“If I had a jackhammer, this is where I’d use it.”
-my massage therapist, working on a particularly stubborn knot in my back
Thursday Thirteen #27: Thirteen Books That Have Changed My Life
1. Codependent No More by Melody Beattie
2. Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach
3. Take Time For Your Life by Cheryl Richardson
4. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
5. A Return To Love by Marianne Williamson
6. Loving what Is by Byron Katie
7. Ask And It Is Given by Jerry and Esther Hicks
8. The Lightworkers Way by Doreen Virtue
9. The Joy Diet by Martha Beck
10. Do You Think I’m Beautiful by Angela Thomas
11. Captivating by John and Staci Eldridge
12. You Matter More Than You Think by Leslie Parrott
13. The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron
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Where Do Pets Come From?
Thanks to my father-in-law for this.
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A newly discovered chapter in the Book of Genesis has provided the answer to “Where do pets come from?”
Adam and Eve said, “Lord, when we were in the garden, you walked with us every day. Now we do not see you any more. We are lonesome here, and it is difficult for us to remember how much you love us.”
And God said, “I will create a companion for you that will be with you and who will be a reflection of my love for you, so that you will love me even when you cannot see me. Regardless of how selfish or childish or unlovable you may be, this new companion will accept you as you are and will love you as I do, in spite of yourselves.”
And God created a new animal to be a companion for Adam and Eve. And it was a good animal. And God was pleased.
And the new animal was pleased to be with Adam and Eve and he wagged his tail.
And Adam said, “Lord, I have already named all the animals in the Kingdom and I cannot think of a name for this new animal.”
And God said, “I have created this new animal to be a reflection of my love for you, his name will be a reflection of my own name, and you will call him DOG.”
And Dog lived with Adam and Eve and was a companion to them and loved them.
And they were comforted.
And God was pleased.
And Dog was content and wagged his tail.
After a while, it came to pass that an angel came to the Lord and said, “Lord, Adam and Eve have become filled with pride. They strut and preen like peacocks and they believe they are worthy of adoration. Dog has indeed taught them that they are loved, but perhaps too well.”
And God said, I will create for them a companion who will be with them and who will see them as they are. The companion will remind them of their limitations, so they will know that they are not always worthy of adoration.”
And God created CAT to be a companion to Adam and Eve.
And Cat would not obey them. And when Adam and Eve gazed into Cat’s eyes, they were reminded that they were not the supreme beings.
And Adam and Eve learned humility.
And they were greatly improved.
And God was pleased.
And Dog was happy.
And Cat didn’t give a shit one way or the other.
For Any Children Of The ’80’s
You might enjoy this article entitled, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the secret to life”.
“Recently, however, while watching my all time favourite movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it dawned on me that everything you need to know about life is contained in the 102 minute running time of this ’80s classic,” says the author.
That Old Time Religion
This past weekend my mother celebrated her 60th birthday. My parents threw a huge party that included relatives from both sides of the family, lots of friends, and members of the families that my brother and I married into.
At some point during the party my dad looked down and happened to notice that the pants he was wearing had acquired some tears and frayed edges, so he started joking about taking up a “love offering” from the guests in order to cover the cost of some new clothes.
(For those of you who are not recovering Baptists, a “love offering” is a special, voluntary collection taken up whenever a guest pastor or visiting musical group participates in a church’s worship service.)
My sister-in-law and her fiance were among the first guests to leave, and as they were making their way to the door my dad caught up with them, huddled them together over in a corner of the kitchen, and with an absolutely straight face told them that he was giving all of the party guests an opportunity to contribute to his special “love offering”.
My sister-in-law’s fiance immediately jumped back about 3 feet, with a look of absolute horror on his face.
“Oh, I guess you’ve never been to a Baptist church,” my mom said, puzzled by his reaction.
“No, I’m Catholic,” he said.
So we explained to him our idea of a “love offering”, and he relaxed a bit.
“Never sneak up on me again and start whispering about a ‘love offering’,” he said, shaking his head. “For a minute there I thought I was gonna have to do something I’d have to repent of later.”
Flotsam and Jetsam
Have you ever felt so tired that you have actually been drugged with fatigue? That is how I am feeling these days, due to my incredibly rigorous schedule of Helping 2 Clients A Week With Spanish. Apparently wrangling those reflexive verbs will really take it out of you.
So lately my mind has just been all over the place, and occasionally I just go in and skim off whatever random thoughts have floated to the top.
Like the fact that my 3rd grade teacher just retired at the end of this school year. That frightens me a little, because if the people who taught me and my generation are now retiring, that means that we are now going to be The People In Charge Of Things. And I don’t really know if that’s a good idea, because I know us. And we are kind of scary.
We are the people who spent our entire 3rd grade year playing with “The Empire Strikes Back” action figures inside our desk in lieu of doing any actual schoolwork. We are the people who may have graduated medical school, but who will always be remembered in my mind for carrying around a tin of snuff in their back pocket and spending all of 9th grade English with their feet hooked around my chair while jerking me around and making suggestive sexual noises. We are the people who are about to apply to law school and be charged with upholding the laws of our land, despite having spent most of college breaking said laws through excessive underage drinking and operating various watercraft while highly intoxicated.
I was 13 when that Whitney Houston song came out that proclaimed that “children are our future”, so I kind of feel like we’re the future about which she was speaking. And apparently the future is now. You just might not want to look at it all that close up.
I’m just saying.
Working For A Living
Once upon a time I used to have the best work stories of all my friends, due to the fact that I worked retail at a big bookstore. When you work retail you work with the general public, and the thing about working with the general public is that there’s no filter, nor any kind of screening process between you and the people you meet.
So there’s nothing at all to stop the general public from coming up to you and asking for your astrological sign so that they can then tell you whether or not you and they are sexually compatible, changing their baby’s poopy diaper in the middle of the children’s section, stealing girlie magazines to use to pleasure themselves in the men’s bathroom, or calling the police in the middle of a transaction in an attempt to have you and your fellow booksellers arrested because they didn’t like your answer to their question. Needless to say I will never again work with the general public, because the general public is HATEFUL AND DISGUSTING. Although they did provide me with some great stories.
The other thing my job had was a person I’ll call “Brianne”. The whole time I was working there “Brianne” was in the process of surgically transforming themselves from a man into a woman. Because I am woefully naive I had no idea this was going on, until the day that “Brianne” showed up at the store as a six foot tall man with painted fingernails, dressed in a strappy, blue-flowered print sun dress and sandals, clutching a stylish handbag. I was unprepared for this particular revelation, especially since the night before I had attended a bachelorette party for one of my friends. I don’t drink, and I didn’t have a bachelorette party myself, so I was completely unprepared for the fact that it’s apparently common practice for brides-to-be to hit the dance floor of a club clutching a life-sized, anatomically correct penis shaped water bottle filled with their beverage of choice. I don’t know that there’s ever a good time to see something like that, but it sure as hell is not when you are stone-cold sober, I’ll tell ya that.
So it was a little odd, the working with Brianne, but my work stories always kicked other stories’ ass. No one else had anything close to a transsexual at their job.
But now that I work for myself as a high school Spanish tutor, I don’t have quite the killer stories that I used to. This was driven home to me the other day when I was talking with a friend of mine who is a new police recruit. Here’s how that conversation went.
My friend: “So today this guy walked into our building with a live grenade.”
Me: “Yeah, I’ve got nothin’.”
But you know what? I’ll take it. I’ll take tub poo and barf on the rug (Important Side Note: these are courtesy of my 3 cats, with whom I spend my days, not my students) and second-tier stories, because in exchange for all of these things never again will I have to assist a customer who has just informed me that she is looking for a book, and the author’s first name is John, and, what do you mean you can’t look up books by the author’s first name?
And if someone does say something totally idiotic, not only am I allowed to point it out to them, but I’m also allowed to give a smart-ass response designed to highlight their stupidity, as in, “It’s a computer, ma’am, it’s not a f*&%$#@ crystal ball!”
I love my life.
Snips And Snails And Puppy Dog Tails
Last weekend we went to the Tennessee Aquarium which is, without a doubt, one of my absolute favorite places on earth.
As we were innocently walking through the doorway into the exhibit of seahorses my husband suddenly grabbed my elbow and said, very calmly, “Just keep moving.”
I was instantly alert, because that is his code for informing me that, “HOLY F*&%, THERE IS A SNAKE IN THE IMMEDIATE VICINITY!!”
Once he had deposited me at a safe distance he went back to check out the snake, because he is a guy, and guys think snakes are cool, and apparently there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. As a matter of fact, when I was telling this story to a friend of mine this weekend he said, “Cool. Did I ever tell you about the time that I kissed a snake?” (Me: Hm, really? Great. Never touch me again.)
There was quite a crowd of people surrounding the aquarium worker who wanted to touch the snake, despite the fact that every few minutes she would occasionally broadcast such helpful alerts as, “Make sure you stay away from its head.”
My husband, of course, was very excited about the whole experience and wanted to tell me all about it when we met up again.
I had a hard time listening due to the fact that he had let the snake coil its tail around his arm, ON PURPOSE, and not only that, but he had actually enjoyed the entire experience.
Me: Why did they make you wash your hands before you touched the snake?
My husband: They wanted to make sure I didn’t give it any germs.
Me (dripping with sarcasm): Oh yeah, wouldn’t that be a shame?
The Way To My Heart
Last Friday was our 11th anniversary, and in honor of that event my husband gave me an extra-special present, a gift that made my heart go all a-flutter.
What was this amazing gift? Flowers, jewelry, poetry? Nope.
In honor of our anniversary he rewired the house so that I can now plug my computer directly into our Internet connection, rather than having to rely on the sometimes-spotty connection I used to get through the wireless router. And I could not be happier. As a matter of fact, when describing how enthralled I am with my very fast, very reliable Internet connection to my husband, I believe my exact words were, “This is a dream come true!”
Apparently the road to my heart runs right smack dab through the middle of my Inner Nerd.
We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby!
In continued celebration of our anniversary, and because hell if I can think of anything funny to say right now, I offer this retrospective piece I wrote last summer, during a time when The Funny was apparently still flowing fast and free.
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Have you ever had one of those days where you have clearly mapped out everything you need to do that day, but Thing #2 depends on Thing #1, and Thing #3 depends on Thing #2, and everything is woven together in an interlocking chain of Stuff That Is Not Getting Done because you can not, for the life of you, figure out how to complete Thing #1? Well the other day was like that for me.
Normally this is entirely my fault, since Thing #1 is usually something like, “Put on clothes.” (Dammit, you mean there’s no naked grocery shopping today? Well, forget it. There’s no point in even showing up for this day then!) But this day was a bit trickier, because Thing #1 was, “Make The Vacuum Cleaner Not Smell Like Poo”.
Having things not smell like poo is very important to me, but it can also be very difficult because we live with three cats. With humans it’s easy, because you almost never have to speak to them about this particular issue. Humans tend to take care of this themselves. But cats are a different story. And last week there was An Incident while I was changing the cat boxes, and it wasn’t pretty.
So as I was sitting on the floor and dismantling the vacuum cleaner, I began to think about how many pivotal moments in our marriage could be traced back to this particular appliance.
When we were first married and my husband received his first big bonus we bought…a vacuum cleaner. (Well we bought other things too, but I don’t have any funny stories about those items.) We were so excited about this vacuum cleaner. You would have thought we grew up in households without any electricity where we were required to clean the carpets every day by licking them with our tongues. We couldn’t wait to get home at night and vacuum things (and no, I can’t explain why that was, so don’t ask.)
I guess we were just excited to finally be a married couple, out on our own, buying “grownup” things. But man were we funny (as opposed to today, where we are a bastion of sobriety and maturity-NOT).
So we vacuumed, and we were happy, and then we moved into our new house, and we had even more space to vacuum, and we were happy, and then one day…we ran out of vacuum cleaner bags. Normally this would not be a problem, but my husband and I have completely different shopping philosophies.
When faced with the need to buy something my husband compares approximately 800 bongjillion styles, prices, sizes, locations, options, and, please, somebody, kill me now and end this misery! Whereas I decide what I need, go to a store that sells it, find something that meets my needs, and buy it. His method works great when you’re buying things like cars, washing machines, and computers, but it can be a real problem when you run out of something like, say, bread.
The tricky thing is that I grew up with a lot of messages that said, “If anyone ever tells you to do something, you MUST do it.” Especially if that someone is a man, and especially if that man is related to you. (Important Side Note: If you are my husband and you are reading this, you had better not be thinking, “Man, I really miss those days!”)
So my husband told me that before I was allowed to buy any more bags and continue my vacuuming, I had to shop around. And I tried, I truly did. But what I never knew until I became a vacuum cleaner owner myself is that, much as each human being needs their own special type of blood, each machine takes its own particular type of bag. And apparently ours uses the extremely rare, AB- equivalent type of vacuum cleaner bag, because I could not find those suckers ANYWHERE.
So the pressure was building, and the carpets were dirty, and I wanted my husband to approve of me, and then one day…I discovered online shopping. I entered in our type of vacuum cleaner bag, and up popped this luscious list of bags, all ripe for the buying. And I thought, “I can’t take it anymore-I MUST be able to vacuum!” And I bought the first package on the list. And then I sat and waited for the earth to crash into the sun, because I had just made a decision to do something other than what my husband wanted.
Of course it turned out to be no big deal. So my confidence slowly began to grow, and I began to trust in my own abilities to buy things like closet organizers and crock pots all by myself. And now I have become such a Brazen Consumer Hussy that I recently bought myself an MP3 player while my husband was off in a whole other state, and I never consulted him once.
And fortunately the vacuum cleaner lives on, able to continue marking these important moments in our marriage. Because the odor turned out to be nothing that sucking an entire Lysol Sanitizing Wipe directly up into the hose couldn’t fix. (You know, just in case this particular issue ever comes up for you.)
