Increasingly Socially Awkward

Last summer my husband and I were invited to a barbecue with two other couples. These couples are nice couples, upstanding citizens, god-fearing couples (unlike my heathen husband and I) who are the kind of people who, if they accidentally didn’t get charged for beer at the grocery store, would go back and pay for it, unlike myself who went “Free beer!” and drank some even though I don’t like beer that much.

So maybe I shouldn’t have expected to fit in. In retrospect, this makes everything pretty much my fault.

When we first arrived to the barbecue, our hostess informed us that, should we need to use the bathroom, we should turn right at the end of the hall. Use the bathroom on the right, not on the left, she very clearly said, and you better believe I listened carefully because when it comes to bathrooms, I am a rule follower.

There were no problems at first except for the fact that I didn’t consume any carbs with dinner but did drink the heck out of the “grown-up” lemonade. I had been craving lemonade. I hadn’t had any all summer so I immediately drank a whole cup of it before I ate anything, even though I wasn’t aware of quite how MUCH vodka was in it.

Obviously, when I needed to use the bathroom after everyone was finished with dinner, I turned right at the end of the hall and headed down it.

That’s when I got a weird feeling. I could see the bathroom door was open, but called out anyway just on the off chance that something bad might be happening, which it was. From the hallway I could see the reflection of our host in the shower doors. He was sitting on the toilet with his pants around his ankles. When he heard me call out he, of course, yelled “Occupied!” and pulled the sliding door closed, at which point I was already tripping over my feet backing down the hallway with the kind of urgency that only a person who has just seen another person they just met that night sitting on the pot can feel.

I then broke the only rule of the night and used the bathroom at the other end of the hallway. I was pretty much in shock at that point. As soon as I sat down, I leaned forward and put my face in my hands to take a moment to compose myself, and that’s when I saw the eye. The one eye. One eye staring directly into my face.

The reason we had been warned not to use this bathroom was apparently because a chihuahua with one eye was nesting in the bathtub for the evening, and now that it saw me sitting on the toilet, decided to check me out through the shower door. It watched me as I finished peeing, which you can bet I did pretty quickly.

When I got back to the dining area, all five adults were at the table, happily dealing out cards. At this point I figure the host and I have some kind of special bond because we both had an awkward encounter and now we would have to fudge our way through a pleasant evening. It would be equally hard for both of us but we would both be willing to make the sacrifice because we were ultimately good people who cared about the well-being of the group. However, when I looked at him, he made no sign that anything weird had happened.

That was when I realized that I had seen his reflection but he hadn’t seen mine, and he didn’t even know I had seen his at all. This awkwardness was mine alone to bear.

In desperation I looked at my husband and attempted to communicate a whole sentence to him via facial expressions, which has never once worked with my husband like it always did with my sister.

What I tried to say with my facial expression was: I saw Sam pooping!

Apparently my face just looked weird. So my husband communicated that back to me.

Husband’s face: Your face looks weird.

My face: I saw Sam pooping!

Husband’s face: You know I can’t read facial expression language.

My face: I saw Sam pooping by accident. Well, he wasn’t accidentally pooping; I accidentally saw him pooping! *pause* And I saw a one-eyed dog! Staring at me from the bathtub!

By then my husband whispered “What’s wrong?” but everyone was done dealing the cards and explaining the rules of the game and I decided to just barrel ahead with the evening. I had another glass of lemonade.

As you can guess, I did not behave in any kind of normal way that night; I became increasingly socially awkward, at one point illustrating an anecdote with an honest-to-god Jerry Lewis dancing impression. For this little venture I actually stood up and executed the dance in as Lewis-esque a manner as possible, the way my siblings and I has always done for fun. When I finished the little dance, every other adult was staring at me with their jaws dropped. No one had found it funny, no one had even seen that movie, no one else would have done that dance and THANK GOD AT LEAST I DIDN’T SING.

Obviously, they all had to conclude that I was just a crazy drunk lady, not, in fact, in a social situation that was very hard for me to survive in. For the next several weeks I lived in humiliation, and that is the story of how I saw a guy pooping and a one-eyed dog and gained a reputation as the increasingly socially awkward lady who doesn’t get invited back to barbecues although, if I did, I wouldn’t drink any lemonade because then I probably would not have had to pee.

The end.

I think you can tell how I was feeling. Also, I didn’t arrive with that hat. It was part of the game, I swear.

 

P.S. This is not even the first time I’ve seen a guy I didn’t really know sitting on the toilet. In 7th grade my friend and I were playing hide-and-seek indoors and I walked in on her dad sitting on the toilet with the newspaper all a-spread in front of him. At least in that instance he was aware that he had been spied, and we both avoided each other in mutually earned shame for the rest of our lives. Like you do.

Maximum Possible Blood

 

I’ve been watching that show Vikings lately and I find it impossible not to wonder how so many diverse cultures individually came up with the idea of human sacrifice. Because: really. What was even the thought process that led up to that? 

In order to figure out where these people were coming from I have devised a little thought exercise in the form of a very short play to imagine the origins of human sacrifice, especially in the case of the Aztecs who appear to have descended into a veritable extended blood orgy on a scale not often seen. Here is my Aztec play.

DRY SPELL

Brock (a surprisingly common Aztec name): Guys, we’ve all noticed that the weather has been dry around here lately. I’m thinking it’s time to put our heads together and come up with a plan.

Pierre (also a surprisingly common Aztec name): Well…………..okay, this is gonna sound crazy, but hear me out. What if we did some kind of dance? Like, a dance to the Gods asking them for rain?

(The group considers.)

Kanye (at least a million Aztecs were named that): That does sound crazy. 

Brock: You’re such an idiot, Pierre. This is why nobody takes you seriously. I’m just sayin’.

Pierre: You can’t just call someone an idiot and make fun of their legitimate idea and then say “I’m just sayin'” and make it better. 

Brock: Sorry.

Pierre: Okay. Let’s think of something else.

(The group considers.)

Kanye: I think I’ve got it. 

Brock, Pierre: Yeah?

Kanye: Yes. I was remembering this one time that somebody died and how, by apparent coincidence, the sun came up the next morning. But I’m thinking: what if that wasn’t a coincidence?

Brock: No way.

Kanye: Yes way. I mean, seriously, this lady died and the next morning the sun just comes up? What are the odds of that?

(Brock and Pierre exchange looks and nod.)

Pierre: But we don’t need the sun to come up. We need rain. How did you say that lady died?

Kanye: I cut her heart out.

Pierre: Huh. So cutting the heart out raises the sun.

Brock: What do you think causes rain?

Pierre: Yeah, what causes rain? Something less violent? More violent?

Kanye: I’m thinking blood. If we could murder someone in, like, a really violent way with the maximum possible amount of blood, that seems like it would somehow be connected to raining.

Brock: What would we do with the blood we take out? Like, roll around in it? Make someone drink it?

Kanye: I don’t know, but what if we took the blood of, like, a hundred people?

Pierre: Or a thousand!

Kanye: Yes, we’ll take the blood of a thousand people and just, like, pour it down the steps of the temple until observers start vomiting from the smell! 

Pierre: So much blood!

Brock: Ha! Yes! Blood! Blood for everyone! 

Pierre: So who do we start with?

(Brock and Kanye exchange looks and then both look at Pierre.)

THE END

The Best Weight-Loss Tip of Ever

I have this idea that, because I weighed less ten years ago than I do now, I’m much too fat. No civilization before us has ever had this particular idea but that doesn’t stop me from caring about what people if this particular civilization think if me. (Although YOU should not. You’re much smarter than the rest of us. Yes. You. Right there.)

Since I’m normal and eat more during times of stress, bounty, or celebration, I go through periods of being very perfect in my diet and periods of ‘feck it.” You know how that works……..you have a very challenging child with special needs whom you love more than life but who drives you to tears regularly but whom you also feel the need to defend from the rest of the world so at the end of the day you go off your diet because you’re a good person who deserves some pleasure? Sure you do. And as you all know, this is a ‘feck it’ trial.

Right now I’m in a period of ‘feck it.” but I did ask a friend who was successful in losing a significant amount of weight (don’t know how you guys do it. I’m still pretty certain you’re all some kind of supernatural creatures with inhuman constitutions) for her advice on what I could do to lose weight. Since my tendency is to do great during the first part of the day before all the noise of other humans starts getting under my skin and then drink wine and eat popcorn at the end of the day (those things go together) as a way for rewarding myself for surviving life, my friend suggested I find a non-food way to reward myself at the end of every day.

She recommended a bubble bath.

That seemed like a great idea, so here I sit in the bubble bath I truly deserve WITH my glass of wine beside me. I can juuuuuuust reach it from here. I’d be surprised if I lost any weight from this method, but you know what?

Feck it.

How to Win a Fist Fight (In Fifth Grade)

Let me first establish one thing: I have never been one of those people who get into fights. Not even as a kid. I wasn’t some tomboy, tree-climbing, army-playing kid; I was one of those ‘inside children’ who read lots of Anne of Green Gables and played the piano and watched cartoons and avoided sweating at all costs.

All-in-all, the fact that I did so well in my one fist fight (using the phrase loosely) ever speaks decently to my survival ability.

Here’s the story: in fifth grade I rode the bus to and from school with two brothers and a sister, and it was a long, sweaty ride. By the time we got home my hair came loose from whatever ponytail or braid it had originally been wrangled into, had curled up from all the humidity, tangled, and was pretty much a wild bramble–and not in that charming forest maiden kind of way–that got in my face all the time. This figures in later, stay with me.

On Wednesdays my siblings and I would go straight from the bus to our piano teacher’s house, where her three kids, the three kids she babysat in the afternoon, and the four of us would all run around in her backyard like rival dog gangs who thought they might want to play together but weren’t sure. Most times I was inside quietly reading, but I guess I didn’t have a book this particular day. That is how I came to be in the backyard when a kid from a rival dog gang picked on my little sister who would have been only in first grade.

Yelling ensued, and this feral rival-boy picked up a heavy toy record player and flung it at me frisbee-like. It hit me in the hip with enough force to (later) bruise and (instantly) send me into the kind of rage in which any glimmer of humanity is erased and….well….it’s rather feral, if I haven’t drilled that into this story enough.

In a lot of pain and blind from the constant tangle of hair that was never NOT in my face, I roared–I’m certain that happened–and made the angriest of grande jetes across the yard with one single thought in my head: I will pull his nose off. I WILL PULL HIS NOSE OFF.

He seemed pretty scared running from me and I doubt he relished the sight of this fiendish child-witch coming at him, but I knocked him down and straddled his chest. Blind as a shih-tsu from the aforementioned hair, I did my level best to literally pull his literal nose off his literal face.

But my aim was off and it turns out that I was pulling on his upper lip instead, which, if you give it a try right now, you will see can actually be very painful.

He squealed and wriggled madly until my brother and sister pulled me off of him, which is apparently a thing that people do when they are afraid someone they love is about to commit a criminal assault.

Rival Boy cried a lot after and I feel super bad about it now, but if you are interested in someday winning a fight and you plan on going Red Ross, don’t rule out pulling on your opponent’s upper lip. Guaranteed: if you are up against a third grade boy, you will totally win.

Broccoli Cream Pie

If you think about it, there are not nearly enough desserts made with broccoli. It’s an untapped market, y’all.

Simply Not Credible

I never thought the song Frosty the Snowman was a very believable song. It isn’t that a magic hat bringing a snowman to life was so far fetched to me because everyone knows that hats are magical to begin with. No, it’s simply that I can’t imagine a snowman being a very good dancer. Those guys are so stubby. You’ll notice in the picture above that the snowman doesn’t even have legs, he has empty boots in front of his body. How are you supposed to dance like that? I guess he could do some break dancing moves–maybe the spin on his back one. But overall: there is just no way this character makes any kind of sense and you know right away that these kids are big fat liars going around telling people they danced with a chubby, limbless ice man.

In short, I need my Christmas carols to be just a little more credible in the future. If we have to hear them non-stop beginning on November 2, the least they could do is feature someone besides lying little a-hole children and the snow version of the Star Wars kid.

All Too Aware

My problem with breast cancer awareness isn’t so much that I mind being instructed to touch my breasts on a regular basis, it’s that I’m expected to do it in such an orderly fashion.

Wise Men Say: Free Speech Installment

Every once in a while I hear someone champion the 1st Amendment by saying something along the lines of, “I may disagree with what you’re saying one hundred percent, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.”

I don’t feel that way. See, I wouldn’t fight to the death for someone to say something I fundamentally disagree with. I would, however, encourage them to continue saying it. I’d say, “Keep talking, dumbass! You’re just making me more right!” and then I’d laugh and laugh on account of how clever I am.

Pens, Paperwork, and Psychotic Breaks

I didn’t have any pictures for this article, so here is the wire telephone I made one time (with a GI Joe for scale).

It’s no secret that a major percentage of adulthood is paperwork. I mean, there’s that final year of high school when it seems very important to many of the adults at the school that your entire class take the ASVAB. And it seems at the time that a significant part of this process is just finding out if you can fill out the header properly. Somehow it takes the first 25 minutes to get your name, the date, your student number, and the name of your high school in the proper order. Because if you get that wrong, they can never trust your answers to the question: “According to graphic 6. A., if cog A is rotated in a clockwise direction, in which direction will cog C rotate?”

I know it’s been, like, some years since then, but I have never forgotten that question. It is a real and unexaggerated example of how elementary that test is. My counselors actually made me take Math Analysis so I could answer THAT question.

Anyhoodle. So I don’t mind paperwork on principle. In fact, I do crossword puzzles for leisure. I don’t mind filling in small boxes in scrupulously legible print. Give me a good pen and I am a happy clam.

Tonight I had a huge stack of forms from my son’s school to fill out so I got my shoebox of good pens and a glass of wine and began.

You know what? I wish I was taking the ASVAB. I remember on that test they asked us to properly differentiate between a wrench and a screwdriver. No joke. But, you see, that is a DEFINITE TASK  with a DEFINITE ANSWER. Nothing is to be implied or inferred. It’s all very literal. That’s why I kicked butt on the ASVAB and the Air Force wouldn’t stop calling me.

That is the last time I was good at answering a question. I’m too literal. Now, for some unimaginable reason I regularly cause major misunderstandings when I have to fill out paperwork. I apparently caused a huge miscommunication when my son’s soccer team application asked for “Your email address”. I gave my son’s ZooBuh! email and not my own. When my husband found that out he looked at me like I’m insane, but he doesn’t even know HOW LONG I stared at that stupid application thinking: Are they asking for my email? That would imply that this is my application. Clearly, this is not my application. This is my son’s application, so when they say “your” they must mean him, right? Why would they assume that all fifth graders have email? But why else would they say “Your”?

Not kidding around, this stuff stresses me out.

Tonight I began filling out page one of, like, a million, by writing my name. Our address. Our home phone number. Easy stuff. Then it asks for “Highest Grade Completed”.

What, like a number? They need a number? What number? A Bachelor’s Degree is high school plus four. Assuming you got your degree in four years. Assuming the year of graduate classes doesn’t count. Honestly, should that be a 16th grade or a 17th grade? And nobody says either of those things, so that can’t be right at all!

I wrote “Bachelor’s Degree” and hoped they didn’t think I was trying to rebel against their sysem of calculation.

Next question: “Mother’s full name.” Okay. It’s a repeat, but okay. “Father’s full name.”All set. “Mother lives in child’s home?” Yes. “Father lives in child’s home?” Yes. “Child lives with (check one) Both parents? Mother only? Father only?”

Seriously?

I check “Both parents.”

“Names of adults child lives with.”

WHAT GAME ARE YOU PEOPLE PLAYING? I  ALREADY TOLD YOU BOTH THOSE THINGS.

But they aren’t kidding with this. Further on they need to know what anesthetic I had when I was in delivery. I want to say it was something like “Demarol” but I’m not totally sure how it’s spelled. I wrote “Demoral” and then I realized that says “de-moral” and I thought, “Well, that doesn’t look good at all,” but I had already written it down and if I scratch it out it will look tacky.

I’m sweating heavily. I don’t want the people judging my kid and thinking his mom is an idiot who can’t spell the names of pharmaceuticals and doesn’t know what 17th grade is.

They give a list of diseases. I’m supposed to write in the dates of the ones he has had. This leads to a long process of asking myself, “wait, how old was his brother that year? I’m pretty sure he was still in diapers. So, no older than two, but he could have been one.” Then they ask me to “describe” the illness.

Hey, these guys  do know they just wrote down all the names of the illnesses, right? When they printed “pneumonia” with a space to put a date next to it, they KNEW WHAT THE WORD “PNEUMONIA” MEANS, RIGHT?!

Describe it? He was coughing. He had a fever. IS THERE THAT MUCH ELSE TO IT?

This was all I could face of paperwork for the night. I can’t possibly imagine what they could ask me next because there is no limit to the personal questions they will ask and no limit to the idiocy they will employ to ask it. If they ask for pregnancy complications do I have to –yet again–explain the faulty position of my placenta? Do they really NEED to know about the placenta? Furthermore, whose placenta even was it? Was it mine? I grew it and it tore away from my uterus and I almost bled to death. But I guess we technically shared the uterus so maybe Placenta Previa applies as a medical condition my child suffered from, but I’m far from sure and I would like to know if anyone else finds these questions easy. THESE ARE HARD QUESTIONS.

Can I go back in time and just take the ASVAB and have people think I’m smart? Because when I bumble around the regular world I feel like I do not belong here. At all.

Boxed Insanity

A few months ago my son had a birthday just before we moved out of town. A family member and his wife sent a gift to what they thought was our new address. However, their method for obtaining our new address was not the same method that most people use, which is asking. Most people just go, “Hey, what’s your new address?”

But not these two. These two printed out a whole bunch of real estate info from our area before we moved–just to see what we were looking at. Or something. I don’t know; it’s kind of hard to understand why, because many of the houses they printed out weren’t even houses we looked at. They just printed out random houses. So when we finally bought a house and told them about it, they threw out–apparently randomly–all of the pages but one. Which happened to not be the house we bought. Or even one we looked at. Then they sent a gift to that house.

That was the beginning of May, and as you may have noticed, this is not May. My husband finally asked them where they sent it and they replied that they sent it to our new address–to the street we don’t live on. Clearing up that part of the insanity, the gift was sent back to the return address where the family members also don’t live. Anymore. They moved to Idaho.

The box’s route: Oregon to Tehachapi, Tehachapi to Oregon, Oregon to Idaho, Idaho to Tehachapi. Just your standard shipping experience. When we finally got the box it was much the worse for wear, which was not a problem for the various hats contained inside, including what I’m pretty sure was a hat used in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as part of an Oompa Loompa costume. Some of you may remember what cool taste this person has in hats; let me remind you of the last time we got hats from him:

This is my fully-insane okie girl/hunter impression. It just goes with the hat, you know?

So the hats were fine. However, they had also sent a gift for our daughter. It was surely once a neato vintage porcelain doll. That had been shipped to different states, like, four times.

Fortunately, my daughter is too young to care about dolls and wouldn’t have been traumatized by this even if she had seen it. My eight year old son, however, was completely freaked out.

When he first pulled it out of the box, he saw only this:

Horrified, he turned to my husband and said, “Dad, why would they send us a headless doll, huh? Why, Dad, why?”

My husband said, “Well, son, I’ve been telling them how naughty you’ve been lately and they didn’t think you deserved a real birthday present.”

And then my son said, “Don’t they love me anymore?”

And then my husband said, “Frankly, son, no they don’t.”

Maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that. My husband explained what had happened and my son was mollified with the cowboy hat in the box. It was I who dug through the rest of the box looking for broken glass and had to be creeped out by this:

As I continued to pull out pieces, I couldn’t help but think of that one Courtney Love song that was ubiquitous in 1996. You know, the Doll Parts song? It was all “doll eyes/doll arms/doll hearts/doll parts” and then bizarrely, “I wanna be the girl with the most cake.” But surely you remember.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am the there was no actual doll heart. Just a doll ear, doll fingers, and a doll neck spring.

So for those of you who have come to visit us on a Saturday or who plan to come up on Saturday, yes, we might take you on a cool hike. We might take you to the pool. We might take you to Oktoberfest or a craft fair or to the 4th of July hot-air balloon festival. But if you’re really super lucky and the stars have aligned and smiled upon you, you will be present next time we get a shipment of hats. Because that is a special kind of fun, the kind of fun that makes you laugh in the daylight but when night comes you get to be afraid that some kind of curse came in that box, too, and that doll is gonna come alive, climb over the side of the bed, and steal your eyeballs.