Some ID, Please

Over the course of the last few months my children have developed full-on alternate personalities. AD waffles between being her sweet, innocent eight-year-old self and a teenage stoner who says shit like "chill out, Elise. Man! YOLO, ya know? YOLO." The RM meanwhile looked into my soul to find what would most hurt me and thus decided that she would now like to be addressed as "Surfin' Barbie" ("surFIN! NO ING!"), have pink hair and get rescued by a "prinztle" who will kill aaaaall the bugs. She's informed me that in her secret life she eats her green beans, so she doesn't have to do it for me. I have had some experience with alternate realities so while I don't like it, I get it. For most of my high school career, for example, I was known to attendees at Memphis Pyramid events as "Elsie Higned" thanks to the misspelled commemorative brick in front of the entrance. I decided that Elsie started an underground newspaper in Johannesburg, drove a Karmann Ghia just like the one in "Pretty In Pink" and had a boyfriend named Ned who wasn't afraid to cry and sent her flowers every week. Cslos, for her part, was evidently a black dude as she was at one point recruited by the African-American men's school Benjamin Banneker School of Technology; this is too much to swallow because in no universe is she technologically inclined. Coincidentally I've also been thinking lately about what my true identity must be; going through my old stuff in the attic has made me question a few things.

In an effort to regain some sort of control over life, I've been cleaning out the house. We've gotten to the tipping point - we now have more stuff than places to put it all, so things are going. Initially I was selling some of it on a neighborhood exchange board, but that became so consuming that I had to stop. I was turning into an asshole anti-Oskar Schindler, snatching toys out of my children's hands and wailing "two dollars! I could get TWO DOLLARS for this!" as I staggered to the computer, so I've started donating the good stuff and tossing the not-so-good like a more decent human being. Anyway, during this process I've discovered that we have a clutter problem because - spoiler alert! - none of us seem capable of throwing away a single damn thing. I get that we'd want to hang on to favorite books or old letters, but why have I felt the need to hang on to a Northwest Airlines paper luggage tag listing an address I haven't even visited since 1998? That's not exactly a valuable piece of my personal narrative. And the clothes are just terrible - even if I could ever again fit into my circa 1991 Adrienne Vittadini turquoise dress emblazoned with giant fleur-du-lis, should I? Should anyone? That just seems irresponsible. Unfortunately, my housecleaning efforts have also turned up a lot of old pictures chronicling some of my more unwise choices; apparently, for example, I was someone who wore overalls. With Chuck Taylor low-tops. I guess I felt the need to be ready to go should Dexie's Midnight Runners need an extra for one of their music videos. Even this relatively recent picture is just so terribly damning

I can't believe I have no memory at all of attending nursing school

 

White hose? White fucking hose? Well, they may be awful looking, but at least they're terribly unflattering. Why not just go full frontal ugly and get the Downtown Brown Baloney Legs look? I don't want to be this person. This whole walk down memory lane makes me feel like I need to reach out to everyone I ever met and just apologize. Especially to this bit of canned heat

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Rrrrrowwwww!

 He's my absolute favorite cabinet member of all time (and yes, I realize how incredibly dorky that sounds, believe me) and finding this picture in an attic box made me remember that I used to treat this man like shit. Yes, I know I was young and irresponsible, but that doesn't change the fact that hurtful things were said! Yes! I never should have let him take me to Cabo, that didn't help anything! Actually the truth is that I was always seriously enamored with Secretary Reich, but once I met him and realized how terribly serious he is - not to mention the size of a medium cactus - I gave him an alternate reality too. In my world, since he was the size of a child he behaved as such. My friend J and I got endless amounts of amusement out of this; you were late to work? It was probably because you got stuck on Connecticut Ave. behind Itty Bitty Baby Bobby Reich on his Big Wheel. I heard Itty Bitty's coming to the Hill today for the budget hearings - do you think he'll wear his hard-soled shoes with his big boy pants, or will his mom make him wear a John-John? Questioning better be to his liking or he'll throw applesauce at Sen. Exon! And did you see the Sesame Street hand puppet he wore to his swearing-in? Really respectful.

 

The only thing that's made me feel better about how heinous I am is that JHP is evidently almost as unappealing; the attic has yielded an awful cache indeed. He's had his own share of fashion missteps for sure; I've seen physical and photographic evidence of an intense sweater vest phase, for one thing, and found a karate uniform that made me feel as if he and I had never actually been introduced. If JHP actually at some point knew karate then Cslos is getting a freaking full ride to Benjamin Banneker. And don't get me started on the (blessedly small) collection of fraternity mock turtlenecks I stumbled upon. Do you know why they're called mock turtlenecks? Because they mock you for marrying a jackass. You are publicly labeled by three Greek letters your spouse wore that translate roughly to "I'm With Stupid". What has to take the cake though is a power ballad he wrote in high school - I found a sheet of paper with a full set of lyrics and the title "Why Must It Come To This?" Oh to be so cursed to be a child of privilege ensconced in a private school in Houston! On the subject of music I also found a case full of cassette tapes that would stand alone as Exhibit A in any divorce court in the country. Vangelis? "Your honor, we hereby grant full custody of the two minors to their mother. Ahh, ahem, strike that, she wants neither Surfin' Barbie nor Paulie Shore."

 

To be honest all this makes me thankful that JHP and I somehow found each other, overalls, karate, bad taste and worse behavior be damned. And it also makes me weep for the children - our children - of such a sketchy union. They don't have any reasonable hope of being normal human beings, which I guess means they're right where they should be. Surfin' Barbie's going to hop on her Big Wheel, throw applesauce and be on her way while AD finds some kine bud. Why must it come to this? I think we know.

 

 

 

Hilarity Did Not Ensue

As you may have picked up from recent posts, the Red Menace has been a touch of a handful as of late. For the last 3 1/2 years, actually, but she's really doubled down these past few months. Monday was a career highlight for her; we were getting ready to go to school and she somehow managed to take a header out of her car seat into the driveway. I still don't know exactly what happened - I was moving a case of Trader Joe's wine (shut up) out of the back seat to make room for carpool when all of a sudden I hear shrieking. Fortunately she mostly landed in the yard but the poor kid still banged her noggin up pretty good on the concrete and was bleeding like a stuck pig; she and I both looked like something out of "Carrie" by the time I got her inside the house. Because my children tend to handle big stuff well and save the serious dramatics for things that don't at all matter ("that is the WRONG PLATE!", "this shirt has a tag!", that sort of thing) she calmed down pretty quickly, so I checked her out, got the bleeding to stop and cleaned both of us up. This was no mean feat given that the blood had soaked all the way through my bra, but we still made it out the door and to school on time. I get a phone call maybe 15 minutes later - or however long it takes to report someone to DFCS, I'm assuming - from the RM's teacher: "um, no, you need to take this child to the hospital...." so I very shamefacedly headed back to school and picked her up.

oh my heavens, you shouldn't have! No, really...well, alright. Gosh. Thanks!

 

In my defense, I come by this failure to panic honestly - both my parents are known far and wide (or at least to my sister and me) as truly pitiless creatures. Cslos and I learned early on that if we went to my father with a cut or bruise his immediate response would not be to check it out and make sure that we were okay, but to instead feign sympathy until he could get close enough to really mash on it and then run away laughing. And this man is a physician. Mom is even worse. I remember one time when Cslos was two years old and fell off of her bed; Mom gave her a quick once-over, decided she was fine and went about her day. When Dad came home later that evening Mom casually mentioned "oh, the little one cut her head this morning...". Dad took one look at Cslos's scalp and said "you've been letting this child walk around all day with her skull exposed." So yeah, by those standards I'm damn Florence Nightingale.

 

Anyway, off to the Emergency Room we went. The RM was confused and concerned about why she had to leave school but perked right on up when she realized she was going to get to meet a bunch of new people. This wasn't a hospital, it was a fresh crowd - the Catskills to her Shecky Greene. Plus she got to play with my iPad - what's not to love? As soon as the doctor came in to check her out, the RM starts "first of all, I'm a girl, not a boy. I don't really like boys. Although Daddy's a boy, and I like him mostly, and also Papa and there's also a mister man at Publix I like who gives me some balloon." "Aha," says the doctor, "and how do you feel?" "Well, I will tell you I had a tummy ache yesterday but I had a poo-poo and I felt better. A big poo-poo. A POND of poo-poo. Frogs don't live in a pond of poo-poo, that would be gross." And so on. Throughout the course of our significant stay, she also informed the staff that her father has lots of gas (TRUE), I am in a circus (NOT TRUE, technically) and she has a dog named Sweet Cherry Pie (NOT TRUE and KIND OF GROSS).

She was fine. No concussion, no stitches - just a little bit of skin glue and she was good to go.

she went ahead and got a little Botox while she was there. Never too early to start with the fillers if you want to avoid the Like Perry forehead, I say

I was enormously relieved that she was fine and that I wasn't going to have to explain to her teachers why I'd tried to dump a kid with a fractured skull at school - merely a flesh wound. That can't be worthy of criminal charges. She was nonplussed. The only time she got even remotely upset was when her hospital bracelet became a bit unwound. Typical RM. She stopped fussing when I told her we could go to Publix and get some balloon from a mister man. I stopped fussing when I got home and got into that case of TJ's wine. Shut up.