Mine and yours

"...and all this was happening around 500 B.C. You know, when the Greeks were doing their thing.  In my region--not your region.  I don't know what yours were doing at that time.  Fucking sheep, probably."

A portion of Ivan's account of a chapter on Buddhism he'd recently enjoyed in a book on world religion, and one of many reminders that his Balkan ancestors are superior to my Northern European ones.

A tube is a tube is a tube

A: Can you run out and get me a tube of Orajel? We're almost out and I'm starting to freak out.

I: (picks up a tube of Desitin diaper cream) Can't you just use this?

A: That's for her butt.

I: (Looks at tube again, shrugs) Okay.

By way of explanation

I:  What's wrong with that girl?  Is she right in the head?

A:  She's from Indiana.

I:  Ah, okay. That explains it.

Flushed

My name is Sophia and I hog the bed.

Maybe only appreciated by gamers (thus, 0.0001% of my readers)

Ivan plays an online, fantasy, player-versus-player game (a MMORPG, to be more precise) called Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC). Admittedly and embarrasingly (because of my stereotypes about gamers) I've gotten into playing it in recent months, too.

Last night in the shower I was so furious with him for what he has done as I washed my still sore places that I was screaming at him in my mind. When I got out and dried off, I needed to do something.

I logged into his main character in DAoC, a known, templated, high realm-rank healer, Atreri, and went to the frontiers where other characters (or "toons") were getting ready to go off into the battlegrounds. I started going up to other people's toons and using the game's emoticons to make rude gestures at them, wave away their stench, and roll on the floor laghing at them. People started making rude gestures back and lots of them asked, "Dude, who the hell are you?" and "What the fuck is your problem?"

I finally announced in region chat that I was pissed off at my boyfriend and this was his toon so I was doing weird things with him. People found that amusing and one dude asked, "Hey, can I have his gear?" After that, all the toons around me started hugging me.

It was a weirdly touching moment.

How socks have to be like

This morning when he emerged from getting dressed, I giggled at how Darius was wearing his socks rolled up in this fine fashion:




He glanced down and explained: "I saw this movie once. When I was little. Um, and a kid, um, had his socks like that. Rolled up. And, um, and that's how socks have to be like."

My house. Where difficult silverware goes to die.

When I was growing up, one of my main household duties was the nightly task of washing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. God, I hated it.

My mother's silverware drawer was a constant annoyance to me. On one side, our spoons, forks, and knives sat neatly in their little trays. The rest of the drawer was a chaotic mess of other, less frequently used cooking- and eating-related utensils: vegetable peelers, spatulas, corn on the cob holders, and so on. I quickly termed this the "difficult silverware" because these items were hard to organize, often oversized, and seemed to require endless rooting through the drawer to find.

In my adulthood, I have tried to alleviate this problem by having a large ceramic container sitting on the counter that holds and provides easy access to all the larger items. I, too, have a mass of garlic presses, measuring spoons, fondue forks, and shish kebab sticks messily taking up space in the other half of my silverware drawer. But at least I have made some progress on the organization front. My mama didn't raise no dummy.

I have noticed that Ivan has very little interest in my personal system of silverware organization. (The same could be said for his position regarding my systems for washing dishes, arranging the medicine cabinet, cleaning the bathroom sink, and putting away groceries, but I suppose at the moment that is neither here nor there.) We share the task of washing dishes, but in recent weeks and months when I have not felt well he has cheerfully born the brunt of it (unless we played cards and placed bets on who had to wash the dishes and I lost--also neither here nor there).

Ivan's kryptonite is putting the clean dishes away. He hates it. He is brought to his knees. He will beg and plead and cajole me that he will wash the dishes if only I will put the clean dishes away. Some days this sounds like a reasonable request. Other days it does not. If left to his own devices, he will put away simple items like plates and bowls and cups. The rest he stacks randomly around the kitchen or else takes a wild guess as to where it might belong and stashes it there. On some level I find this amusing, but when I am in the middle of cooking and politely looking for an item ("Where in the hell is the mixing bowl?") it makes me crazy.

This is how the ladle and the whisk have disappeared.

Really, it could be so easy! They could be proudly sitting in the container on the counter, ready to be called to duty again. Instead, I root through drawers and cabinets complaining, "How far could the goddamned whisk have gotten?"

To which he replies, "Which one is the whisk again?"

They have both been missing for weeks, and to his annoyance I never miss an educational opportunity to remind him of their usefulness and to bemoan their unknown whereabouts whenever I can.

I think about them sometimes even when I am not cooking. I like to imagine they are now free from servitude and pursuing other, non-functional interests and talents they might have. I suppose they will turn up eventually. Maybe when I move out of this apartment. Or, sure as shit, as soon as I decide to replace them and buy new ones.




I call this one "Sans Ladle and Whisk."

Future tense

A: "Voy a preparar su ensalada en diez minutos."

(P.S. My Spanish RAWKS!)

(P.P.S. Is that right, Cindy?)

Spread

**A warning to my father--and everyone else, for that matter--that I discuss my hoo-hoo (and more) below**

Money is pretty tight these days, so it is a rare and wonderful treat to go in for waxing. Gone are the days when I went to the little Vietnamese salon down the street to see the lovely and always surprising Penny (read about examples of that here and here).

No, no. Once I got serious about the waxing of the vagina I started investing in a nice salon--one with bright lights and numbing spray and fancy purple wax. Stephanie is now my go-to girl for my hair removal needs.

I love Stephanie. She is also a lawyer who volunteers her time in the public defender's office. She is interesting to talk to, has an amazing memory for the random things I've told her, and makes the scary and potentially humiliating experience of a Brazilian bikini wax almost...enjoyable. This time, as with last time, I decided to really go for it--have her take it all off. No landing strips; there are no airplanes here. Get this shit OFF.

So yesterday Stephanie finished up the entire front area and was ready to work on the "back door" as she calls it. I took a sip from my glass of wine for strength and sustenance.

"Can you lay on your stomach and reach both hands back and spread your butt cheeks for me?"

I laughed nervously while getting into the requested position and said, "I am pretty sure no one has ever asked me to do this before."

"Well, at least now you know you can," she answered as she worked. "This way, if we're ever taken over by aliens and this is your only way to eat, you know you can do it."

What?

An open letter to Glad, maker of 13 gallon tall draw-string kitchen trash bags

Dear Glad,

I am writing to express my enjoyment of this product.

Lately my partner has been into making his own falafel, and thus we have been going through an increased amount of cooking oil. I confess that am I rather ignorant of what to do with this oil once we are finished, and I feel certain there is probably something more ecologically responsible I should be doing other than dumping it into the trash once it has cooled. I was just trying to avoid pouring it down the sink and clogging up the works.

After this week's falafel endeavors, I sighed with dread when I imagined the mess that would quite possibly be awaiting me when I pulled the oil-filled trash bag out of the plastic can. I was thrilled to be wrong. I was even more pleased after the trash bag was drug across the living room floor and thoroughly stepped on by my step-son and there was still not a leak in sight.

Not too many things are going right at present, but it is nice to know I can count on my trash bags during these trying times. I have been purchasing this brand for years; I will continue to do so in the future with pleasure.

Sincerely,

Amie
A satisfied customer in San Francisco

The peas for a second

I: Can we talk about the peas for a second? The ones we're having for dinner? With the chicken and mashies? The frozen peas? Let's actually cook that shit. Not microwave shit. Like, I'm talking BOILING. I'll be in charge of that.

Advice

This morning when being teased, 5 year old Darius told his father, "If you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all!"

Let them eat cake.

I (while pouring me yet another glass of wine): I'm such a...what's the word? Co-facilitator?

A: Enabler.

I: Yeah.

The day has come.

I have long feared the day when my female parent arrived on Facebook, and the day is here--she has been threatening to do it for years. She doesn't quite know how it works yet. Like me, my mother is a big fan of melodrama. She is also of the opinion that public proclamations are more meaningful than private ones.

These things make for a bad combination.

I logged in this morning to find that she'd attempted to send a friend request to my partner, except it was another Ivan with the same last name that she'd settled on. On her wall, she wrote this Ivan a dramatic and heartfelt message:

I so hope you love my daughter. I love her more than breath. She may never now the depth of my love for her, but she lives so far away. since both my parents r gone, i only have my children n idont think they know how much they mean to me. Maybe you can make her understand that

So embarrassing!

My porn skills are apparently being under-utilized.

More and more frequently, I am noticing folks coming across my blog via google searches for topics of a graphic sexual nature. Recently it was "how to lick my husband's penis" from an interested party in India. Quite regularly, it is "grandmother swallows" from all over the world.

What the hell?

I mean, sex is good. I have spent years teaching and conducting research on sex-related topics. I have even been known on one or two occasions to have sex (but only in the dark in the missionary position with someone I love). People can look up whatever they want, of course, but how are these things bringing them to my little narcissistic, self-indulgent corner of the web?

I feel certain I've never written about any of these topics. Perhaps I should start--maybe this is the shift in career directions for which I have been searching.

I feel certain Ivan will have other ideas about the merits of such an endeavor.

Jan is going to die.

During my summer jobs in college, I worked for numerous camps for kids of varying ages. One of these was Energy Express, a six-week reading and nutritional enrichment program for rural children in West Virginia. Because we spent so much time immersed in children's literature--reading it, writing about it, drawing scenes from books, acting out our favorite stories--I developed a real appreciation for kids' books at this time. I started accumulating a small collection I wanted to save for my own kids around 1996.

These have come in very handy since Darius spends so much time with us, and we generally read at least one book together before bedtime. He tends to pick the same stories over and over, so last night it was a pleasant surprise when he chose a book we hadn't read before: How Smudge Came.

It had been at least a decade since I'd read the book, and I honestly didn't remember much about it other than a girl finds a stray puppy. We snuggled down in bed under the covers and I began reading. Darius likes to ask a lot of questions about the story and the illustrations, so it ends up being a slow process. As we read and discussed each page, Ivan was moving around the room, getting ready for bed. Then I got to a page where another character is introduced and read:

Here's Jan, who isn't very old, but he is ugly with disease and he is going to die.

Ivan froze and said, "What the hell are you reading?" Darius turned to me with wide eyes. Apparently unable to muster any sensitivity and compassion at such an unexpected turn in the story, I burst out laughing.

As it turns out, the story is about a girl with Down's Syndrome who lives in a group home. She rescues a stray puppy in a snow storm and tries to hide him in her room. She cleans for a nearby Hospice facility during the day, and takes the puppy to work with her to meet the residents. The story ultimately has a happy ending, but it understandably brought up a lot of questions for Darius. We ended up having a conversation about death, dying, and Hospice right before turning out the lights for the night. Lovely bedtime topics for a small child.

Oh, yeah. I'm really a natural.

The titty bone

A: I can't find chicken breasts with bones in them.

I: Chicken breasts don't have bones.

A: What? Of course they do.

I: Do your titties have bones?

A: (silence)

I: I mean, do they?

A: Haven't you even been to KFC? Yes, they have bones. Usually you have to pay extra to get them without bones!

I: (thinks) No. Those motherfuckers don't have bones.

On prenatal vitamins

A: Oh, my god. These pills are huge.

I: Do you stick them up your butt?

Marty Farty is in the building

A: Do you know the rhyme?

I: What? No.

A: Marty Farty had a party, all his friends were there. Tutti Frutti let a beauty and they all went out for air.

I: Tutti Frutti did what?

A: Let a beauty.

I: Lit a beauty? What? I don't understand.

A: Let. A. Beauty. Tutti Frutti farted.

I: Wait. Marty Farty had a party and someone else farted? That doesn't even make sense.

A: They were his friends.

I: I guess if you're going to fart that's the place to do it.

What put me into hysterics

I: I'm like the parakeet whisperer, excepting I'm not whispering. I'm talking normal.