Duh Moments

My WonderHubby and I were discussing our DUH MOMENTS this morning. You know, those moments in time when you are being so incredibly stupid and don't realize it and when you finally do, you feel like you should be whacked in the head with a heavy object?? Not heavy enough to kill you, but heavy enough to knock the stupidity out of you. If you're REALLY lucky, you can manage to not have any witnesses to the DUH MOMENT. But, generally, there's at least one person present who will see or hear it, get hysterical and will never EVER let you forget that it happened.

WH and I had a united DUH MOMENT, fortunately with no witnesses. So, of course, what am I going to do about that?? Blog about it, what else? I figure revealing to everyone at once is better than telling one person at a time, right?

We lived in a little town approximately an hour away from my parents and had been visiting them after work one evening and got ready to head home. Now, on the FM dial on our radio here, you can pick up ABC. I've no idea, but it was always fun to be able to listen to the network news and such when we were driving. As we were leaving the house, Jeopardy was coming on. Kewl. We got to play along. We listened to the questions, bantered answers back and forth and even tried to figure out how much we would have won. I even think we managed to get the Final Jeopardy question right, believe it or not. Well, Jeopardy ends, and everyone knows what comes on after Jeopardy, right??

WHEEL OF FORTUNE!!!

Oh, we were PUMPED. This was so cool, we didn't have a totally boring ride home. We sat in anticipation of the show, heard the announcer, the music, introduction of Pat Sajack and Vanna White, their little banter, the introduction of the contestants, and are you ready??? Let's see the first puzzle!!! Boo-da-da-bing!! (is anyone here seeing a problem yet??...we didn't) Pat says, "The category is famous sayings, let's have the r, s, t, l, n, and e", ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. (we're STILL not seeing a problem) Pat says to the first contestant (for sake of argument we'll call him John), "John, go ahead and spin the wheel". Josh spins the wheel, we hear the clickety-click-click till it slows down, "$800.00!! Pick a letter!!". John says, "Pat, can I have an H??", ding, ding, ding.

RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT, Wonder Hubby and I looked at each other and realized that:

a)We couldn't SEE the puzzle.
b)We had no idea how many words or letters were said puzzle.
c)We had no idea where those three "H"s that John just called went.
d)We were morons.

We also laughed ourselves simple. Here are two college educated professionals, who couldn't figure out immediately that you can't play a VISUAL game over the radio. DUH MOMENT!!!! That was many years ago now.

I got to have my own very personal DUH MOMENT a just a few years ago, only this time, my children were witnesses, and I will never live this one down and yes, they do periodically remind me of it, just to let me know they remember, I think.

We drove across the country. My husband, our three boys and I drove the entire Lewis & Clark Trail, WHICH, is probably one of the most cool things I've ever done in my entire life. Once on the west coast, we had family obligations in Seattle, and then we had to drive rather quickly back to PA. We did opt to make a few select stops along the way. One was to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, OH, and the other was to the Black Hills of South Dakota so that we could see Mt. Rushmore. Seeing Mt. Rushmore had been a childhood dream of mine and I couldn't be *that* close to it and not go see it.

We made it to the base of the mountain and our hotel just before the time that they would be lighting it up for the evening. Every night they have a ceremony, and then light up the entire mountain face, if you EVER get a chance to see it, do so, it's an amazing experience. Well, we drove up the mountain, and got to the main gates, after all, it is a National Park, and we had to pay admission. All of a sudden, I noticed this big white dog kind of meandering among the cars waiting to go through the toll gates to get into the parking area. I looked at it kind of quickly, it was white, had a beard, lots of long white hair. It looked like an Afghan Hound mix of some sort. Then I realized there were three, maybe four of them just milling around the cars, and I went OFF on a rant.

WHY would people let their dogs out NOW, HERE?? Here's these DOGS, roaming around this area streaming with cars and trucks and RVs and stuff, and any one of them could run over these dogs in a heartbeat!!! What were those idiot owners thinking by letting their dogs out NOW to do their business, especially since it wasn't off to the side somewhere, but just out in the middle of the pavement???

While I was going off on this rant, I was mostly watching one of these dogs until it went close to the guardrail where the mountain just dropped off. All of a sudden, while I was in mid-sentence, one of those big white dogs OOOP and slipped underneath the guardrail like nothing and disappeared!!! I stopped speaking and looked really HARD at one of the other big white dogs.

THEY WERE MOUNTAIN GOATS!!!!!

So, now, here I've gone off on this 5 solid minute rant about irresponsible people and their big white dogs, for mountain goats, AND, there are witnesses. I suppose I'm just going to have to keep bribing them to keep from humiliating me.

DUH MOMENTS. Everybody has them, we all hate them, and we pray that nobody sees them. They're not always funny when they happen, but make for GREAT stories over the family dinner table years later during the holidays. Welcome to the beginning of the holiday season everyone, get those DUH STORIES out, dust them off, and be proud!!!

Can I throw you out the window?

When we were growing up, our parents all told us their wise words of wisdom gleaned from their hard learned life lessons. We'd all listen politely, sort of, then basically write them off because, as everyone knows, you cannot learn from someone else's mistakes.

Wrong.

Friends of ours had twin boys. When this happened, they were probably 7 or 8 years old. They were having the age old debate over "Can" vs "May" in their house as most parents do at some point or other. One of the boys ran in to his father and said, "Dad, can I (do whatever it was he wanted to do inserted here)?", his father's response was a very calm, "Can I throw you out the window?"

His son looked at him in horror and said, "NO!", to which his father said, "WRONG!", and unceremoniously picked him up and bodily deposited him out the window to the ground below (the room was partially below ground so he only let the boy drop about 3 feet, so don't panic here). The kid came STORMING back into the house, red faced and furious, yelling the whole, "You can't do that to me!" thing, and his father calmly said, "Let's try this again. Go ahead and ask me your question".

Once again, the boy asks, "Can I (insert whatever he wanted here)?". His father responded, "Can I throw you out the window?" The boy said, "NO!!!" The father said, "WRONG!!!", and promptly dumped him out the window yet again. Now, this scenario played out three or four more times. Are you seeing a pattern here?

Finally, totally defeated, the son comes back in, and his father tells him to try this again. So he says to his father in a weary voice, "Can I (insert it one more time for posterity)?". His father says yet again, "Can I throw you out the window?", and in total exasperation the son says, "YES, Dad!! YES, You CAN throw me out the window!!! You've done it (some exaggerated number) times already!!!" With a smirk, his father then says "MAY I throw you out the window?"

The light finally dawning on the boy, his jaw drops open and he just stares at his father and he utters a stern "NO!! NO you may NOT throw me out the window!!" Smiling, the father said, "Well now, I think you've FINALLY learned the difference between "CAN" and "MAY". We won't be having an issue with that again, will we?" And they did not. The boy is grown and off to college now without ever having to be thrown out of another window, to my knowledge.

I told my boys that story when they were roughly 4 and 5 and we were having that same, exact Can/May issue. They thought it was really funny at first. Especially the "throwing you out the window" part. However, for about 3 months when they'd start out a question with "Can I?", all WonderHubby or I would have to do is say, "Can I throw you out the window?", and they instantly converted the question to "May I?" After about 3 months they didn't ask "Can I?" questions anymore. That's the only example I actually know of where someone truly learned from someone else's mistake.

Well, that, and it's about an 8 foot drop to the ground from our windows. *g*

Do you need shots for those bites?

WonderHubby is a great straight man.

When the stuff that inevitably happens in our weird-shit endowed life, he's the first one I look to for that totally dry, sane, comment that will set me off onto something that will then make the situation funny. At least to us, and frankly, the way our life works, we're the only ones that matter at the time.

WonderHubby is amazing, and I adore him. He's had 2 heart attacks, one at 36, and one at 38, and is now the Rock of Gibraltar and nothing can touch him. His cardiologists are thrilled with him every year at his check ups, and we celebrate every year that we have together that we might not have had if he hadn't been so smart and didn't fight going to the hospital like a lot of men do. But, I digress, that's a story for another time.

His second "event" (yes, that's what they call them...."events"....I'm sorry, but that sounds like a party or some other social engagement) was on October 4th. I can't remember the exact date of his first one, just that it was a day or so before my birthday in April, but, the second, was October 4th. There's a reason I remember.

When you have an "event" they give you a blood thinner (whose trademarked name I can't mention here but it rhymes with blavix) to keep anything in the blood from adhering to the walls of the arteries along with that, it also prevents the blood from clotting normally. They keep you on this for a month (at least they did then) after the "event" to make sure that the blood flows through the arteries as smoothly as possible to prevent any further issues that close to the "event".

That October was a particularly stressful month. I was 6 months pregnant with our youngest son, there were some unusually ugly financial issues that were out of our control, two older sons (ages 5 and just 4)who had to be convinced that their father wasn't going to die, it wasn't necessarily the most relaxing environment for him to recover in. But, we did the best we could with what we had, and actually, by the end of the month things were relatively back to normal. WonderHubby had gone back to work, things were going fairly smoothly, all things considered.

Until...

October 29th we decide we're going to do the Jack-O-Lantern with the boys. Again, trying to get things back to normal, we'd gone to a local farm, hand picked our glorious pumpkin, brought it home. The boys were PROUD of this pumpkin. It was a perfect orange color. There weren't any flaws on it anywhere that you could see. I mean, this was the *perfect* Halloween Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin, and the boys couldn't wait to get their hands on it and create their masterpiece of pumpkinry.

So, WonderHubby takes the boys out onto the porch with the newspapers and spreads them out. They carefully place their spectacular pumpkin in the middle of the papers, drew the circle on the top where it needed to be cut and WonderHubby walks out onto the porch brandishing....the implement of distruction...the 12" butcher knife. Now, my maternal instinct has kicked in and I'm busy trying to keep the boys back away from him and reminding him of the "knife circle" that I learned a bazillion years ago in Girl Scouts. He's assuring me in a calm voice that he knows full well how to handle a knife and I start to relax....a little. But, I kept watching him anyway, because, well, that's just what Moms do.

He had the boy's complete attention. They were mesmerized by the huge blade of the knife. WonderHubby was explaining in detail how sharp the knife was and how they couldn't touch a knife unless one of us was with them. The normal "good parent" knife speech. Then he put the tip of the blade to the orange flesh of the pumpkin, rested his hand on the pumpkin itself and said, "You have to be very careful...."

Now, while he's setting himself up, it's running through my head in slow motion that he's got his left hand in the way of the blade and when he pulls up he's going to cut himself. BUT, I don't have time to say anything SO, as he's saying the word "careful", he sliced not only the pumpkin, but the skin between his forefinger and his thumb. He wanted to curse SO bad but had these two LITTLE boys staring at him with HUGE eyes and he couldn't, and I ran for a towel, and his hand started to bleed.

And bleed...and bleed...and bleed. Did I mention the part where they keep him on that blood thinner for a month and it keeps the blood from coagulating??? He'd had the "event" on October 4th, this was only October 29th, it hadn't been a month yet. He was still taking that medication. We tried direct pressure, we tried elevation, we tried pressure point, it wouldn't stop bleeding. It wasn't big enough for a tourniquet. After each solution failed, I'd say, "I think maybe we need to go to the hospital, you may need stitches." He'd growl "NO, I'm NOT going to the hospital for the second time this MONTH!" at me. Finally, when we got to the tourniquet point I looked at him and said, "We're going to the hospital."

What I haven't said at this point is that I'm cracking up through this. The madder he's getting, the more I'm laughing. Who the HELL has a pumpkin accident??? WonderHubby. By the time he finally agreed to go to the hospital, he was FURIOUS, and I was hysterical. I kept apologizing but he didn't want to hear it, which just made it worse for me. I couldn't help it. That inappropriate laughter thingy that I have was going at full tilt.

We get to the hospital and the triage nurse asks him what he's there for and he says, "Because I'm an idiot." I lose it, the nurse laughs. She settles down and asks him again. Remember he's mad. She asks again why he's there, his response was, "Because a pumpkin bit me." I lose it again, the nurse loses it and a couple of other people behind the desk start laughing too. He's not laughing. Finally we all settle down and she gets him to tell her what happened and we're all trying not to laugh. Needless to say, the pumpkin injury wasn't the most critical in the ER that evening so we had to wait a little while.

Finally they get to us, and he has to explain this AGAIN to the doctor. I can't live through this again. I'm laughing as the doctor is asking the question. So is one of the nurses who happens to be walking by. WonderHubby is GLARING at me while he tells the doctor what happened (he left out the pumpkin biting part for the doctor). He needed about 8 stitches and we got to leave.

I think the relief of having to be at the ER for something that I KNEW wasn't going to kill him was what was making me laugh so hard. Being there for something routine instead of something life-threatening makes a world of difference. I'll take stitches any day.

But, there hasn't been a Halloween since that I don't hand him oven mitts or work gloves before I give him the butcher knife to cut the Jack-O-Lantern. Being the perfect straight man he'll tell me something like, "The pumpkin's already eaten tonight, but thanks anyway."

Yanno....((WARNING: Non-Humorous Post))

Everyone else blogs about these socially important things. Either that, or highly personal, poignant, emotional things which tear at people's heartstrings. I read some of these blogs, and then look at mine. Mine, as I state in my "About Me" section, is of absolutely no socially redeeming quality whatsoever. It's merely snippets of my history, or of my present, living in what I so lovingly refer to as "weird~shit~land". Some of it is truly funny, when looked upon with the passage of time. Some of it is sad or is simply outrageous. But, it's mine. I've been told so many times to write a book, or to do stand-up comedy, that I can't even count them. However, that seems so, well, public to me. That puts these intimate pieces of my life so far out into the public domain for public ridicule that I don't know if I can bear it. Call it fear, call it vanity, I'm not sure which.

I just read a blog of a woman who's given birth to a baby who has anencephaly, literally meaning, the baby has no brain. They determined this when they did the baby's first ultrasound at 19 weeks gestation. They wanted her to terminate the pregnancy, but she didn't. She carried the baby to term, knowing that she might only have hours with her baby after birth. The baby is now over 40 days old. She's blogging about her and her life with this little soul when she gets the chance. It's compelling. People are now sending her hate mail, I can't for the life of me understand why. Because she didn't kill the baby?? Because she didn't let her die at birth and harvest her organs immediately?? Because she let her live at all??? She's not going to live long, the mom knows and accepts that. She's already got a DNR in place for her. But, she's doing "normal" things for her. They say that babies like that can't hear, but she startled at a dog barking, so she CAN. So, there's some sort of brain activity beyond brainstem.

I don't know, it sort of makes this blog seem rather lame. One of my friends writes about the social wrongs of censorship. Another writes about the things he sees in his line of work where there is distruction, or the stupidity of others. But, me, I write of the whacked out world that I see. From the weird things that happen to me, which are a lot. It sounds pointless and stupid, but, somehow, in the seriousness of this world, where there is so much pain, and so much ugliness, I think that people need to be reminded that there are funny things too. That there are things that are totally beyond our control that when you look at them in the right light are downright funny. That I have a way of looking at things that I can see the humor in these situations rather than simply seeing the negative in them. Yes, I could just wallow in the drama, but I *CHOOSE* to find something funny in them and make myself laugh rather than stay miserable all of the time. Sometimes that's hard, and I have to remind myself that "Someday" I'll find the situation humorous. Sometimes the situation isn't funny at all, but, when I think about it later, I see *something* amusing in it that I couldn't see when I was in the throws of it.

Maybe that's the point of my blog. To show people not to take themselves or their lives *too* seriously. Not to dwell on the negative, but rather to find those amusing attributes to the negative situations so that they can let their brains cope with them better. Maybe it won't work, I don't know. But, maybe it will. But, I think perhaps that's part of what I had in mind when I started this little endeavor, a peek into my real life *weird-shit-land* window so that people can relate. See their own WSL and maybe find their own humor. Once you find that humor, the situation isn't so horrible. Isn't so bad. Isn't so frightening, and can't hurt you quite as much. At least, that's how it works for me. A defense mechanism? Probably. But, one that I'm willing to share, sort of. Right now, only a few people know how to get in here. When I get braver, I'll let more in. They'll read the other posts before this one and either think I'm crazy and stop reading, or they'll laugh until they see this one and see the "method to my madness".

Either way, that smile is all I'm hoping for. It's what makes people feel better. It's what makes me real to them. It's what'll make people come back. For now, I'll be happy if people understand why I don't write the dramatic blogs that most people do. That's important to me. I really want to be understood about this. It's not because I'm stupid, or that I want to be pointless, it's because what I have to say is different than others.

It doesn't make it less important.

~m~

It can't possibly get any.........

People have always told me NOT to utter the expression "Things can't possibly get any WORSE", because from that moment on, they will. I don't know if I didn't really believe them, or if I thought it was just an old wive's tale or what exactly, but, I personally won't ever use that expression again in my natural life.

WonderHubby's parental units live in the outskirts of San Diego, CA, having moved there on his mother's demands from New Jersey upon completion of her PhD in Cardio Physiology (YUCK). Once there, it dawned on her that she couldn't see us once a month like she was accustomed to (go figure) so, after a multitude of guilt trips, we went out to visit. It had been a horrible winter here in PA, literally an ice storm every Thursday, temperatures down to -15 to -20F. If you looked up the definition of "Glacier" in the dictionary, TECHNICALLY, we had one in our front yard - albeit a small one, it was a glacier nonetheless. Needless to say, we couldn't wait for a southern CA vacation. The ironic thing about it was, while we were gone, there was a weird "heat wave" here and it was in the 50's the entire time we were gone. Approximately the same temperature it was where we were at his parent's. I think it was a plot.

I'm not going to attempt to describe the oddities of my in-laws in this blog post. It would take up the entire post and that's not the point for this one. Suffice it to say that it was an exhausting trip. His mother needs to be moving constantly and had our agenda constantly *filled* from the moment we arrived until the time they left us at the gate to come home. We were absolutely exhausted for our return flight, and we were supposed to go to work the following morning.

We didn't fly into a major metropolitan airport, but rather a smaller, more local airport, so our arrival time was somewhere close to midnight. Not bad, we'd still make it home in time to get a good night's sleep so we could go to work in the morning. First, we looked for our luggage. We found a suitcase that looked EXACTLY like ours, but, upon inspection, found that it belonged to someone else. Apparently, the person that owned this particular bag took ours thinking it was theirs without bothering to look at the name on it. So, we took the bag that wasn't ours to the baggage claim office and told them what we thought happened and they said they would contact these people in the morning and would arrange to have our suitcase delivered to us the following day. So, great, going home with no luggage. One of us says the fatal words:

"It can't possibly get any worse.".......WRONG.

We drive home (easily, I might add, because a lot of the ice had melted, our glacier WAS still intact however), opened the front door to our house and discovered that one of our six (yes six, we were stupid) cats had knocked over a ceramic lamp onto the hardwood floor and it had crashed into thousands of little pieces, also landing on an antique glass turtle that was of great sentimental value to me. So, now, I'm in tears over the turtle, and we have to clean up the remains of the lamp AND the turtle before we can go to bed. Did I mention that it was now somewhere after 1:00AM?? Work was going to be tough, but was still doable. We finally get everything cleaned up, the cleaning supplies put away and we head upstairs. One of us AGAIN states those infamos words:

"It just can't get any worse, right?".......WRONG.

We leave all of the toilet lids in the house DOWN for a reason. We don't want stupid cats falling in. It's pretty simple. Slightly graphic moment here, when I'm done, standing up and lowering the lid is all one maneuver because we don't want stupid cats falling in at inopportune moments. Well, that night, stupid cat #6 (names Ziggy after David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spider's from Mars) came flying into the bathroom, jumped up onto the sink bashed into my arm as the lid to the toilet was going down and fell totally into the toilet uh...BEFORE I'd flushed it. So, now it's 2:00AM and we're giving stupid cat #6 a bath in the sink (cats REALLY don't like baths) with antibacterial soap; one of us doing the holding, one of us doing the actual bathing and rinsing part. THEN, the cat has to be blown dry with a hairdryer because he's a Burmese and only has one layer of fur and it's COLD and we can't let him run around soaking wet. OK, it's 2:30AM, work will be hideous but, will be done, the cat is taken care of, we finally get ready to go to bed, WonderHubby utters the inevitable:

"Thank GOD, it can't get any worse."......WRONG.

At 3:30AM our phone rings. WonderHubby vaults over me because if the phone is ringing in the house at 3:30 in the morning, someone is DEAD, right? Wrong. It's the stupid people who took our luggage home from the airport. The conversation went something like this:

Stupid Guy: "I have your luggage"
WH: "OK"
Stupid Guy: "Do you have mine?"
WH: "No"
Stupid Guy: "Why not?"
WH: "Because I'm not stupid and don't leave the airport with other people's luggage"

Totally Dead Silence....

Stupid Guy: "Well, aren't you going to meet me so we can trade luggage?"
WH: "No."
Stupid Guy: "Why not?"
WH: "Because I don't have it, it's at the airport with the luggage handlers for XXXXX Airlines."
Stupid Guy: "So, how do I get my luggage?"
WH: "You drive back to the airport, give them my luggage, and they'll give you yours."
Stupid Guy: "I have to drive all the way back to the airport?"
WH: "If you want to get your luggage, yes."
Stupid Guy: "Do you know how far that is from here?"
WH: "Well, since I didn't take your luggage and I don't know where you live, no, I don't."
((WonderHubby was losing his temper by this point, the sarcasm was building because Stupid Guy actually was annoyed with him for not being as stupid as he was and taking the wrong luggage home))
Stupid Guy: "Well, I guess I just have to waste another trip to the airport"
WH: "Maybe next time you should read the luggage tags."

He hung up the phone, came back to bed, and started to say that expression again. I interrupted him. We'd had enough for one night. So, we settled down and went to sleep. We never did make it in to work the following morning.

I never EVER use that phrase. I think my reasons are clear enough.

We Promise Not to Make You Dead

My Daddy was in the Navy when I was a little girl, so we spent every single vacation where both sets of my Grandparents were; in a little town smack dab in the middle of West Virginia. I mean, dead center of the state. The way the roads were then, it was a 9 hour drive back then, and there were no DVD players in cars, no gameboys or PSPs. My sister and I had to make do with reading books, or playing "car games" like counting license plates or green cars. Anything to keep my father from killing us on those pilgrimages through the mountains to our little hometown in the middle of the state of West-By-God-Virginia.

My Daddy's Parent's were from the more affluent part of town, lived in a 3 story Victorian House that my sister and I thought was a mansion as little girls. My mother was a farmer's daughter, and while both sets of Grandparents technically lived on the same road, albeit about 5 miles apart, the worlds were completely different. We adored my Daddy's parents, but, we always had more fun out with at my Mother's. That's where my cousins were, and that's where we could be kids, doing summertime things, playing kid games, swinging on tire~swings, hunting craw~dads in the creek, playing with new pups or kittens in the barn, or just running around.

My one cousin was only a year older than I and was our favorite playmate. We would get into all sorts of trouble together and we'd always come up with creative games to play. My sister always hated when it was time for us to figure out what to play. Our (my cousin's and my) favorite game was airplane. One of us would suggest it, and my sister (who was a year younger) would start to cry. We'd look to her.

"Why are you crying?"
"Because I don't want to be dead" (said among a bunch of sniffles)
"We promise not to make you dead....this time"
"You....won't?" (more sniffles)
"No."
"OK, I'll play."

That settled, we would start our game.

My Grandmother had a slightly rickety porch swing. Painted green, where the paint was chipped and peeling a bit. That would be our "airplane". My Cousin would be the Pilot and the Dad, I would be the Mom and a Nurse and my sister would be the little kid. We'd start swinging the swing, making it go higher and higher and all of a sudden my cousin would JAM his foot onto the porch making the swing jar and bounce in all directions. We would all scream, he would start yelling "MAYDAY, MAYDAY" into the imaginary radio and we would all "fall" out of the swing and land on the porch in crumpled little masses. It was VERY dramatic. I think we probably deserved Oscars for our performances.

I would always "come to" first. I was injured (we would take berry juice and smear it on us for blood. I would crawl over to my cousin and throw water on him to waken him and then put rag slings on his arm or something or wrap up a leg or bandage his head because something *had* to be broken. Then together we would crawl over to my sister, laying lifeless somewhere on the porch. I would take her pulse. I would listen to breathing. I would look at the tons of berry juice now covering her prone body. Then look at my cousin with a very sad expression, nearly in tears and say in my most dramatic voice. "I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do." and then cover my sister up with a blanket and she was *dead* for the rest of the game.

If we played "Shipwreck" it was pretty much the same scenario, only we would drag her lifeless body to shore and do pretend mouth to mouth on her and have to give up because she was *dead* and then cover her up with branches. "Tornado"....same thing. "Bank Robbery"....same thing. She was sort of like the guy in the Red Shirt in Star Trek. You knew every time he went down to a planet on a field mission that he was gonna die.

Every game we played, somehow or other, we made her dead, and we LIED to her every single time to convince her that we weren't going to make her dead so she'd go along with us and play, just so we could ultimately make her dead. As an adult, I can't imagine why she would put up with that. I mean, laying for long periods of time under a stifling blanket in the middle of summer while my cousin and I set up our imaginary signal fires couldn't have been a lot of fun.

Occasionally, we did let her "live". I think that was mostly so that she wouldn't go and tell on us for making her dead "AGAIN". For some unknown reason, my Mother and my Aunt had some major issue with us doing this to my sister over and over again. I figure karma has, or probably will pay me back for the multiple demises of my sister, but I can't help remembering how much fun it was, being a kid on a summer afternoon, out in the country, playing silly games like that.

Kids today just don't know how to play like that anymore.

Your Mommy doesn't have a WHAT?????

My eldest son learned to talk at a very early age. He was using complete, grammatically correct sentences before he was 18 months old, which, I must admit, was pretty funny when watching the reactions he would get from strangers. His vocabulary was enormous and his pronunciation was impeccable. He did, however, have days when his tremendous fluent abilities would cause me all sorts of undue embarrassment, totally unbeknown to him.

For example, he would have, what my WonderHubby and I would refer to as "The Letter of the Day" days. Now, these were days when he would select a given letter and every single word he said would begin with that letter. He started this somewhere around 15 months or so. A psychologist friend of mine was astounded that he had the ability to do this, as this required quite advanced thinking and skill, things not generally found in someone quite so young. In general, The Letter of the Day days were pretty interesting to observe, and rather amusing at the creative words he would come up with. There were, however......exceptions. These would be letters like B, or God forbid, F.

In the middle of the grocery store he announced at the top of his lungs just how ITCHY he was, which, of course, came out as BITCHY. The little white haired ladies and the other young mothers would look at me in disgust that this sweet child would be uttering such a repulsive word. But, F....F was absolutely worse. You simply cannot imagine how many TRUCKS and DUCKS we would find on F-day. "Mommy, Mommy, look at the f***!!!", he would YELL excitedly. We would find them in stores, in parks, always in public places where every adult present would look at me in abject horror to hear the f-bomb being dropped by a toddler. After a while, I merely became immune to the looks.

We were never parents to lie to our son about the names of his body parts. His penis was his penis. Not a willy, not a pee-pee, not a jigger, a penis. He would bathe with my husband sometimes, but, at this point, we already knew that this child was a little too smart for his own good, so he didn't bathe with me anymore. So, he knew that Daddy had a penis too, like him, and one day he asked if I had one too, and I told him no. He didn't ask any other questions so we left it at that. Never tell a child more information than they ask for. Topic closed...or so I thought.

One day we went to the grocery store and we're in the check out line, I'm filling out my check, he's flirting with the check out lady and all of a sudden he blurts out in that loud baby voice of his "Mommy has NO penis!" You could have heard a pin drop in the entire store. The check out lady looked at me horrified, I turned about 15 shades of purple, my son started singing "Mommy has NO penis!" over and over like a new song. I gathered up my groceries as quickly as I could and RAN out of the store.

From then on, my son used that expression as a sort of "Greeting" whenever we went anywhere. He told everyone. Bank tellers, gas station attendants, convenience store clerks, strangers who just happened to stop to talk to him, EVERYONE. The conversations would go something like this:

"My, aren't you a hansome little guy!"
"Mommy has NO penis"
Person looking to me in shock, and quick end to conversation with me purple and running out of wherever I was.

Finally, I just more or less, gave up. I realized he was going to do this to me forever and I might as well just accept it.

One day, I think went to get a slice of pizza for lunch. I ordered the pizza, the girl told him how handsome he was, and out came the the proverbial, "Mommy has NO penis!" The girl looked at me with that same look I'd seen a hundred times or so by now, and I just looked back at her and shrugged and said back to her, "Well, I don't!" This, for some reason, embarrassed HER and she quickly turned around to find something else to do. Like find our pizza.

Out of the mouths of babes.

Out of the Cuckoo's Nest

Someone unknowingly said something to me today about a "Rubber Room". He had no way to know about it, and I had no idea the impact those words were going to have on me. It wasn't really his fault, he truly had no way of knowing. But, being "involuntarily committed" is bad and that's what "rubber room" now means to me.

The hows and whys I ended up there aren't especially important, except to say that I was not there due to the drug and alcohol addiction issues or withdrawal like most of my floormates. I was pretty much a zombie for my first 24 to 48 hours on the floor so I don't remember much. Mostly that I was cold. That was the first thing I remember, actually. Being so cold I was shivering, and thinking that I didn't understand why it was so cold in hell, because I knew I was dead. Obviously, I wasn't. After that is when my partner in crime showed up, and that's when I really started to remember stuff.

Learning the ropes were pretty simple. You were a sheep. They woke you up, they gave you meds, they made you eat, they made you go to stupid classes, and they gave you very little down time. We did pretty well for a bunch of zombies, because, see, I wasn't the only one.

Oh, there were REALLY funny things in there. Like the guy that hoarded EVERYTHING in his room. He would steal pencils from everything so he had like 40 of them when he was released, plus 30 packages of snack crackers, plus packets of sugar. He snagged everything. Then there was the guy that stripped naked and ran ALL over the entire floor before security could catch him. We wanted popcorn for the show. There was the guy that played solitaire all the time and accused himself of cheating (this is way to weird to make up). There was also the girl that I went all through school with that had been fighting serious demons then, and obviously things hadn't changed a whole hell of a lot in 30 years - that wasn't funny, that was sad, and extremely ironic. We had one conversation the entire time I was there, she was there before I got there and was there after I left.

They wouldn't give us dental floss. We had to go ask for it and only then, they'd give us less than a foot, because they didn't want any hangings. Excuse me?? I know dental floss is strong, but hanging by dental floss?? I had to laugh. We couldn't have mouthwash. OK, I can sort of see that, there's recovering addicts on the floor. We also couldn't have deoderant either if it had any alcohol in it ((insert mental image of someone licking deoderant)) I'm sorry, that one made me laugh too. And yes, it was like round up time at the OK Corral when it was time for meds becauase the nurse had to stand behind her little window and hand them to you with your little cup of water and then check under your tongue to make sure you took them.

We DID in fact have our own version of Nurse Rachett, she had no sense of humor and yelled at us all the time. We couldn't have shoe strings or strings in our sweatshirts. OK, OK, there's that hanging thing again, at least those made more sense than the damn dental floss. The food ALL tasted the same. And they monitored ciggarette breaks. They allowed you one ciggarette at 10, at 12:30, at 2 at 4 at 6 and at 9. The smokers would freak if they missed their smoke break.

The place was surreal. There were 2 payphones on the floor, but, you weren't really allowed to have change, so you either had to make collect calls or people had to call you, and there was no privacy. Bedtime was at 10pm period, or Nurse Rachett would be mean to you. We did arts and crafts things, I'm sorry but I found a LOT of humor there. A bunch of adults drawing or gluing or doing paper towel tye-dye. That was probably the most enjoyable part of the day though. It's where I learned to laugh again. I hadn't laughed in months, and I actually laughed in there one day.

I had to be without my partner in crime for 3 days before they allowed me to go home on Christmas eve. I lost a lot of myself before I ever went in there. I found a little of me in that place, and I've been learning me ever since. Parts are gone forever, never to return. Parts are newly discovered that I need to learn to embrace. It's only been 2 years. My partner in crime and I go out on our "anniversary" to celebrate the change in our life that happened the day we met, and the fact that we're here a year, now two years later. I love her a lot, she and I are the only ones in the whole world that understand what we went through together. Because we're the only ones that were there. There WERE funny things. Even in there.We found them. I even make jokes about it now, saying that I'm the psycho-bitch from hell and even have the papers to prove it. Most don't believe or really understand the reference and just laugh it off like any of my other comic relief lines.

It really was just a joke, Mar, there was no malice and you know that. Maybe someday words like that can fly under the radar and I won't feel like I was sucker-punched. Today just wasn't that day.

Why I'm Not a Planet and Who Wrapped Me

First of all, I am not a planet. That would be Mars, with an *s*. I'm Marz with a *z*. I've been that for twenty-mumble-something years. It probably actually started one of those nights up on the mantle, but I digress. I always wanted a nickname. But my Father, wouldn't allow it. "Your name is Martha, if I wanted to call you something else, I would have named you something else". I thought Martha was old fashioned and stuffy and I wanted a nickname that, well....wasn't. However, battling my Father was like battling a brick wall. You're not going to get anything but sore hands.

When I went away to college everything changed. I was away from home, I was living on my own...sort of...I lived in the dorms. Made new friends, and they shortened my name, to Mar. That worked for me. My name, just shorter. I also had the total "little miss innocent face" thing going for me. Nobody ever suspected me of doing anything wrong....Ever. Which, except once, worked to my advantage. We'll save that *once* for another time. My last 2 years I had a single room and as it was legal to drink in the state of NY, we would drive the 15 miles to cross the state line and buy alcohol to take back to campus. Yes, we actually were smart enough to not drink and drive, mostly.

My college was a small State College, now University in upstate PA, and all state schools were dry campuses. So, this contraband liquor was brought onto campus by my friends and brought where? My room. Why? Because I looked more innocent than anyone else and no one would ever suspect me of breaking ANY school regulations. So, I hid all of the booty in my closet, hidden behind a little cabinet i put in there, and no one ever clued in. When someone wanted their stuff, they just came to my room to visit, and we made them drinks while they were there and off they'd go with said drink in hand and no one was the wiser.

Back then, there was a candy bar called a Mars Bar. They were great. Another extinct candy at this point, I think they disappeared somewhere in the 90s. My friends started taking the wrappers from the candy bars and taping them to my door. After all, it was Mar's Bar. I had the only bar on the floor and everyone but the Resident Hall Assistant knew it. I think at one point, there were 30 wrappers taped to my door, amid all of the other things my door was decorated with.

I eventually took the wrappers down, all but one so as not to draw *too* much attention to myself, and I wrote MarZ Bar on my dry erase board that hung on the door for people to leave messages on. Just a little change in the name, but enough to keep the idea intact.

So, I finally had my nickname, even though it never came into my house. My Father to his dying day called me Martha. I didn't have to fight the impenetrable wall and kill my hands, I just had to quietly go around it...sort of.

The End of Ends Part II

About a year after the funeral crashing event, my favorite cousin died, and his death hit me really hard. I was already going through some strange issues in my own life, among them, I'd started finding a few grey hairs here and there and I just wasn't ready to cope with that, not yet. I know it sounds extremely trivial, but in the midst of all of the extremely difficult things that were going on around us, this trivial hair issue meant a LOT to me. I went to my hairdresser and told him I wanted to dye my hair. But, I didn't want to dye it so that there would be any question as to whether or not my hair was dyed. If it was going to be dyed, I wanted the ENTIRE world to know it was dyed. So, I dyed it......purple. Yes, purple. When I was indoors, under normal lighting, it wasn't too dramatic. But when I was out in the sunshine, my hair was OH-MY-GOD-PURPLE.

My mother, toddler son, and I had to make the 9 hour drive to the little town where my cousin's funeral was going to be held the day AFTER one of my hair dying applications. This little town was in rural West Virginia. That's right, West-By-God-Virginia. I'm driving into the upper edges of the Bible-belt with purple hair. Even Satan is going to smite me, and the funny thing about it was, I didn't even give it a thought. UNTIL...

The morning of my cousin's funeral was bright and sunny. When we arrived at the funeral home, the director asked us if we were going to the cemetery, I told him yes, so he had me park on the street and put a sign on my dashboard. There were a lot of people present and there were cars on both sides of the street, leaving only enough room for one car to go down the center of this two way street. My mother, son and I got out of the car and started to walk toward the already crowding funeral home. We were met near the door by one of my Aunts. The sunlight reflecting off of my nearly iridescent purple hair. She kissed us all hello and then the conversation went something like this (please insert HEAVY country accents here)....

"M, do you KNOW your hair is purple?"

"Yes, Aunt V, I know it's purple." (What was going through my head was "OH MY GOD, YOU'RE KIDDING ME!!!!! The Hair Fairy must have snuck in and whacked me in the head turning my hair purple in my sleep!!!....which is actually kind of funny as my hairdresser IS in fact gay so, "Hair Fairy" isn't really that far off the mark...heh)

"Did you MEAN for your hair to be that color purple, or was it an accident?"

"I meant for them to dye it this color Aunt V, really."

"Really."

I had that same conversation about twelve times that day with different members of my family.

Before the ceremony I was a little nervous, so I left my son with my mother and I went for a little walk down the sidewalk to get some fresh air. Again, totally forgetting the whole purple hair thing. UNTIL.....

A car driving down the now narrow street almost plowed into one of the parked cars because he was too busy staring at my purple hair instead of watching where he was driving. Can you just imagine that headline?? "Man dies in car accident as a result of purple hair...Film at 11". It was now obvious to me that not one of these people could handle purple hair. It scrambled their brains.

I was already trying not to laugh. That was obvious enough to my mother who kept shooting me dirty looks, which, I may add, didn't help. Of course, the weird country biker music they were playing in the funeral home was not helping either. The spittoons in the corners of the rooms adding a certain ambiance, along with lots of people with missing teeth added to the overall picture. Scenes from Deliverance as well as strains of Dueling Banjos were playing in my head. All that was missing was the shotguns and everything would have been perfect. Once again, I found myself in the position of trying to cover my face with my hands to hide the fact that I was trying not to laugh. Tears were forming in my eyes, and I was shaking. At least this time, no one would have been curious as to why I would be crying. I truly adored my cousin. Personally, I think he would have thought the whole thing was funny too and knowing him, would have been laughing right along with me, though I bet he couldn't have kept it hidden as well as I did. I will say this much, that one also goes up there with one of the strangest funerals. EVER. Just one more thing, my cousin would have loved my purple hair.

I try to stay away from funerals in general. But, as we get older, we have to go to more of them. I've honestly got to admit though, that I'll take the strange and funny ones over the horribly sad ones anytime.

The End of Ends Part I

My WonderHubby and I actually crashed a funeral once.

The mother of a wonderful woman that I met online passed away, and I got notified in an email and had no way to contact her about arrangements or anything. Her mother's hometown wasn't too far from us, so I grew determined that I was going to that funeral. WonderHubby didn't think I'd be able to find it. After all, ALL I knew was her mother's first name, and the hometown my friend was from. Well, courtesy of the internet (insert superhero music here) I tracked down the town's local paper, found the only woman with that given name that died around that time and with a pending funeral in the next few days. OH, and with a daughter who's name just happend to be my friend's. We were good to go. OK, Mapquest for directions to the funeral parlor, infant son in tow, and we were off to the funeral the following day. We make the two hour drive down there, and arrived about 15 minutes before the funeral is about to start, when I suddenly get cold feet. I don't want to go in. WonderHubby now looks at me like I've just lost my mind because I've made him miss work to go and through all of this, and now I'm too scared to go in. So, after a few heated moments in the car, in we go. We meander our way through the throng of people, find my friend, she bursts into tears and all is wonderful, well, sort of, considering her mother had just died. We talk for a few minutes and go find seats in the back in case we need to escape with the little one and the service begins.

Now, before I continue I feel that I need to point out a few things. I am Christian, I was baptised and raised a Lutheran. WonderHubby is Jewish. We have a wonderful respect for the other's religions and everything is very smooth in our home. It's other places where we run into......issues. This was one of those places.

The service was run by a Holy-Roller Sothern Baptist Preacher. Now, in general, I don't have a problem with that and neither would WonderHubby. We both believe that everyone practices their religion the way they feel works for them. Everything went fine UNTIL...

The Preacher asked us to bow our heads in prayer, no problem with that, and then proceeded to do an Alter Call. For anyone who doesn't know what an Alter Call is, it's the time in the service when the Preacher calls for anyone who has not given themselves over to Jesus Christ to be SAVED to do so by a show of hands while everyone's heads are bowed. Well, I have NEVER, EVER heard of anyone doing an Alter Call during a funeral in my life, and I stole a peek over to WonderHubby and he just had the most perplexed expression on his face, a total WTF??? I proceeded to start to laugh. It began by subtle shaking, and I started to feel tears well up in my eyes and then I had to dessperately try to keep laughter from spilling out amid this totally silent congregation. This was the WRONG TIME for me to get hysterical laughing. I put my hands up over my nose and mouth and hoped that everyone would just think I was crying like the other mourners. Even though there were people staring at me anyway because they hadn't a CLUE who I was and why I would be so distraught over the passing of Miss Mary. But, seriously, here was this Baptist Preacher, now very much on his roll, and my VERY Jewish husband being told to hand his immortal soul to Jesus Christ in the middle of a funeral that he only went to in the first place because he thought I was completely insane, and was no doubt in fear for the life of our infant son, and he's now looking at me like WTF is THIS?? I almost choked myself to death on my own laughter-tears.

Thankfully, I survived the near death experience.

Beginning at the beginning or the beginning of ends

I've been told more times than I can count that I should either do stand-up or write a book. Writing a book seems totally daunting to me. Entirely too much criticism by entirely too many people BEFORE it ever makes it to the public arena. I don't know if my fragile ego could handle that kind of rejection. Honestly, I've done the stand-up bit...sort of. If you consider getting me slightly drunk at fraternity parties and putting me up on the mantle and talking to other drunk people and cracking them up into hysterics as doing stand-up. Apparently I was good at it, because they had me do it on a regular basis. It didn't give me a salary, but, it did provide me with free beer, which, for a college student in the 80's was just about equal. Does that give me any credibility as a comedienne? No, it gives me credit as a college girl who liked to drink beer on Friday nights and talk too much, who other semi-drunk or drunk people thought was funny.

Could I do that today? No. First of all, I don't get drunk and stand on mantles anymore as a general rule. It just doesn't seem like a good plan. Secondly, I don't think I'm actually funny enough to earn a paycheck trying to do it. I do know people that will disagree with that statement, even though I tell them that they're wrong. I think I have moments where I'm funny. I understand and use sarcasm quite often. And, quite frankly, I'm a weird-shit magnet. If something weird is going to happen to someone, it's going to be me. Chances are that usually makes for a comical story. I also think I might not see things the same way others do, and that I'm usually able to find something truly amusing in just about any given situation. Even truly macabre ones, like say....funerals.

Yeah, funerals can be really funny. Maybe not so much for the dearly departed, though, I wouldn't totally rule that out. Wherever they are, I can imagine them watching their collected mourners and making comments like, "Marge, why in God's name did you wear THAT??", or "Dave, what is the deal with that TIE??", or "For the love of GOD, don't let Helen near the bar alone during the wake!!!" Truly a lot of room for humor if you look at it that way.

But, beyond that, things that I've actually SEEN, go sometimes beyond the scope of funny into the realm of just totally weird to the point of actually being afraid I'm going to get thrown out of *serious* places for laughing.

Mostly, though, I think I use humor to help me cope with the uncopeable, to deal with the undealable, to manage the unmanageable. I use that strange ability I have to find something, somewhere that can amuse me so that whatever oddity, or freak show, or tragedy doesn't turn me into a disaster while it's busy wrecking havoc all around me. I think THAT is what I do most with my odd~ball sense of humor.

So, friends, in this weird world of mine, there's almost ALWAYS something funny, no matter the situation, even if I have to look really hard, I am bound to find it...eventually.