Category Archives: Nonsense

Orange Is The New Identity Theft.

It looks like I’m going to have to go shopping for new clothes in the very near future. I decided to revive this old post about one of the last times I had to visit a retail establishment to procure appropriate clothing. Shopping is a very dangerous affair, you guys.

This was originally posted on December 24, 2013.


As someone who is simultaneously lazy, fat, and cheap, my clothes simply must last. I hate shopping. All that walking around, trying stuff on, it’s too much. I don’t like paying money for new clothing in a size I don’t want to be. I need my clothes to just hang on indefinitely until I’m either wealthy, well-rested, and/or thin, preferably all three.

My unwillingness to shop has resulted in me owning only three pairs of jeans. Since I work from home, these jeans are all I wear. Well, except for the one pair that doesn’t actually fit. I don’t wear those. One pair was purchased in 2010 and I have worn them about four times a week since. The other pair is relatively new, purchased in May after my other jeans purchased in 2010 got a huge split from excessive wear and girth.

The seams of the old pair had been threatening to give way for some time and recently I decided that it was time these jeans caught a break. At least I had the pair from May to wear. I could wear those into the ground and go easier on my dying pair. Maybe I could even lose a little weight and fit into the inappropriately named skinny jeans that have taken up permanent residence in the drawer of ill-fitting clothing. It seemed like I dodged a bullet. I was not going to have to walk around bottomless OR go shopping. Everything was fine for a mere twenty four hours when my plans came crashing down.

I had to run a load of laundry so my kid would have a uniform shirt to wear to school the next day. I grabbed all the clothes that required laundering and I threw them in the washer, then transferred them later to the dryer. When the cycle was done and I opened the dryer door, I saw an empty, but still intact, crayon wrapper. I frantically examined each article of clothing, feeling relief that most of the orange smudges I found were in hidden places or clothes we don’t wear outside.

But my good jeans were not so lucky. It would appear the jeans scooped up that crayon in one leg and saved the rest of the load. My only decent pair of pants – the only ones that fit, the only ones without a giant crotch tear – had martyred themselves for the sake of the child’s wardrobe and my husband’s boxers.

After several days spiraling through the five stages of grief, I was in a place where something could be done. I attempted to Goo Gone the crayon, but the goo did not go. I Oxi-Cleaned the pants, but the stain was still there.

I had no choice but to enter a Target on a Sunday afternoon, ten days before Christmas, to buy new pants. I psyched myself up, got new not-on-sale pants and went home relatively pleased that only one person gave me the finger in the parking lot.

This story would have had a happy ending if news didn’t break a short time later that Target had a massive data breach. 40 million credit and debit card numbers may have been compromised over a 19-day period and my card became one of them around 4 p.m. on the 19th day.

These pants are nice and all, but they may turn out to be the most expensive pair I’ve ever purchased.

 

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Down With Decorations!

The thing about achieving a personal record is that almost immediately after I do so, panic sets in that this may be the best I ever do. Sure, I could work harder, keep pushing, but what if 22 hours really IS the shortest amount of time I can leave up my holiday decorations?

My husband is the Decorator of the House. If you visit and tell me that my home is lovely, I will tell you honestly that I had very little to do with it. I’m totally fine with blank walls and empty shelves, but for some reason my husband likes the house to look like people actually live in it. He puts up the candles and the framed pictures of our kid. I contributed my mother’s urn on the mantle, but is she really décor? I don’t know. Maybe.

Every year I begrudgingly participate in the holiday decorating. The only thing I hate more than year-round ornamentation of the home is the seasonal ornamentation of the home. I am a busy woman and I resent having to spend time putting up shit that I will just have to take down soon thereafter. Don’t even get me started on how I have to go outside to decorate for Halloween. (I flat out refuse to decorate outdoors for Christmas. It snows in December. That’s enough fancy for me.)

Yes, sure, I do it to see the smile on my kid’s face. But let’s face it, he also smiles if I give him five bucks or an ice cream cone. Also? I cook him dinner and wash his clothes and stuff so that really should be enough.

In 2013, my husband had to travel for work in the week preceding Easter. Still weary from the Christmas decorations I’d packed up the first week in January, I kept putting off pulling out the Easter crap. It might have been mentioned as something we should do but I probably pretended to agree while silently hoping it wouldn’t be brought up again.

The problem with that was the house was totally undecorated, the kid noticed and here it was Saturday night before the big day and I felt the pressure. After my son went to bed, I sat down with my Domino’s pizza (and breadsticks) and filled plastic eggs with candy and loose change. And then I put up the decorations. Not many, but some.

“Who decorated?” Nathan exclaimed with glee on Sunday morning as we got ready to retrieve his father from his red-eye flight home.

“The bunny must have done it. I’m sure he knows how Mommy feels about decorating,” I replied, quite proud of myself for my selfless act of decorating AND my clever idea who to blame it on.

The next year, Kris was away again the same week and the bunny decorated the night before. I didn’t even pretend those decorations were going up early. I had started a new tradition where I didn’t have to look at pastel nonsense all over my house for the weeks before Easter and I had no intention of going back to the old way. Frankly, it was bad enough I’d have to look at it for at least a week before I got around to putting it all back in the basement for another year. Nathan noticed, but he wasn’t as elated over it as he was the year before.

This year, Kris was home. We figure we’ve got one or two years more at best where this kid believes in a decorating and egg-hiding rabbit who comes into our house while we’re asleep, so on Saturday night we put up the damn decorations. It took all of three minutes and then we sat down to catch up on The Walking Dead, which, oddly enough, was less creepy than the quilted rabbit wall hanging out in the foyer.

When Nathan got up and collected the eggs, he was really pleased with the chocolate. You know what he did not care about? The decorations.

“Hey, Nate, you don’t care if I put this Easter stuff away, do you?” I asked, already pulling stuff down.

“Nope,” he said, stuffing his face with more chocolate.

By 6pm, I’d packed up the basket and errant pieces of plastic grass, the eggs and the quilted rabbit. I’m not sure I can do any better next year, but with training and perseverance, I can give it my best shot.

And really, isn’t that all anyone can ask of me?

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All the Cool Kids are Writing Sonnets.

“Of course I can but I just can’t, you know?

It’s hard,” I whine. “Why can’t this come with ease?”

There’s effort here and yet it doesn’t show.

So close, the words won’t rhyme or scan; they tease.

 

I wish for depth of feeling in my words.

Profundity eludes me at all cost.

Significance? There is none, only turds.

But I keep writing even if I’m lost.

 

My peers all push me to participate

And tell me that I must a sonnet type.

And even though I know it doesn’t rate

I’m writing you this pile of vomit. Tripe!

 

Although, you see, this poem is not good.

I wrote it, damn it, ’cause I said I would.

 

 

 

More Like Dio-drama.

When I first had Nathan, people were coming out of the woodwork to tell me how to raise him. This generosity with advice seems to have leveled off and I’m not sure if it’s because I seemed ungrateful in the past or if there just isn’t a mother out there who knows what to do with the drama of the school-aged child.

Never have I felt so all alone as I did the day my son came home with his first diorama project.

Now, back in the day we called these shadow boxes. I remember virtually nothing from my shadow box days except that I hated them. This was due in large part to my tendencies toward Big Ideas and Poor Execution. If I stretch back into the corners of my memory I can almost recall a fuzzy image of me standing at my dining room table doing the child’s equivalent of swearing while my mother sat on the couch not helping. But that could have been any of the dumb assignments that kids get that seem to have no real reason to exist other than to teach them that life will be filled with many nonsense assignments that drive everyone crazy and to just suck it up and get them done.

The day Nathan was assigned this project, he came stomping and huffing out of school and, when I met eyes with the teacher, she gave me the he’s-your-problem-til-tomorrow look I’ve come to know so well. I asked why the grumping and he explained.

The children were going to randomly select the animal to be the topic of their project and Nathan expressed that he hoped he picked animals he knew about. The teacher said she hoped he picked something new. This offended him to the core of his being because obviously she just didn’t want him to be happy.

More to the point, I thought, was that she obviously didn’t want ME to be happy.

After a full meltdown at home, I learned the root of the problem was that he didn’t know how to do the project and if he at least knew about his animal (gorillas) then it would be easier. But now he had to learn about gorillas AND dioramas and this was all just too much for my dear little anxious one to handle.

He was given four weeks to do the assignment and every day it wasn’t completed meant a day that Nathan a) yelled at me because it wasn’t done yet, or b) cried that it wasn’t done yet. All of the teacher’s reminders, I’m sure directed to the entire class, were translated by Nathan as personal attacks on his work ethic.

Tired of all the melodrama, we gathered supplies and I guided him through his first project of this magnitude. No sitting on the couch not helping for me! I didn’t need a parenting manual to tell me what to do!

He turned in his diorama and accompanying two page report with bibliography on Tuesday, a full three days before it was due. For as pleased as he may have been to have this off his plate, I was doubly pleased to have it off mine.

After school, I asked how the day went.

“Fine, but my gorilla fell down and she wouldn’t let me take it home to fix it so now I’m going to fail just like she wanted me to all along,” he complained.

Well, okay then. The drama continues.

finished

Finished project before the gorilla fell down.

Winter Anxiety.

Since last winter, I’ve been fantasizing about moving away from New Jersey to a place where I’d never have to see snow again or at the very least have some idea what the weather will be every day.  Last year only ranked as the 14th worst winter on record but felt much worse. I actually lived through the worst winter in the state in terms of snowfall (1995-96), but that year didn’t traumatize me like last winter did. I was in college back then so maybe that was it.

Considering it was 20 years between that worst winter and the one that had me itching to flee the state, odds were that maybe I would be able to handle whatever this winter threw at me since moving to a warmer climate wasn’t exactly practical. It made more sense to keep my expectations realistic and attempt to go with the flow.

As my Facebook feed reminds me daily, the cold and the snow are typical in this region and therefore I should just settle down with my winter angst. I do expect a certain amount of bad weather and, in fact, I’ve been pretty quiet until now about how frozen my fingers are and how tired I am of wearing so many layers. But after Mother Nature taunted me as she did last week, I’m done. I give up. I’m out.

I’m not a flexible person. I like to have a plan and stick to it, but given how unpredictable the weather is, I try not to make too many plans.  Since I’m trying to meet the universe half way here and not put unrealistic expectations it, I think it would be super awesome if maybe the universe could get off my back for a change. You see, I had plans last week and the weather decided to mess with me.

First up on Thursday was a focus group which was an opportunity to earn some actual money. The location of the event was about 20 miles from my house and no sooner were the details all firmed up did the 5-day forecast start to not look so hot. I don’t put much stock in longer-range outlooks though so I decided to pretend I wasn’t stressed. Plus I had bigger fish to fry.

My kid’s birthday party was scheduled for Saturday. 17 kids and more than a dozen adults were supposed so to gather at my house for a Pokemon celebration. I still had a million things to do that didn’t make sense to do until closer to the party.  With close to half a foot of “wintry mix” anticipated for Saturday afternoon, I started sending texts to see if moving the party was a viable option. It was not.

I’ve had virtually nothing to do for weeks that couldn’t be easily rescheduled. Suddenly, now that I had obligations scheduled and I had been praising the weather for not being a giant jerk so far, it was making me regret ever saying anything nice.

Thankfully, after 24 hours of watching the predicted snow accumulations go up and down for Thursday morning (and subsequently wondering if I was going to earn that money or not), there ended up being no precipitation at all. Saturday went from 5″-8″ to 3″-5″, then to less than 1″, only to have 5″ or so fall on Friday night and nothing on Saturday. Sure, I went through half a bottle of Tums from the stress, but at least things worked out.

Then there was a blizzard warning.

I’m over this. I think I’ll use my snow day to plan my escape from the Northeast.