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