Monday, July 23, 2007

Dancing With Myself

Ellis is on her toy cell phone (insert pauses (sometimes lengthy) in between what she says):

“Hi, Dana!”

“No, I can’t come over today.”

“Well, we are in the car. We are taking Jonah to the bus for camp.”

“I know! He gets to go to camp, can you believe it? A whole week!”

“Weeelll, I would go to camp, but I’m going to stay home,”

She covers the toy phone’s microphone area and says in a half whisper, “Mom! Why am I not going to camp?”

“You are a little too young to go to camp, Ellis. If you want, you can go in a couple years.”

She gets back to her conversation.

“I don’t want to go to camp. Jonah wants to go, but I want to stay home and we are going to have a party and you are invited, Dana!”

“I know! It is going to be so much fun! I have my babies and you can bring food and we will have a fun party! And I think Ashen will want to come, too.” (Ashen is another person like Dana, whose existence has been spun out of whole clothe.)

“And then we can go swimming and we will invite David [last name deleted, he’s our next door neighbor and is in his late 40s, but Ellis always likes to insert herself into his life]. He will want to come swimming.”

“I know! I can’t wait!”

“OK, ‘bye, Dana! I’ll see you tomorrow! For the party!”

Annnd… Scene!

Friday, July 20, 2007

Ummm…. Derrrr?

Lucas called last night. He was at band camp. He’s taken up both the clarinet and the alto saxophone. He’s actually quite good, even though at times it sound like he’s trying to strangle a duck while he’s “trying to find the high notes.” Yes, find the high notes, like he keeps them in a special place inside the length of the clarinet and blowing really hard will help shake those troublesome notes loose and free them to waddle around the halls in search of their ancient atonal, yet squeaky master.

The conversation from Band Camp goes something like this:

“Hi, Mom”

“Hi, Lucas! How is Band Camp?”

“Fine. I guess.”

“Uh-oh. What’s wrong, my friend?”

“I forgot my clarinet and my sax. So I need you to bring them to me.”

“Nu-uh! You did not!”

“Yep, I did. So how soon can you get it to me?” (ed. note: Band Camp is at least 45 minutes away and it’s already half over by this time.)

“OK, um, well, I guess we can bring them up to you.”

“I’m just kidding! I didn’t forget my instruments! I’m not dumb, you know!”

“You’re a laugh riot, Lucas. A flat out, stomp on your face and smack me in the head with a large trout, laugh riot.”

But guess what he forgot at Band Camp when he left after the big concert?

My first guess was one of his instruments, and the story might be a little more tidied up if that were the case, but nope, our boy wonder left his sleeping bag, his back pack and his duffle bag with all his clothes in it back at Band Camp base camp. But the clarinet and alto made the trek back alive, praise zoraster! I’m not sure exactly how he managed to do that. I can understand misplacing one or two small things, like maybe your toothbrush misses the bus ride home, or you escape the walls of Band Camp without a contact lens case, but we are talking about an armful o’ stuff. You’d have to make two trips, just to not carry it all, that’s how much crap we are talking about. It’s like a week long mini-series of stuff to forget about. It hardly seems possible, but I think that boy could misplace a nostril and walk off without realizing it. He’d be all, “I’m breathing kind of funny right now, I don’t know why. Hmmmm. Whatever.”

And then we’d ask, “Lucas! Where is your left nostril? What did you do with your left nostril?!”

“You know, I just don’t know. I had it this morning, I was breathing with it and everything, and then after lunch, ‘zzz-blorp!’ it was gone,” and he’d say that, fresh as a daisy, as if the notion of losing one’s left nostril were a perfectly normal thing, happens all the time to lots of people.

That sound you heard? That was the sound of my head exploding in a gooey mass of jell-o pudding pops and frustration all over the kitchen table.

Maybe making him walk nekkid back to camp to get his crap will help next time. “Dude, you can wear clothes on the way back. They are in the duffle bag.”

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Eight Things About Me

This looney “tagged” me and now I feel compelled to engage this this whole “meme” thing. And can I just say for a moment, that I don’t even know how to pronounce “meme” and should therefore be excused from all such things? Seriously, the last “meme” type thing I really knew about was that “All your base are belong to us”goofiness and that was like a century ago in Internet time.

Oh, and the lolcatz. Heaven help me, I still think those are kind of funny.

Anyway, fine… here you go. Eight things about me. But don’t expect me to “tag” anyone else, OK? People will start to avoid me even more than they already do.

• 1. I loathe the taste and smell of vinegar and will sometimes refuse to enter a room that even has the slightest whiff of vinegar.



• 2. I’m tone deaf in a weird way. If something is out of tune, it grates on my soul. But I have NO idea whether the note is flat or sharp. In band, playing the clarinet or sax, and during the tuning phase of rehearsal, I would just guess at which direction to tune. Usually, I’d guess wrong and my band teacher would make a face like I was the dumbest person on the planet. I didn’t like band class very much.



• 3. I’m obsessive about keeping my computer’s Desktop clean, though I’m a total slob in real life. I’m looking at my physical desk/work area right now and it’s kind of hard to see anything given the piles and piles o’ crap. But my computer’s metaphorical Desktop is well ordered and there are NO stray documents or detritus on it.



• 4. I’ve had the same keychain/fob since I was in junior high, which means I’ve had it for over a quarter century. It’s astonishing that I haven’t ever lost it. I have things that belong to me that are older, certainly, but I don’t carry those things around with me every day, you know?



• 5. Until about three years ago, I had NEVER, EVER run out of gas. I was very proud of this fact for some reason (kind of like how I’m strangely proud that I still have a key ring from seventh grade, I guess). And then I ran out twice in the same week.

Jeez… EIGHT things? Really? Are we even close to being done yet? I’m dying over here… Fine. Three more.

• 6. My biggest regret is that I never finished college. It hasn’t really hurt my career, but it kind of bugs me.



• 7. I eat my salads essentially “dry” (but perhaps with a couple squeezes of lemon). Everyone thinks I’m weird, just sitting there with my pathetic naked lettuce, but I don’t mind my “dry” salads. See #1, do you know of a salad dressing that DOESN’T have vinegar in it?



• 8. Though there is significant evidence to the contrary (you are reading it) and I feel like I have a decent grasp of English grammar and sentence structure, I have trouble remembering the “lay/lie” rule and will invariably use the wrong word. Actually, it goes beyond mere “trouble,” I truly just don’t know and can’t seem to learn the rule. I know one of them takes an object, but I can NEVER remember which. In fact, I will often alter my speech and writing just so I don’t have to use one of those words. Seriously, I’m sitting here typing this out and and thinking, “Do I want to go lie down on the couch?” or “Do I want to lay down on the couch?” I know one of those sentences is correct, but I do not have clue one which.

But now I know that I really want to go take a nap, so there’s that…

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

More Evidence

More evidence that I will have to adjust my world view and see my little girl, who was born like two weeks ago, I swear; I was changing her overflowing diapers just MOMENTS ago, and she isn’t really seventeen AT ALL; for Pete’s sake on a popsicle stick, this can NOT be happening to me; I will have to start seeing her as something else entirely:

She is breaking our long standing tradition and she doesn’t want to go to a local bookstore at midnight this Friday and get the last Harry Potter and will thus fracture our streak of getting latest HP saga as it hits the shelves. We don’t dress up or anything seriously goofy (except that one time when I went as Hermione), we just get two copies of the book and race to see who can finish it first. She invariably wins, since I don’t have long stretches of time to devote to reading nothing but Harry Potter. I have to be semi-productive and will sometimes take breaks to sleep, eat or bathe, for example.

That sound you just heard? That was the sound of my heart breaking.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be in a dark corner listening to my extensive collection of The Cure, Dead Can Dance and The Smiths.

And NO, it doesn’t help that I got a sneak peek at the last Harry Potter book months ago.

Monday, July 16, 2007

How Long Before Bic™ Pen Ink Fades?

Last night, Reha and I were hanging out in our bedroom, hiding from the children and letting them plot their World Domination Tour ’07 without interference from us. Occasionally, one of them would come back of our room and make sure we weren’t going to come out and thwart their plans and alert the authorities, but mostly they left us alone.

Which is just too weird. We don’t usually get a lot of time to just hang out, read books or sit and talk within the walls of our own home, there is always someone clamoring for our attention. We tend to escape at least once a week and leave the kidlets to their own devices, much as if they were feral dogs, just so we can have some sanity. Lots of times we end up talking about the kids and our plans for them and whether or not the price we can get for a potty trained four year old has gone up enough that we are willing to risk imprisonment and go through with our “dispose of all children via the Gypsy open market” plan.

Anyway…

We call Carrie back to our room for an audience with us, so we can discuss Her Future. So got back from Japan last week and since then has buried herself in such mind expanding activities such as: ignoring us, IM’ing with her friends until the wee hours of the morning (you can set a clock to it), sleeping until mid-afternoon, and of course, treating us with contempt and disdain. It’s so nice to have her back!

OK, I’m kidding about all that, except for the part about staying up far too late.

She’s going to be a Senior next year, and though she has zero desire to become a responsible member of adult society, we feel certain parental duties and urges to shove her out into the world at least marginally prepared for life outside of the Deal Family Compound. Like, she has to decide where she wants to go to college. And she has to take the ACT or SATs. And it’d probably be nice if she got her driver’s license at some point. And she has to stop putting off taking those P.E. classes, or she won’t make it out of High School AT ALL. So we are having A Discussion about Her Future and I can’t help but make fun of her for many reasons, the greatest of those being that she’s funny when she freaks out about having to take a P.E. class. “Exercise, eeeew. That’s for the proletariat.”

“Jon, you are being totally rude!”

“Oh, come on, Re! I’m just kidding. Jeez!”

And then Reha lifted up my shirt and wrote on my expansive white belly, “Rude!” in ball point pen.

“Hey! Why’d you do that?”

“What? It’ll wash off. Plus, you never take off your shirt. No one will EVER see it. And given the size and sheer stark whiteness of your paunch, that’s a Good Thing.” (She didn’t really say that last thing, but it was unspoken and floating there in the air, I could feel it.)

“Yes, but what if I get into an accident and they take me to the hospital and they see that my big fat belly says, ‘Rude!’ and then I get sub-standard treatment because after all, who wants to save the life of a rude person and then I die?!”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

This morning, I completely forgot to wash it off (I was in a hurry and was mostly asleep during my shower, as usual).

So my belly says “Rude!” on it. If they have to take me to the hospital anytime today, I’m pretty well screwed, that’s all I’m saying.

 

Novus

Proximus

 

Favorite Entries

If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.

• Help Wanted
• From the Office of Mis-directed Email
• A Word from the Small Person in the House
• RNT Product Review: Chocolate Mix Skittles Left Me Sterile!
• Jon’s Report Card circa… A Long Time Ago
• Dear Gratuitously Naked Conversationalist at the Gym:
• A Peek Inside the Writer’s Guild and Producers’ Negotiations
• We Regret the Error
• Letters from a Homeowner to His General Contractor
• What I Did There
• Hermaphrodite Administrative Assistants and Receptionists Need Not Apply
• Giving Me an IM Account Was Obviously a Huge Mistake
• Official Ransom Note Typography Vista vs. Mac OS X Shootout
• I Need a Real Hobby
• Beat Down
• Big Fat Lies
• True Love
• Now MY Ovaries Hurt
• Don’t Get Her Started
• Disturbing Trend
• Had to do it
• Mooshy stuff
• Ransom Note Typography End User License Agreement “EULA”
• Diva-licious!
• Just so we’re clear
• PETA may have a point

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?

©2005-2008 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved. I'm not kidding around here, I know people who know other people who would be willing to beat you up or similarly infringe on your rights, should you happen to infringe on my rights.