Category: Humor

Nobody Puts Joe In A Corner

Who stands in a corner voluntarily? Joe does.

I swear, I’d really like to believe my boys are exceptionally bright but sometimes they make me think I should set my expectations a wee bit lower. This evening I was sitting on the sofa helping Joe practice his words for his spelling test tomorrow. Spelling has never been an easy subject for Joe, but even as the words have increased in difficulty during his fifth grade year, he has been doing a bit better with spelling this year than he did last year. (Yes. I was, in fact, simultaneously knocking on wood and typing just then.) I’ve begun to see a light at the end of the tunnel, as if his hard work is paying off and things are finally starting to take root in his brain. He didn’t struggle at all with hemisphere and he breezed right through isthmus. He was even able to give me the correct spelling and a word-for-word definition for archipelago. Then, just when I was starting to get a bit cocky thinking that all the time and effort I’ve put into being a stay-at-home caregiver was at long last yielding measurable results, he said something that really confused me.

“Okay, Joe. Spell tributary.”

“Mom…wait. Wait. I have to tell you something first,” he pleaded.

All too familiar with his stall tactics, I pressed on.

“Spell tributary and then you can tell me,” I replied.

“T-r-i-b-u-t-a-r-y,” he spit out. Then, as quick as lightning without a pause for breath in between his words he spewed forth, “Mom-today-I-stuck-my-nose-in-the-corner-of-the-dining-room-by-the-magnetic-board.”

He said it so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to catch half the words. Still, he was looking at me expectantly as if he’d just divulged the magic fix-it solution for the holes in the ozone layer.

“What?” was all I could muster. Well…that and a quizzical scrunching of my eyebrows.

“I-stuck-my-nose-in-the-corner-of-the-dining-room-by-the-magnetic-board,” he said again, slightly more slowly but still in a barely intelligible way.

“Okay,” I said with brows still furrowed, “that time I got corner and magnetic board. What corner?”

“UGH!” he was getting frustrated with my slow-uptake skills. “The corner in the dining room by the magnetic board.”

“Yeah? What about it?” I asked.

“Today, I stuck my nose in the corner of the dining room over by the magnetic board,” he repeated, trying very hard to be kind to his old and clearly mentally impaired mother.

“What? When did you do this?”

“When I was working on my math homework,” he replied.

Okay. This was starting to make some sense. It’s not unusual for any child to seek a break from his math homework. It’s even less surprising when your ADHD child becomes distracted from the process of long division.

“The next question, I guess, is WHY?” I asked, drawing out the end of that interrogative word hoping it would help him to understand how truly bizarre what he had just disclosed was.

“Because I’ve never done that before. I’ve never seen the house from that angle,” he replied with a tone that told me he was making perfect sense and I was an idiot not to understand it without explanation.

“Wow, Joe,” I said, trying my best not to look concerned about his mental faculties. “That’s an interesting reason to subject yourself to voluntary time in the corner.”

“I was curious,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Then, as quickly as the conversation started it was over. “What’s the next word?” he asked.

Later, I was retelling the story to hubby who had been out with his parents this evening. After laughing about it for a bit, we started thinking about how differently Joe views the world. We’ve never been able to enter into how his ADHD mind works. We continue to try, but without firsthand knowledge and experience, we’re befuddled. We began to wonder if perhaps Joe knows something we don’t about the world. Maybe there’s something we’re missing? Simultaneously, we went and stood in separate corners in the dining room to see for a moment the world through Joe’s filter.

“I’ve never done this before,” Steve said.

“Me either. Ten years in this house and I’ve never once had my nose in a corner,” I replied.

“Does your nose touch the actual corner of the wall?” Steve inquired from the other corner of the dining room.

“Well, the magnetic board is blocking me at my height, but if I scrunch down a bit let’s see. Yep. Yes it does. It fits right into the corner,” I told him.

“Huh,” he said.

“Why? Does yours?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“Who knew?”

Now, you could think we’re a little nutty for sticking our noses into the corner the way our son did, but after 11 years of grasping at straws trying to find a passage into Joe’s ADHD brain we will try anything. We desperately want to understand him better. Any hints at all would be welcome. The funny thing is that I started out thinking my son was crazy for choosing to stick his nose into the corner of the dining room, but the more I thought about it the better I felt about it. While most people take things for granted, Joe investigates. He theorizes. He experiments. He doesn’t accept things at face value. He is deeply curious, and there are far worse things you can be in this world. So, I take it back. I am totally okay if my son, by conventional standards, doesn’t appear to be exceptionally bright. If some people choose to think he’s exceptionally weird, that’s okay by me too. The bottom line is that he’s exceptional, and that’s pretty freaking fantastic.

 

 

Posted on by Me 6

The King Of Doubt Marries The Queen Of Curiosity

The bottle that did not kill me and would not, apparently, make a good mixer for my vodka.

Two years ago I was very sick for Thanksgiving. Suffering from both bronchitis and a sinus infection, I had multiple prescriptions for antibiotics, decongestants, and cough syrups, and a doctor’s order for bed rest. As I was coughing the other night on Day Three of what is now a five (soon to be six) day cold, I heard a little click. Light bulb! I jumped out of bed and ran to the closet in my bathroom. After digging around for a few minutes, I found a half full bottle of codeine cough syrup, a remnant from my 2010 sickness. I ran downstairs to get a dosing spoon. Perhaps I would finally get some respite from this wretched cough and sleep! When I got back upstairs, hubby asked me what I was doing.

“I found this cough syrup. I’m going to take some and finally get some sleep,” I told him.

“How old is that stuff?” he asked.

“A couple years?” I shrugged. There was no expiration date on the bottle.

“Are you sure it’s okay to take that?”

“It’s not a dairy product. It’s not like it turned or anything. It’s gotta be chock full of preservatives. I’m not about to ingest two-year-old raw chicken I had sitting in the back of the closet. Don’t ruin this for me,” I said, trying to convince myself that he was not going to introduce any doubt into my resolved mind.

I was going to get some sleep, dammit. He would not deprive me of this with his overactive imagination and his wild visions of my dying prematurely and leaving him as a single father of two sons. Nope. I was going to live on the edge and take the stupid codeine. I deserved the sleep. He was not going to take this from me. I was going to take it. Yep. I definitely was. I shook the bottle lightly to mix the syrup and poured myself the recommended dose. Oh, okay. If you must know, I sniffed it too. Silly husband had me a bit curious. That’s all. It smelled fine. Just as I was about to drink it, he spoke up again.

“You sure you don’t want to verify that it’s okay to take that?” he asked.

“I’m sure it is fine. It smells fine. I saw a show once that said the worst that happens with most medications is that they lose their effectiveness with time. Most of them don’t become more dangerous. They become less dangerous,” I reassured him.

“Most of them don’t become more dangerous? How do you know this isn’t one of the ones that does become more dangerous?”

Seriously? He was egging me on. I knew it. I stalled for a few minutes. When he went in to sit with the boys as they were falling asleep, I decided that I might as well go ahead and conduct a Google search. Once I knew for sure that I was right I could show him the proof and then he’d have to leave me alone, right? I grabbed my laptop and did about fifteen minutes worth of reading, all of which supported my theory that it would be fine to take it. If anything, it had probably only lost some effectiveness, so the worst that could happen would be that I would take it and get none of the cough-free sleep I so desperately needed and deserved. While he was still out of the room, I hopped out of bed, drank the cough syrup, quickly recalled how icky it tastes, chased it with some water and a brushing of my teeth, and jumped back in bed just before he returned.

“So, did you take it?” he said.

“Yes. Yes I did,” I said confidently.

“How much did you take?” he inquired.

“Why do you want to know?” I asked.

“Well…if something goes horribly awry and I end up having to call 911 because you seem to be turning into a zombie, I just want to know what to tell to the physicians whose brains you’ll be trying to eat what you took.”

“Funny,” I said, rolling my eyes at him. “You’re a laugh riot. Just you wait. I’m going to sleep tonight, wake up fine tomorrow, and you’re going to owe me an apology for giving me such a load of grief,” I told him.

“Uh huh. Sure,” he said as he turned out the light on his side of the bed and went to sleep.

I’ll have you know that I slept like a baby that night. 9 hours straight. I did the same thing last night. And, I’m going to do it again tonight. No regrets about my decision. I am still, however, slightly disappointed in myself for letting him get into my head like that and making me think for a fraction of a second that I could be wrong. When am I ever wrong? The good news is that I have my browser set so that it doesn’t save any of my web site activity because I’m stealthy like that. He will never know that I did actually check up on the safety of the medication upon his recommendation. (Well…unless he reads this blog, I guess.) Men. You can’t let them know they can get to you. If they know that, it’s all over. You’ll never again have a moment’s peace.

 

 

Posted on by Me 1

There Goes The Neighborhood

Classy versus trashy

Well…what I suspected has become reality. We’ve become those neighbors. You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones you worry will ruin your property value by virtue of their sheer proximity to your home. We try to be good about taking care of our home and yard but, when given a choice between spending a weekend working on our lawn and garden or spending a weekend hanging with friends on a last-minute camping trip, we skip town. We’re always on the go. We’re not around much. As a result, we’re not the best about taking care of our property. We’d just rather be doing things other than home maintenance, and it shows.

I’ve long suspected that our next door neighbors wished they lived adjacent to a neater, tidier family. Instead, they got us. Their yard is immaculate. They have a beautiful patio with a built-in grill, a perfectly stained pergola, and a discreetly placed hot tub. Winter, spring, summer, and fall, their yard is perfectly maintained and their garden is appropriately appointed with seasonal plants. Their house is immaculate. I like to attribute their beautifully maintained home to the fact that their children are grown and out of the house. (Of course, it certainly helps that they actually work around their home fairly regularly too.)

Our house? Well, let’s just say that our house looks lived in. It’s not unusual for me to pull out of the garage in the morning and discover Nerf weapons strewn across the grass, a hockey stick leaning against the siding, and a bike helmet resting on the sidewalk. We’ve had parachute-laden plastic soldiers hanging from the ash tree while Lego minifigures fight battles in the lawn. But, as bad as we are about our front and back yard, the yard on the south side of our house that borders our neighbor’s beautiful home teeters on the edge of Sanford and Son. We don’t have enough room in our garage for two cars, much less all the many things that should neatly fit in there. So, our side yard has become a haven for all sorts of random things. It holds plastic planters, a wheelbarrow, empty propane tanks, patio furniture, kid toys, dog toys, and sawhorses. Truth be told, I won’t even walk in there. It’s fenced off from our backyard so I can pretend it doesn’t exist. And, while everything in there is hidden below the fence line and not visible from the front or the backyard, it’s still an embarrassing eyesore. I know it. Steve knows it. Our next door neighbors know it. It’s been the elephant in the room for years. In the ten years we’ve lived here we haven’t figured out what to do about it.

Well, a couple days ago our neighbors figured out what to do about it. They told Steve they would be erecting a trellis for vines on the north side of their home that overlooks our yard. They didn’t want us to think they were doing it because of our crappy side yard. They just decided they wanted something more pleasant to look at than our siding. I so do not blame them. I would do the same thing if I lived next door to us. It would be hard to enjoy a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner if when looking out of the dining room window you got to gaze upon our uncovered yard waste receptacle. We’ve talked about getting a storage unit for some of our extra crap. We would do it too if we could afford an extra $60 a month. The only way a storage unit would fit into our budget, however, is if I went to work part-time at Starbucks as a barista. As much as I truly like our neighbors, I can’t say I like them that much.

So, I am going to try to live with the shame of being that neighbor instead. If you hear me call one of our boys Lamont now, though, at least you’ll know why. Hold on, Elizabeth! I’m coming!

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Want Something Cleaned? Pee On It

It’s clean and I didn’t have to do it!

Last night, our son Luke had a friend spend the night. His friend slept in the top bunk of the bed where Joe usually sleeps. Joe was displaced, so he slept on an air mattress in our room. This morning before sunrise, Joe woke up to use the bathroom. As soon as he was finished, Steve went to use the bathroom. The toilet flushed, the light turned on, and all hell broke loose.

“JOE!” Steve yelled with disgust.

“What, Dad?”

“There is pee everywhere in here. You have GOT to look where you’re peeing,” he said.

“It was dark,” Joe replied calmly.

“Well, then, TURN ON A LIGHT! Seriously! The floor is wet. There’s a puddle here. You are going to clean this mess up,” Steve barked.

“I didn’t mean to,” Joe complained.

“Yeah, hon. He didn’t mean to,” I said, hoping to diffuse Steve’s annoyance. It didn’t work.

“You should see the mess he made. Joe…did you get any pee in the toilet? Any at all?”

“I’ll clean it up, Dad,” Joe said as he grabbed some paper towels.

“We need more than paper towels, Joe. We need rags.”

Joe came in and did a little mopping up with paper towels while Steve railed on about the sheer amount of urine covering our bathroom floor. Joe apologized and sneaked out when he felt the coast was clear. I couldn’t blame him. This pee mess had really gotten to Steve. I waited for things to calm down, then I went to inspect. Steve was on his hands and knees with disinfectant and he was mopping the floor and wiping the walls. Our bathroom floor was spotless. (Not that I would eat off it or anything.)

“It was dark. How did you know he’d peed everywhere?” I asked.

“Because when I stood up I realized my butt was wet,” he replied, “and I knew that was not right so I flipped the light on.”

I muffled a giggle. At least now I could understand the vehemence of his response. As the only female in our house, maybe I’m just used to it. I don’t sit on a toilet seat here, or anywhere else for that matter, without expecting it first. Sit on someone else’s pee once, shame on you. Sit on someone else’s pee twice? Well, I’m just not that clueless. I’m used to messes. I own several pairs of yellow rubber gloves because of them. I also make my sons clean their own toilet. I won’t even touch that thing. And, you could not pay me to use the toilet in their bathroom. Donald Trump couldn’t even give me $5 million for my favorite charity to do it. Still, the mess was hearty enough to encourage Steve to clean our toilet and mop up the bathroom floor.

In the 10 years we’ve lived in this home, Steve has cleaned our bathroom floor once, maybe twice. (He says more, but I find that highly unlikely because I’ve never actually witnessed such an act and I’m home a lot.) As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, Steve is wonderful about cleaning our stove, which I refuse to do because it’s one of those gas contraptions that take forever to clean. He’s also amazing at deep cleaning totally random, out-of-the-way spots in our home right before we have guests over. He has been verbally abused by me via blog twice for cleaning the laundry room and the cabinet under the kitchen sink just before company arrived…because we all know the first place house guests snoop is under the kitchen sink. It turns out that I am actually grateful to Joe for peeing all over our bathroom in his still-half-asleep, 11-year-old boy way. His pee mishap has left me with a shiny clean bathroom floor that I didn’t have to touch. Heck…if I had known that Steve would become so impassioned about cleaning after a little yellow accident, I never would have potty trained our boys. Imagine how clean my house could be!

 

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Hormones, Guns, And Astronaut Diapers

In September 2009, Celeste and I used our crazy hormonal rage to walk 50 miles and raise over $5k for MS research. Please note: no one was harmed during our MS Walk.

This afternoon I got to enjoy one of my favorite fall pastimes, holiday shopping at a craft and gift fair with friends. I very rarely start shopping for Christmas gifts before October. My mind is simply not in the game. Once the trees begin to lose their leaves, though, there’s no point in denying the obvious. Christmas is not far away. So, when Heather suggested we go to the Mile High Holiday Mart hosted by the Junior League of Denver, I had to acquiesce. I picked up Ana and we headed to the Inverness Hotel to meet Heather and get our shopping on. As we approached the hotel, the volume of traffic increased. I knew it would be packed with other women who had the same thought. My introverted self prepared for the exhausting task of elbowing my way through throngs of distracted ladies. If you’ve ever been to a holiday craft fair, you know the crowd is by and large comprised of women. The few men who are there lurk in corners and hold full shopping bags, praying their descent into the halls of estrogen ends soon.

After about a half hour of browsing separately, my friend Ana found me and told me she’d just received a text from her sister. There had been yet another shooting, this time in a shopping center area in her home state of Wisconsin. Ana’s sister lives not far from where the shooting had occurred. Coming not long after the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, where a gunman shot and killed 14 people and wounded another 50, this was not welcome news. What is wrong with people?

I spent part of today reflecting on this shooting spree mentality. It’s not just an American phenomenon. In the past twenty years, armed gunmen have opened fire and killed hundreds of people in Britain, Germany, Finland, Norway, Australia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Before I write another word, I want you to know this is not a blog about gun control. I’m not against the 2nd Amendment. I’m not anti-gun, and I’m not trying to take guns out of anyone’s hands. This is because I’ve decided that guns are not the problem. Testosterone is the problem.

Has anyone noticed that these mass shootings are carried out by Y-chromosone-enhanced persons? Women aren’t the ones opening fire in crowded theaters dressed as Batman. We’re not the ones shooting people in churches, schools, shopping malls, and political rallies. We’re not the ones who air our sadness, our disappointment, our anger, through a spray of bullets. Instead, we women are slightly more subtle. Take, for example, astronaut Lisa Nowak, who was so upset to find out her boyfriend had another woman that she wore an astronaut diaper so she could drive across country without stopping just to pepper spray her competition. She didn’t take anyone’s life. Heck. She didn’t even take anyone’s car. Her clearly hormonally driven, emotional attack didn’t land her in prison. Nope. She got two days in jail, a bunch of anger management classes, 50-hours of community service, and the embarrassing nickname “the astronaut diaper lady.” No one had to be buried. We women may act a wee bit crazy sometimes, but we’re not usually homicidal maniacs. We may occasionally run high on emotional drama, but we don’t often run high on murderous rampages.

And yet, the stereotype of the PMS-raging woman persists. We can’t have a woman president because a hormonal women is potentially dangerous. We wouldn’t want a woman in the throes of estrogen fluctuation to have access to nuclear weapons. Yep. I’m certain that this world is not going to end on 12/21 as the Mayans predicted. Instead, the world will end at the hands of an emotionally unstable woman in control of nuclear launch codes. (Yes. I am rolling my eyes as I write this.) You know, I spent a couple hours crammed into a small space with hundreds of other women and, although that’s not exactly my comfort zone, not once did it cross my mind that perhaps one of them might go postal and whip out an AK-47 because another woman got the scarf she’d had her eye on. You know why? Because estrogen doesn’t kill people. Maybe we should leave gun owners alone and start doing background checks on testicle owners instead? 😉

 

(PS…Before any of you testosterone-enhanced individuals gets your whiskers in a twist, this blog was meant as a tongue-in-cheek editorial based on an observation I made. I’m not really suggesting we deprive men of their most prized possessions. Well, not seriously, anyway.)

 

 

 

 

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Doing The Oblivious Backfloat While Swimming In Denial

You know how you know something is happening, but you don’t really see it until you have photographic proof? This happens to me a lot with weight gain. I feel okay about putting on that extra ten pounds until someone catches a shot of me at the dinner table at Christmas and suddenly I’m thinking, “Whoa…wait a minute. What happened here?” as if I am shocked and hadn’t actually noticed that my pants haven’t been fitting lately. Well, today, my sister took a family photo for us at the corn maze we were at with our boys. As I was going over the photos again just a few minutes ago, I was shocked to find that my oldest son is now tall enough that the top of his head reaches my shoulders. I looked at the photo a few times to verify this. Then I called for a second opinion.

“Steve…I think Joe has grown. He’s almost up to my shoulders,” I told him.

“Yep. He sure is,” was all he said. I’m sure he was thinking I was a complete numbskull for not having noticed this before.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

“It’s been happening,” he said. “You haven’t noticed?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I knew he was getting bigger but I guess I hadn’t realized how much bigger. Someday he might actually be taller than me,” I said.

“Let’s hope so,” he replied.

“Do you think he’ll get facial hair too,” I asked.

“If he’s lucky, he’ll even get more of it than me,” he quipped.

“You know…when I said I was okay that they were growing up, I wasn’t really focusing on this part of the actual growth process. I’m not prepared for them to go through puberty, start shaving, and lock themselves in their bedroom for private time. I don’t want their cute little voices to change. How will I know they’re still my babies when that happens?”

My darling husband looked at me as if I’m a loon which, let’s face it, I am.

“Let me see the photo,” he said. Then he peered at my laptop. “Huh. I don’t think I’m that much taller than you either,” he continued, clearly thinking something was amiss with the photo.

“You’re six inches taller than me,” I informed him. How can he not know this stuff?

“Are you sure you’re not standing in a hole?” he asked.

“What kind of crater-like hole I would I be standing in while in a flat corn maze? Maybe it wasn’t me at all? Maybe you were standing on a hill?” I shot back.

“I’m just saying that maybe he’s not really quite as tall as he looks in the photo,” he continued while ignoring my snarky attitude.

Me and the boys in 2009

Joe’s in bed right now, and he’s actually sleeping and not just watching My Little Pony on his iPad. (Oops. Wasn’t supposed to mention that my 11 year old son is currently enjoying watching that show on Netflix because that tidbit might embarrass him. Oh, paybacks. How I love thee.) It would be counter-productive to wake him up and ask him to stand next to me so we could measure his height. At his last physical, though, he was measured at just over 54″ tall. I like to say I’m 65″ tall, but I fudge that number by at least half an inch, maybe more. All of this means that it’s completely possible that he is shoulder height to me. When did this happen? Just three years ago, he was teeny.

It’s funny how sometimes it takes photographic evidence to convince us that time is marching on and our children are growing up despite our best wishes. We go from day to day in such a dizzying rush, trapped in the now of running here and there, and we truly can’t see the forest for the trees. My boys are growing up. And, although I know that as they inch higher and higher in grade school, it’s not the same as seeing them standing up to my shoulder in a photo. It’s not real until I try to pick up Joe and find it to be an incredible struggle now that he’s finally 70 pounds. I guess it’s easier to float along as a parent, just swimming in denial. Damn you, George Eastmann for pioneering celluloid film and the Brownie camera that led us down this slippery slope into a world where our images are continually being captured. It’s a lot more difficult to live in oblivion when you’re staring at the proof.

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Window Seat Wars

On the rare occasion that my husband and I are able to jet off somewhere alone, we’re are generally quite amicable and cooperative travel companions. We share suitcases equitably, although he usually gets a bit more bag space because his “clothes are bigger.” We jockey phone chargers and reading material like seasoned pros. He drives. I navigate. We get an Almond Joy to snack on so we each get a fair and measurable half. He tries to tolerate it as I coach him to the best parking spot or security line (because I am highly insightful). I try to tolerate it when he tells me he needs to stop for a second or third latte (because he is highly caffeine dependent). As a rule, things are smooth and seamless.

It’s all quite pleasant…except for one issue. The window seat. There is only one. We both want it. Love? Honor? Cherish? Absolutely. Window seat? I think not.

Savvy girl I am, I am chief travel agent in our family. I book all our travel. I print itineraries. I check us in online. I keep the scannable boarding passes on my phone. He’s at my mercy.

“What are our seat assignments?” Steve asked as we boarded the plane to Boston today.

“22E and 22F,” I informed him.

“Window and center,” he said, appraising the situation.

“Yep,”I replied.

“I’ll be taking the window,” he reported.

“Oh no you won’t,” I enlightened him. “I am 22F. Window seat is mine.”

“We’ll see about that,” he retorted as he sped up to jump ahead of me boarding the aircraft.

I tried to elbow him out but he slipped by me and was the first one in the narrow aisle. I stayed doggedly on his heels, bantering with him on the way.

“You’d better not even think about it,” I warned.

“It’s done,” he said. “You’re too late. Accept it.”

“Never,” I replied, still plotting a hip check that would get him out of my way.

But, alas, it was not to be. The rows in front of ours were occupied so I couldn’t check him. It wouldn’t be right to hurt a fellow passenger in our private war. He slipped into row 22 and plopped himself into my window seat.

“Get out of my seat,” I said under my breath through my smiling, clenched teeth.

“No,” he said defiantly.

I’d had enough. I hit the flight attendant call button.

“What are you doing?” he snapped.

“Get out of my seat and there doesn’t have to be a scene,” I told him.

“Possession is 9/10ths,” he said trying to call my bluff.

The flight attendant approached. I flashed her my sweetest smile.

“I think this gentleman is in my seat,” I said, showing her my boarding pass with 22F clearly displayed.

“Oh…is this your seat?” Steve said innocently. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at it. “Oh…you’re right. I’m 22E on this flight and 22F on the next one,” he lied. He them stood up, shifted his things, and moved out into the aisle. The flight attendant, happy to have avoided conflict, gave us a curt smile and left. I walked past hubby to claim my rightful seat. He followed me in and took the center seat.

“Ha,” I gloated. Triumph!

I lifted the shade on the window and prepared for a peaceful flight. You don’t mess with my window seat. You just don’t. I’m a generous woman. I’ll negotiate on most things. I’ll give you the last bite of my candy bar or my very last fry. I’ll tolerate the three snoozes it takes you on a weekend to decide you’ll just exercise later. I’ll even interrupt my day to let you back into the still-idling car you accidentally locked yourself out of. But, the window seat is sacred. Even if it was overcast all the way to Boston and I didn’t get to see a flipping thing, it’s a matter of principle. The window seat is one of life’s little pleasures. It’s worth doing battle for it. Marriage is full of compromises, and this one is his.

Oh, fine. He can have it on the way home.

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Don’t Eat Something That Doesn’t Agree With You…Befriend It

Somewhere lost in our pit of a house, probably stuck in between pages in a book on a bookshelf, is a copy of one of my favorite comic strips ever. I cut it from our college newspaper way back when. The cartoon depicts two alligators, one shoved into the other’s mouth. A banner hangs above their heads that reads “Alligator Debate.” The caption reads, “Al suddenly realized he’d just eaten something that didn’t agree with him.” It cracks me up every time I think about it.

As I watched the presidential debate tonight, I simultaneously followed my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Don’t ask me why I would do this. Clearly, this being the first election in which I had access to such a broad spectrum of individuals via social media, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. While hoping, I suppose, to get a more well-rounded view of what other Americans thought of the debate, all I succeeded in doing was giving myself an even bigger headache than I already had. At one point during the debate, I told my husband that my favorite part of the debate is when it’s over. At least then the fact checkers get the opportunity to dissect what has been said and let us know what was legitimate and what was bunk. At that point I’m ready to start considering what I’ve heard, but I never start the process until I know what’s fact and what’s fiction. Unfortunately, I don’t think (based on what I saw on social media tonight) that very many people take the time to reserve judgment or to consider the other side.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.” I haven’t either, which is why I love this quote. Most of my Facebook friends fall far from me on the ideological scale. If I were to unfriend those with whom I have a serious a difference of opinion in politics, religion, or philosophy, I’d be cleaning out the vast majority of the 311 folks on my list. While I won’t deny that I get great satisfaction from my conversations with the friends who see life through a similar lens, I learn an awful lot from those who disagree with me. So, even as those friends are making comments that make my eyes roll, I wouldn’t withdraw my friendship. Their ideas, beliefs, and opinions, only inform and enhance mine. Although, on nights like tonight when I am bombarded by opinions 180-degrees from my own, I have to dig really deep to hold true to Jefferson’s quote. I have to remember how important difference of opinion is to intellectual growth. And, yes. I have to remind myself not to want to eat the friends who disagree with me.

(If I manage to find that comic, I will post it here. I’m still smiling thinking about it.)

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How ‘Cry Me A River’ Became ‘I’m Too Sexy’

When our oldest was a toddler, we began to suspect that he was a fairly sensitive child. As soon as he began to talk, our suspicions were confirmed. He seemed to pick up on emotions and parental concerns more quickly than most children his age. From the tender age of three, he began asking the tough questions (about God, natural disasters, death, etc.). We would do our best to answer them, never talking down to him but making our answers as palatable as possible for his preschool mind. Without fail, two or three days later, he would return to ask a follow up question to our response, proof that he had been pondering our answers ever since we spoke them. He would sneak attack us with his concerns about the world. Our friends and family would often comment about what a sensitive child he was.

I’ve never liked the term “sensitive.” Never. Maybe it comes from my family. When I was Joe’s age, I would be whining and carrying on about something. My mother would make tiny circles between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and ask me if I knew what that was. It was the smallest record player in the world playing, My Heart Bleeds For You. Sometimes, just to mix things up, she would break into Cry Me A River instead. I suppose that for me, then, sensitivity was equated with whiny weakness. So, I would not allow myself to go there. At the mention that our Joe was sensitive, I bristled. I decided I could not live with that term, even if it was the truth. So, hubby and I opted instead to tell people that our son was a “deep thinker.” He is. He doesn’t cry easily or often, but he ponders the mysteries of the world often and deeply.

No. This is not an Rorschach test.

This morning I was in the midst of a drawing game on my iPhone. I regularly draw a scene in the Draw Something app and then immediately question whether or not my friend will be able to guess the answer from my substandard artistic attempt. My litmus test consists of sharing the drawing with either my nine or eleven year old son to see if he can guess it. If he can get it, I assume we’re golden. So, that’s exactly what I did this morning. The word I was drawing was “iceberg.” I suspected that my crude iceberg might be lost underneath the very rough drawing of a polar bear standing on top of it. So, I went to my review committee.

“Joe, what do you think this drawing is of?” I asked, covering the answer at the top of my screen so he had no hints.

“Ummm…ice? No. Wait. Is it global warming?”

Holy crap. Really? That’s where we’re going with this drawing?

“Why do you think it’s global warming?” I queried.

“Well…the polar bear is on a piece of ice but there’s no other ice near it. There is water all around. The polar bear looks like he’s stuck.”

Wow. Did not see that coming.

“That’s a little more thoughtful of an answer than I’m looking for here, Joe. Look again, please.”

“Oh…is it iceberg?” he said, finally noticing that I had drawn an arrow to the item the bear was adrift on.

Ding. Ding. Ding. We have a winner.

Later, on the way to school, Joe dropped this light thought on me. Keep in mind that I was less than 1/4 of the way through my morning non-fat latte.

“Mom…you know how people say that space is the final frontier?”

“Ummm…sure,” I replied without a clue as to where this had come from or where it was going.

“I think they’re wrong. I think the final frontier is actually time travel,” he informed me.

“That’s a pretty deep thought to have before 8 a.m., Joe.”

He sat silent for a while and then chimed in again.

“My teacher told the class the other day that we’re all deep thinkers. I think she’s wrong. I don’t think any of them are deep thinkers like me.”

That comment proved it. The phrase we had coined to cushion his ego had actually puffed him up. Suddenly, not only is he not weak, he’s actually got more honest depth than most other people on the planet. Apparently, we accomplished our goal. Our son’s sensitivity is not an issue. He doesn’t even notice it. But, now we’re going to have to do something about that haughtiness.

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Siriously Awesome

My iPhone screen is bigger than yours…if you have the 4 or 4S.

Today was a red-letter day at my house. The Fed Ex man delivered a lovely, small brown box to me today, a box containing my brand, spanking new iPhone 5. Did you hear the heavens rejoicing as I opened that box and beheld the wonder that is a shiny, happy iPhone? Sigh. It’s been a couple years since I got to sink my teeth into a new Apple, so I couldn’t wait to try it.

After I synched it with my MacBook and got connected through AT&T, my first order of business was to have a heart-to-heart conversation with Siri. My previous iPhone was the 4 and not the 4S, so I had never formally made Siri’s acquaintance.

Me: “Siri, I would like you to call me Justine.”

Siri: “Of course. I will call you Justine. What a lovely name.”

Me: “Siri, do you like pizza?”

Siri: “Surprisingly, I haven’t tried that before.”

Me: “Are you my friend?”

Siri: “What a question! Of course I’m your friend.”

Well, now that we’d established our friendship, I thought it was safe to get personal.

Me: “Siri, Am I fat?”

Siri: “I would prefer not to say.”

Huh. Here I thought she was my friend. Feeling a bit disappointed with her response, I tried to curry favor with her.

Me: “Siri, you are my best friend.”

Siri: “I don’t really like these arbitrary categories, Justine.”

Okay. Back to business, then.

Me: “Siri, play The Smiths.”

And to my complete joy, “How Soon Is Now” began playing. Even though we’d gotten off to a rough start with her unwillingness to tell me I’m not fat, I began to see what she might be good for. I had her schedule an appointment, text my husband, and tell me the weather forecast for tomorrow. My kids think Siri is the best thing since sliced bread. They keep trying to ask her questions about which superhero is better, but she just sends them to the Internet (which, by the way, is precisely what I do when they ask me those questions).

Is this new iPhone everything I expected it would be? So far, yes. It’s lighter, thinner, and light years faster than my old phone. It can text for me, which is awesome. And, Siri is fun, even when she can’t understand my bizarre requests. Although…she did offer to find me a swamp to hide a dead body, so that makes her a better friend than most. And, at the end of the day, it’s nice to thank someone for their help and have them politely reply, “Your satisfaction is all the thanks I need.”

 

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