Archive for the ‘Junk Drawer’ Category

Everybody’s been a to baby shower, luncheon or awkward office gifting session to honor a swollen, pimply expectant mother-friend/relative/acquaintance/stranger.  Present at every event is a group of veterans.  You know them.  Those of us who have had babies.

And at some point even the most courteous baby-launcher is tempted to break into dithyramb about The Great Delivery and how the mystery came to life for them.  How many hours they transitioned or meditated and how many of their friends lit candles on their behalf, or how the C-section was just inevitable (I’m SORRY), and necessary to save the life of the baby (I DESIRE your vaginal birth) and how next time they’re going VBAC (I really am a good person, even though I know the anesthesiologist by name).  Yes, childbirth is a sacred-ish ritual of sorts.  And some uteri have all but pinned gold medals to their labia for the righteous births they piloted.  But in the end, it starts to sound the same.  And birth style is a grain of sand of importance in the Jupiter-sized life of a human being.

Nonetheless, I’m feeling an urge, a persistent tickle, to share my birth stories with everyone.  The stories of ALL THREE of my children, with time-marked segments between every landmark along Labor Trail.  I will compare, contrast, conclude, kvell and queef.  And I hope you’ll enjoy my story and realize its significance for you, should you somehow find my uterus housed in your pelvis and you are obliged to give rebirth to my children.  And I will attempt to translate it into a language that the Disinterested Ears of Labor Stories can understand.

• KID 1:  blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, JERRY SPRINGER, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, NURSE: “HAVE YOUR HUSBAND FEED YOU GRAPES,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, OUUUCCCCH, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  BABY.

• KID 2:  ICE CREAM.  EPIDURAL.  BABY.

• KID 3:  PITOCIN.  EPIDURAL.   BABY.

Please see me with any questions.

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I have jury duty today, which means I will be under oath, gag, lock and key.  I won’t be able to TALK about it.  At all.  I’d like to know how the court can regulate the tongues of women at coffee.  But who would risk blogging about a trial that they’re not even allowed to discuss with their own newborn baby?  And I bet the county court system is, at the very least, on Twitter and possibly even Facebook.  If the White House can squander the hours of day updating Facebook, surely the county court has time to tweet and join the Facebook group Just Because We’re The County Court Doesn’t Mean We Won’t Click Your Dating Ads.  And the county court would find out about me, retweet me, and THEN arrest me.  On YouTube.

So today mum will be the word.  And I will have to walk through the world like a Pvt. Mummy as opposed to Pvt. Mommy.  I will be dead to me.  An oral amputee.  Silenced, gagged, and shrouded in a spiral litigious gauze, away from the all-too-generous venue of the internet, and the souls who kindly and generously agree to receive my one-way stream of spew, like pleasant smelling flight attendants courteously holding airplane barf bags.

But silence will be a refreshing turn for Greta.  And silence gives way to reflection, and, thus, wisdom.   This makes me think of the song we sang under the baton of the best kindergarten teacher in the world, Mrs.  Zabloski.  Back in a time when teachers wore pink lipstick and had Folger’s breath (before lattes came to the US), and the mainstays of kindergarten were paste, rhythm sticks, and reading assignments like this:  pam, fan, man, can.

A wise old owl

Sat in an oak.

The more he sat

The less he spoke.

The less he spoke

The more he heard,

‘Why can’t we be like that

Wise, old bird?’

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Yankee doodling. Not so dandy.

We’ve been remiss in taking our children to experience and enjoy America’s pastime:  baseball.  You know this when your eight-year-old daughter asks if the nimble gentlemen in the bright white pants are playing softball.

Cousin JT gave us some tickets, so we went under the lights of the Oakland Coliseum and watched the A’s take on that team from New York whose name I can’t even say at this point.  And our daughters received a thorough indoctrination into the sport of spectatorship.  They learned that hot chocolate costs $5 even when they run out whipped cream, and that Daddy really appreciates Mommy when she surprises him with beer.

They also learned that Yankee fans (cursed be my fingers for typing that) have a lot of what they like to call moxie, and they’ve brought it with them across 3000 miles, via covered wagon or American Airlines, to scream, “GO YANKEES,” in A’s territory.   And when an Oakland A strikes out they yell, “SIT DOWN, LOSER.”

And then an A’s fan starts booing like, like a foghorn.  A sustained, guttural, primal boo.  And then the Yankee fan yells, in the way a reasonable Yankee fan would yell were he not in Oakland, California, “A’S SUCK.”  So, the Foghorn Booer’s girlfriend with the gauged ears replies, “SHUT THE FUCK UP.”  To which the New Yorker replies, “A’s SUCK.”  And then the gauged girlfriend yells, “FUCK YOU.”  And then she grabs her Foghorn Booer lover around his head and holds him close to her all-American bosom.

And later the Foghorn Booer yells, “FUCK YOU, A-ROD,” as if the man at bat had never allegedly cheated on his wife with the most iconic woman of my teens and twenties M A D O N N A.  If you can’t respect a philanderer for supposedly bagging Madge, when can you?

All the while, one of the box seat holders above is tooting a green soccer horn to which the Yankee fans behind you, different ones this time, respond, “SHUT UP.”  And the horn continues.  Followed by another “SHUT UP.”  And again.   And again.  And one more time, until you realize that a shouted SHUT UP is far more irritating than a soccer horn at a baseball game.  Or a Yankee at an A’s game.

And then the A’s begin to lose, like everyone who plays the Yankees does, and then all of sudden much of the stadium is cheering for the Yankees, and you realize that everyone loves a winner and a Yankee, or everyone has one aunt from New York or has lived themselves there for a few years or a long time, but had to get out because YANKEE FANS ARE REALLY ANNOYING.  Though for a moment, you consider being a Yankee fan just so you can live in the peace of perpetual victory that only Yankee fans know.

I’ve had enough Yankees in one game, to last me the full baseball seasons of six lifetimes.  No more Yankee fans for me. Quit putting the Y over the N.  Add a space.  And enough with the pin stripes.  No thank you very much.

And our girls did not want to leave at the seven inning stretch, but stayed with their beleaguered A’s until the team’s last licks in the 9th.  And our girls hoped for another plate of nachos.  And they were denied.  As were the A’s, and the few green and gold fans left who didn’t flee to beat traffic or become pinstriped turncoats.

And our girls can’t wait to go again.

"Jewelry makes me less combative." -Greta

When I receive an invitation to a party for CRappy Clothing, Hella Rot Jewelry or the longstanding SLAVON and Clamspray, I run for cover and immediately develop a near deadly case of greasy hair that must be washed vigorously, rinsed and repeated excessively on the night of the ‘party.’  It’s not that I don’t like getting together with the ladies and drinking wine and competing with the working moms in a gentlewomanly game of You Have It Harder Than I Do.  And I like buying things.  The problem is, I don’t like multi-level marketing.

And before you scream and split hairs and want to hurl an overpriced, jungle-patterned suit in my face, hear me out.  I don’t love the following things about what one may or may not want to call a pyramid scheme.

Products are overpriced because selling clothing via a party to which only a few people (mostly friends, family and neighbors) are invited is a highly inefficient way to generate sales or income.  This is true, no matter how good the artichoke dip is.  And if that’s not enough, the sales rep present is making only a bit of money, but her friend of a friend of a colleague of a realtor of a teacher of 2000 people ago is making bank because she is at the top of the ‘recruiting’ pyramid.  An individual’s sales benefit the tree of people who recruited him or her to the business and the people who recruited them, and so on.

And in most cases, the bulk of the money exchanged in a pyramid is not through the actual sale of the products, but through people purchasing an often expensive ‘starter kit’ to sell the products.  The company profits mostly from people buying the opportunity to make money, not from people buying the product itself.  Yes, purchase the position of sales rep and they’ll call you a manager, but you’ll really be the customer.  THAT’S TOTAL FREAKING BULLSHIT.

That would be like the waiters at our local pub, O’Flannegans, giving themselves bad service.  You never give yourself bad service.  That’s why God invented customers.  And you don’t sell things to yourself either.  That’s called employment masturbation, and I’m sure there’s a Church in Rome against it.

Now people do make money at the top of the pyramid.  And once the market is at a saturation point, the new recruits who buy their start-up kits are left with start-up kits.  That’s not only immoral (though legal), but it’s VERY, VERY CHEESY.

And I don’t usually like the salespeople of these parties because more often than not, they are a mani-pedied mom at school who semi-snubs you with regularity until she gets her ‘starter kit,’ and then she would crawl naked through glass and cross the freeway blindfolded for a chance to talk to you, because now you’re her cute and perky BFF.  But she blows her cover by saying every six seconds, “You should host a trunk show!”

So I hate parties like this and I don’t want to be the person who doesn’t buy anything or drink the Koolaid, yet still eats the pizza.   But my friend Kathy, who is obsessively and compulsively fun, urged me to attend a party she was hosting (for a sales rep), not in order to make a purchase, but for the unique opportunity to mock the event.  Her words.  She knows how to lure a Greta.  So I went.

And I had a delightful time chatting with Kathy’s mother-in-law and the friendly dentist with great teeth and great pants.  And the sales rep present was rather adorable and likable for a snake who wants me to buy a starter kit.

And after not quite enough wine to warrant a cab ride home, I left the party having thoroughly enjoyed myself.  And on my way out, my friend offered me a Ziploc pouch.  The pouch contained the colorful necklace that I was eyeing in the catalogue.

Oh my god.

Yes I was.  Salivating over a necklace despite its filthy pyramid origins.  And while I protested, because it was absolutely unacceptable to take a gift from a party about which I was sufficiently bitter, I TOOK IT.  And there I was.  With multi-level market blood on my hands.

And then I felt like a heel for being a cynic.  I mean, yeah, it’s immoral and stupid and cheesy, but, hey, free necklace.  Free CUTE necklace.  And for $39.95 I was bought.  Purchased.  My bitterness was sponsored and stripped of me by my cheerful, generous friend who was ambushing her party-goers with gifts.

And so I was reminded that we all have price.  And for the amount on the sticker, our souls can be wrapped in tissue, bagged and sent off with a simple, “Have a pleasant day, Madam.”

Who knew my price would come from a cheesy, sleazy pyramid, and look OUTSTANDING with a plain white shirt and black shoes and slacks?

The detestable nature of bloggers was recently brought to my attention via a Facebook post in which they were likened to burglars and murders.  I will admit that having an unmitigated voice through the megaphone of the world wide web is a crime of sorts.  And like thieves with irrational cocaine confidence, bloggers run amok with their ‘stolen’ means of unregulated publication.  So, if you find yourself a victim to the criminally lame acts of bloggers, employ the following self-protective measures.  Remember, bloggers are looking for easy targets.  Don’t be a victim.

• If a blogger friends you on Facebook and you don’t want to be friends, don’t accept the friendship.  Friend counts are important to your self-esteem, but at what cost to your sensibilities?

• If you hate that bloggers tout their blog posts on Facebook, unfriend them.  Block them.  Light a candle and curse their names.  Including the ‘doctom’.  Sure, your soul will be blackened, but hopefully a giant piano will fall on their laptops and they will unable to blog forevermore.  Amen.

• If you hate reading a blog called, for example, savingprivatemommy.com, don’t go to savingprivatemommy.com.  Go to Amazon.com and apply a tourniquet of retail therapy.  Or, for the ultimate in protection against blog injuries:  Potterybarn.com.  Grab your credit card and charge like it’s the first three minutes of Armageddon.  And the defibrillating sticker shock of cute, overpriced veneer will get your heart pumping again.

• If you must keep checking a particular blog because you must read how stupid that blogger is, do so.  Then get mad and break a window.  You will get a bill.  And the blogger will get a hit.  Bloggers like hits like whores like fishnets, as both make them look better and, thus, might someday help them earn some Starbucks money.

• If you just truly can’t stand that bloggers exist because of their unrelenting, unedited mediocrity, then go buy a book through a major publishing house.  Read it.  And then buy another one.  And after that, another one.  And I promise you, there will be SO MUCH READING MATERIAL, that you won’t have time to even CLICK on a blog because you’ll be swimming like an Olympian in a pool of prize-winning prose.  And the sharks of Bloggy Ocean will be kept at bay.  Where the literary windsurfers are.

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