hug THIS, kid

I tried to hug my daughter this weekend and she stiff-armed me with a stern, “Mom. No.” I said, “Why?” She said, “I don’t hug family members. Only my friends.”

Well, let me tell you something, missy.

I gave BIRTH to you and I wiped your hiney and I taught you cuss words and you know the one normal thumb you have? I gave you that. Half of your chromosomes, your brown eyes, and your chins. All me, baby.

If you weren’t bigger than me and freakishly strong, I would’ve hugged you anyway. Instead, I put cat food in your dinner. Hug THAT.

Love,
Mom

this is what awkward smells like

The boy had a dance this afternoon. All I saw was the view from the door, but it was enough to make me dry heave all the way home. It was held in the cafeteria, which means the air was rich with the combined smell of last week’s menu and dozens of tightly packed, profusely sweaty, early-stage teenagers. If awkwardness had a smell, it would be this: a heady mix of body odor, pizza, goats, Frito chips and desperation.

The boys aren’t old enough yet to be truly earnest in their pursuit of girls. Instead, they all stand packed together near the Guitar Hero set-up, hands deep, deep in their pockets, tripping each other, and blurting variations on the word “poop” at random intervals.

The girls are starting to realize that the boys are simpletons, undone by the merest glance from one of them. A flutter of her eyelashes, and his hand dives ever deeper in his pocket. The girls are figuring it out and they’re working it. Unfortunately, everything in their arsenal they learned from the E! Channel, so they’re like little bitty, under-developed and overly made-up versions of Pamela Anderson, with enough toilet paper shoved in their bras to support a battalion of allergy sufferers.

The teachers are posted at the entrance and exit, the punch bowl, and the bathrooms, anywhere a kid could make an escape, throw up, or make out (however, they seem not to notice the two full-throttle puberty cases chowing down on each other’s faces in the far corner.) The teacher at the door where I stood to retrieve my boy looked particularly sweaty and disconcerted. I imagine he spent the previous few hours questioning every choice he’s made since high school and realizing his mother was right when she said he should’ve been a doctor.

out of context and in-toxicated

Conversation overhead during my sister's 38th birthday party:

if you sit with your buttcrack on the crack of the couch cushions, you'll turn inside out.

my eyelids are sweaty.

she loves to blow your big salad.

beat that meat into submission!

i'll be the little spoon if you be the fork.

can you see my weiner? of course you can't. I don't have one!

don't let the dog lick your face; she just turd burglared the litter box.

i'm so lonely. everybody's cute.

...and then he tried to stick his whole hand in there!

I'll just pretend I have a penis.

you've got ham in your crotch!

there's a dog in my bra.

I'm gonna make sweet sweet love to this cigarette.

what the hell's a Kardashian?

it doesn't tickle if you squeeze harder; it just hurts.

her hoohaw's gonna eat you!

I'm sitting on the jizz chair!

she's like a drunk 5-year-old child.

it sounded like two meat patties flappin' together.

it was a good thing I was on the toilet!

she always ends with an air hump.

throw up on the dog; she's used to it.

mayonnaise is so much better than a stapler!

i'm gonna go see if i peed my pants.

more effing character than Disney

I was reminiscing to my kids about what life was like when I was their age and I got the feeling they think I’m full of crap. I could tell by the way they kept saying, “Mom, you’re so full of crap!”

My kids are wrong.

For instance, I remember rolling down the highway in the back of my Dad’s truck. Not in the back seat of my Dad’s truck, sillies. In the BACK of my Dad’s truck, with the leaking gas can and the toe-squishing spare tire and the sharp, stabby, dead pine needles.

As strict believers in Darwin’s law of the jungle, the bigger kids always laid claim to the coveted “spot against the cab”, where they were slightly protected from the 55 mile-per-hour, eye-piercing tornado of sawdust, twigs, and dead bugs. The younger and smaller you were, the closer to the tailgate you had to sit. That was the worst spot because your lips were all that stood between you and French kissing some bug guts.

My kids, raised in 3-strap industrial strength car seats until the 3rd grade, can’t fathom it. In fact, I suspect they wistfully think riding in the back of a truck was actually some fantastical form of tingly transportation.

Now, it’s worth noting that we were country kids, not townies. We had rattlesnakes while other kids had pesky sugar ants in their pantries. Our parents, out of a desire to escape the asphyxiating confines of convenience and electricity, moved us to the official Middle of Nowhere the summer of my 13th year. We were 1 mile up a dirt driveway and almost 25 miles from the nearest town of notable size. Their plan was for us to build a house and some character*, not necessarily in that order.

(*This was our parents’ battle cry: it builds character. The harder/messier the wound/work/lesson, the better the character. For example: My brother: “Dad, I cut half my thumb off splitting kindling.” Dad (slapping a well used back-pocket bandana over the wound): “Scars build character.” If that’s the case, my brother has more character in his thumb than both of my kids put together.)

My siblings and I did things every day that my kids think only exist in really lame old-timey movies. Manual labor *gasp*. Making do with less *ohthehumanity*. Entertaining ourselves without electricity *horror*.

The fact is, I can make these totally unembellished statements about my childhood and I swear on my precious angels’ pampered little lives that I am 100% not full of crap:

We had a cliff on our property. I played on it, 40 feet above jagged rocks that would’ve looked lovely with my blood all over them. There was a rattlesnake den in a cave underneath the cliff. I liked to throw rocks in there just to hear the rattles go off. (Sorry, Mom.)

We had a pet goat. He was so stupid, he hung himself one cold winter night. I poked his dead tongue with a stick before my dad told me to get away from there.

We once found a bear (see: a mammal with claws and an appetite) in the treehouse above our sleeping baby cousin’s playpen. It got shot.

A spray bottle of undiluted kerosene spritzed on kindling gets the morning fire going RIGHT NOW. (Sorry, Mom.)

The closest my kids can come to my childhood is that they once saw a bear in a book, and there’s a cliff on Gramma and Grampa’s property where they’re absolutely not allowed to go. They just haven’t built enough character for it.

He probably just missed the cafeteria food

A 22-year-old man was charged yesterday with posing as a high school student to play basketball. A 22-year-old man, old enough to drink, gamble, and stay up past 9:00 on school nights, voluntarily re-entered high school 4 years after actually graduating.


Permian High School Senior Class President

There’s so much wrong with this, it’s hard to break it down. I’ll do my best (which is very, very good).

In 2009, he enrolled in the 9th grade at Permian High School in Texas, posing as a 15-year-old. He was 6’5” tall. The fact of all that tallness and his full-on facial hair didn’t set off any alarm bells at the high school because, as staff said, “he’d skip down the halls, acting goofy.”

Alarm bell number one. A normal 15-year-old skulks, hunches, mopes, and masturbates but does not skip. A high school freshman would no sooner be caught skipping than he would be caught wearing footsie pajamas and snuggling with his granny in public.

Secondly, at 15, boys aren’t done growing. This guy was 6’5”. So, if my calculations are correct (and they always are), by the time his junior year growth spurt was done, he’d be 10’6”. Alarm bell number two.

And apparently, this guy played some fairly good basketball which explains why the school staff was willing to overlook the fact that he could grow a full beard between 1st period math and 5th period English. Alarm bell number three.

Finally, this guy got caught when he was recognized while playing basketball for his current high school by someone from the high school he'd graduated from four years ago. Not a single adult teacher at his current high school ever thought, "Hmm. This 15 year old sounds like Barry White. Is that normal?" Alarm bell number four.

So. The Adults In Charge are to blame. What else is new? Adults are idiots. Every 22-year-old high school freshman knows that. But the thing I just can't get past is, this kid voluntarily returned to high school, after he’d already done his time.

That's like, I don’t know, yearning for a repeat performance of that time you got an erection in the lunchroom and tried to hide it with your pudding cup but only succeeded in poking a hole in the styrofoam. Going back to high school ranks right up there with prolapsed rectum and finding your parent's sex toy drawer for things you never, ever, ever want to experience.

This beard growing, Barry White singing, 6'5" freshman is obviously a freak. As punishment, I recommend they sentence him to detention with Mr. Jonswickle. May God have mercy on his soul.

Mother's Day, Becca-style

It started out so well. A hand-made card from my sweet daughter. I should've known better; it went downhill and sideways very quickly.




and a bonus illustration!



*sniff* She's so sweet.

happy effing birthday

It's my birthday. I’m turning 36 and I’m not too happy about it. I reflected on things while shaving my beard this morning and I decided that, despite looking like across between Jabba the Hut and Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof”, I do manage to maintain a certain standard of appearance.


Me. Age 36.

It’s not a high standard, it’s not even a middling standard, it’s more like the lowest possible socially acceptable standard, but still. It’s better than no standard at all. Even though my youth is gone like a bottle of Strawberry Mango Mad Dog 20/20 on a Saturday night, I still won’t let myself wallow in certain fashion cesspools that seem to be taking over the world...or at least, our local corner of the world.

Fashion cesspool #1 - pajamas
If you are over the age of 18, wearing cartoon themed pajamas is just asking for humiliation and forced sterilization. If you wear the offending garments in public, that makes you a prime candidate for the anti-freeze smoothie taste test I’m putting together.


oh, Tink. No.

Fashion cesspool #2 - pedicure
Nothing says “if Darwin was right, I should be dead” like a pair of nasty, scaly, scabby, yellow feet. Do everyone a favor and take care of that mess before flip flop weather. I’d rather see the end result if you hacked off your feet with a dull, rusty blade and left the white knobs of your tibias gleaming from a spurting wet stump than see your disgusting, putrescent, unkempt bare feet. You are nasty.


ohsweetbabyjesus

Fashion cesspool #3 - skinny jeans
Because I have faith in humanity, I’m sure someone has already killed whoever invented skinny jeans. If not, I'd like to hunt him down and kick his ass to death. Anyone who can come up with an item of clothing that looks universally bad on every single person who wears it should pay dearly. For making 90% of the teenagers in my hometown look like knock-kneed heroine addicts. For making skinny girls look fat and giving fat girls another reason to crack open a case of Twinkies. The problem is that despite the name, skinny jeans don't equal skinny. They really equal 20 pounds of butter in a 10 pound pantyhose.


mmmm...butter

I may be a mustache having, mom-jean wearing 36 year old, but at least I'm smart enough to avoid the cesspools.


pictured: Cesspool Mother Ship

she's doing it wrong

Princess Bea (seen here, with her unfortunately tiny eyes and itty bitty teeth) ran a marathon. She finished in 5 hours, 15 minutes, 57 seconds. She was met at the finish line by her parents, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.

Apparently, this particular princess doesn’t understand the rules. She’s supposed to sit in her palace all day, ordering the servants around and kicking kittens just because she can. When she’s in public, she’s supposed to hide needles in her dress sleeves so she can pull them out and poke commoners when they wander too close. And her main food source is supposed to be bon-bons and the souls of her subjects. Because it’s the rules.

It sounds like this princess actually trained for said marathon, which means buckets of princess sweat. That’s rarer than a unicorn’s tears. Was there anyone there collecting it? Isn’t that what a handmaiden is for? No? Well, somebody’s losing their head over this (what do you mean they don’t do that anymore?! Hot poker in the eye, then. No?! What. The. Hell.)

*sniff* I don’t know if I want to live in a world where a princess a) looks like that, b) sweats, and c) doesn’t wear a ball gown 24-7. I mean, if a princess doesn’t get to order a beheading, then what do the rest of us have to hope for?

you have to admit it's a valid question

What do hookers, heroin users and I have in common?

No, it’s not the way we dress, although I realize hookers and heroin users love their granny cardigans every bit as much as I do. It’s not the infected sores, either. (I know, I know, I’m gonna have to get to the doctor eventually, but in the meantime, www.oozingskinlesions.com assures me that I’m not contagious. Relax.)

Well. Apparently there are more similarities than I realized, so I’ll just go ahead and give you the answer: none of us can donate blood this week. It turns out that hookers, heroin users and I all share the common bond of being declined by the Red Cross.

It’s an extremely exclusive club, so no, I’m not gonna sneak you in the back door. But here’s how you can get in on your own: have unprotected sex with 100 men a day for a minimum of 6 months, share needles with some guy named Scat in the alley behind Sizzlers at least once, OR have such low iron that the technician who tests your hemoglobin worries if you’re healthy enough to be operating a motor vehicle.

People get declined for things all the time. Credit cards, car loans, college admissions, marriage proposals. But how many people get declined by an organization desperate to draw your universally life-saving type O+ blood? Wait. Let me clarify. This is an organization that sets up in a van ON SKID ROW and buys the blood of homeless people. And they turned me down.

I must be some kind of special. I’m going to go celebrate with my new friends. Hey, Scat, wait up!

I can't believe it's not butter

I read an article online today that Steven Seagal’s sex slave filed a lawsuit against him for basically being a kung fu pervert and looking like a stick of butter with a ponytail. She also says she has knowledge of his “unique physiological reaction” to being (…I'm...running...bathroom...puking...) sexually aroused.


Parkaaay!

Let me be the one zillionth person to respond to this: omigodgross.

The article went on to question briefly why the sex slave filed a civil lawsuit as opposed to a criminal complaint. Because interwebs reporting equals excellent reporting, the inquiry was perfunctory and without insight. Here’s my insight: a civil lawsuit gets you money. A criminal complaint requires proof.

The only thing this lady’s lawsuit says to me is that a) she’s willing to publicly admit to being around a sexually aroused Steven Seagal and b) give that lady some damn money. She’s obviously earned it.

This woman is literally holding the entire world hostage, and we’re just praying he’ll pay her off because, God knows, nobody wants to know the specifics of that “unique physiological reaction”, amirite? I know I am.

part it on the left

It's that time of year again, a time when the teenage girls in my life go shopping for a dress they'll pay 3-figures for (on SALE), wear once, and regret for the rest of their life.

It's prom season.

Unfortunately, I took a glance at a catalog one of them brought over and the first thing I saw was something that looked like a hooker's best dress combined with a crack ho's last nightmare...if that nightmare included wearing your guts on the outside of your clothes.



From what I gather, based on a 30 second perusal of said catalog, dresses have two main requirements: they cannot be subtle and they have to be so short, you need to have two hairstyles to wear them.



Also, the more you look like Merv the Perv's french-maid fantasy, the better.



Thank god, Becca's not even vaguely interested in prom shenanigans. But even if she were, her dress would look something like this:



I promise.

It's a term of endearment, right?

I was born with verbal diarrhea.

My nickname from the moment I spilled my first secret (age: 3 months) has been Motormouth. Furthermore, as I aged and body parts grew and improved (and eventually failed and sagged), I never developed a filter between my inappropriate thoughts and what comes out of my mouth.

Over my life, it's gotten me into more uncomfortable situations than a g-string at a Chubby Chaser's Convention and yet, I've never learned to control it. I'm a very, very slow learner.

And now, because it's too damn late for me to change, I'm embracing my particularly well developed social handicap and that's why I renamed my blog.

I may not have invented kicking ass...

...but I'm damn sure good at it. (I'm thinking about suing Hollywood for copyright infringement.)

In an effort to tie all my kick ass online stuff together, I'm renaming my blog (with new banner goodness). Same kick ass me. New kick ass blogspot.

Bookmark.

My kids think I'm lovely

I was having a random, wandering conversation with my kids the other day about their day at school, when they hit me with this zinger:

Becca: "Hey, Matthew. I was at your school helping in the keyboarding class and I saw Mary..." Matthew interrupts: "I think she looks like Mom", while Becca continues "...my friends say she's a fat whore."

There followed a great silence...and then we laughed so hard, Becca ran off to the bathroom before she peed herself.

It reminded me of the time I was playing gin rummy with my dad. I was about 12 and I accidentally flipped him off. Or the time my little brother accidentally told my mom to shut up. I can vouch for the fact that teenagers don't have any control between what they MEAN to do and what they ACTUALLY do.

I can also vouch for the fact that while I may be fat, I am no whore. After their hysterics died down, the kids assured me that this is, in fact, true.

Phew.

this is not about Tiger's wang

Tiger Woods’ (you thought I was gonna say penis, didn't you?) daughter goes to school, which wouldn’t strike me as odd…if she wasn’t two years old. That’s a bit younger than the typical kid is forced to learn that 2+2=blue, isn’t it?

When my kids were two, they still had potty incidents and managed to spill their spill-proof sippy cups. Their days definitely didn’t include English Lit first period.

When Becca was two, she climbed into the garbage dumpster and ate from the sugar canister someone had thrown out. When Matthew was two, he stuffed a banana in his toy-box and I caught him eating it days later. Trust me, they were in no shape to sit still and listen to a teacher for hours at a time.

Now, before you consider the source and decide my kids were probably paste-eating grunters until they were six or seven, please note: my kids were very smart (and still are, though they’re currently teenagers so that takes some of the smartness right out of them by virtue of chemistry and hormones).

I’m just not sure what two year old would tolerate a structured classroom environment without absolutely losing their sh*t. I think it’s cruel to force that on 'em. At that age, they should be frolicking freely, pretending to be boogers or raindrops or pink polka dots or something.

Hell. Who knows. Maybe little Miss Woods is a child prodigy. I know her DAD was a prodigy by the time he was two and look at him now. Quality.

I’m just thinking they should give the kid a break. Just let her be two and smear pudding on her face and take a nap when she’s tired and spend time with Mom instead of Staff. But that’s just me.

Human? I think not.

Saw a picture of this guy



in an article about billionaires. His name is Carlos Slim. It’s an ironic name, like calling me Slender Willow or Vanilla Petite, but he can get away with it because, well, he’s got more money than God.

Considering the rest of the billionaires on the same list have lame names like Jim Walton and Lawrence Ellison, old Slim’s not only the richest, but the one with the coolest name. That means he gets to date the head cheerleader.

I read the list and then got to wondering what billionaires do when not taking over the world one sweatshop at a time. Origami with $1000 bills? Yoga on mink yoga mats? Since they crap dollar bills, what do they wipe with? Oh, I know. Disposable baby harp seals… ‘cause you know there ain’t no cleaning that off with Dawn dish soap, baby.

I guess some billionaires might spend their time donating money to worthy causes and setting up foundations to benefit all mankind *cough tax write-off cough*, which is admirable. And other billionaires inexplicably spend their money on $2000 suits yet still get really bad haircuts and wear 1980s serial killer glasses:



All this thinking got me…uh…thinking: how do you become a billionaire? On this year’s World’s Richest list, Forbes tries to church it up. It says Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal made his fortune as an “investor”. An investor?! You don’t invest $100 per paycheck and end up with $19 billion dollars. That guy didn’t “make” his fortune, he inherited it.

Prince Alwaleed could take a play outta the next guy’s book: David Thomson, worth $19 billion and the most honest man alive. In italics, next to his name, it just says “inheritance”. He didn’t work a single day of his life and he is SO PROUD OF IT.

Billionaires are funny. Why not just straight up say “I sold 357 metric tons of asbestos and lead-based toys to foolish Americans” or “I exploited my country’s most recent financial crisis by buying low and selling high”? Instead, they think they need to make it pretty on paper, when in reality, nobody really believes Li Ka-Shing made $21 billion by being “diversified”. What does that even MEAN? My guess? Drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.

Furthermore, I wonder: do billionaires look down on millionaires? Are billionaires like the populars in high school and millionaires like the audio-video club? Would Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal be caught dead at prom with Donald Trump? The world may never know.

I’ve come to the conclusion that billionaires might as well be a different species than the rest of us. Except Carlos Slim. Guy with a name like that would be totally cool downing some ice cold Dos Equis on my patio, I just know it. *Slim, call me.*

Quality time with Becca

I was sitting on the couch next to Becca last night. We were watching TV and she slowly leaned toward me and lay her head lightly on my shoulder. Awww, I thought, pleasantly surprised, my heart swelling…then she farted. Apparently, more important than snuggling with her mom, she was just freeing up some space.

May the guilt be with you forever and ever and ever

When my kids were little, I spent all my time worrying about the decisions I was making. Was the movie I just let them watch going to turn them into crazy, shotgun-toting, clown-loving cult members? What if the way I taught them to tie their shoes wasn't the right way? Was I feeding them enough preservatives?

But now that I'm the mother of teenagers, I don't worry about my decisions any more; I worry about theirs. It's the natural order of things. Look it up.

Their past, present, and future decisions make up about 99% of my worrying nowadays. (The other 1% is worry about my mustache. Don't pretend you didn't notice.)

I remember being a kid. I wasn’t sorry I DID whatever I was in trouble for, I was sorry I got CAUGHT. Made me more careful. If I caught my kids doing some of the stuff I did at their age, I’d just cry and Steven would take everything away from them but their underwear.

It's time to face the fact that there may realistically come a day when Matthew's privileges are as follows: FM radio and toilet paper.

And I just know that the booking officer will turn to me and say, "This is all your fault."

boy, 1. mom, 0.

Mom, singing, "What do tigers dream of..."

Matthew, "Mom, who sings that?"

Mom, "Umm...Ed Helms, I th..."

Matthew, "Let's keep it that way."

ZING!

Random musings

The other day, Becca described a guy as "tall and dangly". I assume she meant gangly, but might be wrong.

Christmas decorations left up after New Years are a visual example of how it feels to be clinically depressed.

I realized I root for the movie bad guy more often than not.

Large groups of small children in an enclosed room smell like a herd of goats. And small groups of large kids in an enclosed room smell like Frito chips. It's science. Look it up.

Pop Pop, did your butt itch?

Dan Rather said our grandparents come from the greatest generation. Let us examine, shall we?

Their generation lived to fight through World War II, eat dirt during the Depression, to have some serious sex during the Baby Boom (bowm-chicka-bowm-bowm), and to retire before douchebags like Bernie Madoff snorted their life savings. They only drove cars made in Detroit, and did the jitterbug with absolutely no idea that they looked less like they were dancing and more like their asses really, really itched.

The ladies wore heels to do housework, lipstick to the grocery store, and girdles reinforced by asbestos and industrial grade rubber. The men shaved every day and smoked cigarettes pretty much constantly, in bed, in the shower, in the baby's room, at work.

Dinner was red meat, butter, and something-something starch. Everybody had a vast liquor cabinet and Mom knew just how Dad liked his gimlet. All the dogs were named Rover and kids were named after ancestors, not inanimate objects.

It seems like it was a good time and these were people who knew exactly what was what. Baseball was America's past time and nobody had ever heard of soccer. America was the greatest country on earth and if you disagreed, Senator McCarthy would by-God like to have a word with you.

The facts are pretty clear. That generation kicked so much ass, America had absolutely no choice but to barrel full throttle through the middle of the century, consuming vast quantities of democracy, butter, and fossil fuels...

...and then their kids hit puberty. With the act of such a great group of Americans to follow, their kids didn't stand a chance, so they went ahead and ricocheted off the shining, righteous deeds of their parents and straight on towards free love, hash brownies, and disco.

But despite their hooligan kids, they were almost certainly the greatest generation. And if you doubt that, here's proof.



Check and mate.

Resolutions are for pussies!

You know what they (I) say about resolutions? They (I) say you don't need the beginning of a year to make a resolution. Resolutions get broken. So you promise yourself something and then you let yourself down. I'm too busy letting other people down to let myself down too. There are only so many hours in the day, you know.

But because I am physically incapable of (admitting to) failing, any resolution I might choose to make would go something like this:

I resolve to quit smoking. I go buy my first ever pack of cigarettes. Smoke one. Throw the rest away (after the vomiting stops). Resolution fulfilled. Man, I so rocked that.

I'm going to market it and call it the Kelly No Fail Method of New Year's Resolutions (patent pending). The royalties will make me rich.

This year is going to kick so much ass.