Some Pig

Early To Rise

Lately I've observed that my children have the disconcerting ability to go from sound asleep to wide awake in a nanosecond.  At least, I think it's a nanosecond - all I know is, one moment Celeste is sawing logs next to me on the queen-sized, and the next her little face is rising over the inert form of her father like the sun over Kilimanjaro, crowing, "Peekaboo!  Peekaboo, mama!"  There's no transition time between the two stages, either; the moment their eyes fly open, the girls can and do chatter away like magpies, the connections between their mouths and their brains up and firing away without a second's pause.  This is less remarkable in the younger one, whose verbal acuity is limited to expressions like, "I want toast," and, "No, mama, NO NO NO I do it myself," but India has been known to shuffle down the hall, hair still tousled with sleep, and immediately offer a disquisition on the social dynamics and living habits of fairies in a way that makes her sound like the world's smallest Ph.D. candidate defending her dissertation.  If it were possible to earn a Ph.D. in fairy social systems, that is, and if it were acceptable to go to one's dissertation defense in a plaid flannel nightie, but you see what I mean.  Along the lines of thanking heaven for small favors, at least the girls are not the kind of kids who arise before daybreak with fulsome tidings of the new day.  They usually sleep until what is the at least bearable hour of 6:30 and sometimes even seven before popping up like daisies in the spring, but even so, the alacrity with which they rise is staggering.

Now let's compare that with my experience of the same time of day.  I hate getting up, hate it hate it hate it.  When the alarm goes off at five f&%#ing thirty every a. of m., my immediate reaction is to lie in bed, staring at the ceiling and engaging in free-form hatred of all mankind, then to wish desperately that the manservant would hurry up with the coffee.  Provided I don't hit the snooze button first, I then resign myself to the misery of existence and the necessity of showering and dressing before inflicting myself upon the world.  Generally that is followed by a more focused burst of hatred when I extricate myself from bed only to see my spouse and kinder happily, and unconsciously, enjoying the comforts of the mattress and blankets.  [NB:  You may have surmised from this post so far that the girls are co-sleeping with us, which they aren't-really-only-sort-of-in-a-way.  Basically they go to sleep in their own beds every night, then insinuate themselves into ours sometime between one and three in the morning.  It is not ideal, but it seems to provide the greatest good for the greatest number and as one who believes in utilitarianism, well, I think this is the best option given our current situation.  Plus I'm too tired to care.  If you have the magic bullet that will keep the girls in their own beds all night, every night, please share; otherwise, the nightly migration will continue until the girls get too big for all of us to fit in one queen-sized bed or they get sent away to boarding school.  In England.  At age six.  What?  If it's good enough for royalty, it's good enough for me!]

Given my attitude toward early rising, and my hatred of forced removal from bed, you'd think I'd find a career more conducive to late waking.  Nightclub proprietor might be a good choice, or perhaps celebutante - I bet Paris Hilton hasn't seen this side of five-thirty a.m. ever unless it's by staying up all night.  So what do I choose?  Public school teaching, a profession best left to those folks who consider themselves "morning people".  In fact, my whole life can be seen as a conspiracy to make me get up early.  When I was in high school, the bus arrived promptly at 6:10, necessitating a 5:00 wakeup time in order to make sure I had enough time to pop the collars on my multiple collared shirts and froof my hair to the proper degree.  It was the eighties, people, and these things were important!  It was agony getting up at that hour, but I was determined not to be like the tacky girls who used to hang out with their curling irons using the electrical outlets in the hall near the girls' locker room.  [An aside: Personal grooming, like falling in love and doing one's taxes, is an activity best pursued outside the public domain.  Watching you put on eyeliner is not a pleasant distraction from my everyday life; it makes me wonder what else you're willing to do while the whole world watches.  Floss your teeth?  Consummate your new relationship?  Adolescent girls would do well to note this.]

So on to college, a phase of life when one is expected to sleep until noon, stay up until the wee hours, consume large quantities of coffee and other borderline-suspicious substances, and generally ignore the hours of the clock in favor of one's own circadian rhythms, no?  In my case, no.  Instead, I chose to join the crew team - a sport notorious, nay, infamous, for its early hours.  I had my schedule timed down to the minute.  I could wake up at 4:51 and still make it to the boathouse in time for practice. Then, since I am a slow learner, I decided to take it back up in grad school and then stick with it for several years at the club level.  Rowers tend to be very focused, driven people (yeah, I know, that doesn't exactly sound like me - I was a coxswain and therefore just along for the ride), with real careers in addition to their time-sucking and exhausting avocation, so what time of day are these people usually available in the numbers needed to get a boat out on the water?  Right again.  During the season my wake-up time shifted to four-fifteen in the morning from roughly mid-April to the end of October.  Needless to say, I was not the nicest human being with whom to share the planet by the time late September rolled around.  Add to that the fact that I was teaching full time and coaching cheering and basically I was technically insane from sleep deprivation for roughly six months every year.  

So then I finally grow up and get married.  We move to The State Formerly Known As Home and settle into domestic euphoria, because "bliss" is not a strong enough word to describe the joyful state of being married to Warren (okay, I threw up a little in my mouth just then).  I am still on the hook to get up during my weekdays, but am free to pursue late mornings, early bedtimes, and many a nap in between during my weekends and summer breaks.  So then what do I do?  I go off and have children.  SMALL children.  Children who have needs, and sleeping patterns, that completely and totally disregard my preferences. Children who need 2 a.m. feedings, and early morning diaper changes, and help getting the cereal and then the milk into the bowl, and who can't read their own damn books to themselves.  Children who seem to expect some kind of maternal interaction on a regular basis throughout the day, "the day" being that period of time that coincides with the sky outside being light, even if that begins at five in the morning.  I am secretly dying for adolescence to roll around, if only so I can sleep past seven on the weekends! Never will you hear me complain about my children sacking in until one in the afternoon; that will be just in time for me to go take a nap and let them have the kitchen to themselves for awhile. 

Having said that, I know how this story will end.  I will get up at five-frickin-thirty a.m. and drag my ever-aging and increasingly exhausted carcass to work for the next twenty twenty-five thirty years of my life.  Finally I will retire, full of years and revered by all, to spend my remaining days in the bosom of my family.  The day I pick up my gold watch and certificate of merit, I will take a ball-peen hammer to the alarm clock that has been heralding the way-too-early dawn since I was in college and smash it until no one molecule of that wretched invention is connected to any other.  I will retire that night in joyful anticipation of my mid-morning rise.  And then, at precisely five-fricking-thirty a.m. the next day, my eyes will fly open and I will not be able to get back to sleep. Nor will I be able to sleep in any other day for that matter either. 

Chores I Have Known

The theme of my February break week seems to be "ketchup" - as in, ketchup on all the things I don't get done during the regular work week.  "But you're a teacher!" I heard you say, "You have all kinds of time to run errands and do chores!"  To which I say, come spend a week with me, buster, and then you'll see what "all kinds of time" looks like.  Anyway, I didn't intend for this post to consist of me moaning about my busy life, so back to the topic at hand!  As I was saying, I'm catching up on all kinds of things, including the ever-present mountain of laundry that threatens to erupt like those volcanoes Bobby Jindal doesn't seem to think we need to monitor (Um, really, Bobby?  The governor of a state nearly rendered nonexistent by a natural disaster doesn't want to stay on the watch for more of them?  How interesting.).  As I was (finally) putting laundry away this morning, it struck me:  It's not the doing of the laundry I object to (to which I object?), nor even the folding - I sorta like folding laundry; it's one of those soothing, mindless chores one can do while watching reality TV Senate confirmation hearings on CSPAN.  What gets me is putting laundry away.  Why?  I don't know.  But I just emptied a basket of dry, folded, clean clothes that had been sitting around since Sunday for no good reason other than I simply didn't want to do it.

Which brings me to my questions:  Why are some chores so much more odious than others?  Also, why is it the minor chores that seem so grating?  During grad school, I shared a house with four other people, and all of us hated putting dishes away.  We didn't mind doing dishes (well, I sucked at it, usually missing two or three big splotches of food/grease/whatever, but I didn't mind the actual washing of the dishes), but we all hated putting them away.  The dishwasher would be full of clean dishes, the drainboard next to the sink piled high with glassware teetering on the brink of destruction, every flat surface covered with some kind of baking dish, and the cupboards bereft of nearly everything short of the roasting pan before someone would declare a mass tidy-up session.  What was most notable was the fact that out of five people (or often six or seven, including boy/girlfriends and various hangers-on), EVERYONE was willing to do the dishes, but not ONE of us liked to put dishes away.  We'd do dishes by hand for days rather than empty the dishwasher.  (I'm not going to address the general cleanliness of the house or chore rotation.  We'll just let a cone of silence descent upon that topic.)

So tell me:  What chores do you avoid?  Which menial tasks do you ignore, and what happens as a result?  And, do you have any idea why you hate this chore?

Older is Definitely Better!

Remember my previous posts about old guys?  Well, some new oldster names came to my attention lately and I thought I should share them:

 

Rupert Everett is fifty!  Okay, so he doesn't play on my team.  So what.  I'm just ogling, anyway.

 

Okay, OKAY!  I know Howie Long looks like your seventh grade gym teacher ... but in seventh grade you didn't realize your gym teacher was SWEET LIKE THIS!  Plus he's a Woostah boy made good, so you gotta love him.  I'm sure he's got a beautiful, blonde, size-2-former-beauty-queen wife at home, but if he ever decides to go for short, dark, and snarky, I'm riiiiiiiight here, Howie baby!

 

I could listen to this man read me the phone book.

 

Okay, unlike the previous picture, you have no idea who this guy is.  It's Dmitri Hvorostovsky.  Don't ask me to pronounce that (the Hvorostovsky part, that is; I think I can handle Dmitri).

 

This man can shake me OR stir me, a-nee-time!  He may have to be my Celebrity Out Clause - you know, the one person you're allowed to have a cheap, meaningless fling with outside the bonds of marriage with no penalty (thanks, Madge, for that nomenclature!).  Of course, Johnny Depp may be devastated by that news ... what's a girl to do???  Speaking of which, here's a picture of the Deppster just for comparison's sake:

 

Normally, unwashed-hippie-soul-patch-dude doing the namaste thing doesn't do it for me.  Except in this case.  Yeah, I KNOW he was in last year's post!  Like I said, it's solely for the basis of comparison!

Okay, ladies, what's your take on this guy?  Yeah, he's cute, but he dated an Olsen, fercryinoutloud.  And, I dunno, the steroids thing, and then the neverending comebacks?  He may have jumped the shark.  But he DOES have nice eyes:

 

I want to end this post with a thinking girl's hottie.  He's one of a handful of men who fall into the ugly-hot category; as in, depending upon the day and the movie he's in, he can be totally homely or really smokin'.  He's kind of a shape-shifter, which is what makes him so interesting.  The one thing that doesn't change is the fact that he is seriously intelligent, which shows no matter what the camera does:

 

Okay, that was picking the low-hanging fruit.  Of course he looks great in his publicity shot, so here's an example of a not-so-flattering picture:

See what I mean?  Not a classic Cary Grant type by a long shot, but I wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers, as the saying goes.  Okay, can I amend my Celebrity Out-Clause?  What about an "A" list and a "B" list?  Decisions, decisions!

Help A Sista (and Brudda) Out

This is going to be a short one because I want you to take the time you usually spend savoring my words of wit and wisdom to do two things:

1.  Go here so you can click over to this and vote for her.  'Cause if you don't, she's going to have to move to Missouri, and not that I have any reason to diss Missouri (I mean, gotta love the show-me state, right?  Not only did it grace us with Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey, but it sounds like the kind of state that has kick-ass state fairs with lots of food on sticks and who doesn't love food on a stick?) but anyone who has read even ONE of Elaine's posts realizes that a small town in the middle of the country is just not her style.  I hope you have a computer with more RAM or ROM or RIM or whatever it is that makes things load fast and play nicely than I have because I have tried to vote for Elaine's video several times now and the SOB website will not! stop! loading!  So I need you to do it for me.  Also, the "most popular" thumbnails show a preponderance of skinny girls in bikinis and the last thing we need is for a skinny girl in a bikini to get cut yet another break, I find that those women generally get things to go the way they want most of the time anyway so BACK OFF SKINNY BITCHES AND LET SOMEONE ELSE HAVE A TURN. 

2.  Once you have done that you can go excavate the nether regions of your junk drawer and find a few Happy St. Swithin's Day cards left over from last year's Saint-a-palooza fest (am I dating myself by using the "palooza" ending?  I bet that is so over) so you can use them for Inappropriate Card Day and send one to me (for reals - email me and I will send you my snail mail address; I love getting mail and 99% of the time it is bills, catalogues, the local freebie newspapers and crap flyers and the other 1% of the time it is cards from grandparents to the girls, neither one of whom can read yet).  As someone who rarely gets the holiday card written, addressed, stamped and out the door before the occasion for the card comes and goes, thus rendering said card passe, I am all in favor of this new holiday.  In fact, I have not one but TWO Valentine's cards reposing on the counter right now that did not make it to their intended recipients, so if YOU email ME with your snail mail address (see link on sidebar), the first two people to do so will get an Inappropriate Card just in time to miss Inappropriate Card Day!  Plus I am shameless about grubbing for comments and I just lurves me some MP and Sanity, Interrupted, so perhaps by linking to his post they will leave me comments! 

Adventures of Wildly Inadequate Mom, Episode 1 UPDATED

I have a confession to make.

I am not washing that damned rubber sheet again.

India is desperately trying to go without pullups during the night, and last night she had a teeny-tiny little,  um, urine event.  And I, being the happy homewrecker maker that I am, took off the fitted sheet and squinted hard at the rubber sheet underneath.  Then, after ascertaining that there were no visible stains, I gave it the ole sniff test and voila!  No smell!  So that damned sheet is staying on the bed.

There.  I admitted it.  I am willing to let my child sleep on urine-soaked sheets.  Because that is what it boils down to, even if the urine soaking is admittedly microscopic in nature. All because I hate that f*&%ing rubber sheet.  Getting it off the bed is bad enough, but getting it back on the bed is a nightmare.  The sheet is elasticized all the way around, so that the moment I get one end of the mattress covered, the other end lets go and comes flying back down the length of the bed. Watching me try to wrangle it over the far corners of the mattress, observers could easily mistake my efforts for a poorly executed revival of Martha Graham's Lamentations, that dance she performed completely encased in a tube of stretchy fabric.  Seemingly the only way to get it to stay on the bed is to anchor it at every corner with a different limb, a la Wile E. Coyote. I have been known to break into a sweat trying to get this infernal creation to get on the mattress and stay on the mattress.

And I get to do this every day.  Every.  F*&%ing.  Day.  Lucky me!

While I'm confessing my transgressions, I might as well come right out and say it:  Warren's a better mother than I am.  When India comes into our room damp and crying at two in the morning, my reaction is to mutter unprintable things in my head about having to wash the fricking sheets again, while his is to offer concern, cuddles, and a prime spot in our bed.  He tells her he is so proud of her for trying to be a big girl and he means it, while I am secretly wishing she would just put the damned pullups on again already.  Warren will gladly take half an hour and let the girls "help" him with a task he could do in five minutes, whereas I secretly hurry through chores when they're otherwise occupied so I won't have to redo it all over again later.  At bedtime, he has long conversations with the girls about what they did and how they felt, whereas I just want to read the book, sing the song and be done already.  I get irate when the errant elbow knocks over the full glass of milk, which then explodes all over the table, the wall, the floor, and the chair, while Warren just says, "Spills happen! You didn't mean it."  Going back to the bedwetting issue, Warren has created this whole plan whereby we put her on the potty right before she goes to bed, then again when we go to bed, and then again at midnight (which means we have to set an alarm and then get her up), all in hopes of catching the pee train before it leaves the station.  I, on the other hand, had advocated for keeping India in pullups until she had three dry nights in a row, figuring that would take awhile to achieve and give us a reprieve from the idea. Warren will bend over backwards to be nurturing and supportive; I've been known to tell India to rub some dirt on it when she has a meltdown over critical issues like the color of her tights.  

In my defense (because I am feeling a bit defensive about all this), I do spend a lot more time than Warren does with the girls, and a lot of it is by myself AND during less-than-opportune times when everyone is a) tired, b) stressed, c) hungry, or d) all of the above.  Adding an extra task like washing the sheets to an already overloaded day is a big deal, particularly when your better half doesn't seem to have a clue about how the washer operates.  Here's a story:  I loaded the wet sheets in the washer one morning before I left for work.  Then, so my dearest of dears could take his shower with the water pressure unimpeded, I put the washer on delayed start.  At dinner that night I jumped up to put the (supposedly) now washed sheets in the dryer so they'd be ready for bedtime.  But the sheets were in the same unwashed state I had left them in!  Why?  Because my darling husband, even though he knew the bed had been wet the night before, looked at the washer and figured I must have left it on by mistake, so he turned it off!  So later that week, after another incident, I asked him to strip the bed and run the washer, figuring that would eliminate the middleman altogether.  Again I come home to unwashed sheets in the washer.  Why?  "I couldn't figure out how the washer works," he admitted sheepishly.  Really!  A washing machine!  We're not talking about the space shuttle here, people, or even the average industrial photocopier, it's a washing machine.  What's there to figure out?  There's a dial thingie, a soap dispenser thingie, and a button thingie.  Turn one, put detergent in the other and push the third - not rocket science!  Okay, first, dude's got an MBA, so he's not dumb; second, he's not one of those poor ignorant doofuses you see on the Dr. Phil show who have no idea what it takes to do housework until their wives leave them with the house and the kids for 48 hours.  He's far more domestic than I am, truth be told, and he's flummoxed by a washer??  Pfft!

Looking on the bright side, I do see a silver lining here.  Warren works for a retail apparel company.  They're in good shape now, but if this recession goes as long and as deep as they're predicting, Warren may find himself taking a one-way trip to Layoff City along with a lot of other highly qualified professional workers.  On the other hand, they're not stopping production of eighth graders anytime in the near future, at least not that's been announced publicly.  We could find ourselves by necessity reversing the time-honored roles of male breadwinner and female homemaker, a situation that would play to both our strengths.  Let me tell you, I would love to come home after earning the day's crust to have my husband place a goblet of red wine in my hand while cooing, "You've had such a long day, why don't you sit down and talk to the children while I get dinner on the table?"  That will be after I give him the advanced tutorial on how to work the washer, of course.

UPDATED TO ADD:

After four nights in a row and trying, and failing, to coordinate our midnight wake-up program with India's bladder, and four middle-of-the-night cleanups, and four days of running the washer and dryer, I told India today that we are taking a break from trying to stay dry at night. I will call the pediatrician next week and see if there is anything we should try that we haven't tried yet.  From what I understand, kids who can't stay dry through the night by age seven get a nasal spray treatment of some kind of hormone that tells your bladder to stay shut all night.  I certainly hope I don't have to wait three more years, but we'll see.

In Which I Have Good Ideas

Good Idea #1

You may remember quite some time ago when I shared the story of how we repainted a number of rooms in our house, including the girls' bathroom.  Among other things, I was fretting about what I could do to mitigate the unrelentingly pink, um, pinkness of that particular room.  Now, I am usually not one to come up with clever ideas around household decor, and my efforts to be stylish often just fall flat.  For example, Warren's cousin painted one of the bathrooms in her house a sort of an oatmeal-y tan color with lighter tan towels and silver bath accessories, and the effect was all very House Beautiful.  Had I tried the same, the effect would have been far more "Holiday Inn," or perhaps more accurately, "cheap condo the builder painted one neutral color".  [Of course, this is the same cousin who has attained great professional success while maintaining a house and a social schedule that would put both Martha Stewart and Laetitia Baldridge to shame, all while being so friendly and down-to-earth that one can't help liking her even as one's guts are twisting into knots with jealousy.  Or so I imagine.  Not that I feel that way, you see, it's just that I can see how other people might feel that way.  Ahem.]

So anyway, quite unexpectedly I had an idea!  We needed a towel rack in the room, and I decided I wanted something more colorful and kid-friendly than a regular towel rack. I couldn't find anything that quite fit that bill, so we bought a peg rack and some sample paint and painted it a bright blue-green.  Then - and here's where the genius idea comes in - I had the inspiration to line up the girls' tub toys along the shelf part of the peg rack and waalah!  Look how cute!  Now I can hang up different colored towels on the pegs, which helps distract from the - er, 'vibrant' pink of the walls, and the ducks and tugboats fit the child theme of the room.  Of course, this idea does have a built-in half life of about six years tops before the kids totally outgrow the tub toy theme, upon which time I will either have to redo the room or come up with some other near-genius inspiration to rescue us from a repainting job.  If you have any ideas, please, by all means, share them!

One From the Archives; Or, Mess With Karma at Your Own Peril

My audience is clamoring for a new post!  Which, translated, means my coworker asked, "When are you going to post again?  I keep looking and it's the same stuff."  So much for the screaming masses, eh?

Well, given that we have been short of any new inaugurations, my students are more annoying than cute right now, and I never see Warren to have any kind of postworthy exchange, I have to reach back into the plethora of Some Pig experiences to share a story of my yoot.  (Anyone get the My Cousin Vinny reference?  Vinny: "The two yoots..."  Judge: "Yoots?"  Vinny:  "Yeah, yoots.  The two yoots..."  Trivia experts! Name the two famous actors who played bit parts in that movie!). 

Okay, I appear to have digressed yet again. On to our story...

Setting:  A small junior high school in Podunksville, The State Formerly Known as Home.  Time:  The late seventies-almost-eighties.  I was, as is so often the case, a rather unattractive specimen of early-adolescent humanity:  Thick glasses, equally thick braces, a thick middle, and a thick crop of bushy, frizzy hair.  Upon retrospect, I was also rather thick-headed when it came to peer relations and I often just didn't "get" some of the all-important subtleties of peer relations.  Add to that a large vocabulary, an inability to keep my mouth shut and a near-total dearth of athletic ability and what do you have?  As you can imagine, it was rather thick going at times for one so blessed at such an awkward stage of life.  Yeesh.

Going to a small school, I had no choice but to interact with just about everyone in my class.  There was no real way to avoid people you didn't like unless it was to not talk to anyone at all (which one kid of my acquaintance did - I went to school with him for the better part of eight years and I still can't tell you what his voice sounded like).  Cue the entrance of the antagonist of our story.  "Rhonda" was just about the antithesis of the 13-year-old me: A popular girl with a blond pageboy, perfect preppy teeth, an affinity for sports and the admiration of everyone in our little hormonally-charged world (In the interest of truth in journalism, I will add that she was the kind of ruddy-skinned blond one usually associates with sunburnt, overweight frat boys in Cancun, and she had a bubble butt.  Not that I'm trying to sway your opinion or anything, I am merely relating the facts.).  Rhonda was also the alpha bitch of the mean girl pack, and THE DAUGHTER OF MY DAD'S NEW BOSS.  Yeah, how's that for a comfortable situation?  I might just as well have put on a sweater made of pork chops and wandered into the lion's cage at the zoo.

Rhonda hated me, for reasons I'll explain later, but for most of our acquaintance she kept it at a simmer.  Shortly after she moved to Podunkyville in fifth grade, she marshalled all the other girls in class to sit with her and exiled me to sitting with the girl who wore lip gloss outside her lips.  In sixth and seventh grade she would do things like make fun of me for wearing a plaid shirt that had green in it on a Thursday, because only queers wore green on Thursdays, or get everyone in class to stare at me when I wasn't aware they were watching - not very nice, but not the worst of the worst.  Then, in eighth grade, she joined forces with "Lindy," an unholy terror of a girl who also hated me, and they conspired to make my life miserable.  The most vivid memory of their efforts is the stretch of time when, during our brief recess periods after lunch, they would get all the girls in our lunch to form a circle around me and harass me, verbally and physically.  Girls I talked to everyday, girls who were my friends inside the building - including people I'm still friends with even as we speak (um, type) - joined in the fun. I still remember going to math class after one such attack, shaken to the core, where I sat next to my 'best' friend, who had just been wholeheartedly participating in the Caroline roast.  She whispered something to me about how she was sorry, but she didn't dare risk making Rhonda and Lisa angry (The only two girls who didn't join in were my friends Jen and Vanessa, both of whom didn't care about being popular, and both of whom pointed out that those girls weren't really my friends.  Would that we all had such perspective at age 13!).  Finally, after enduring three or so days of torment, I went to the principal's office in hysterics and told all.  THAT didn't endear me to anyone, you can be sure, but at least I got to be an office aide at lunchtime and no longer had to go outside.

Fast forward a couple years - okay, decades.  Rhonda moved away in 9th grade, moved back briefly, then went off to prep school when we were sophomores.  We'd see each other from time to time, since our fathers still worked together, and we'd make strained polite conversation.  Then she went to St. Lawrence for college, got a long-term sweetheart, and became a landscape architect.  Later I heard she and the college sweetheart got married happily ever after, blah blah blah. 

Except - !

Except that, shortly after their honeymoon, Rhonda came home to find said sweetheart-now-husband firmly ensconced in bed with a woman not his wife - a woman with whom, it turns out, he'd been consorting since well before the wedding.  The marriage, needless to say, was over, over before all the wedding gifts had even been unwrapped.

How do you like THEM apples?

When I was in college, between the bullying episodes and the marital meltdown, I worked with Rhonda's mom.  I found out that Rhonda had picked on me because she was jealous and angry.  She was the second-to-last child in a large family that was coming apart at the seams.  They had moved to Podunkyville from Cape E. to escape the effects of her father's philandering, and she was miserable.  Then her parents and my parents had tried to throw us together as instant friends, because, hey!  We were the same age!  There she was, a newcomer from an unhappy household being forced to socialize with the cherished daughter of an intact family.  So, yeah, from that perspective I can feel some glimmer of sympathy for her, but not a whole hell of a lot.  When I heard the news about her ex-husband, I didn't feel glee or satisfaction.  What I felt was vindicated.  What I hoped then, and still hope to this day, is that between her personal woes and that experience, she felt exactly the same amount of misery, pain, and anguish she inflicted upon me.  I hope she cried hot tears alone in her room and wondered what the hell was wrong with her that such things would keep happening.  I hope she looked in the mirror and wished she were anyone else, anyone other than the miserably inadequate creature staring back at her.  As no less than Justin Timberlake observed, what goes around comes around, and I hope to this day she got the full measure of what she had coming.  Hey, I'm being fair and balanced, here - I don't wish her MORE pain and misery than I felt, just the SAME - but that would be plenty in itself. 

(By the way, don't feel too badly for her.  She married some Boston Brahmin, the year after Warren and I got married, and she's probably doing just fine, thank you.) 

Fashion Distraction, Winter Edition

Those of you SP readers with long memories may remember a public-relations kerfuffle a few years ago involving the first President Bush (motto:  Looking better by comparison to the other Bush presidency all the time!).  The brouhaha revolved around Bush pater and mater claiming their legal residence as an anonymous hotel in Houston for tax purposes when the only residence they owned was the family compound at Walker's Point in Kennebunkport. So the question arose, Are the Bushes considered Texans or Mainers?  Steak or lobstah?  Rodeos or the Fryeburg Fair?  Tall tales or Yankee reticence? 

Well, after many years and several subsequent presidencies, I finally have an answer.  Bush pere is clearly much more aligned with New England than the Lone Star state.  How do I know?  Well, I have photographic evidence.  I couldn't figure out how to save a screen shot of this, but I was able to link to it here. I'll wait while you take a look, then meet me back here.

So, did you notice what I meant?  I'll give you a hint:  It has to do with the thing that looks like a large, dead wolverine perched smack dab atop George 41's head.  Yep, on that most significant day in our nation's history, the former leader of the free world was wearing - an ear-flap cap.  Millions of eyes the world around are trained on that stage, and George Herbert Walker Bush looks like he bought it when he saw it at Marden's (That phrase may be meaningless to those of you who live south of the Piscataqua Bridge, but trust me, it resonates for us.).  From the neck up, he could have been going to the inauguration or down to the Paris Farmers Union for some more rock salt, there's no telling which.  And that is proof positive the Maine ethos is lodged deep in his soul.  Jeezis, it's cold as a bahstid up theyah on that stage in Janu'ry; no point gettin' the pee-neumonia just 'cause a buncha them teevee peoples are lookin' atcha, is theyah?

To elaborate:  Living through winters in Maine deprives one of all concerns for fashion, style, or even general aesthetic sensibility when it comes to outerwear.  The point of one's outer garments is to keep the elements far, far away, and if something works, form comes way, waaaaay behind function in priority.  This is why I continue to wear my shapeless, dorky, and totally unflattering winter hat even though it resembles (as I have already mentioned) a large gray fleece marshmallow and makes me look like a 'tard. (Sorry, all you politically-correct-type peoples.  There's just no other way to describe the total effect and do it justice.) (Oh, excuse me - to stay true to my roots, I'd have to say "it makes me look like a wicked 'tard."  My oversight.)  This is why, when I am fully decked out in all my winter gear, I can safely say that not one item coordinates even slightly with any other item.  It is also why, now that India's choice of accessories is under my purview, I am bringing her up to follow in my aesthetically uncoordinated footsteps. Just recently she was rocking a pair of red and white striped gloves with her pale lavender coat, navy snowpants, a pink fleece hat, and bright-purple-and-black boots.  Celeste, on the other hand, often looks like she stepped out of a winter-wear catalogue (courtesy of the gp's largesse), but soon I will have her mixing and mis-matching with the best of them.

Now that I am older and wiser and possessed of disposable income, I suppose I could make more of an effort to present a coordinated front, but some part of me just won't do it.  There's a small, stubborn spark of New England Calvinism in me that sees such efforts as wasteful or show-off-y.  After all, if it's dry and warm and keeps the snow out, that should be good enough, right? And given that this winter has been, in the words of a friend of mine, "relentless," there will be many more opportunities for me to look completely devoid of fashion sense in the near future.  That ear-flap cap may not be such a bad idea!

P.S. That Maine sense of, um, eclecticism isn't limited to outwear.  I ask you, what's an appropriate outfit to wear to a second wedding taking place in the early afternoon?  Apparently the answer is, anything from jeans and a oxford shirt with your favorite baseball cap to a long velvet evening gown and all points in between, ranging from a black cocktail dress trimmed with electric green to a sweater and khakis.  Gotta love a place where you can point to what you are wearing and call it your "best dressy T-shirt" with a straight face, which is how one man of my acquaintance identified his clothes.  A former principal of mine tells a story of going to a wedding in Brownsville Junction, to which she wore a pantsuit she often wore to work.  In her words, "I was dressier than anyone else in the place, including the bride." 

Wild Kingdom

I am absolutely dog tired.  That's like being regular tired, but seven times worse.

Working with eighth graders is a challenge at times.  They have the attention span of fruit flies, the energy of a hyperactive chihuahua on a double espresso, and the social graces of a bull in a china shop.  They are either grooming themselves and each other incessantly, or they have the personal habits of one of those algae-covered sloths.  They chatter away like parakeets and pace around like caged lions.  They whomp on gum incessantly, so that the room sounds like a herd of dairy cows got lost on the way to the milking barn and set up shop in room 208 instead.  Attempts to get them to do anything together are usually about as successful as herding cats.  On any given day, I am about one incident away from going barking mad, and on a lot of days I cross that line and wind up crazy as a loon.

I just realized:  I'm not a teacher, I'm Marlon bloody Perkins.