They are everywhere. The most infiltrating force known to mankind, at least in my life. They are dripping off the curtains, slithering among the couch cushions, wallowing in the mudhole they created under the tree swing, racing around on bigwheels, crashing into and breaking flowerpots, lower legs are not safe in this world of uncoordinated steering and undeveloped depth perception. Its like a life skills training camp for the very small. Aged from nine to two months. It's called family day, or in my opinion, hellhole-don't-plan-on doing-anything-that-you-planned-to-because-your-entire-day-will-be-revolved-around-trying-to-avoid-becoming-the-juice-box-and-cheese-stick-bitch. It really takes up allot of unnecessary energy. It's a horrible social stigma. If you don't get a kid something basic like something to eat or drink when they say they want it, you're a bad person. And on a small scale, I completely agree with this. But getting a drink for one, means getting a drink for all. There are 12 of them, just kids, not including their parents who, upon seeing that at long last, someone is getting drinks, suddenly realize that they are indeed parched as well. It balloons into a When You Give a Moose a Muffin situation and before you can say 'No Ive got other things to do than serve you and your children refreshments all day' you're making grilled cheese and lemonade for the masses.Sometimes it happens so fast that I am lead to wonder if the whole thing hadn't been planned all along.
Unfortunately this does not only happen on family day. I should probably mention that family day happens every other week on a Thursday, which happens to be the only day that I sometimes have a day off from my crazy work schedule. Yeah, it sucks in a major way. My family is very large, and a few years ago, before the numbers were getting out of control, when they came to visit it was no big deal. This is no longer the case. It seems like they are never not here anymore. And I'm inclined to believe that I may have been a very bad person in another life because of the sheer crap that keeps on piling up. It's all in the timing. The story always goes like this-It was a beautiful day because of the sheer fact that I had the day and the house to myself. I was planning on doing something that requires peace and quiet-painting, chicken nuggets, a really good movie, a bottle of wine etc. No one had mentioned anyone stopping in for a visit. I am in the either just in the middle of whatever I decided to do or about to start. And then I hear it. The crunch of gravel under tires. I hope in vain it's a wrong turn or a Jehovah's witness, someone I can tell how to get out of here, but no. It's not. I hear minivan doors sliding and the subsequent screaming of little girls who are deathly afraid of our huge and harmless dogs. While I do get some satisfaction out of not calling the harmless dogs away from them, the satisfaction is short lived as the reality of what must come next settle in.
For some reason, in these situations, where I could have a house potentially all to myself, my sister 'T' decides that she will, yes indeed, be setting up her wild savage camp for the evening into the next day. I am not sure why she sees this as an acceptable situation. I don't go by her house with wild beasts and say hey, Im going to stay the night, make a huge mess for you to clean up later, drink all of your coffee and then leave.It is inadvisable if you don't want to overstay your welcome as soon as you state that you are not immediatly leaving.
This has been going on for a few years now. I think it has more of a cumulative effect than is healthy. There's not enough time in between seiges to forget how awful it was last time. It would really help if her kids were not the worst out of the whole bunch. Each of them has a very distinct annoying trait. The oldest is constatly arguing that you didn't say he couldn't dig a 2 foot hole in this particular spot, you said he couldn't dig a 2 foot hole in that spot over there.It is beyond aggravating. The next one is a pathalogical liar. I am not sure why nobody has yet to see this as a serious problem. Seriously, the girl could give classes on how to stick to a story. Its amazing. She just needs to learn a little about stretching the laws of nature and life and not breaking them. She still maintains that her next door neigbors mom bought her daughter a snapping turtke as a pet, its green and it makes a snapping noise. Apparently the mother told her. (btw, snapping tutrtles are brown, you can't buy them as pets as they are incredibly dangerous and you would know if a small child had induced one to actually snap at them as they would be missing a finger or two). Her commitment to her lies is admirable, if misguided, but she lies about everything, things that don't matter, things that really do, and so she manipulates her world adn I find this very annoying as I just want a straight answer from her. She also has this annoying habit of narrating a movie as you're watching it, like you didn't just see it or something. I think she would do better to just stop talking. The next one is the least anoyying out of the bunch and I kind of feel bad for her. She kind of gets lost in the fray. Her anooying trait is that she has a smokers raspy voice. no her fault, but she uses this voice to whine. It's an attention getter, for sure, as you just want the noise to stop. Which leaves the youngest. As soon as she was born, the first thing anyone ever said (out of earshot of her mother) was how enormous her mouth was. This has been an affliction we all hoped would disperse as she grew older. It has not. The kid has the biggst mouth I've seen, and lungs to match it. She does not squeal, no, she screams, deafeningly. About everything. Being the youngest of four, she pulls all the stops. Attention is at a high premium, as her father is in ministry(for him this means never being with his wife and kids, and instead hanging out all day with college kids and pretending that it's work) and her mother puts house fixing projects, sewing, crafting and all manner of business into her schedule and this subsequently leaves very little time for actually paying attention to her children. She is a master at ignoring her childrens antics right next to her. While this is a common skill for many mothers, you do actually have to pay attention to them at some point in time. At least to spare the people around them. Please, SPARE ME!
So there you have it. An insight as to why I am slowly going insane.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
panic in a server station
I see him coming towards me.The head chef. I am at one of my many part time jobs. This one happens to be a 'friendly' neighborhood bar and grill. Those of us that work here know otherwise. If you have ever worked in the restaurant business you know that they are cesspools for gossip, catty behavior, and bad-sometimes skeevy and unqualified-management. Not all but most, I would say,are riddled with high skill level social situations, a dimension of my own personal hell as I am lacking in traditional social skills. Not bereft, mind you, just not very svelte. I digress.
He's walking towards me. We shall call him K. in the milliseconds before we make personal space bubble bumping, I feel a sense of dread. I can't pinpoint exactly what it is that I know about him that makes me feel this way until he is too close to pretend I am busy getting a refill for someone, or something, anything. My mind makes the necessary links between my dread and the information behind it, finally. His wife has recently had a baby. Dear god, no wonder my baby radar set off the alarm! It's just tricky-er with boys since they don't get the baby 'glow'. (This is a phenomenon where the average persons brains are so addled with evolutionary ticks that they mistake spit up, the wild eyed look of sleep deprivation, and a lack of showering for an attractive maternal aura).
So he's here, opening his mouth and I am trying to calculate the likelihood that his first words will be baby related, since all people with babies really want to talk about is of course, their offspring, against how much social prowess he contains. It may be that he will take the trickier route and ask me something about my sister, whom he knows and likes better than myself as they used to work together and she is incapable of being unliked. I try not to hold it against her since I actually do like her, but maybe I should dislike her, just to break the trend. I decide on the more indirect route and this is why. My sister has also just had a baby. And for baby people, others babys are their second favorite topic because 1) they are in the general topic of babies yay! 2) it is a clear conversational pathway to talking about their own babies and 3) they can then compare babies and either gloat at the sheer superiority of their babies development or pinpoint things to work on so that in the near future they can gloat about their babies superior development.
So this is what he says:' Hey Little owl how are you? How's your sister? When did she have her baby again?" I swear to god. I really wish I would be proven wrong just once, about this whole baby thing. So I give him the necessary information to make him happy and try to get the disappointed boredom off my face, a challenge I have had for many years, not just with disappointed boredom but with many an emotion that I should probably hide. I know I am not the only one with this problem, but with me, my face is a little to expressive to begin with, so the problem is not always with how strongly I am feeling about something, but with how much of it i allow to reside on my face. Being as I am also slightly sarcastic, this combination can be quite a pickle.
I am not going to bore you with the details of the conversation from this point. I am sure you can fill it in. All I can say is if you are like me and sick an tired of all this baby crap, it can be quite amusing to deftly steer the conversation away from the inevitable and see what creative ways people come up with to turn it back in favor of babies. This can also provide much entertainment with people of devout religion, since they at least are crudely trained to manipulate conversations. It can be a jolly good time.
Close to the end of our little chat about all manner of babies out comes one of the most annoying phrases ever known to man. 'I have a some pictures, do you want to see them?'. To this, it is universally known that ones answer must, at all times, upon pain of social stigmas forever, an enthusiastic 'yes!'. This can either be a golden opportunity or a sinking ship of despair.My job no longer is to listen, as he has stopped talking to look through pictures in his phone. Now, my sole focus in the break of eye contact, is to intensely search fro someone to fob off this blithering idiot onto. It takes some practise, but I have been in many a blithering idiot situation with pictures and so I will impart some of my extensive knowledge on the subject. I am almost certain to have to look at at least one maybe two pictures that look almost identical and do not require the lengthy explanation they are proffered with. But in order to avoid enduring endless photos of the same child doing the same thing over and over again I do the only thing one can really do. I call out for a hapless woman, it doesn't matter who, it matters only that she is a female and under the same supposition that I am(that her sole joy in life is to be interested in very small people), and say 'Come(for gods sake come!) look at K's new baby, Isn't that cute? Awww....And in the shuffle of bodies, make extra sure that someone ELSE is in prime viewing position. Now this is still a precarious situation as I may be sucked back in unwillingly at any moment. So the more the merrier. Call as many women over as possible and success shall be mine, I'm sure of it.
So that is precisely what I did. thank god. A happy ending to a story with a precarious beginning and a gruesome outlook. That's all anyone can really ask for. I relate this cautionary tale(stay away from those who are procreating) not to judge harshly but to bring to attention some of the things that ordinary people do unknowingly. We must forgive them because they have children and this means that a good portion of their daily goings on really suck, no matter how much they supposedly love parenthood. I just wish they wouldn't be so obsessed. They are as obsessed with their kids as I am with my dog.
She's awesome. Want to see pictures?......
He's walking towards me. We shall call him K. in the milliseconds before we make personal space bubble bumping, I feel a sense of dread. I can't pinpoint exactly what it is that I know about him that makes me feel this way until he is too close to pretend I am busy getting a refill for someone, or something, anything. My mind makes the necessary links between my dread and the information behind it, finally. His wife has recently had a baby. Dear god, no wonder my baby radar set off the alarm! It's just tricky-er with boys since they don't get the baby 'glow'. (This is a phenomenon where the average persons brains are so addled with evolutionary ticks that they mistake spit up, the wild eyed look of sleep deprivation, and a lack of showering for an attractive maternal aura).
So he's here, opening his mouth and I am trying to calculate the likelihood that his first words will be baby related, since all people with babies really want to talk about is of course, their offspring, against how much social prowess he contains. It may be that he will take the trickier route and ask me something about my sister, whom he knows and likes better than myself as they used to work together and she is incapable of being unliked. I try not to hold it against her since I actually do like her, but maybe I should dislike her, just to break the trend. I decide on the more indirect route and this is why. My sister has also just had a baby. And for baby people, others babys are their second favorite topic because 1) they are in the general topic of babies yay! 2) it is a clear conversational pathway to talking about their own babies and 3) they can then compare babies and either gloat at the sheer superiority of their babies development or pinpoint things to work on so that in the near future they can gloat about their babies superior development.
So this is what he says:' Hey Little owl how are you? How's your sister? When did she have her baby again?" I swear to god. I really wish I would be proven wrong just once, about this whole baby thing. So I give him the necessary information to make him happy and try to get the disappointed boredom off my face, a challenge I have had for many years, not just with disappointed boredom but with many an emotion that I should probably hide. I know I am not the only one with this problem, but with me, my face is a little to expressive to begin with, so the problem is not always with how strongly I am feeling about something, but with how much of it i allow to reside on my face. Being as I am also slightly sarcastic, this combination can be quite a pickle.
I am not going to bore you with the details of the conversation from this point. I am sure you can fill it in. All I can say is if you are like me and sick an tired of all this baby crap, it can be quite amusing to deftly steer the conversation away from the inevitable and see what creative ways people come up with to turn it back in favor of babies. This can also provide much entertainment with people of devout religion, since they at least are crudely trained to manipulate conversations. It can be a jolly good time.
Close to the end of our little chat about all manner of babies out comes one of the most annoying phrases ever known to man. 'I have a some pictures, do you want to see them?'. To this, it is universally known that ones answer must, at all times, upon pain of social stigmas forever, an enthusiastic 'yes!'. This can either be a golden opportunity or a sinking ship of despair.My job no longer is to listen, as he has stopped talking to look through pictures in his phone. Now, my sole focus in the break of eye contact, is to intensely search fro someone to fob off this blithering idiot onto. It takes some practise, but I have been in many a blithering idiot situation with pictures and so I will impart some of my extensive knowledge on the subject. I am almost certain to have to look at at least one maybe two pictures that look almost identical and do not require the lengthy explanation they are proffered with. But in order to avoid enduring endless photos of the same child doing the same thing over and over again I do the only thing one can really do. I call out for a hapless woman, it doesn't matter who, it matters only that she is a female and under the same supposition that I am(that her sole joy in life is to be interested in very small people), and say 'Come(for gods sake come!) look at K's new baby, Isn't that cute? Awww....And in the shuffle of bodies, make extra sure that someone ELSE is in prime viewing position. Now this is still a precarious situation as I may be sucked back in unwillingly at any moment. So the more the merrier. Call as many women over as possible and success shall be mine, I'm sure of it.
So that is precisely what I did. thank god. A happy ending to a story with a precarious beginning and a gruesome outlook. That's all anyone can really ask for. I relate this cautionary tale(stay away from those who are procreating) not to judge harshly but to bring to attention some of the things that ordinary people do unknowingly. We must forgive them because they have children and this means that a good portion of their daily goings on really suck, no matter how much they supposedly love parenthood. I just wish they wouldn't be so obsessed. They are as obsessed with their kids as I am with my dog.
She's awesome. Want to see pictures?......
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Thematic content of this blog
It suddenly occurred to me that whomever may happen upon my little blog will not have any idea what so ever as to what it is about, since my first post is very short and basically about why I don't want to blog. Ironic, I know. Forgive me for my dithers.
I am of the party of people out there who believe themselves to be almost exclusively so weird and random and not normal as to be completely with out the resource of camaraderie of been-there, done-that-ers, tell-me-your-version-of-the same-old-story. In this I am almost completely convinced I am alone. Or am I? You tell me.
So, my particular claim to crazy is my family. I swear, we could make a movie. They drive me nuts. One day we are all cruising along, and the next, procreation is in full swing and we are in major production of babies. Yes, babies. I was a kid person until I became an aunt. And filial affection was eradicated after baby number five or so. We are now at twelve and counting. It's embarrassing if you ask me. I swear my family is not Amish, Mennonite or polygamist. They just never took sex education to heart.
As you can imagine, this amount of humans, all clustered together in age, is quite the pot of gold of ridiculous situations. So that is mostly what this blog shall consist of. I warn you, fuzzy maternal warmth is not my forte. So if you are a kid person, this may be either enlightening( as in omg I don't want kids anymore) or offensive(as in omg I can't believe how heartless she is towards whiny slime machines)
I do have a life(kinda haha) outside of my family. I am also a massage therapist and a server at a bar and grill( a girls gotta pay the bills) and these are both great inspiration for ridiculousness as the public in general is quite full with crazies.With that I bid you farewell until next time.
I am of the party of people out there who believe themselves to be almost exclusively so weird and random and not normal as to be completely with out the resource of camaraderie of been-there, done-that-ers, tell-me-your-version-of-the same-old-story. In this I am almost completely convinced I am alone. Or am I? You tell me.
So, my particular claim to crazy is my family. I swear, we could make a movie. They drive me nuts. One day we are all cruising along, and the next, procreation is in full swing and we are in major production of babies. Yes, babies. I was a kid person until I became an aunt. And filial affection was eradicated after baby number five or so. We are now at twelve and counting. It's embarrassing if you ask me. I swear my family is not Amish, Mennonite or polygamist. They just never took sex education to heart.
As you can imagine, this amount of humans, all clustered together in age, is quite the pot of gold of ridiculous situations. So that is mostly what this blog shall consist of. I warn you, fuzzy maternal warmth is not my forte. So if you are a kid person, this may be either enlightening( as in omg I don't want kids anymore) or offensive(as in omg I can't believe how heartless she is towards whiny slime machines)
I do have a life(kinda haha) outside of my family. I am also a massage therapist and a server at a bar and grill( a girls gotta pay the bills) and these are both great inspiration for ridiculousness as the public in general is quite full with crazies.With that I bid you farewell until next time.
Friday, July 30, 2010
My first blog:explanation of benefits
What an awful phrase: explanation of benefits... When I hear that too-well-known verbiage I immediately think of my slippery red-haired, too inquiring-after-how-my-life-is-going insurance agent. Ugh. But in this case it is very fitting. I am a little(ok alot) technologically challenged. I have no idea what possessed me to start a blog.Other than Cat (shout out to my besty!). I spent the better part of two days racking up reason why this is such a bad idea. But, as besties usually are-at least the ones who know you better than you know yourself- she was right. I DO actually think it may be a good idea.
To be quite honest, my reasoning behind not being a blogger are probably the same ones that most people have. Umm, hello! Who has anything new to say? Also, the not new things that we all have to say probably shouldn't be read by the people we know! Inevitably what I write is going to be somewhat about them! And to be quite frank, I think we all have things to say about people that we don't want to say in front of them! I speak the truth for every other passive aggressive female out there.We HAVE negative things to say, we just don't!
So there it is.I will be giving you-my one and only follower, Cat-the down low on the ridiculousness that is my life and the crazy people that I am forced to allow into it.Enjoy!
To be quite honest, my reasoning behind not being a blogger are probably the same ones that most people have. Umm, hello! Who has anything new to say? Also, the not new things that we all have to say probably shouldn't be read by the people we know! Inevitably what I write is going to be somewhat about them! And to be quite frank, I think we all have things to say about people that we don't want to say in front of them! I speak the truth for every other passive aggressive female out there.We HAVE negative things to say, we just don't!
So there it is.I will be giving you-my one and only follower, Cat-the down low on the ridiculousness that is my life and the crazy people that I am forced to allow into it.Enjoy!
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