“When all of a sudden, people say, ‘Wow, you look nice,’ and carry on, it’s shocking. Really awkward.”
– Nikki Cox
Hey kids! Let's learn about history from your bizarre Aunt C.!
If ever you are participating in a group game night with a bunch of people you have only met once before and with whom you share absolutely no history, conversation, or shared interest (because they are part of your brother-in-law’s set and that one time you met them before was over a year ago), and you a playing a game in which you have to describe a person from history…who might not have been a palatable choice for a conservative crowd…
…do not, under any circumstances, try to get your teammates to guess the name on the card you chose. Skip it and go to the next card. Trust me on this.
Dear, dear. Now we're all uncomfortable, aren't we?
Example: “Ok! He’s an 18th century French writer who was extremely controversial. Got locked up for years because of what he wrote, both in the Bastille and an insane asylum. To be fair he was basically a filthy, vile pornographer who wrote about horrible things. Word “sadism” comes from his name.”
Example Response: “Um, wow, C., you know a lot about this weirdo…”
Today Venice and I drove up to visit Marie in the hospital (currently residing there due to general unpleasantness of the pancreas). We brought her a huge gift basket we made thanks to a major geek-out in Target where we bought anything pink, Liberty of London, or necessary to a fine lady incarcerated against her will that we could find. After that we headed into the city. We shopped J. Crew and Loft, scored major finds on the sale racks, and ate a luxurious lunch (free drinks from the waiter!). Afterwards I met up with J. at his parents house where he was studying for exams and fell asleep for two glorious hours on a comfy sofa.
In other words, exactly what I needed.
There's family you're born into, family you marry into and family you make. All are important. My Ladies Who Lunch friends (Venice, Marie, Peregrine, Ariosa, Margot, Angel, Fairy, GS, etc.) will someday be the surrogate Aunts of my children. Who will be awfully confused when they get a school assignment to make a family tree.
“It is better to travel well than to arrive.”
– The Buddha
Eyjafjallajokull Volcano (say it three times fast!)
You know your family’s lifestyle is a bit unusual when you get an email from your father saying that they are stuck in Sicily and can’t fly home to England because of a volcanic explosion in Iceland. And that to get home they will have to go through Rome to get to Paris to get to London. Oh that’s just Mum and Snickers, by the way. Dad is going to Germany.
Now, although I’m grateful enough to know that they won’t get lost flying through a volcanic ash cloud and crash into the Matterhorn, or get hit by a fossilized coelacanth flung high into the atmosphere, or get a chunk of igneous rock sucked into a jet engine…I’m still having some trouble dredging up any sympathy for them being stuck in the Mediterranean.
“I wore dresses all the time. I like to wear dresses.”
– Willard Scott
Anyone else hitting up this awesomeness next week? Better believe I am! My sister-in-law is getting married in a month and I still don’t have a dress to wear. My belovedShabby Apple is going to be selling their fab frocks at the Riverwoods this weekend at discount. If I don’t score this for the upcoming nuptials (which look, by the way, to be the social event of the season!) it won’t be my fault!
“The list of Irish saints is past counting; but in it all no other figure is so human, friendly, and loveable than St. Patrick – who was an Irishman only by adoption.”
– Stephen Gwynn
This might be the only holiday where people have to actually genetically alter themselves to feel like they qualify for the desired binge.
For some reason, come St. Patrick’s Day every single person in the US seems to acquire Irish geneology, even where previously there was none before. And everyone gets wildly protective of their geneology and suspicious of others. I overheard a loud girl on her cell phone while walking from car to office today, “Yeah, I don’t know where she gets off saying she’s Irish! She just dyes her hair red. I mean, my family, we’re Irish…”
This is particularly funny to me these days because the state I live in is notoriously English and Scandinavian in terms of population. Blonde hair and blues eyes abound and names ending -son/sen are very much the majority. (Note: mobile phone girl was a Viking’s daughter if ever I saw one!)
Now, we do know we have some Irish ancestry because we have family records detailing which of them got gruesomely killed in the battle of Boyne, but I digress. The point is that my father is…wait for it…half Slovak. So my Dad has darker skin and tans wonderfully, as do all my siblings, and don’t get me started on my fantastically beautiful black-haired, blue-eyed, dark-skinned cousins!
And me? I’m short, brunette, green-eyed, incredibly pale (un-tan-able) and bad-tempered. That’s right: a leprechaun.
“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about Rock’n’Roll.”
– Shigeru Miyamoto
Last Friday, J. and I headed north to the city to play with Angel and her husband Hotty. Both of the men lived/worked in Korea at some point and converted their respective wives to the cuisine so we went to Angel’s favorite restaurant, got ice cream, and retired to their basement flat to play Rock Band.
In retrospect, I think I liked him because he was (also) touchy about his height.
Growing up we didn’t have gaming systems and to this day they remain verboten at Chez Parents, so I have never developed the necessary finger-eye coordination and thumb dexterity required by video games. My gaming experience was limited to watching Peregrine playing Final Fantasy back in the day, and trying Spyro The Dragon (exactly two times) while babysitting. And since I didn’t know what the point of the game was or how to achieve it, I mostly just scampered around whatever level I was on blowing fire and falling off things into oblivion while evil signs flashed “GAME OVER,” or something of the sort.
Pictured: Angel, Hotty, C. (with mustache), and J.
So, Beatles Rock Band went about as I expected. They started me on the drums which was manageable on the easiest level, but still confusing as I couldn’t get the timing of my whacks on the drum set vs. the scrolling instructions right until J. told me to ignore it and go along with the beat instead (oOOOoohhhh. Rhythm. Right).
At some point I graduated to guitar and luckily we set it to “impossible to fail” because I proceeded to slaughter the music. Then I got really ambitious and went from “Easy” to “Medium” and discovered my lack of hand-eye coordination is not just limited to sports. And I must be mildly dyslexic because for the life of me I couldn’t manage to match my fingers with their assigned keys, much less with the dots of color that wouldn’t stop rolling towards me. And chords! Impossible!
I think I’ll be settling back into video game retirement now, thanks.
“Not for all the money in the world would I let any children of mine develop into Pendletons!”
– Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs
Dear un-named child of an extremely generous university alumni: I am very grateful for your father’s contributions and service. I am sure that the whole school thanks him for his patronage. You, on the other hand, are not your father and are not entitled to his privileges. He has given us a lifetime of service and hard work, you have give us a series of debilitating migraines because of your rude, unbelievable behavior. I do not care how much money another person has donated, you are an insufferable ass and no amount of money will make you less responsible for your actions.
Wealth doth not a gentleman make.
I got home yesterday absolutely burning with rage after dealing with this boy.
“If,” I snarled at J., “we ever become as successful as we hope, we are donating everything to PBS and cancer research. I’ll be damned before I see any of our family act like that! The things I wish I could have said!”
“You don’t have to take apart every jerk that you deal with you know.”
“But I want to. It would make the world a better place!”
If I be waspish best beware my sting!
I come from some WASP stock myself, but if I ever behaved the way this kid does, my parents would gleefully disown me!
“At least she’s eating better things than macaroni and cheese.”
– Heidi Klum
Translation of fragment: "Mac and Cheese is food fit for dogs. And Gauls. Go Rome!"
Throughout my life my mother has been in school, in some capacity or another. When I was about three or four, she had to leave Dad and I for a few weeks to finish up something or other with one of her degrees (I misremember which. Which isn’t me being a bad daughter, it’s her having one in Asian Studies, one in American History, and now another in Classical Studies from Cambridge because she decided to learn Greek and Latin. In other words, my mother is exceptionally awesome). Time has blurred the details a bit but as I recall, this was an absolute highlight of my short life because Dad and I subsisted on mainly pizza.
I didn’t realize this during the Great Pizza Blitz, but it turned out that my Dad hated cooking. Really hated it. He encouraged my Mum to go to school, continue her education throughout her life, and work if she wanted, but by golly the one thing he wanted was dinner to be on the table, because left up to him, dinner would come grudgingly from a frozen package.
So, a few years down the road when she decided to teach for a semester or two at a local university, I thought the Pizza Affair would be reborn. I was sadly, terrifyingly mistaken.
This is NOT food.
Mac and Cheese. From a box. Every night. Some days even for lunch. Sometimes we varied it up with chunks of hotdog, but mostly not. Again, I’m sure both time and horror have worked their magic on me and the vile orange sludge was not as prolific as I remember, but it sure seemed like it at the time. When my mother’s teaching finished, I refused to eat another disgusting, processed bite, and I’ve never touched it since. Once when shopping J. picked up a box for himself on days when I’d be at school late or he needed a lunch, I had to swallow escaping bile.
However, watching Food Network the other day, I saw a recipe for ‘Grown Up Mac And Cheese’ and thought suddenly to myself, “That doesn’t look so bad.” It sounded pretentious enough that I could assure myself that it would be as un-Kraft-like as possible, but looked really easy to make. So, on Sunday I girded my loins and made Mac and Cheese for the first time in years.
And you know what? It was pretty darned tasty!
**I’ll still never make the packaged stuff again. My children will not be subjected to this powdered cheese monstrosity, except to survive the Zombie Apocalypse. And even then, I might choose death.
“So Amanda stays with Darcy and Elizabeth stays in the modern world? Why does she want to do that?”
“Birth control, indoor plumbing, and women’s rights?”
– J. and C.
Whether against his will or not, J. is slowly getting dragged into my PBS obsession, and it’s been fun to watch.
Pictured: a post-modernist moment. You may close your mouth now.
For someone who dislikes Jane Austen pretty strongly, he liked Lost In Austen quite a bit (granted, we both loved Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). He laughed just as loud as me when the main character asked Mr. Darcy to take a dip in his pond so she could enjoy a Colin Firth-esque “post-modernist moment.” He found the fact that Caroline Bingley was a lesbian hilarious, liked that Wickham was a good guy after all, and that Jane and Charles run off to America together. One Sunday night he called back to where I was in the office and reminded me that Masterpiece was on in a half hour and asked if there would be another LIA installment.
She heard you, J.. Beware.
And when Dorcas Lane (of Lark Rise to Candleford fame) stated she doesn’t like to judge people, to the face of the man she’s refused to marry for having a scandalous, mistress-mongering past, and said man snaps back, “You’ve never had a problem with sitting in judgement before. Good-day,” … it was incredibly satisfying to hear my red-blooded, football/basketball loving, hamburger devouring, man’s man, all-American husband cry, “Oh no he didn’t! Burn!”
I’m sure he’d like me to reciprocate by learning to love basketball and Sports Center, but I’m not quite there yet. I’ll work on it.
I had a dream the other night that J. and I had a pet fox named Gordon. The major drama of the dream was keeping him a secret from our landlords who were snooping around tried to prove his whereabouts. Gordon was a sleek, sophisticated animal with delightful house manners, directly at odds with what I understand a pet fox to be like.
See, one of my favorite pre-us-kids tales of my parents is that when they were newly married and at university, they rescued a little fox from a fur farm and brought him home. Stanley (for that was his name) repaid their generosity by instantly behaving like a demon from the ninth circle of Hell.
Train ME will you?!
He destroyed things. He ran away multiple times. He chewed everything. He was so hyperactive that they eventually tried tying him up while they were at work/school and he tangled himself in the cord to the point that he dislocated a hip (costing a hefty vet fee for starving newlyweds).
My father thought that foxes were sort of feline so Stanley might be litter-box trained, but that plan backfired. With a dog you can stick their nose in their mess, put the mess in a litter box with them, etc. and they will eventually connect the dots. Evil Stanley, however, only learned to infuriate my dad by trotting into whatever room he was in, defecating on the carpet on purpose, and then running to sit in the litter-box with a smug expression as if to say, “What can you do to me? I’m already here! Pthfffbbt!”
One day, Stanley ran away (again) and my parents disgustedly got in the car to search for him (again). After driving for a while, they spotted a furry smudge in the road, a tail fluttering in the traffic wind. My mother peered at it for a second before throwing her hands triumphantly in the air (which my dad likes to impersonate when telling the story) and crowing, “It’s STANLEY!”
Such is their hatred that years later, when they took me to their old university stomping ground to show my their first house, the church they got married in, and so forth, my mother pointed eagerly to a spot on the road and said, “There! That’s where we found that miserable fox! Ha!”
It’s too bad they are such terrors; I think a pet fox would be, well, fantastic!
Small Dog Syndrome 