Archive for the ‘Junk Drawer’ Category

This can apply to any work, volunteer, or COMMUNITY THEATER environment.

Through the passive-aggressive veil.

Threw it away.

1.  Speak in soft tones, even if you are telling someone to eat their feces.

2.  Phrase everything as a fake suggestion, even though it’s a command:  So, maybe we can sniff my toenails one more time.

3.  Have thick, curly hair and rearrange it frequently.  This suggests softness of spirit and an easy-going manner.  It also has a distracting effect:  hair is quicker than the mind.

4.  Just be totally fucking crazy.

5.  Attempt to elevate your status by offering compliments with an overdone and obvious restraint in both your tone and word choice:  Lovely job.  Nice.

6.  Use the word ‘professional’ in every fifth sentence.

7.  Tell everyone that you work for a major entertainment conglomerate, but do not disclose your job title.  They will forgive your numerous shortcomings because they might think you actually drew Buzz Lightyear.  And when you watch the Oscars, discuss it like you’re a cinematic proctologist.

8.  Wear scarves.

9.  Use animosity when asking someone where the animosity is coming from.

10.  React to someone who disagrees with you the same level of victimization that you would exhibit if your boyfriend yelled at your sister, slapped your mother, and bought you a bag of poo for your birthday.  And then forced you to sniff his armpits for a half-an-hour.  While he ate his boogers.

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I Feel Pretty

I struggle to not lose my mind during one of too many laps down the same uninteresting stretch of freeway to drive my kids to school, from school, from school to softball, and from softball.  And please don’t forget to credit me with the little pesky return trips on most of these.  Oh, the suffering.

Now this is not a noble kind of suffering.  It’s not true, pitiable misery.  It’s not respected work.  It’s not something to be proud of.  But it is.  It is my life.  I traded in the impossible balance of work and motherhood to become a full time SAHM.  Now, I am an unpaid shuttle driver.  And I have it GOOD.  I do.  I am lucky enough to be home full-time to ‘be there’ with my kids.  Ladies and gentlemen, ‘be there’ means ‘drive there.’  And it sucks.

When I complain to other moms, they just smile faintly and stare.  Do they think I’m a whiner?  I am.  Even I don’t respect me.  You shouldn’t either.  Or are they numb?  Have they lost the ability to feel human feelings?  Have they become one with the machines they ride?  Am I slowly becoming a Honda Pilot?  If that is to be my fate, I hope it comes fast, because the human/car hybrid is not a cute place to be.  You don’t know whether you should cry or drink gasoline.

The tedium is exacerbated by fighting girls who whine for Starbucks and play sparkly purse tug-of-war, causing an in-your-face kind of quarter to fly arrogantly from the glamour pouch and plink itself into your Climate Control System’s vent.  Possibly an $800 repair one day.  Or did it just land my wind pipe?  Hard to tell when you and your car become one.

No one warned me about this when we began having children.  They’ll need health insurance: check.  Clothing:  fine.  Time:  okay.  Patience:  on a good day.  Love:  no problem.  But rides?  To softball?  Physical fitness never seemed more inconvenient.

And then there’s the HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL for which I drive a combined 2 1/2 hours a day, if you include the waiting in the parking lot of the parking lot.  The parking lot is literally a parking lot.  It’s one thing for a freeway to be a parking lot.  It’s another for a parking lot to be a parking lot.  I know my readers from Montana just gave up on me.

Yes, you pass your neighborhood school, which humbly eyes you asking, So what’s so great about the HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL?  You’re too good for my humbleness?  You think you’re a snob with high performing children?  Nice Lexus.  No, wait, sorry, that’s a Honda.  ANYway…you’re a dumb snob because you rear-end is flying idly through the air when it could be contracting and releasing its way to fitness down the little tree-lined path to me.  Good luck with that.

Well, I chose the HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL because of the high test scores, since I have taught at both very high performing  and very low performing schools.  It was very clear which students were getting all the opportunity and which were being left behind.  I wanted my children to have those test scores that made people want to move to a certain neighborhood.  I wanted my children to defy their zip code and outperform the well-to-do children in the southern part of the county, in the name of social justice, egalitarianism, and, heck, personal vanity.  That was before I knew how those test scores were achieved (by moms wearing tight pants, diamond studs and make-up before 8 AM, interrupting yoga to plan the White Man’s Multicultural Day, and gleefully transporting WHEELBARROWS full of flashcards to and from home, after dislodging their faces from the inner recesses of the Teacher Sphincter, one of the most kissed varieties of sphincter on the planet.  It’s right up there with Boss Sphincter, Producer Sphincter and People with Vacation Homes in Hawaii Sphincter).  Those high scores are not school-made.  They are parent-made.  By parents who sit, stay, roll over and play dead for the teachers who take pride in the progress of their students.  I didn’t know I had to drive all that way, just to pick up flashcards to make the teachers look good.  And I don’t get AMEX gift cards in December and June.

So the subtle but certain torture of the car is quite an unhappy conundrum.   The suffering, by its very vagueness, is tedious and, thus, torturous.  But unlike true trauma, it lacks the malignancy that allows you to feel entitled to pain.  It’s like having someone powerwash your eyebrows off, with white chocolate syrup.  Sure, your eyebrows have been blasted off, but come on, WHITE CHOCOLATE.

And so I struggle in a way that even I cannot justify.  Yes, the SAHMs of the universe suffer, only to be dismissed by the work force as lucky to have the opportunity to experience such boredom.  Oops, I forgot to be grateful.  Thank you, Boredom.

Now, somebody hit me over the head with anxiety and a deadline.  Or, at the very least, some some urgent voicemail to return or ignore.  I could use some adrenaline.  Perhaps I should just cultivate a love of repetition and talk radio, and burn a really interesting CD for the car…  Help!

What are the tedious trials of your day?  Please share with me.  I hope you’ll comment away.

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Greta is enjoying a long winter’s nap.  She misses you, though, and appreciates your visit.  Please check back this weekend for more of her adventures, delivered fresh to your PC or to Justin Long.  ‘Night.

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With the Olympics and Fourteen Days of Love and Food and the fake Broadway show opening behind me, I feel in need of a little rest.  But before I take the next eleven hours to not think about the rumpus room that is my website, I would like to give you my final thoughts on the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.

• I wish I were a hockey fan. I missed the game and it didn’t destroy me.  And that’s the problem.  It’s great to be an individual with your own drumbeat in the drum line and all, but it sure is fun to be instep with the rest of the world who loves hockey and give yourself the gift of elation or heartbreak when your team does what it ends up doing.  Vancouver was a sea of maple-leaf-red after the Canadian team won gold.  I want to care enough about something to wear red for it and bump into people on the street while screaming things.  How come I’m stuck loading the dishwasher in a state of envy and indifference?  I will not let this happen again.  I will watch.  I will embrace the chaos, the fight, and the inability to really see the puck on TV.

• The Canadians didn’t just own the podium, they paid off the mortgage, raised five kids, and buried all their dead pets there. Fourteen gold medals.  They deserve it.  If nothing else, for being in our shadow all the time.  (Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.)  I’m not sure why the Americans are called the winningest team or the most decorated.  We (you know, Lindsey, Shani, Apolo and me) got the most coin necklaces, but bronze has only the fraction of the importance that gold does:  He’s worth his weight in bronze.  It’s a bronze opportunity.  Nothing bronze can stay.  Bronze Girls.  Bronze Gate Bridge.  Fool’s bronze (even the fools won’t have it).  Bronze digger (hey, that might be me).

• The US men’s four-man bobsledding team ended a sixty-two-year honor drought and won gold. Glad I didn’t hear this statistic before.  I didn’t know how bad I had it.  But no disrespect, seriously.  I’m always happy for people to shock themselves by how cool they are.  What I want to know is how you get in to that sport.  Is there a pee wee bobsledding league or is all training done in saucers?

In any case, thanks for joining me here at Saving Private Mommy for your primary source of irrelevant Olympic coverage.  I had a great time being rubber cemented to the TV and the laptop.  Now we, the good spectator citizens of the world, must rest up for more adventures in the summer of 2012 in London.  It’s going to take of lot of napping between now and then.

And coming up, is the gorgeous spring outside that nature will officially hand over in the next few weeks. In anticipation, the trees in my neighborhood are sprouting their pink blossoms and the hills are soggy and green.  Ahead are longer, warmer days, and a big boot to comfort foods, plus the Easter Bunny and my girls turning three and six and me turning thirty-nine and my husband, too.  And my oldest turning eight much later.

I hope you’ll join me as I put my feet up for a bit.  I’m going to need my dogs to be in good shape and perhaps you do, too.  I have telemarketers to take on and a governing board of the PTA to make fun of.  Please check back.

And now, a little March poem from our favorite spinster, Emily Dickinson.

To March

Dear March, come in!
How glad I am!
I looked for you before.
Put down your hat–
You must have walked–
How out of breath you are!
Dear March, how are you?
And the rest?
Did you leave Nature well?
Oh, March, come right upstairs with me,
I have so much to tell!

I got your letter, and the birds’;
The maples never knew
That you were coming,–I declare,
How red their faces grew!
But, March, forgive me–
And all those hills
You left for me to hue;
There was no purple suitable,
You took it all with you.

Who knocks? That April!
Lock the door!
I will not be pursued!
He stayed away a year, to call
When I am occupied.
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come,
That blame is just as dear as praise
And praise as mere as blame.

Image via Wikipedia

Correction:  According to an SPM source, Shani Davis‘ gold medal race WAS broadcast during prime time.  Greta apologizes for this misstatement based on an incomplete knowledge of the facts.  Now she really feels like the New York Times.

In a time when the judges’ scoring system is everything, Tiger Woods entered the competition with a public apology made before the fiercest panel of evaluators in Olympic history:  the general public.  Here is how he scored.

First of all, discussing publicly the reprehensible aspects of one’s personal life is highly difficult, and if handled well with no mistakes, he can come away with high marks and possibly a gold medal.  In this respect, he landed each combination perfectly, taking full responsibility for his transgressions. However, the fact that the ‘mistakes’ he kept referring to where vagina dialogues with numerous attractive 19-year-olds when his wife and children were at home reading Goodnight Moon cost him huge point deductions.  Tiger, however, is a smart competitor and upon his realization of this, he re-focused his game on getting a spot on the podium.  So he won’t hear his national anthem, but he will get a medal and a bouquet.

Perhaps the most costly part of his skate on the razor thin ice of these XXX Games, was when he assured everyone that he was seeking help for his problems in therapy.  Fixing being a philanderer in therapy just makes his mom look bad, and the hippy notion of attending Assholes Anonymous in hopes of being able to walk past the irresistible Hotties of Bar Night Future will never fly with some judges like Hedwig Pimelwasser, of the former GDR or East Germany.  Someone who stood in line for toilet paper and went to church in secret has no tolerance for someone who gets to learn how to be a good husband while crying on a comfortable Ethan Allen couch next to a box of anti-bacterial Kleenex in an office that is tastefully adorned in varying shades of calming green.

Tiger did attempt some difficult combinations.  He urged the paparazzi to stay away from his wife and child who had ‘nothing to do with his mistakes.’  While I agree that a two-year-old doesn’t need to be followed by cameras all the way to preschool, Tiger’s desire for privacy should have been checked at the first tee of the PGA Tour or the door of the Playboy Mansion, whichever came first.  And if he really wanted anonymity for his wife, he should not have chosen one whose face could sink 1000 ships, and who is so adored by every camera that ever had the honor of transforming her image into pixels, and who is MORE SEARCHED ON GOOGLE THAN TIGER WOODS IS.  EVEN BEFORE THE SCANDAL.  Oh, and whose entire career is built on taking really good photos for the salivary pleasure of mankind.  Dave Letterman had a high profile affair, too.  Can anyone remember what his wife looked like?  Unfortunately, this was quite a leap for Tiger, on which he double-footed the landing.  Automatic 2.0 deduction.

In the end, there were some strong elements to his program.  He apologized in a way that Bill Clinton never did.  He was Oedipus Rex experiencing a reversal of fortune and he gouged his eyes before the world in hopes that the receptionist at Nike.com gets to keep his job, despite lost revenue from the now not-so-sellable Tiger Woods line of shoes.  The ones with quiet soles that help you sneak home at 4 AM.

Tiger earned himself a 5.29 mostly for the difficulty of his program, some of which he carried out effectively, but in the end sex scandals are a hard sell and lacking any artistic merit, which is important in the eyes of the judges.   A spot on the podium evaded him, but I think society can perhaps now let him carry on to reconcile with his wife in private.  I think Scott Hamilton would say, “He’s got to be happy with that.”  And perhaps, through Asshole Anonymous, Tiger can learn that in life, unlike in golf, lowness does not count high.

Coming tomorrow:  Bode Basics.  On Bodie and the monkey that’s mostly off of his back.  And the media’s dislike of him.  And why Greta disagrees.  And Shani Davis and why he snubs the media and Greta agrees with that.  And, hopefully, another gold from Apolo Anton Ohno, which may provide us an opportunity to forgive him for Dancing With The Stars.

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