sundays, my least favorite day of the week.  Even on Sunday morning, with a whole day ahead of me, I feel that the weekend is over, that I’m only preparing for Monday.  I feel like I must hurry, that I cannot relax.

Once I am home in the evenings, where it’s warm and bright inside, but dark and cold outside, the idea of a world full of lights and activity just down the road from me seems impossible.  And yet it’s not.

I’m nearly always surprised, on the occasions that I venture out of the house after dark in the winter, to find that others are out and about.  It’s as if the jolt of an electric shock runs through me and wakes me up when I see that the parking lots and shopping centers are well lit, the roads are buzzing with cars, the restaurants are serving dinner and the stores are full of bustling shoppers.  Life, I suddenly realize anew, does go on after dark.  Obviously not everyone feels the need to bunker down when the sun sets.

And then there are people who prefer the darkness.  I call them vampires.  Or former co-workers…  I used to, many years ago, work for an environmental firm.  It was a place that, among other things, was fond of trying to conserve energy.  Some of the offices had been fitted with lights that were set motion detectors.  The lights would come on as you entered the room.  But they’d shut off if they didn’t detect nearly constant movement.  Unless you were a very fidgety kind of typist, you’d be sitting in the dark after a few keystrokes.  Then you’d have to stand up and wildly wave your arms around trying to trigger the sensors into turning the lights back on. 

In other areas of the building they didn’t bother to install motion sensors.  They simply turned the lights out.  During the day.  While everyone was working.  The bosses felt that the sunlight filtering in through the windows was light enough, so they’d turn out hallway lights and half of the ceiling lights over the maze of cubicles.  Even on the sunniest of days it made the place feel dim.  On cloudy days it was like working in the deep dank recesses of a cave.  In the winter, by late afternoon, the place was full of long suffocating shadows – filing cabinets and bookcases looming out of proportion.  The last person to leave the office was supposed to turn off all the lights.  Since that was often me, my husband gave me a flashlight to light my way lest I trip over an errant file folder on my way to the front door.  It was unnerving, working all day in a dimly lit building then being the last to leave and needing a flashlight to do so.      

I don’t know how much energy, if any, was saved this way, but I know “that deal with the lights” as I came to call it, nearly drove me insane.

Now the night has come, and the land is dark, but it’s okay.  I am home.  I am bunkered down against the cold, against the night.  And the moon is NOT the only light I see.  I’ve got the lights turned on all over this place. 

4 Comments

Filed under anxiety, darkness, life, lights, standard time

November 6, 2007 · 1:19 am

When the Clocks Change

So that extra hour of sleep this weekend… You know, the one you got with the change back to standard time? How was it?  Did you enjoy it?  If you did, don’t tell me about it.  I haven’t benefited from that extra hour of sleep even once in the past six years.

Since my son’s birth, little joys like an extra hour of sleep, even once a year, have become a thing of the past.  The kid wakes up pretty much the same time every morning, regardless of when he goes to bed the night before.  If I put him to bed at 8:30, he’s up by 6:15.  If I keep him up until midnight, he’s still up by 6:15, with the added bonus of grump personality to polish it off.  To remind me that not only was he up until midnight, but so was I.  And that sucks.

This year though, I actually allowed myself to get my hopes up a little.  Snags and his dad were having an Xbox night, and I thought I’d head off to bed early, maybe grab two extra hours of sleep.  It was going to be great.  My husband would put Snags to bed and then he was going to sleep in another room because I was getting up early to go running, and he didn’t want my alarm to wake him.  You know, the way his alarm clock wakes me every.damn.morning. of the week. 

So I went to bed.  And you see where this is going right?  It’s all downhill from where I got my hopes up.  Because an hour later I woke up and needed to go to the bathroom.  I went, then I crawled back in bed, closed my eyes, and the dog started scratching at the bedroom door.  She needed to go outside.  Grudgingly I got up, went downstairs, and let her out.  I climbed the stairs and crawled back in bed.  And that’s exactly when somebody else’s dog, outside somewhere, started barking.  Bark, bark, barking.  So my dog started growling.  Right there, in the middle of my bed, in the dark, she’s lying there growling. Now this this probably only went on for ten minutes, but it felt like hours until I got up and shot both dogs. 

Okay, okay.  I didn’t shoot them (please note, no animals were harmed in the making of this story).  But I did lie there imaging myself calling the police and asking them to troll the neighborhood listening for the barking dog and for them to shoot it to put me out of my misery…

Eventually the outside dog stopped barking and my dog stopped growling in response, and I fell back to sleep.  But then I dreamt about work stuff.  Now dreaming about work generally sucks any time it happens but it is especially sucktacular when it happens on weekends. 

I don’t know if I met the work deadline in my dreams because my dog woke me up AGAIN by scratching at the bedroom door so she could go outside and do her business, AGAIN.  Had my husband been in bed with me I would have kicked him and pretended I hadn’t, pretended I was sound asleep, and he would have heard her and gotten up and taken her outside.  But of course he wasn’t there.  So I tried to fool the dog into sleep by calling her name all sweet and enticing like until she jumped back on the bed, and then I petted her, hoping she’d fall asleep and forget about her need to pee for the second time in three hours.  But it was wasted petting because she didn’t fall asleep, and she jumped down off the bed and scratched at the door with her mangy paw until I gave up and took her downstairs to let her out again. 

This time, as I headed back up to bed, I started thinking about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the book I have been reading, and how perhaps there was a vampire RIGHT BEHIND ME ON THE STAIRS and so I ran up the stairs as fast as I could, cursing the dog and the scary book and the night and the fact that I had to get up in a few short hours to go running.  Of course when I got to the top of the stairs my heart was pounding, and as I climbed into bed AGAIN, I could feel my heartbeat and hear it in my ears.  Like a bad drum beat.  In the middle of the night.

I tried to fall asleep again but this time my brain wouldn’t shut off and I just kept thinking of all kinds of shit: the route I was planning to run, how cold it would be in the morning, the birthday party Snags had to go to in the afternoon, whether or not I’d let the dog back in the house if she woke me up a third time, the laundry I needed to take care of so I’d have some clean clothes for work, the Halloween decorations that I needed to put away, the scary book I was reading…

Then I realized it was hot in the room.  I tried to ignore the feeling but it wasn’t getting any better, so I threw off the covers.  That didn’t help so I got up and changed out of my flannel pajamas into something not so flannely and crawled back under the covers trying to decide if I should leave the flannels on the floor or put them in the bed under the covers.  In the morning, I knew, I’d be cold and want to change, but the flannel pajamas would be too cold to put back on if I left them on the floor. Even in different pajamas I was hot, so I had to get up again to turn on the ceiling fan.  Ten minutes later, of course, I was freezing, so I had to pull all the covers up onto the bed again.  All in all, between the temperature game and my brain that was on overload, I was awake for an hour and a half.  Add to that the treks up and down the stairs to let my dog out, and the stranger dog barking outside somewhere, and instead of gaining an hour of sleep, I lost a ton.

What’s that saying?  One step forward, two steps back?  So I’m mad. And bitter.  I can’t get that sleep back.  It’s gone forever.  And sadly, I know that when Spring rolls around, and we all have to move our clocks forward again, I’ll be even more behind.

8 Comments

Filed under daylight savings time, dog, humor, life, sleep, standard time

November 2, 2007 · 9:55 am

And Then She Said

And then she said, “Your son is successful in all the areas here, he doesn’t need improvement in any of them.  Let me show you some of his work and give you some examples of what I am talking about…”

She pulled out the spelling test. “Your son,” she said, “was the only child in the entire class who knew how to spell every sight word we’ve learned so far.”

“Look at his writing,” she said, as she pulled out another sheet.  “And look here,” she pointed.  “He knows how to use punctuation marks!  I can talk about something one day and the next day he is incorporating it into his writing.  Because I know he is listening, it is easy for me to sneak in more learning.  I can write a question on the board and casually mention to the class that this is a question mark and we use it when we ask a question, and the next day your son is using question marks appropriately in his writing.  None of the other children are doing this.” 

“And here,” she pointed again, “he is using QUOTATION MARKS!  I talked about them just the other day and the next day he was trying them out!” 

“I LOVE having him in my class,” she said.  “I just get so excited because I see he is learning things and I can just slip new concepts in, like punctuation marks, and I know that he at least, will pick up on them.  We don’t usually teach punctuation marks in Kindergarten but it’s an easy thing for me to slip in there and your son picks up on it and has something new to think about and practice using.”

“In math, he is so advanced I’ve arranged to meet with the math enrichment teacher to have her develop a special math program for him so we can continue to meet his needs and so he won’t be bored.  It will be special, just for him, and only one or two other children in the entire Kindergarten.”

“The other children,” she went on, “look up to him and go to you son for help on things.  In fact, just the other day a bunch of them went up to him on the playground to get him to solve a problem for them.  They had been playing something and had some kind of problem and one of them said “Snags can help us solve this!”  And the children all agreed, so off they went to find him.  He has lots of friends here. He gets along with everyone.  He likes to help others.”

“He follows the rules, he is responsible. I can always count on him to listen and do what I have asked.  I don’t have to repeat myself.”

Right up until that last sentence I had been nodding my head and smiling encouragingly.  Tell me more! I thought. Go on, brag up my kid!  I thought.  I mean, I knew he was pretty smart.  We haven’t done any IQ tests or anything, but compared to some of the kids he plays with whom I can’t even understand, who don’t know their shapes or their colors or how to count to ten, well, he just seemed pretty smart to me.  He can count up to 200, and he uses words like apparently and evidently and vegetation and possibility and perhaps.

But then she said “He follows the rules…I can always count on him to listen and do what I have asked.  I don’t have to repeat myself…” and I got such a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  She can’t be talking about my kid, I thought.  Certainly not.  Listening?  Not having to repeat herself?  If she’s got this part confused with some other child, then maybe all the smarty pants talk was about another kid as well…

Because right before the babysitter knocked on the door so my husband and I could go to the parent-teacher conference, I had to take the LEGOS away for misbehavior.  For not listening.  For not following the rules.  Get a bath without arguing.  Brush your teeth and get your pajamas on…  “Okay, fine then.  I am taking away the LEGOS!”

But she said she was talking about my kid. 

So I invited her to come live with us.

10 Comments

Filed under humor, Kindergarten, life, parent teacher conference, school, smart, Snags

October 31, 2007 · 12:40 am

Halloween: Then and Now

Think back a bit.  No, further… further…a little further…  Nice try.  You aren’t THAT young.  Go all the way back to when you were a kid.  Six years old, maybe eight, maybe ten… Remember when you got all overly excited about Halloween?  Remember the costumes that came in a box and consisted of some type of cape or gown and a cheap plastic mask with a really thin elastic strap to hold it in place?  And if you didn’t buy one of those you likely made your costume, or your mother did.  You were a girl from the 50s, or a cheerleader, a vampire or a witch, or for those who waited until the last minute, a ghost or a hobo.

Remember school parties and school parades where you lined up and marched around the school parking lot or the school playground wearing your costume?  When I was in second grade (or was it 4th?) I was Casper the Friendly ghost and I wore my costume to school and my mom packed Cheetos in my lunch and I wiped my orange cheese dusty fingers on my costume.  I remember my mother wasn’t happy about that.  I mean, who ever heard of an orange streaked ghost?  Even a friendly one?

How about trick-or-treating?  Do you remember how it took FOREVER to get dark enough out to go trick-or-treating?  It was only recently that I realized nothing significant had changed with the general flow of time or light and darkness.  Rather, it took forever to get dark back then because I was a kid ripe with anticipation, home from school at 3 p.m., and it didn’t get dark until nearly 7.  I had hours to kill.  Now I’m an adult and driving like a bat out of hell to get home from the office in time to flip the porch lights on, light the jack-o-lantern, and scarf some dinner down before the first band of ghouls come knocking at my door with their little hands all outstretched. 

Remember how it was almost always cold out on Halloween night and your mom always insisted you wear a coat over your costume to keep you warm and how that pissed you off (although you didn’t know “pissed off” because you were too young.  You knew it “wasn’t fair” and nobody would see your costume and “I won’t need a coat! I won’t be cold mom!”).  But often, your mom made you wear a coat anyway, because conventional wisdom and old wives tales said that being out in the cold would give you a cold.  Now we have global warming, thicker skin, and stronger defiance, and coats are rarely seen on Halloween.  Now we know that colds are caused by GERMS. 

Then remember how you would go house to house to house to house trying to collect as much candy as possible?  And sometimes people would go a little crazy and their whole family would be dressed up in scary costumes and sitting on the porch to scare you or they would play frightful music from speakers aimed out their windows?  Sometimes they’d answer the door in costume and that was always a little strange too.  A grown up dressed as a witch, or a pirate and you felt, but couldn’t express how exactly, you found it a bit creepy.  Not scary so much as just wrong somehow.  That was an adult, and adults were too old for Halloween.  They were supposed to open the door and give you the goods and that’s it.

Remember the candy?  The chocolate and peanut butter and caramel gooey goodness?  Remember the candy that you loved and the candy that you hated?  I hated the lollipops and the bubblegum and the hard candies.  Especially the red hots and jaw breakers.  Yuck!  Me, I was all about the chocolate and the peanut butter. Mmmm, mmmm! And years ago candy bars were bigger, weren’t they?  Sure, lots of people gave out snack size bars, but I swear that even those were bigger and then there was always that one house that gave out full size candy bars.  Everyone wanted to go that house, get there before the big candy bars ran out! I always thought the people who gave out the full size candy bars must have been rich to afford that.

Then there was the house where a dentist lived, and it was obvious it was a dentist because they always gave out toothbrushes.  Or the houses where they gave out pencils or stickers or pennies.  BORING!

There were also the houses where the people gave out homemade popcorn balls or candied apples.  They always looked good, but of course your mother wouldn’t let you eat them.  They were homemade.  Maybe the person who made them was a little bit crazy and had poisoned them just for fun, right?

When you got home from trick-or-treating you always had to dump your bag out on the table and let your parents look it over, let them inspect the candy for hidden needles and razor blades before they let you dig in lest you slice your tongue off.  Later on, hospitals started offering to X-ray the candy…

Those were they days, weren’t they?

Halloween now, it’s different.  Costumes are different for one thing.  Masks are considered dangerous, everyone needs a flashlight or a head lamp, the parents are all out supervising the trick-or-treaters (Halloweeners my dad calls them) to make sure nobody grabs their child off a porch and drags them into their house never to be seen again…  And with the parents out, nobody is home to answer the door and hand out candy at at least half the houses!

Schools don’t celebrate Halloween anymore because it’s too scary or too violent or it violates somebody’s religion or it’s not politically correct, or whatever. 

Some towns don’t even encourage trick or treating anymore.  They advise parents to take their youngsters to the mall and the merchants all hand out Dum Dum lollipops and bubble gum in a well lit place and they do this a few days before the real Halloween so the real day can go unmarked.  “You already celebrated Halloween, honey!  We did that three nights ago, remember?  At the mall?”

In my neighborhood we still have Halloween and trick-or-treating.  My son is going out this year dressed as Darth Vader.  He’s got a cool costume with a mask (but he will probably have to take it off to walk between houses) and a red light saber.  And he’s excited, as he should be. It’s kind of funny that he should be so excited considering that he cannot eat the candy he collects.  It’s not that I am afraid someone will have poisoned the candy.  He can’t eat the candy because for him, IT IS POISON.  He’s got food allergies.  He is allergic to milk, eggs, peanuts, and tree nuts.  And there aren’t many candies free of those ingredients.

So milk chocolate is out.  Peanut butter cups, Charleston chews, Mary Janes, Mounds, Almond Joy, Snickers, all out.  Marshmallow candies, out.  Chewy, gooey, caramel goodness, out.  There are a few treats he can eat: Nerds, Twizzlers, Dum Dum lollipops, a few others as well.  So my son will go out on Halloween night.  He will go trick-or-treating.  He will collect candy just like his friends.  And when we gets home I will sort through his bag of poison, (and yes that is how I think of it, he is out collecting poison) and I will take away all that he cannot eat. 

In truth, for all that he can’t eat he might as well be out collecting farm pesticides and household cleaners.  I am just going to take nearly all the candy away.  Some of the candy that I have to take away, I will eat.  Some my husband will eat.  Some of the “unsafe” candy as we call it, candy full of his allergens, we will re-Halloween-gift into our candy dish to had out to the kids still knocking at our door.  What’s left after that we will probably haul in to the office and share amongst co-workers.

As I separate the poison from the few candies my son can eat, I count it all, putting hatch marks on a piece of paper.  I’ll give my son something in exchange for all the candy he cannot eat. Maybe a toy.  Maybe a video.  Maybe we’ll pay him a nickel, maybe a dime per piece of candy we have to take away (hence the reason for the counting).  He did work to collect it, after all.  Anything safe that he collects, any candy that doesn’t contain his allergens, he can eat. Not all in one night of course!  That much about Halloween remains true.

You might wonder, “Why, if she feels like he is collecting poison, does she let her son go trick-or-treating at all?”  Well, because he likes it.  This is life, right?  Halloween is part of life and trick-or-treating is what you DO on Halloween.  My son doesn’t mind all that much about the candy.  He’s never tasted a Reeces Cup so he’s not missing anything.  I’m the one who’s had to make the biggest adjustment, the holiday no longer the same as it was in my youth, and certainly not the same as I’d imagined it would be for my son that day six years ago when he was a tiny infant, just a few weeks old, and I dressed him in a chili pepper costume for Halloween. He was screaming bloody murder but I propped him up on the sofa, next to a Halloween bag filled with baby bottles full of breast milk and a few pieces of candy tumbling out as well, and I took a bunch of photos.  I thought of the future, how one day he would like dressing up in costume, going out and collecting candy, sitting in his room and stuffing his face with chocolate until he was too full for dinner… Ironically, I am the one missing what he can’t have, what I imagined he would one day have.

My son is six now.  He likes choosing a costume and going trick-or-treating with his friends.  He’s excited this year to pretend for a while that he is Darth Vader, that he has the ability to scare others, all the while being a little scared by the scenes outside: the other children in costume, the adults that dress up, the flickering jack-o-lanterns, the frightful music playing at some houses, the mean scary guy down the street who decorates his house in an alluring manner then grabs children’s hands as they reach into his candy bowl.  He’s scared my son two years in a row now, left him crying.  We won’t be fooled a third time. This year we’ll only look at his house from afar. 

My son likes to hurry home after trick-or-treating to help me hand out candy to all the kids that come to our house. I am careful not to let on that I feel a vital part of Halloween has been lost, that I am nostalgic over what he cannot have. I can’t talk about the deliciousness of chocolate and peanut butter mixed together, of Snickers and Almond Joys.  I cannot suggest he is missing out in any way.  I am sure in some way he suspects this, but thankfully he’s never had those candies to know.  He’s happy with the hard candies and lollipops that I despised as a youth (and still despise).  He’s happy with a new toothbrush or some stickers, a pencil, a few pennies.  Those things aren’t boring to him at all, rather, they are things that he can keep.  And that’s fine.  And this is life.  It’s Halloween!  And besides, that’s the whole point of Halloween, right?  It’s supposed to haunt you, just a little.
 

13 Comments

Filed under costumes, food allergies, Halloween, life, nostalgia, then and now

October 29, 2007 · 12:01 am

After the Party

Driving home after a birthday celebration for my mother-in-law, we pass the site where my brother-in-law’s pastry shop is going to be.  It’s officially under construction, but so far the construction looks like a lot full of turned up dirt with a few stakes in the ground. 

Snags, riding in the back seat of the car, says “I hope Uncle Mikey isn’t an astronaut by the time they finish building his pastry shop!” And since construction generally takes six or eight months around here, and since Mikey isn’t a pilot of any kind, nor does he work for NASA, the chances of him becoming an astronaut in the next six or eight months are somewhere between pigs flying and hell freezing over.  My husband said “If Uncle Mikey is an astronaut before his pastry shop is finished, I’ll eat my hat!”

Snags thought that was pretty funny, you know, eventually… like after we spent several minutes explaining what “eat my hat” meant. But then Snags went on to demand “What hat?” and my husband said, “I don’t know, any hat…  Some hat…  A hat.  It doesn’t matter…”

Snags (the optimist) considered all this for a few minutes then said, “Well, if Uncle Mikey is an astronaut by then that’s okay because I will take over his pastry shop!”

To which I replied, “You will?  Oh really?  How are you going to do that?  What about school?”

“Oh, I’ll go to school! School can come to me while I am at the pastry shop!” Snags said, the air of a child actor in his tone.

“Besides,” he continued, “They aren’t even teaching us anything at school anyway.  At least it feels like they aren’t! I don’t think we’re learning anything.”

I called him on that.  I said “Well, what about all the sight words they’ve taught you?  And all the words you can write now?  You even write whole sentences by sounding out words yourself!”

“And math!” my husband added.  “You know how to count by ten.”

Snags obviously felt bolstered from our pointing out all the things he had learned in school.  “Yeah!” he said, “And I can count by eleven! Listen… 11, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, 91, 101, 1000…” 

My husband couldn’t take it.  He interrupted. “How about 11, 22, 33, 44, 55….”

“You don’t know Dad!  Snags cried.  “I can count by twelve too, wanna hear?” Snags asked.

“Sure,” I said stifling a laugh.

“Okay… 12, 32, 42, 52, 62, 72, 82, 92, 102, 1000!” he proudly proclaimed.

And there, in the darkened night, with a low slung but full and bright moon shining in front of us, I thought to myself, maybe he’s right.  Maybe they aren’t teaching him anything in school afterall.

10 Comments

Filed under astronaut, counting, humor, Kindergarten, learning, life, pastry shop, Snags, Uncle Mikey

October 26, 2007 · 12:43 am

Was That a Bat That Just Flew By?

So I was listening to NPR yesterday and… Yes, I listen to NPR!  You got a problem with that?  Anyway, like I said, I was listening to the Diane Rehm show on NPR yesterday morning and Diane and her guests were talking about Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  It’s a book I haven’t ever read but now I am going to.  I hope it’s not as scary as Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot because I don’t think I can take scary anymore.  When I was a teenager, scary movies and books were fun.  Now… well, now I’ve got a child and I am an adult and I’m supposed to be brave. For my child. It wouldn’t look so good to jump 10 feet in the air and scream in fear because I just read a scary passage and Snags climbed out of his bed to ask for a glass of water…

But I am definitely going to go to the library and check out that book.  This weekend, if they have it.  And the reason I am going to do it is because I learned something very valuable while listening to the story.  So I am going to read the book as a Thank You! to show my appreciation for Bram and for NPR.  If he hadn’t written the book, they wouldn’t have been talking about it on the radio.  And I wouldn’t have learned one of the finer points about vampire safety. 

You see, they said on the radio that Bram Stoker left out a few characteristics about vampires that were pretty common folklore at the time he wrote the book. One of them being that vampires like to count things.  I seem to recall that Sesame Street got that part right, but Bram Stoker, he left it out altogether. But it’s important, because according to the folklore, one way to keep vampires away is to scatter things about.  That way, if a vampire comes to get you, he will get distracted and start counting all the things you left scattered about.

Which is why, I am pretty sure, that I haven’t had a problem with vampires in my house.  I’ve got piles of shit everywhere.  Magazines, books, toys, clothes, you name it.  I was going to clean it all up, but now I’ve got a reason to keep the place just the way it is.  This isn’t clutter.  It’s vampire deterrent.  And my neck, it’s staying bite free. 

4 Comments

Filed under clutter, Dracula, humor, NPR, radio, vampires

October 24, 2007 · 12:09 am

Running for Tiffany

Once upon a time there was a girl.  She liked to run.  She liked Tiffany’s.  The jewelry store, that is, not other girls named Tiffany.  Although she assumed they were very nice as well.  The girl in our story wasn’t rich enough to shop at Tiffany’s very much, and she’d never eaten breakfast there at all, but she loved looking through their catalogs.  In fact, she often flipped through Tiffany catalogs while she ate her breakfast in the mornings at her own kitchen table.  And there, with milk from the cereal bowl dribbling down her chin, she could imagine, if only for a few moments, that she was beautiful like Holly Golightly and she was adorned with glittering gems from her favorite store… Until her six year old son interrupted her glorious daydreaming by demanding something like, “Belle!  I need you to put this axe in Princess Leia’s hand.  Thanks!”  
 
Then the girl would snap back to reality and attach the LEGO axe to the LEGO Princess Leia, and the little boy would run off to play and the girl would glance at the clock, realize she was running late, and wolf down the rest of her breakfast before dashing up the stairs to get dressed for work.

This was all pretty routine until one fine fall day when the girl received an email from a running friend of hers, telling her about the Nike Women’s Virtual Half Marathon and how instead of a finisher’s medal, all participants who finished the race would receive a keychain designed by Tiffany.  Well, if THAT didn’t get the girl’s attention, nothing would.

Now the girl had already run a lot that year as it was.  Still, she had hoped to squeeze in just one more race that fall. The girl had given some thought to using her husband’s entry in an upcoming race that he had to skip due to his sore knee and his foot that he had run over with his lawnmower.  She thought long and hard about it, but in the end she chickened out because, well, it’s against the rules to run a race under someone else’s bib number.  And even though the girl suspected that other runners did that kind of thing all the time, she was afraid SHE would get caught and kicked out of racing forevermore. So she told her husband she wouldn’t use his entry after all.  Imagine! The girl was actually starting to hang up her racing shoes for the season when that fateful email arrived!

The email explained that in order to participate in the virtual race, the girl would need to purchase her very own Nike+ iPod sports kit. The kit contained a little accelerometer that the girl would attach to her shoe and a receiver that would attach to her iPod.  All wired up like that, the girl would run 13.1 miles any time of day and anywhere in the world on October 21st and the sports kit would track the distance she ran, the length of time she’d been running, and the calories she’d burned.  If she completed the miles, the Tiffany keychain would follow in the mail.

The girl decided that this was a fantastic plan and she liked it even better when she discovered the whole Nike+ iPod sports kit was fairly inexpensive at $29.  The girl compared that to the $200.00 Garmin Forerunner system that some of her running friends wore and she decided that the Nike+ iPod system was a bargain.  Plus, the Garmin system didn’t come with the promise of a Tiffany anything!

So the girl bought herself a sports kit, set it all up, and went out to run.  Once outside in the cold fall air, the girl learned very quickly that nothing keeps a girl running like trying to calibrate a new Nike+ iPod system.

The girl was the responsible sort and so she read the directions to her new gadget rather carefully.  The directions suggested the best way to calibrate her new gadget was to run ¼ mile on the inside lane of a track.  But the girl was running out of time.  The date of the virtual half marathon was fast approaching and she didn’t know where to find a track.  So the girl took her new gadget to her favorite trail and started running.  The girl ran one mile but her Nike+ iPod system said she had run 1.05 miles.  So the girl started over.  She ran a second mile, and her gadget said she had run ANOTHER 1.05 miles.  Frustrated with the inaccuracy, the girl continued on her quest to properly calibrate the device to her satisfaction.  In the end, the girl did calibrate her Nike+ iPod kit, and she did it by running 11 miles…  

A week went by while the girl dreamed about that Tiffany key chain.  Then the morning of the 21st arrived.  It was cold and dark as the girl awoke to dress for her race, but stars from the Orionids Meteor shower streaked over head and promised to help light the girl’s way as she headed out once again to her favorite trail.  She started running just as the sun rose at 7:00 a.m., her favorite songs playing faintly in her ears.  She ran and she ran and she ran until she had gone a little over 14 miles.  When she was done, she stopped.  She hopped in her car and drove home where she uploaded her running results into the computer and took a shower.  She ate some lunch then took a restless nap by bribing her six year old son into taking his own nap.  “I’ll pay you $5.00 if you sleep for an hour!” she said.

As she lay in her bed, tired and a little sore from all that running, the girl realized that everyone has their price.  For her, it was the promise of a Tiffany’s keychain that will arrive in the mail.  For her son, it was $5.00 cold hard cash. 

The girl’s husband laughs at all of this.  He says to her, “You better hope the keychain was designed by Tiffany the jewelry store and not Tiffany the teenager who used to sing in malls!”

The girl doesn’t think that is funny at all.  Regardless, she’ll be waiting by her mail box…

9 Comments

Filed under humor, life, Nike+ iPod, running, Tiffany's, virtual half marathon

October 22, 2007 · 12:06 pm

R.S.V.P.

R.S.V.P. It’s French.  It means répondez s’il vous plait.  Translated into English it means get off your lazy ass, pick up the phone, and call the number on the invitation I sent you and let me know if you are coming to the party or not.  If I don’t answer the phone, just leave a message.

Okay…okay.. translated into English R.S.V.P. actually means  respond please.  But for some reason, it appears that people are completely ignoring the little note that says R.S.V.P. on their invitations. They’re not responding at ALL.  And I’m not sure why.

Is it because it’s French and not that many people in the good ole U.S. of A. speak French?  Well, if that was YOUR excuse, you can’t use it anymore.  I’ve just translated it for you and so now you know what R.S.V.P. means.

The same holds if you were going to say you don’t R.S.V.P. because YOU think it means REGRETS s’il vous plait and that you only need to call if you AREN’T coming to the party.  It doesn’t.  If I wanted you to only call if you weren’t planning on attending my party, I would have written the words “Regrets Only.”  But I didn’t.

And while I’m at it, let me also tell you that the date written after the letters R.S.V.P. means that you are supposed to call and announce whether you are coming or not BY THAT DATE.  It’s kind of like the sell by date on a package of ground beef.  Or the expiration date on your carton of milk.  You are supposed to do something BY THAT DATE.  When the date is linked to an R.S.V.P. it means you are supposed to let me know BY THAT DATE if you plan to attend or not.  It does not mean wait until the day after the party to say “Oh, by the way, sorry we missed your party, we went camping that weekend…”

And now, dear readers, I’m sure you are asking yourselves what on earth is Belle’s diatribe all about?  You might even be shrugging on your jacket this very moment to run out and check your mailbox again, just to be sure you didn’t over look an invitation from me.  Don’t worry.  You didn’t.  My anger isn’t directed at you.

It’s directed at THE PEOPLE I SENT BIRTHDAY PARTY INVITATIONS TO for Snags’ 6th Birthday.  And yes, I know his birthday is over and done with and that the party has already come to pass, but sheesh!  I realize I should let it go, but I can’t.  This is  STILL bothering me.

And it’s bothering a friend of mine too.  Natalie recently mailed out invitations for her daughter’s birthday party.  When we received ours, I picked up the phone to call and say that yes, Snags would very much like to come to the party and we were looking forward to it.  My friend then informed me that I was the ONLY person who had responded so far, and she was getting a bit worried.  Why weren’t people responding?  Had the invitations been lost in the mail?  Did people not like her daughter? 

I assured her that people loved her daughter.  Her daughter is beautiful, and smart, and friendly.  I explained that I had experienced the same thing over Snags’ party invitations.  I told her how I had sent out 15 invitations and only half that many bothered to respond. 

“So what should I do?”  my friend asked.

I suggested she give it some more time.  Be prepared, I told her, to feed and party with all the children you invited, but understand some of them won’t show up.  And they won’t tell you they aren’t going to show up.  And then, I went on, understand that some children WILL show up even though their parents haven’t called to tell you they are coming. And those children will likely bring uninvited brothers and sisters with them.  It’s a real mess, I agreed.  But plan for a full house and maybe half will come.  “You’ll probably have leftovers,” I told her.

I’ve discussed this issue with friends and co-workers alike.  I’ve asked them all what they would do, if they sent out invitations with a clear request for people to R.S.V.P. and the R.S.V.P.s weren’t coming in. Many people said they’d pick up the phone themselves and call their intended guests.  They would outright ask people if they were coming.  Others said they wouldn’t call.  They said they would hope for the best but expect the worst.

I think in the future I won’t write R.S.V.P. on my invitations at all.  I think I will come up with something new, an R.S.V.P. alternative.  I will write it on the invitations in fat red magic marker so it’s hard to miss. 

I’ve thought of a few already: 

C.A.T.M.I.U.R.C.T.T.P.O.N.B.4.12.O.S. (call and tell me if you are coming to the party or not before 12 on Saturday)

Or

W! T.I.W.E.& S.D.S.A.O.Y.K.I.U.D.C.A.T.M.I.U.R.C.T.T.P.O.N.B.T.D.S. (Warning! This invitation will explode & spread dog shit all over your kitchen if you don’t call and tell me if you are coming to the party or not by the date specified).

Or, maybe simply:

U.SUCK.IF.U.DON’T.R.S.V.P.

20 Comments

Filed under birthdays, invitations, life, parties, R.S.V.P.

October 17, 2007 · 12:35 am

Letter to My Son

Dear Child of Mine,

You know those little squares of a papery material that I put in your lunch box everyday?  Those would be NAPKINS.  You are supposed to wipe your hands and face with them during and after eating your lunch.  And then you can throw them away with the rest of your trash.

You don’t have to bring the napkins back home all sparkling clean and untouched at the end of the day.

You know the SHIRT UPON YOUR BACK?  It is NOT A NAPKIN.  It is a shirt.  You are supposed to wear it, not wipe your hands and face on it.  It is a shirt.  It is not a cleaning rag.  There IS a difference.

The same goes for your PANTS.  They cover your lap and your legs up to your waist and as convenient as they may be for wiping jelly off your hands, they are also NOT A NAPKIN.

Napkins. We use them at dinner and at breakfast, too.  So I am pretty certain you have seen them before. Many times.  And yes, I understand that the dog will snatch your napkin off your lap at dinnertime and so I have to let you leave your napkin on the table while you eat here at home.  But as far as I know, there aren’t any dogs roaming under the cafeteria tables at your elementary school.  Are there?  Please, by all means, correct me if I’m wrong.

I know your grandfather likes to talk to about money and stocks and stuff.  Did he perhaps mention that he had bought you some stock in laundry detergent or stain remover?  Is your disregard for napkins a ploy to increase my purchase of those items and thereby, the value of your investments?  If so, you might want to reconsider.  Because I think we could be working at cross purposes here.  I mean, when you grow up and become wealthy off your stain removal stock, you’ll be spending at least an equal amount of money buying your own product line to clean your dress shirts if you don’t break this hand wiping on clothes habit now.  And fancy suit pants?  Honey, they have to be DRYCLEANED.

Perhaps you are concerned about the environment and you don’t want to waste paper by putting napkins in the landfills everyday?  Well, let me suggest that the stain removal chemicals going into the water supply might be a bigger problem, and your excessive use of drawing paper isn’t saving any trees either.

So PLEASE USE A NAPKIN!

Love,
Your Mother

11 Comments

Filed under clothes, humor, laundry, napkins, Snags, stains