A Matter Of Taste

Today as I was driving home from grocery shopping "Uptown Girl" came on the radio so I started rocking out to it for MaryJane's benefit because she just loves it when I act the fool, especially if there's lip-synching involved. After The Boss was finished yearning we were fortunate enough to get Jagger hollering about how his whole world was black and his ranting got me to thinking about my taste in pop culture. For some unfathomable reason, I have always been attracted to stuff that is more than a little off the beaten track and while that predilection has resulted in a few great suprises that the rest of my peers had to wait a few years to discover, it hasn't done me any favors in the "fittin' in" department. My very first little-girl crush was, of all people, John Belushi. His death devastated me and worse, I was too young to understand why he died. When I should have been yearning with The Boss along with my peers, my sister and I were putting my father's old Beatle records on the player and revving it up to 78 rmp so The Beatles sounded like The Chipmunks. When I was a very young adolescent, my friends and I bought tickets to some G-rated Disneyfest so we could sneak into the first Evil Dead movie. My friends hated it--they were used to Alien-style horror--but I loved every stupid second and made a mental note to check out any future Sam Raimi flicks, plus I developed a huge not-so-little-girl crush on Bruce Campbell. During my brief stay at public high school I had the clueless balls to sign up for and participate in a stand-up comedy competition. My peers had very appropriately stolen style and material from folks like Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal while I was so besotted by Irish comedian Dave Allen that I stood on a high-school stage and tried to tell "guy walks into a bar" jokes. And people thought Carrie White's prom was a bloodbath. Speaking of good old Carrie, I was begging for Stephen King novels when I was eleven because I had stolen my mother's copy of The Shining when I was seven and chilled and thrilled all through many a night, but that's the only King book my mother had. In the mid-'80's I was harassing the local video store for Jackie Chan flicks and even-then-hard-to-find Eraserhead. The Vietnamese owner was more than happy to stock them, but getting my mother to rent them for me was another story. I might be one of the first fourteen people in the country to know who Ren and Stimpy were because I begged my mother to drive me to an animation festival at the artsy-fartsy nobody-goes-there-but-potheads theater downtown that featured the very first Ren and Stimpy cartoon ever made. I think it was five or six years before I saw Ren or Stimpy again. In Catholic boarding school my friends all read French Vogue and Cosmo magazines. I read Fangoria and CineFex magazines. I had to get those magazines at a comic book store, which brought me into contact with Peter Bagge's "Hate" series and the early work of Alan Moore. I was informing my "Gotta Have Faith"-loving friends that George Michael was gay. I didn't even have the sense to become a Goth Chick--at least that was a recognizable stereotype and one adopted by thousands of fat, self-hating girls all over the country at that time and ever since. Even now, you won't catch me knowing what happened on "Desperate Housewives". I didn't really get into "Seinfeld" until it started to come out on DVD. I still love "I Love Lucy". My sister Molly had to tell me what the "Numa Numa" song was. Mythbuster Adam Savage is the only man I'd leave my husband for (sorry, Bruce).

The Unwarranted Epiphany

We have been having trouble with our satellite reception for a few weeks and some things did not get recorded on the DVR that both my husband and I had been looking forward to, like the season premiere of Prison Break for example. It seems that the back room signal is wonky and all attempts to fix it through Customer Service have failed so far, so my husband and I are relying on the front room signal to record the shows that we really really want to see. He called the other night to ask me to program something in for him and I mentioned that I had put a Mythbusters episode in at the 10:00pm spot. He commented that he had been planning to watch an old Survivor that he had missed when it was first on at 10:00pm, but that it didn't matter. Now, I have seen pretty much every Mythbusters episode and they do tend to repeat them ad nauseam, but I was in a truly terrible mood and snarled into the telephone "Oh never mind the Mythbusters, just never mind, for God's sake!" Click. He hung up on me. I know how my husband feels about hanging up on people, he feels that it is among the rudest things that a person can do to another, so I suddenly realized that if he felt it necesarry to hang up on me, I must have gotten truly out of control. I never got angry or upset with him and I didn't get weepy or feel sorry for myself, I just started thinking that my already low-functioning stress management skills must really be at their limit and I better do something about it but quick, fast and in a hurry. I thought about ways to help myself relax, ways to be more in the moment so kid-raising shenanigans don't overwhelm me so much that I can't enjoy the simple joys of parenthood, ways to let things go and not be such a control freak, lots of things. My husband came home several hours later, came into the house, put away his Diet Dr. Pepper the way he always does and came into the bedroom to say hey like he always does and after the usual "Hey how was your day" formalities were exchanged I said "Let's talk about your hanging up on me for just a second." To my absolute astonishment he said, "I didn't hang up on you, I dropped the phone." Wow. I asked him what was the last thing he remembered me saying and he said "Oh, something about programming in a Mythbusters episode." He never even heard the rude things I said! Everything I thought about was something that really needed thinking about so it was a lucky mistake. I'm still not sure how to turn things around for myself, but at least I had a good think about it.

Suddenly Inevitable

I was absolutely adamant about not sending our son to public school, preferring to home school him until he needed to gather some paperwork for college or asked to attend school. I was hoping that by the time he would need to gather paperwork for college there would be some kind of computer-assisted solution and he'd never have to go to public school. My mother had been on my side, because she is a Montessori teacher and we have an entire house full of school supplies at our disposal. My husband had been for sending the lad to Kindergarten because it would afford me some more one-on-one time with our daughter and permit me to get some tie dye done. For some unfathomable reason, a few weeks ago my mother announced that she thought we should send Little Nigel to Kindergarten so that she would have a chance to organize the schoolrooms. With no support from my mother I had no choice but to cave in and register the kid for Kindergarten. The whole thing makes me extremely angry and depressed. We went to meet Little Nigel's teacher last evening and she's a lovely person, the schoolroom is beautiful and I'm sure Little Nigel will have a wonderful time. I'm still angry and depressed. I'm angry because even though I made my position clear to all parties, I have been overruled, which makes me feel like I have no control over my own kid's activities. I'm angry because the whole story about "organizing the schoolrooms" is probably a blow-out-the-carb-level pipe dream, based on the number of organizing projects that have actually been completed around here without some kind of immediacy-inspiring incentive like a dead rat stinking up the store room. I'm angry because the opinion of both my husband and mother is that sending the kid to school will reduce my stress level and that is pure horse pucky because now I have to have a working morning routine that gets the kid off to school with everything he needs for the day; a nice packed lunch, clean clothing, actual underwear, homework. I also have to have a working afternoon routine that allows me to check out his schoolwork and spend some quality time with him before I have to feed him, tub him and send him off to bed. In between these routines I am supposed to be making tie-dye inventory along with the daily chores and spending time with MaryJane, who is right at her potty-training start point. I'm depressed because I don't think anybody around here gets that my stress level is going to go up up up, not down, no matter how happy making tie-dye makes me because that activity is not going to cancel out all the other stress-inducing shenanigans that go on around here and I can't even imagine what kind of stress-inducing shenanigans will arise from Little Nigel's Kindergarten Experience. So basically, some other people have gone ahead and set something up that I will have to cope with and maintain while they sit on down, pat themselves on the back for "helping" me, and just do whatever they damn well please!

Shark Week

Little Nigel had a birthday party a few weeks ago; a real birthday party with non-related invited guests so I wanted to make it a special day for everyone. Since Little Nigel loves Spongebob Squarepants it was to be a Bikini Bottom-themed party, and it seems that there are very few things that the advertising people won't plaster with pictures of Spongebob And Friends (I expect to see Spongebob Squarepants tampons any day now). Any normal person would have gone down to the party store and picked up a basic Spongebob Party Package, but I have a real problem with giving up my creative control to the guys down at Nickelodeon so instead of doing the normal thing, I chose to use the undersea setting of Bikini Bottom and have a few Spongebob-y details like grilling "Krabby Patties" for the children's lunch. Instead of standard Spongebob-imprinted "goodie bags" filled with sugar and dollar-store crap, I chose to have wheelbarrows full of sand and real seashells for the kids to dig up and keep, providing them with 2-quart-size chinese takeout boxes to put their shells in. The idea of putting a bat through smily, friendly old Spongebob's mug disturbed me, so I chose to make a six-foot-long Great White Shark pinata for the kids to destroy. After sketching out several ideas for construction, it occurred to me that a shark-shaped pool float would be an ideal paper mache mold. Internet Ahoy, and a week later a nice 72" long inflatable shark arrived in the mail. I procured some wallpaper paste and newspaper, smeared the inflated shark with Vaseline and began smoothing newspaper strips in place a week before the party. I planned to make the shark in two halves so I would not have to destroy the pool float, which would leave no margin for error and let's face it, this project was at the corner of Error and Central. Originally, I had imagined making a top and bottom half, but the pool-toy elves had chosen to give their inflatable shark a nice vertical seam so I figured, why not stick to what the inflatable shark designers had chosen. Everyone who has ever made a pinata knows that it will be either too weak or too strong, so I was ready for that, but I had no idea what other problems might arise so I was keeping the plan flexible. Once the two halves of the pinata were dry and off the mold I had to fuse them together somehow and once off the mold the paper mache was extremely flimsy and difficult to work with so I inflated some balloons and taped them inside each half so I would have something to press against as I duct-taped the two halves together. I also made some wire "ribs" that wrapped the two halves together and reinforced the shape. Once the shark was in one piece I gave it another layer of newspaper and paste to hide the wire and the duct tape and give me a smooth surface for spray paint. I popped all the balloons in the middle of the shark, leaving the ones in the nose and tail intact so the candy wouldn't have anywhere to go. I also stuffed the side fins and the rest of the extra space with red confetti, both to keep the candy stable and in the middle of the shark, and for dramatic effect when it was hit with a bat. I spray-painted the belly of the shark white and the body with that speckle-y looks-like-granite paint and dabbed on a couple of eyes. The shark was to be filled with gold-foil-covered chocolate coins five seconds before the shark was hoisted into whacking position because we feared they would melt. Duct tape covered the candy-hole and voila--a Great White Shark pinata! Every kid at the party had a go at poor Bruce The Shark Pinata and even though he had a huge seam running down the middle of his stomach, all he did was bend slightly. One of his fins did get knocked off, trailing red confetti, which was pretty cool. Finally, we got out the "big bat" and gave it to the biggest kid at the party and told him to kill Bruce, which he did and Bruce exploded, showering everyone with red confetti and chocolate coins and shreds and shards of gold foil and chocolate because I think the "killing blow" was a tad more forceful than strictly required. It was a lot of work, but it was so worth it. Next time I'll make The Titanic and fill it with little chocolate people!

Dance Dance Revolution

We had the pleasure of the company of our nine-year-old nephew Madison for two weeks this summer. Madison is a city kid so coming out here to the genuine boondocks was a bit of a challenge to his self-amusement skills. Madison explained to me that at home he and his mother and sister often visit the mall just to window shop and/or visit the video arcade. I can safely say that in seven years I have visited the mall for one reason and one reason only--to go to the movies--and the concept of window shopping is completely foreign to me as I never shop without an agenda, but going to the video arcade sounded like a lot of fun to me. This particular video arcade is brightly lit and small enough for me to see all three kids at all times so I actually got to play a few games myself, including a few rounds of Dance Dance Revolution. My best friend Jo absolutely raved about this game and how much fun it was so I had to give it a try even though it cost a buck per game. Madison told me that it was difficult and he gave me a demonstration to prove it, plus I watched a few Goth kids flail around on it for a while before I tried it. My first game was all about figuring out the timing; exactly when to make the move the game asked me to make. The second game was incredible. It seems that I am some sort of Dance Dance Revolution idiot savant because I had that thing going for twenty minutes and passed every level with near-perfect scores until MaryJane parked her tushie on the back step-pad and blew my game for me. I also got to take a few spins on one of my all-time fave-rave games CarnEvil, which is just what it sounds like, a basic shoot-em-up set in a demon-posessed carnival. I am no kind of savant at that game, but it sure is fun blowing holes through maniacal pinheads bent on eating my brain. I was glad to see that game at all, since there are so many fancy-pants stand-up video games these days, but it seems that games like House Of The Dead, Area 51 and CarnEvil have stood the test of time. Window shopping proved to be an experience that put me and Madsion on different pages, so to speak. His idea of window shopping included going into stores and fondling merchandise until the proprietor started glaring or MaryJane started breaking stuff, whichever came first. MaryJane usually beat the proprietor, as she is a little F5 tornado and most of the stores Madison wanted to visit contained either electronics or fancy little objects de crap that are just ripe for MaryJane's bull-in-a-china-shop approach to pretty much everything. We had lunch in the food court, which again was a new experience for me, but I could really see the advantages of eating in there when shopping with a pile of kids because I could stay at the table with MaryJane and send Madsion and Little Nigel off to get their food and still see them the whole time. The kids loved it because they got to eat a melange of different junk foods all at once. I loved it because there was a stall in the food court that only sold french fries dressed up in different and interesting ways and, not to put too fine a point on it, Aunt Flo was in town so a giant pile of cheese fries was just what I wanted. After lunch we went on the carousel because MaryJane had never been on one. She eschewed sitting on the little bench and insisted on being strapped to a horse, which I stood next to so she wouldn't just slide off. When the thing started moving she freaked out for about ten seconds, then she calmed down and by the time the ride was over she was hooked and she wailed like a banshee when she was unstrapped and led out the exit. I got a couple of pouty looks when I denied the children permission to go ice skating, but I was not about to open that particular economy-size can of worms when we already had worms everywhere between MaryJane The Hurricane, Madison's pure and innocent but incorrect belief that we would be spending the entire day shagging up and down escalators to visit every kid-oriented store in the place and Little Nigel's sudden burst of materialism which caused him to ask for pretty much anything and everything he saw. The only store in the entire mall that none of the children had any interest in was the one store that I really needed something from--Victoria's Secret. When I suggested going in there so I could buy some desperately-needed underwear for myself, the two boys acted as if I had suggested eating cow pies, so I dropped the idea. We finished off the mall visit with a round of Slurpees. MaryJane gave herself a nice brain freeze and wasn't shy about telling us all about it at top volume all the way home. I didn't buy Madison a hermit crab so he was disappointed. I didn't buy Little Nigel an African fertility statue, a faux Samurai sword, an inflatable Allosaurus, a $20 t-shirt reading "I Brake For Bitches", a skateboard or any Floam so he was disappointed. I still don't have any underwear, but at least I discovered a new talent and reminded myself of why I don't go to the mall.