Three Wishes, or A Frightening Glimpse At My Current State of Mind

Coming home from work with Son-Three just now. As we pull in the driveway, he says, completely out of the blue, "If you had three wishes, don't you think you'd use one of them to know the words to every song ever written?"

This was seriously out of the blue--the conversation just before that had to do with a chick fight between two girls who just graduated with Son-Two. Nothing to do with songs or lyrics or even wishes. Were this coming out of a normal child's mouth, I might be at least a little concerned with the child's mental health, but this was Son-Three, who has a long history of saying random and completely odd things. (See: "What's the opposite of a moron?...A more off!" "What's the opposite of this nose [while pushing his nose up]?...THIS nose [while pushing his nose down]!") So far, for the most part, the weird and completely random things seem to be merely an indication of his ability and need to say weird and completely random things. So instead of worrying about his mental health at the moment, I'm concerned about mine.

What would my three wishes be? The lyrics of all the songs ever isn't a bad wish. But one of my wishes would, I hate to say it, be an endless supply of just enough money. I don't want to be filthy rich, just to have enough to not worry every single second. And as mentioned previously, I know that money doesn't solve every problem, but it would free up some of my mental resources to solve the other problems (for example, the problem of my third son randomly* saying things like, "Cereal is cereal and cereal is quiet. Cereal is cereal and cereal can't talk.")

I was thinking how great that would be, just to be able to relax a little, to breathe easier. And then it hit me that immediately after I made that wish along with my other two, I'm absolutely certain that the global economy would collapse and money would become an antiquated and worthless concept.

Yeah, things are pretty cheery here in Masked Mom's brain.

*Because random is pretty much the only way you can say something like that.

Twenty-One

Our marriage turned the legal drinking age today.

It intends to celebrate accordingly.

Don't Do The Dew

So Mountain Dew is having this big "Dewmocracy" promotion. They've introduced three new flavors, Dew drinkers are supposed to vote on which one they like best and at the end of the promotion only the most popular will remain.

I made the horrible mistake of taking a sip of the pinkish purple one ("SuperNova").

I was in the car with Son-Three, Son-Two and Daughter-Only. I said, "That tastes like feet!"

Son-Three took a sip (because the smart ones always want a sip of something someone else thinks tastes like feet) and declared it the best of the three. He said,"And it doesn't taste like feet..."

"Yeah," I said just as the medicinal aftertaste hit me. "You're right, it tastes like a cough drop rubbed on feet."

Needless to say, I won't be tasting Voltage or Revolution. And the only way I'm voting is if there's a line for "none of the above."

Evolution

Tonight's junior-senior prom at the boys' high school. Son-Three was unable to attend due to his girlfriend having a dance recital, which he must attend instead. After the recital they will be going to the official post-prom party sponsored by SADD, of which the girlfriend is a member. They've been together since November of last year--in high school years they're not only married but well past the honeymoon stage. The way Son-Three was grumbling about it you just knew the words "ball-and-chain" were right on the tip of his tongue (or they would've been if anyone who isn't hopelessly outdated actually used that phrase anymore).

Son-Two is attending with E.G., who happens to be the girl Son-Three "went out" with in eighth grade. First Son-One goes camping with Son-Two's ex-girlfriend and now this...clearly, high schoolers have really evolved since I was in school. I can't imagine smilingly accepting the fact that my sister was going to the prom (or on a camping trip) with my ex-boyfriend. I've tried to brush it off as a gender difference--girls are notoriously catty about this kind of thing. But it's just as hard for me to imagine Hubby finding out his brother was taking Hubby's ex-girlfriend to the prom.*

Our boys are unfazed by this sort of development and seem baffled by my bafflement. The other day, Son-One**, Son-Three, Daughter-Only and I were in the car after a tennis match, waiting rather impatiently while Son-Two and E.G. stood by the bleachers ironing out pressing prom details. I looked over at Son-Three and said, "Isn't this weird to you at all?"

And he said, "What?"

I said, "Oh, I don't know...first Son-Two goes out with A.C. sophomore year and then Son-One goes camping with her senior year. Then you go out with E.G., albeit in eighth grade, and now Son-Two is taking her to senior prom. But I guess that's just the kind of thing that happens in a small town."

Son-Three said, "Yeah, it's probably way worse in The Next Town Over, which is way smaller."

I smirked, "Yeah, over there, the same thing happens but the girl is their cousin!"

And then, building steam: "And over in The Even Smaller Town Two Towns Over, the same thing happens but the girl is a goat!"

They're apparently not too evolved to snort out loud at a very immature joke.


*I would've asked Hubby his opinion on the subject, but I've been married to him for almost 21 years and I already know that his response would have involved a discourse on how the question is impossible to answer because there is no way that any girl he was willing to go out with would EVER have been willing to go out with his dorky little brother.

**Home from college and pining for his current girlfriend--who, blessedly, is from Westchester County (all the way across the state) and has not yet dated either of his brothers.

Fly Away Home

So when we were first looking at this house last fall, I noticed a few ladybugs in between the glass and the screen in the dining room window. I pointed them out to Hubby and told him that I vaguely remembered that some culture or other (maybe someone in Asia?) considered ladybugs good luck. We took it as a sign--even though I didn't trust my memory 100% (and now that I have dial-up, Googling it is out of the question without tying up the phone for several days...).

Ladybugs may or may not be considered lucky in some Asian (or not) culture but when they're crawling in your ears or up your nose in the middle of the night, you can only wish you were lucky enough to have a gigantic can of Raid next to the bed. When their carcasses litter your bedroom floor after every semi-warm winter afternoon, even after attempts to vacuum out every nest from every nook and cranny, they no longer seem dainty or adorable. When you begin to feel a sense of unbridled glee at sucking up yet another colony of the little buggers, you know things have gone entirely too far. Despite the cutesy ambivalence of their name, when more than, say, ten or so ladybugs gather in the same place they begin to seem a lot less ladylike.

It has gotten better the past week or so--for reasons I don't completely understand--but for a while they were EVERYWHERE. I even found one--a flat one--in a library book I was reading in the bathtub.

But in this, as in all things, perspective is important. I was busy bemoaning our infestation when Cranky Boss Lady called me about an infestation of another sort at Other Kid's house. Other Kid's Mom (who is CBL's daughter) had just called her to say there was a bear in the back of her pickup truck. Apparently OKM had loaded her truck with stuff to take to the dump the next day--she has done this a million times and never had any problems. This time a big black bear crawled right over the side of her brand new pickup truck (scratches down to bare metal), dragged the cans out and up the side of the hill to the edge of the yard, where he proceeded to pick through the contents of each can before going back for the next one.

I imagine that the vacuum, my weapon of choice in the Ladybug War, would have been pretty useless against this particular pest--at the very least, I would've needed a much bigger attachment.

Is Blogging Just Like Riding A Bike? For That Matter, Is Riding A Bike Like Riding A Bike?

It's been a while but I'm just gonna get on, start pedaling and see where I go.

At least with blogging, I don't have to worry about skinned knees...

He's No Simon Cowell...And Maybe He Should Have His Hearing Checked

Whatever the future may hold for Other Kid, he definitely doesn't have what it takes to be a hard-assed judge on a TV talent show.

We were riding in the car together last weekend when Martina McBride's "This One's For The Girls" came on the radio. I was singing along--something I have a pathological compulsion to do when Other Kid piped up from the backseat: "Are you singing?"

Immediately self-conscious, I said, "Um, yes..."

"Well, did you make this song?"

Not sure now where he's going*, I say, hesitantly, "Um, no..."

"Well you sound EXACTLY like the lady on the radio."

(This post is dedicated to Pasta--an old friend from high school, not only because she recently nagged me about posting more often, but because she was there at the start of my belting it out in the car disorder--singing along to Huey Lewis, The Thompson Twins, Duran Duran and a host of other '80s pop stars while driving aimlessly around in the Wilds of New Hampshire.)

*One place he might have been going: the very same week the above exchange took place, Youngest Niece was sitting beside me while I was singing along to a Christina Aguilera song and she said, "Who sings this song?" And I said, "Christina Aguilera..." And she said, "Then let her do it." (This she learned from one of Second Niece's friends, apparently. Other Kid, obviously is less discriminating and doesn't run with quite such a cynical crowd.)

Perfect Post For February: Call Me Frances

Just after the birth of a baby, there's that moment in the hospital where the pen hovers over the birth certificate form and you want to be sure, really sure that the name you've chosen is the "right" one before setting it down in ink for the government wonks and all the world to see. In the case of Hubby and I, as I'm sure in the case of most parents, the names set down on those official pieces of paper were the result of endless hours of debate and not a little bickering--debate and bickering that often begin well before the birth and sometimes even before the pregnancy. Daughter-Only's name, for example, evolved throughout my earlier pregnancies--when we chose a girl's name only to have a boy and another boy and another boy. The name evolved slightly each time until we arrived at the name we gave Daughter-Only.

Years of work for a name that she had rejected twice by her eighth birthday. For a while, around the time she was four, she insisted upon being called Lisa. A perfectly nice name but not the name we had given her after literally years of effort. And we had no idea (nor do we still) where she came up with the name Lisa (the only possible connection I've been able to think of was The Simpsons, but we weren't fans at that point and I'm not at all sure how she could have heard it). All we do know is that for several weeks, she literally wouldn't answer to anything else.

The second name change made even less sense. One morning when she was six or seven, as she was gathering her backpack for school, she said, "I'm Dr. Ashklomash Coco Peppermint." That one lasted only a couple of days--probably because only she could pronounce it...

During both episodes, I couldn't help remembering when I was in fourth grade and decided my name should be "Frances." I didn't go so far as to insist on my family refering to me solely as Frances, but I did orchestrate a playground game in which we pretended to be from the planet Frantasty and everyone had to be named something that started with "Fran." We were a planet full of Franks and Francines and Franceses. I did it and have no logical explanation why my nine-year-old self wanted to be called what I considered an old lady's name even then. All I can say is that's the same year I went through a persistent, annoying and entirely gross phase of chewing on the ends of my hair.

In any case, Nita, over at Advanced Maternal Age is having name issues with Rio at the moment--issues that any parent (or anyone who wanted to be called "Frances" for no known reason) can probably identify with. She generously shares them in her post "My Name Is..." and in a second post "My Gears Are Grinding." So for a giggle and a trip down memory lane, here's my button:



And, Nita, it's all yours!

Browse other winners at Suburban Turmoil and Petroville.

Top Ten Symptoms Of Severe Sleep Deprivation

10. You are disproportionately amused by this 6:40 a.m. announcement on the radio: "Our random drawing name this morning is Harry Beaver of blah blah. Harry Beaver, if you call by 7, you'll receive blah blah blah. Once again, Harry Beaver, we must hear from you by 7 a.m."

9. This line from Steve Martin's Born Standing Up seems not only disproportionately brilliant but an alarmingly apt description of much of your life: "Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."

8. You find Chuck Palahniuk's latest book Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey disproportionately moving and heartwarming despite the fact that practically every character and situation in the book is bizarre and disturbing to a point just this side of repugnant.

7. You find yourself disproportionately fascinated with the word "disproportionately."

6. Your "Top Ten" list is only five items long.

The Price of a Good Hair Day?

Daughter-Only says this morning: "Mom, my hair is the straightest* it's ever been, ever. But now I have a huge zit** and my throat hurts and we're out of hard candies so there isn't even anything to make it feel better."

*Straight constitutes great in Daughter-Only's mind. Like most girls who have a natural wave, she wants her hair straight while all the straight-haired girls are out there frying their hair to get a little curl in it.

**It wasn't huge. It was, in fact, barely noticeable. But I didn't point this fact out to her because I had no interest in hearing her tell me how I must be blind or that I have to say that because I'm the Mom, etc.

Ghosts of Christmas Future?

[I know I'm a little late with the holiday posts, but this slow Internet is kicking my poor blogging ass. Posting takes so long that it is now something that takes strategic planning ahead not something I can do in the ten minutes between when I roll out of bed and we have to get out the door. Anyone who knows me personally or even through the blog can attest that strategic planning ahead is not really in my nature. And, alas, ol' Saint Nick (in the form of a communications company of any sort) didn't come through with any options other than slower-than-death "hi-speed" dial-up. But in any case...here's a Christmas post.]

Christmas night (the night part of Christmas Day, as opposed to Christmas Eve), I am face-down in my pillow "zonked" as my mother used to say--probably snoring, definitely drooling, soundly, soundly asleep--when I'm awakened by a knock on the bedroom door. It is Son-Two coming to tell me, just a little after midnight, how much he loved the movie Failure To Launch which he just finished watching. For those unfamiliar with the movie, Matthew McConaughey's character is a thirty-something man who has lived at home so long that his parents enlist the help of Sarah Jessica Parker's character to trick him into moving out. Of course it ends up being a sappy romantic comedy but I couldn't help wondering if Son-Two was subconsciously trying to tell his mother something--like he has no plans to move out before his thirty-second birthday...?

In other Son-Two news, he continues to not (as the educational professionals are so found of saying) "work up to his potential." This is a subject with endless opportunities (if that's what you'd call them) for nagging on my part. One morning over Christmas break, we were on the way to his volleyball practice and I launched into a speech about how easy it is to get in the habit of expecting too little of yourself and how soon after you learn to accept too little from yourself you start to really doubt your ability to turn things around and it becomes a vicious black hole of low expectations and even lower rewards, making it clear all the while that I was speaking from a vast well of personal experience.

As we pulled up in front of the school, Son-Two deadpans, "Thanks for the pep talk."

I said, "That was no pep talk. It was a cautionary tale. It was a rare opportunity to learn from someone else's mistakes."

If I've learned anything from my own mistakes it's that learning from another's mistakes is as rare as eyebrows on an egg. And if I've learned anything from Hollywood romantic comedies, it's hire Sarah Jessica Parker to lure your adult son out of his cozy nest (even though Zoe Deschanel's character is much more appealing).

So at least I know I've got a plan.

Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood?

The best thing about moving (other than the slow tedious process that is unpacking), is getting to know your new neighborhood. Living five miles from town, we have fewer neighbors than we did before, but we do live in a cluster of four or five houses along the state highway between two towns and what we lack in quantity we seem to be making up for in entertainment value.

The first night in our new house, I was sitting in the living room in front of the yet-to-be curtained picture window when I noticed a flashing light coming from across the road. It seemed to be coming from very near but not actually from inside the neighbor's house--it was like a camera flash but it came every second or so. I looked at Hubby and said, "Do you think our new neighbor is communicating with aliens?"

The next morning, all was explained when I noticed a wooden lighthouse sitting in a flower bed next to the house. But as soon as one question was answered, more arose.

The man has ponies--lots of them. Sometimes there are as many as ten or fifteen in the pasture beside his house and sometimes there are only a few and some days there aren't any to be seen. There is a tiny shedlike structure at the top of the hill and a made-from-a-kit round steel building that looks like a giant metal meatloaf, so I assume that's where the "missing" ponies are, but the weirder thing about the ponies is that even though there are so many of them there are only two color patterns--one is a rich brown with a blondish mane and tail and the other is white with chocolate brown spots.

I'm pretty sure my neighbor is cloning ponies in that shed up on the hill.

In fact, I'm so positive that this is what's going on that I no longer even call them ponies--they're clonies.

And that lighthouse? It's beaming the results of his latest cloning efforts to scientists on some other planet.

I'm pretty sure.

All The Ice Cream He Could Eat And Other Musical Commentary

We were playing cards Saturday night while listening to a mixed CD that included Nickelback's "Rock Star." Now one of my favorite lines in the song has always been "I wanna be great like Elvis without the tassels..."

I mean truly, it's one of the greatest lines in any song ever--clever and funny and what better rhyme for "assholes," which, in the uncensored version, appears in the next line? I thought there was no way the line could be improved upon, until I overheard Next-To-Youngest Niece singing it Saturday night:

"I wanna be great like Elvis without the tonsils..."

It doesn't rhyme quite as well, but you gotta give her points for creativity.

In other musical news, Daughter-Only and her friend R and I were in the car when an Angels and Airwaves song came on the radio. D-O says, "I love his voice, but it's really hard to like their music when the entire band is ugly."

I'm sure they've got a place for her on the Reviews page at Rolling Stone.

Oxymorons, Emphasis On Morons

So, I missed the last day of NaBloPoMo--didn't get out of work before the library closed. And the good news is my head didn't explode.

The bad news is that we still didn't have Internet when I got home that night. Because it turns out the phone company is a big, gigantic liar too (just like the cable company)--the DSL signal that I was assured would be coming to my house was not strong enough to reach our house from their local office. I understand, I guess, that they couldn't have known that instantly in the first phone call, but I'm a little baffled as to why no one could be bothered to let me know that I wouldn't be receiving the service they had promised. When I did finally call on Monday morning, they said, "oh, yes, we tried to send the signal to your house, but you're too far out to receive it" and I said, "And why wasn't I notified of that?" She said, and I quote, "sputter, sputter, spit and mutter..." Whatever. I can't get DSL. So she says, "We do offer dial-up, would you like to sign up for that now."

Uh, no. If I'm getting crappy dial-up service then you can bet your sweet, stupid butt I'm not getting it from your company who couldn't even be bothered to call me back to tell me that all you could offer me was crappy dial-up service.

So there it is.

And the oxymoron? We got dial-up--but we got the upgraded "hi-speed dial-up."

Hi-speed dial-up.

Yeah, but we got it for $12.95/month and it was turned on the exact moment the non-moronic customer service representatives told us it would be.

One More Lame Post From The Library...

...And then it's back to the lame posts from home--with any luck anyway. The Internet is supposed to be on at the house tomorrow, but I believe I've heard that story before.

Pushing The Limits Of The Definition Of The Word Post*

This is a post, right?

*Especially since the title is actually longer than the post itself and this is also being posted by proxy--I have dictated it to poor beleagured Son-One (more academia) over the phone since the library is closed on Wednesdays. I hope the gods of NaBloPoMo appreciate my dedication.

Proudly Prostate Free Since 1968

Son-One was home over Thanksgiving break and I was a little concerned about the trip back into Buffalo on Sunday to return him to the halls of academia*--between potential traffic and potential weather, I figured there was ample opportunity for disaster and the way things have been going lately when there's a chance for disaster, disaster it will be**.

The trip went smoothly though and as Son-Two, Daughter-Only and I were making our way back onto the highway after a stop at Wendy's Drive-Thru, I said, "The traffic is so light I can eat my Frosty with a spoon!"

And from the backseat Daughter-Only says, "Did you just say you had your prostate removed?!"

*From what I've been able to discern from visits to the dorm as well as Son-One's own admissions, activity in those halls seems to consist mainly of gossip, video games and occasional surreptitious imbibing of not-quite-legal beverages. In other words, and probably not surprisingly, very little of an academic nature is actually going on in the halls of academia.

**It occurred to me as I wrote that that, really, considering the fact that we were moving somewhat under duress and that we moved a household of six people and twenty years of accumulated stuff, things have gone remarkably smoothly and really the cable/Internet issue is the only major hurdle we've faced. So, I'm a whiner.

Liar, Liar Pants On Fire (Or, The Story Of How Masked Mom Was Flagged As A Lunatic By The Cable Company)

More tales of woe from the Internetless wonder. We still don't have cable or Internet at the new house and turns out we might be in a gap between two regional offices of Time Warner and unable to get service from EITHER of them. Why no one knew this until today is beyond me--and the only reason they even realized it today is because I called both offices repeatedly until I got some semblance of a straight answer and that answer wasn't even straight enough so I called everyone I know along that stretch of road that I now live on and found who has cable and where their cable is out of and now I'm waiting to hear back from one or both offices at which time I'm probably going to tell either or both of them to stuff it because I'm going to get the package through the phone company and to hell with them. Maybe.

At least I was smart enough to post from the toasty warm library instead of the soon-to-be completely abandoned old house...

Blind Ambition

Daughter-Only was thisclose to winning the middle school spelling bee last year--but a teacher mispronounced/misread a word (totem--she said "tofem" and Daughter-Only was robbed. A number of other teachers who witnessed the robbery informed Daughter-Only how unfair they thought it had been. Why they didn't inform the teachers and other organizing people of the unfairness is beyond me...).

This year, she's determined to snag the win. She's practicing maniacally. And she's extremely upset that I haven't been practicing with her. She has accused me of horrible parenting for not being more interested in practicing with her.

Let's consider the evidence and you can make your own conclusions. She has asked me exactly two times to practice with her. The first time, I was actually elbow-deep in the turkey on Thanksgiving Day and the second time, I was driving the car.

I am a horrible parent, huh?

Monday Is My New Favorite Day of the Week (I Hope)

What was originally scheduled for Wednesday the 21st by the cable company has now been moved to Monday the 26th. So we should have cable/Internet access in our warm, toasty new place then. In the meantime, the gas has been turned off at the old place (where I am now) just in time for the first cold snap of the season so I'm risking frostbite to post--but frostbite is better than head explosion, right?