So, in honor of crappy-ass November and the fact that it brings less craziness and a respite, I bring YOU a photo essay, worthy of framing and a Pulitzer Prize in Redonk-a-donk. And a poll.
Give me booberty or give me death.
I have to walk up a busy street to take Frannie to school, and to fetch her in the afternoon. It is a fifteen-minute walk one way, and involves crossing several crosswalks and going through a couple of stoplights. It’s not great, but it’s good exercise–I get an hour of forced walking on school days. And Strudel is usually happy going for a ride in her strolly.
The last crosswalk light on the way there is broken, and always flashes red now. There were some workers there recently, fooling with the intersection, and I think they screwed it up.
Yesterday I was crossing with the green light but against the red hand, which makes Seattle drivers irate, generally. They will look at your light and bust you righteously. The problem of course, is that there’s no button to push to get it to change, so we are stuck crossing “illegally.”
As I was crossing, a car was attempting to make a right. He was driving one of those monkey-shit brown rust buckets and saw me coming and tried to decide what to do. Should I punk this stroller mama? His car lurched with his indecision. He finally decided to punk me.
“DON’T WALK!” he yelled at me, as he cut me off. His hair was grey and limp and he looked like he had maybe one tooth left in his head. I wanted to shout “It’s broken!” back at him, but what good would that do? That would have deprived him of this chance to menace a lady with a baby. Then he would have to find another stroller mom to menace, and in Seattle that could take all of thirty seconds.
This is good, I think. I’m glad to see that someone is taking a stand against the scourge that is stroller moms who cross against lights.
Best comic Evah!!! Well, today, anyway.
Halo and I were at the mall yesterday, at the new LUSH store, splurging on “Honey, I Washed the Kids” and “I Should Coco” soap. YES! For so long I have waited for you, LUSH, to come to my town. And now you are in Bellevue, which is close enough. Now there is a spa situation in my shower every morning without nine dolla shipping and a week’s wait, and I am a very happy fucker. I also bought Franny an ocean bath bomb, and cut it into fourths, and last night it turned her bathwater blue and puked seaweed particles everywhere as it fizzed, much to her delight.
Every year now I have a crazy-ass birthday weekend, which is awesome. Basically I act like a spaz, eat like a spaz, and do things differently than usual. It’s kind of a renewal before we get plunged into winter proper.
So my mall objectives were thus: to have happy mall fun with Halo, including lunch at the Cheesecake Factory (forty-ninety-twelvedy menu items, and no kids menu). Cheesecake Factory, are you trying to say that the world does not revolve around children? Cheesecake Factory, you are letting the terrorists win.
Also, other objectives were to go to the LUSH store, also, to get foo foo cornball dresses for holiday pictures starring boobnibblers past and present. It is the one dumb mom thing I do. I certainly do not take my kids to see a creepy old man I’ve never met before and have them photographed on his lap (hint: anagram of SATAN). I can’t think of any other dumb mom things right now, but know that I don’t do any of them either. Oh wait, matching outfits. We don’t do that either, mainly because Franny can’t keep both of her middle fingers up in a way that passersby can tell what we’re doing.
So we were walking through Macy’s, peeping the jewelry as we took Boobnibbler Past to the bathroom (again). I recently threw out my fabulous SJ bling away because the bling dots were falling out and it was turning green. I spotted blingy initial necklaces and rushed over to fondle them.
“Ooooh!” I raccooned.
“SJ, that’s J-Lo brand,” Halo said.
“Eeee! I’ve been burned!” I backed away from the display, ashamed. “Don’t tell anyone!”
Halo laughed. “I’m putting this on my blog!”
Not if I get to it first! And I am still thinking about buying a couple.
Update! 10/24/05
Halo busts me for not being able to bust me. I am a bad friend. Co-starring my hand.
1. Dear MF Diary,
Things have been crazy like Jay-Z and it’s all my fault. I have not felt like writing as much because I have been dog-ass tired. October is a crazy month; it contains Franny’s birthday, my birthday, and my companion’s birthday. Strudel is the lone March holdout.
2. Special Unitorn Shindig
So: Franny’s fifth birthday was pretty good. I brought her in the house with her eyes closed, and held a sheet up in front of the dollhouse so I could unveil it dramatically. She was very excited about her dollhouse and about having some friends over. She was amped about the cake too, which my companion spent four hours making. At her request, it was red velvet with chocolate frosting and a “unitorn.” Okay, she doesn’t say “unitorn” anymore, but I can’t let it go. Sometimes we still say wulva around here too, so, you know. It’s loose like that. (The English language is loose, not vulvas. FYI.)
“Now I’m five! I’m five today!” she shouted, all day long.
Then we took her to dinner at The Spaghetti Factory and sang to her, and she hid in my shirt, but recovered in time to eat her spumoni. For Franny, this day will go down in history as the day I, Sugar Nazi, let her eat leftover frosting off the spoon. Twice. She’s still talking about it.
She went back to Seattle Federline’s house the night of her birthday. When I picked her up from school later that week, I asked her about her birthday after she’d had some time to think about it.
“What was your favorite part?” I said, as she skipped along and bonked her Olivia lunchbox on her leg.
“My unicorn cake!”
Then she told me about her birthday at her dad’s house. Her grandparents were about to go out of town, so she had to have it a week early. She received three video games for her Nintendo Gamecube over there.
“It wasn’t very special,” she said, and then moved on.
3. Goodbye, Ted K.
There is more to report. Here at the Double “A” Ranch we have moved on to the amazing year 1999. Last week we got DSL after years in dialup Siberia and we were able to split it between both computers, so now we can have dorky librarian races! Quick! What’s the population of Peru? When did George Bush make the “put food on your family” speech? Who can find the scariest penis on the craigslist personals? Who will get distracted by mongoose porn and disqualified first? (Me.) Simultaneous internetting! What a country!
Also, last night my companion, AKA “Tha Unibomber,” AKA “some guy who thinks he’s from the 19th-century,” AKA “a recent convert to the horseless carriage” got a cel phone!
“The first thing I have to do is figure out how to turn it off,” he said on the way home. No, the first thing we have to do is get you an Outkast ringtone. Nice try though.
4. Smoking and Fried Food is My Heritage
And now, for the reason I am so tired and less writerly. I am banishing my muffin top, which is hard work, people. I am going 78 miles uphill, both ways, and it is sleeting sharks here. I sit up nights, crying over my smoking-hot pair of Diesel Jeans that I am about two sizes away from. I am of hearty peasant/white trash stock, so my body would like it if I would sit in a hut/trailer, narfling borscht and turkey wings / KFC and cigarettes and weighing 300 pounds. But no, this cannot be.
It started about six weeks ago, when Strudel had a Springfield Power Plant-style growth explosion and my back hurt by dinnertime every goddam night. I know the fix for this is exercise, so I started doing sit-ups and ugh, push-ups. And my god it’s hard to exercise when you’re breastfeeding–it is such an energy drain to begin with. You need to eat at least 500 extra calories a day to lactate, which is like an extra meal. To round out my upper body work, recently I added lunges and squats, which I used to be able to do one million of. I used to be able to bend light poles with my thighs, which, let me tell you, is hell on traffic on major arterial streets. But I digress.
So, anyways, I have added more exercises and now my ass and thighs hurt so bad I creak when I walk. I want to feel like the grown-ass twenty-eight year old lady I’m going to be on my birthday tomorrow, who has rocketed two babies out of her hoo-hoo and gotten a master’s degree and finally ended a starter marriage that dragged on way too long, and who has lived all over the country and has 4,000 pairs of red shoes. I don’t want to feel like some broken down old lady like I did six weeks ago, so…exercise. I have lost at least an inch off my waist already, and now am eating whatever comes across my path guilt-free. I am looking into starting kickboxing after xmas. That way I will win every argument with my companion. Haw!
5. The Days of Wine and Boobranching
Finally, Strudel is teething again. She is getting her top two teeth, after getting her bottom teeth at three months. She bit me in bed this morning and I may be turning her out to pasture soon. Now I remember why I weaned Franny at eight months. First, there’s the “snapping” off–there’s nothing like seeing your nipple get to be four inches long as she pulls away. There’s also the vicious grabbing. She grabs my breast and stuffs it into her mouth like a freaky animal. She grabbed me so hard the other day that milk squirted out and into her eye. And now with the teeth.
USE A CONDOM, PEOPLE. You’ve been warned (again).
Where was I? I think I was in labor at the Chinese restaurant on Friday, March 11th, telling my lawyer to fuck himself. So my water broke in my kitchen on Thursday night, and I slept okay that night. I was excited, because I knew the trial of carrying my donkey-kicking potential-anti-Christ was about to come to an end.
Will someone please email me and tell me what “DBZ style” means? This shit is driving me bananas. I think it has to do with Dragon Ball Z, but what is a DBZ-style game or movie?
Thanks.
sj@iasshole.org
Update! 10/16/05
One of my friendly blog-acquaintances over at Apple-Mint replied in regards to “DBZ style.” Apparently I need to keep a fifteen-year-old stowed away for those pop-culture codes I can’t crack. Here’s what she said:
“i stuck my head into the basement and asked my 15 year old stepson what “dbz style” was. after a grunt and a painful tearing away of his eyes from the videogame he was playing, he said, “dragon ball z style.” when it refers to games, it means cute cartoony games that are pvp (player versus player), and all the dbz games suck. dbz art is fan art drawn in a similar style to the dbz cartoons. he also said that anyone who said they were “dbz stylin'” was probably ten years old or a total n00b.
i’m enlightened. how about you?”
Oh yes, me too.
Franny’s birthday went well and the little dollhouse was received happily. I did a lot of debating with myself about whether or not to give her the little television that came with the set. We don’t have one at our house and while I miss it sometimes, I’m glad that Strudel isn’t going to be exposed to it all of the time. I tried to limit television when Franny was little, and we suffered through rabbit ears, which naturally cuts down the amount of TV you watch anyway. But I ended up getting cable as a coping technique during the death throes of my marriage, and I have to admit that it was nicer having a drunken lout on the couch next to me if “Trading Spaces” was on.
Now, surprisingly, Franny watches a lot of TV when she’s not with me. When I picked her up from school yesterday she was telling me she was watching a show with That Poor Woman where some guy’s face was being eaten off by a disease. I think little kids will have nightmares no matter what, but I have to think this isn’t helping. Perhaps That Poor Woman will rethink her approach to children and media when she spawns this spring.
Sometimes I think what I do is pointless. I try to get her to eat healthy food, and monitor the media she’s exposed to, but does it matter when she’s with me only half the time? She has small morning chores and evening chores here, and seems surprised every time she comes back because I expect her to flush the toilet and wipe her butt (I am so unreasonable). I don’t even want to speculate why it is not habit for her to do so already. It takes her about a day to adjust and fall back into place here, after which she seems pretty happy and stops with the “Well, my dad lets me have gum” talk.
“I’m thinking about leaving the TV out of this set when I give it to Franny,” I told my sister on Friday, when we were fooling with the dollhouse.
“Why?” she asked me.
I had to really think about it, because it was more of a gut feeling than anything else. I’m glad she asked me that, because it’s caused me to really think about what I’m trying to do for the girls. I have really come to value life without television. In the short amounts of time I let Franny watch PBS as a toddler, she was already becoming an agent for the advertisers, which was freaky and irritating. In the end I decided to leave out the big screen TV that came with the dollhouse. It lurks on the fridge because I haven’t gotten rid of it yet.
Franny, however, thought her dollhouse was incomplete. I had just put the pants back on one of her little people (their feet are huge) and she took him away to put back into the house.
“He’s going to watch television while I eat breakfast,” she said over her shoulder.
“But they don’t have a TV,” I said.
“I’m pretending the birthday card that Evan gave me is a TV,” she replied.
“They could read a book,” I said, pointedly.
“Yes, they do sometimes,” she said.
I thought about just giving her the TV then…about giving in to what she really wants. I know, intellectually, that I cannot control every aspect of her life or how she turns out. I can’t stop her from pretending there’s a TV in the house, but at least I can give her a toy that reflects our values and the way we live.
I am running away from home. I have met someone on PunkConnection.com who totally r0X0rz. ANARKEY!!! ANARKEY ANARKEY!!!!
Love,
SJ
Sorry! This is just cracking me up today.
Quotes from some dating profiles on the site:
“im RaiNe, dont talk to me if u shop at hot topic, because u only fuel the fire…”
Missy, UR on PUNKCONNECTION! :-o
“Im a dude from Kalamazoo and there is no GODDAMN SCENE HERE!!! FUCK!!!!!!”
DUH!!!! YOUR IN KALAMAZOO!!!!
“Only a demon would feast off the flesh of the dead…”
There HAS to be a better way to get into someone’s pants! Thank you for playing!
“I’m not at the hand of their tools! I’m gonna live by my rules! Why should I listen to those fools? I’m gonna live by my rules!”
Okay, that is probably a totally awesome song quote or something, but it leaves something to be desired. How about some editing?
I’M not At the hand of their TOOLs! I’m gonna live by my rules! Why should I listen to those fools? I’m gonna live by my rules!
“Is it just me or does a punk dating site seem….well, not-so-punk?”
I think I like this guy.
“fat balding hunchback with small penis desires anyone who will sleep with me!”
Actually, I think I have found my site. Peace out! ANARKEY!!!