Category Archive

A couple nights ago I had a dream that I was watching Brokeback Mountain.  I’ve never actually seen Brokeback Mountain, so my subconscious had to make it up as it went along.  I have to tell you, when it comes to the art of filmmaking, my subconscious is an uneven talent.  I understand that the real Brokeback Mountain had some scenes that made some viewers uncomfortable.  I wouldn’t know anything about that.  The most memorable scene in the version I saw had the two cowboys drinking beer and making Jiffy Pop popcorn.  I’m sure I wouldn’t know anything about that either. 

Except that I do, because I just made some Jiffy Pop popcorn last Friday.  It was because we were out of microwave popcorn, and we just happened to have this Jiffy Pop that Elvis had gotten as a present from his teachers at school.  So I made the Jiffy Pop.  It was okay.  Microwave popcorn would have been better.

When I was a kid, they didn’t have microwave popcorn.  Well, I’m assuming that there was no microwave popcorn because most people I knew didn’t own microwaves.  And I remember what a big deal it was when my mother finally got an air-popper.  That was amazing.  We would totally gather around and watch the popcorn popping because that’s what you do when a technological marvel is occurring.  Anyway, before the air popper my mother would make popcorn on the stove.  Not Jiffy Pop, though, because that was too expensive.  No, she’d just make it in a pot.  We wouldn’t gather around and watch because, you know, there wasn’t really anything to see. 

I think my mother must have made popcorn every day and we’d all eat it while she watched The Doctors and Days of Our Lives.  I was never that into The Doctors, but Days of Our Lives had a really interesting storyline at that time, what with the Salem Strangler killing people and Jessica having that split personality (nun by day, shameless hussy by night), and then it turns out her boyfriend is the strangler and Sister Marie is her mom?  Holy crap, that was exciting.  I guess you had to be there.  Anyway, Another World came on after that, but usually by then the popcorn was gone.  My father didn’t like my mother to watch soap operas.  He thought they were a waste of time.  My mother would watch them anyway, but it was a secret, so we had to keep it on the downlow, as it were. 

There were never any gay cowboys on Days of Our Lives when I was watching it.  Things might be different now, just like the popcorn is different.  I would never watch soap operas with my children.  And yet that is one of my fond memories of childhood. 

I had another dream that I went to high school with Johnny Depp.  I had known Johnny Depp since the fourth grade.  We didn’t talk much, so we weren’t close, but in my dream we were in high school together, and one day during math class he tried to kill me.  I never understood why, but I got asked to tell the story over and over, and that’s when people started noticing some inconsistencies in the narrative.  It turned out that I’d just read Winona Ryder’s memoir of the event, because it had actually happened to her, not me.  Then it turned out that she made the whole thing up, and I felt pretty ripped off.  Kind of like Oprah, I imagine.

I didn’t go to high school with Johnny Depp, of course.  Johnny Depp and I aren’t even the same age.  I think 21 Jump Street may have been on when I was in high school.  Probably some episode of 21 Jump Street had some high school students trying to kill each other and lying about it, but I don’t remember much specific about 21 Jump Street, except when Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise would go undercover as delinquent brothers.  I’m not sure why that made such a strong impression on me, unless I really dug the way Johnny Depp looked in a do-rag.  Really don’t know the answer there. 

I think I know where this dream came from, though.  I’ve been eating Frosted Mini-Wheats this week, and on the back of the cereal box there’s this movie offer, and one of the movies you can get is Lucas–you know, that movie Corey Haim made before he got old and desperate?  Winona Ryder was in that movie, too.  She was very young.  Johnny Depp was not in that movie.  But Johnny Depp dated Winona Ryder, as you know.  That’s how he got his “Wino Forever” tattoo.  There were no tattoos in my dream, though.  Just attempted murder and literary fraud.  It was more exciting than the gay cowboys eating Jiffy Pop, though.

There was something wrong with that Jiffy Pop. 

It’s Valentine’s Day, and I should have written something about love.  Instead I wrote about dreams of love and love gone wrong.  Also the popcorn going wrong.  I love popcorn, and I love this blog.  And I love you guys.  (Nothing funny, just being festive.  Grow up, for Pete’s sake.)

While I was in California my stepmother told me that I should start telling her and my dad now which of their many possessions I’d like to have “after they’re gone.”  This is weird to me because I remember when my mother was dying, she started asking each of us what things of hers we wanted to have, and that was very painful because she only had two weeks to live and I didn’t want any of her things, I just wanted her to keep living.  My mother was not a woman of many possessions, anyway.  Or rather, she was a woman of many temporary possessions, not the sort of things one usually bequeaths to anyone else.  My parents’ life together was one of looking forward to the day when they would have more money (or fewer liabilities) and more time (or fewer responsibilities), and finally be able to get something nice and go someplace exciting.  My father actually went to a lot of exciting places on business—Europe, Russia, Japan, Hawaii, who knows where else—but it was not usually practical for my mother to go with him.  She did accompany him to a conference in Boston once.  That might have been the only trip they took together (alone) since their honeymoon.  It’s ironic, in the Alannis Morrisette sense, that just as they were on the cusp of empty-nestdom, she should leave the nest herself.  Wherever she is now, I reckon it’s at least as nice as Hawaii, but I think my dad still wishes in retrospect that he had taken her to Hawaii when he had the chance. 

 

My dad is well aware of the opportunities he missed with his first wife, so he hasn’t made the same mistakes with the second one.  Of course it helps that he has more money and all that et cetera, but still, he’s learned his lesson.  Also, my step-mother isn’t shy about telling him what she wants.  Or what she doesn’t want—but she only tells him about that after he’s already given it to her.  And then she tells anyone else who will listen about how much she doesn’t like it and why on earth would he buy such a thing for her.  It’s a bit hard to take because a) despite his documented shortcomings, my father is very thoughtful about gifts—even if it isn’t what you wanted, he sure has a lot of reasons why he thought you’d like it, and b) my mother never got anything as nice as the stuff Dad buys for Step-mother.

 

Step-mother is a wonderful woman in many regards, but she could use some work in the graciousness department.  I don’t claim to be a paragon of this virtue myself, but I do know that if my husband bought me a piece of jewelry that he thought I’d like, I’d suck it up and wear it.  At the very least I would refrain from calling it “tacky.”  While we were there last week, I got to see my father at his wit’s end, trying to explain to his wife that the earrings made from diamond chips he gave her for their tenth anniversary really were diamonds.

 

“I don’t see how they’re any different from cubic zirconium,” she said.

 

“Because they’re diamonds!  They’re 100 percent diamonds, made from carbon!  Cubic zirconium has zirconium in it!”

 

“So I have genuine fake diamonds?”

 

“You have genuine REAL DIAMONDS!  And they weren’t cheap, either!”

 

That’s when I told her that if she didn’t want her genuine fake diamonds, I would gladly take them.  Only I’d pass them off as real.  Then everybody laughed.  Which was good, because I was about to punch her.  Also, I don’t have pierced ears, so a fat lot of good genuine diamond earrings would have done me.  Maybe I could have bequeathed them to somebody.

 

Which brings me back to my original subject.  My mother had no jewelry to speak of, aside from her wedding ring, which she was buried with.  It was a simple white-gold band, just like my father’s.  My dad remembers that they bought the set at Monkey Wards for $65.  It’s a sweet story, I think, but that’s neither here nor there.  She also had no china, fine or otherwise.  I think she used the same white Corelle dishes for the first twenty years she was married.  Then she bought some dinnerware with a country goose theme.  This was after she decided that she was going to be into geese.  She bought some goose glasses to go with them, but quite a few of them broke.  She couldn’t find the same pattern anymore, so she bought some slightly different goose glasses to replace the broken ones.  A lot of those broke, too.  I inherited the lone surviving goose glass a couple years ago.  It has since broken.  I wasn’t too torn up about it, though, because I’d also inherited the goose dishes and the goose salt-and-pepper shakers, which are packed away like they were fine china, and not just some country kitchenware that isn’t my particularly my style.  I have naught against geese, country or otherwise.  I just have my own dishes that I registered for at Target ten years ago, and I hardly ever use those, either.  We prefer Spiderman and Barbie plates at our house.

 

I also have my mother’s old melamine serving platter.  It’s yellow-green and too thin and thus has a crack in it.  I don’t use it anymore.  It’s entirely useless, and not valuable.  It’s not even attractive.  I keep it because it was my mother’s, just like I keep her old reading glasses, which she may very well have bought at the Pic’n’Save, for all I know.  They are in the same cheesy glasses case I made her for Mother’s Day in my eighth-grade home ec class.  It’s one of those plastic-grid needlework crafts, a yellow flower with a white background.  It is, of course, filthy.  It’s been filthy since a week after Mother’s Day twenty-three years ago.  Good Lord, twenty-three years.  The glasses and the case are in the bottom of my temple bag because the last time I went to the temple with my mother, she had me carry some of her stuff in there.  Sometime after she died I cleaned out my temple bag and found them, and I just left them there.  Where else would I keep them?

 

What’s left at my parents’ house is a whole lot of pretty nice stuff I don’t want.  What I want is the crap stuff I grew up with.  I want the Keane paintings my mother bought in a garage when she was still young and single.  They aren’t worth anything and I reckon my husband would sooner die than have them on his walls—but they are integral images of my childhood, and therefore they appeal to me.  They are both night scenes.  One is of a lone little blond girl sitting on a step of a long staircase in the moonlight.  The other is of a young woman on a busy street.  In each picture the subject is staring straight at you with their giant eyes.  Yes, it is creepy and weird.  (This was before Margaret Keane became a Jehovah’s Witness and started painting happy pictures.)  My mother bought the woman-on-the-street picture because it reminded her of herself—a young single woman on her own.  She even looks like my mother did in those days (at least as much as anything Keane painted could look like a human).  In the background there’s a sketchy image of a man who looks like the young version of my Dad.  To us that gave the painting a sort of mystical quality, since my mother was years away from meeting Dad when she bought it.  Dude, her destiny was right there in the freaking painting, and she had no idea!  My brother has that painting.  I suppose it’s appropriate, since he’s the only single one left among us.  Maybe he’ll meet a blond woman with giant eyes someday, and their kids will be similarly impressed by the magic painting that can tell the future.

 

After my mother died, everything she owned became a holy relic to me.  There was so little, materially speaking, to remember her by.  She hated having her picture taken because she hated how fat she looked, so we have very few pictures of her.  Most of the things she had were not meant to last.  They were meant to be used until they could be replaced with something better.  This is why I still have Post-It notes that my mother wrote on.  Stuff that should have been thrown away a long time ago has taken on ridiculous significance simply because I know there will be no more of it.  It will never be replaced with something better. 

I suppose this is the legacy my mother left me, that I can live with not having the best of everything—but also that I won’t have forever to do what I mean to do.  As much as possible, the doing should be done now.  It shouldn’t be saved for later.

As my husband is fond of noting, I am the Ebeneezer Scrooge of Halloween.  But like Ebeneezer Scrooge, I wasn’t always this much of a spoilsport.  (Well, truth be told, I have always been a spoilsport to some degree, but not this much of a one, and not always in regards to Halloween.)  I used to think Halloween was kind of cool.  Then I turned twelve.  Just kidding.  No, seriously, even after I lost interest in dressing up and trick-or-treating, I thought Halloween was a perfectly fine holiday to celebrate.  Then I married my husband, and Halloween became a sacrament.  Suddenly, like church, it was no longer fun anymore.

The first Halloween after we wed, I was pregnant with Princess Zurg.  I was very tired.  I was very cranky.  I was sick.  I was, in short, pregnant.  The church was having a Halloween party (we Mormons love us some Halloween! and we don’t call it a “harvest festival” or some other wussified thing), and part of the building was being converted into some sort of haunted-house-esque trick-or-treat thing, and Sugar Daddy had volunteered us to be in charge of one of the rooms.  In the first place, this was not my thing.  Aside from being No Fun Whatsoever, I’m just not good at entertaining.  Or more specifically, I can be scary, but not on purpose, and not for fun.  SD was a bit miffed that I could not catch his vision.  I was not excited to make a jell-o mold brain.  I didn’t want to peel grapes for eyeballs, or whatever.  I agreed to dress up as a mad scientist, because he had the lab coat and probably the dried ice, but I was not enthusiastically agreeable.  I was pregnant, and in my selfish little world, Halloween didn’t add up to a hill of beans.  I just didn’t care, and being young, pregnant, and largely uninitiated in the art of marriage, I resented feeling obligated to care. 

So Halloween came.  I got home from work, feeling like hell–which should have put me in the mood for Halloween, I suppose, but strangely it did not–and I wanted to go to a Halloween party about as much as I wanted to stick needles in my eyes.  SD probably would have liked me to stick needles in my eyes.  That would have been creepy, and more in the spirit of the evening.  I so emphatically did not want to go to this party, did not want to be a mad scientist, did not want to scare children, and most importantly, did not want to pretend to have fun, that I actually started to cry.  I just wanted to go to bed, but I knew that wasn’t an option.  Oh, I could have told SD that I was too sick and tired to go, but he would have guilted me into going anyway.  Because he is really that controlling, and I am really that much of a pushover.  Guilt is my number one motivator, and he uses that information to his advantage.  I still have rage issues to work out, as you can see.  I’ll try to get back to the topic at hand.  Ahem.

I don’t think I’ll bother to tell any more of my side of the story because you have most of the relevant information.  To sum up:  I decided that a gift given grudgingly must count for something, so I went to the Halloween party with SD, immediately regretted giving my grudge-gift, and spent much of the evening hiding in the ladies’ room because the only thing I hated more than Halloween at that point was him.  Did I say that out loud?  Eh, whatever.  The long and short of it is this: 

I ruined my husband’s Halloween.  On purpose.  And now it’s a family tradition.  A dysfunctional tradition, sure, but don’t judge me, dear reader, until you’ve walked a mile in my pregnant uterus.

So every Halloween for the last nine years, I have not been able to maintain a good attitude.  Even if I think I’m going to maintain one, the evening of October 31 arrives and I find some reason to mutter or scream at the top of my lungs the words I hate Halloween.  And I do.  At that moment, I do.  As SD is fond of reminding me, I owe it to my children to celebrate Halloween, which is fine.  It’s not like I have some ethical objection to the holiday.  It just always manages to bring out the worst in me.  Something always happens to make me totally pissed off at the world.

This year I have found myself less annoyed by Halloween.  I don’t know what it is.  Maybe I’m maturing.  Maybe I’ve lost my will to fight back.  Maybe the valium is working.  I don’t know.  But I actually enjoyed carving pumpkins this year, instead of thinking it was a big, fat, messy pain in the neck.  (It still was a big, fat, messy pain-in-the-neck, but it was also fun.)  I’m excited to see the kids in their costumes.  Princess Zurg is going as the Corpse Bride.  Mister Bubby is going to be Link.  Elvis is going to be…whatever clothes he agrees to wear tonight (though he still has his Padawan learner costume from last year, which we never did get a picture of because he wouldn’t keep it on long enough).  SD is going as a gay serial killer.  (Or something.  He’s going to wear that freaky mask he bought and has been giving me the hurt-lip about ever since I told him it was too scary for children.  Ninety percent of adults polled agreed with me, but he’s since successfully desensitized our own youngsters, so I lose that argument also.)  I, having finally found my Pilgrim outfit after it went missing for six years, am going to be Hester Prynne.  And the baby will be doing double duty as both Pearl and the worm in the Corpse Bride’s ear.  (We just don’t have enough baby-sized folks in this house to go around.) 

But I still feel anxious.  I don’t think it’s possible for me to have a happy Halloween.  Something is going to happen that will make me spoil it.  My husband will characterize this as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and perhaps he’s right.  Well, screw him.  He’s not going to spoil my Halloween.  I can do that myself.  Which is exactly his point.  GAH!

My mother called it a couch.  Her mother called it a davenport.

My father called it a couch.  His mother called it a sofa.

I call it a couch.  Unless I’m calling it a sofa. 

I’ve never referred to it as a davenport.  “Davenport” was the name of the residence hall I lived on my last two years of college.  Top Dav (4th floor) and Bottom Dav (3rd floor) were women’s halls.  The 2nd floor was called Baby Dav, and it was a men’s floor.  Mostly basketball players lived there.  Top Dav was where BSU and student government types lived.  Bottom Dav was informally known as the Slut Hall.  I lived on Bottom Dav.  During my senior year, one of our hallmates got scabies, and we were all given prescriptions for permethrin.  I didn’t fill mine because it was Christmas Break and I had a plane to catch.  My two best friends went to pick up their prescriptions at the local pharmacy and were waited on by a very attractive pharmacist.  They were extra-embarrassed.  None of us ever got scabies. 

Anyway, the whole time I lived there, I thought of Davenport as a couch, even though the hall was probably named for some rich alumna or emeritus professor, which made me wonder, if my last name was Davenport, would I be more or less likely to refer to my couch as a davenport?  I might think it was funny to do that.  My kids would certainly think it was funny.  “Don’t jump on the davenport!”  “Which one?  Ha ha!”  Dumb, yes, but good, clean fun.  Unlike the fun to be had on Bottom Dav.

There is a kind of couch called a loveseat.  I never use the term loveseat.  To me, it is a small couch.  Or a short couch.  “Loveseat” is just so corny.  When I was a kid, my parents had a couch that was probably technically a loveseat, but they never called it that.  It was a funny piece of furniture.  It had a wooden base and the seats were these canvas hammocks with dark green, corduroy cushions that lay on top of the hammocks.  I probably don’t need to tell you that this was the ’70s.  They also had a chair of this same make, only the cushion was orange.  Did I mention it was the ’70s? 

So anyway, what I remember about that time is that we kids liked to climb under the couch and poke our heads up through the hammocks and cushions.  Or we’d get on the couch and poke our heads down through the cushions.  We thought that was fun.  It may have been good, clean fun, but it resulted in a really messed-up couch that my mother was stuck with until 1987, when a lady at church died and left us all her furniture. 

Sugar Daddy and I bought our first couch at the Goodwill.  It was $30.  We were careful not to buy the $10 couch because, you know, you get what you pay for, and we didn’t want to know what sort of thing we’d pick up for $10.  Probably scabies.  Anyway, in retrospect I shudder to think of what was in that couch we bought, $30 notwithstanding.  It was hideous, of course–some predominantly-brown plaid upholstery with a burlap-like texture.  You know what I’m talking about. 

It was replaced a year later with SD’s aunt’s old couch, which was also covered with predominantly-brown plaid upholstery with a slightly less burlap-like texture.  The crevices in that couch were like black holes.  We moved it up to Oregon.  One day when we were looking in the couch for the remote, or something like that, we dug out articles of clothing, household tools, baby toys that had been missing for a year, and I think an entire teddy bear (not ours). 

A couple years later we replaced that couch with the couch we have now, which we paid $300 for.  Its crevices are also black holes.  You could hide a dead body in that thing and we’d never be the wiser, as it’s been urinated and vomited on repeatedly for the last four years.

About a year ago a friend of mine gave us her old couch because she was purging her house of stuff.  It’s a light-colored floral-pattern couch, not remotely our style, but it’s quite comfortable.  We meant to get a more contemporary-looking slipcover for it, but we never have.  Instead we’ve opted to personalize it with mud and cheeto dust.  No one has peed on it yet.  Which just goes to show you, free couches are always better.

It’s funny how the mind works.  See, I was just ruminating on the word couch because couch synonyms have been showing up a lot in my crossword puzzles, and I ended up giving you all a definitive Couch Family History.  On second thought, maybe it’s just funny how my mind works.

Anyway, what I was going to say was that there’s this other couch called a divan.  If you put broccoli, chicken, curry powder and a creamy soup in a casserole dish and sprinkle it with buttered bread crumbs and bake it in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes, you will have Chicken Divan.  I don’t understand the connection.  But it does sound more appetizing than Chicken Sofa.

This and my husband’s latest post will serve as a commentary on those alleged male-female differences.  Remember when Tom Cruise jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch?  That sort of thing never happened to Donahue.  Donahue didn’t have a couch.

So I was listening to the Old Hits For Old People radio station the other day, and the disc jockey told me to stay tuned so I could hear one of the top songs on Hillary Clinton's iPod.  Well, you know me, I always do what the disc jockey tells me, and anyway, I am a sucker for uninteresting trivia about Hillary Clinton, so of course I stayed tuned.  Well, technically, I flipped stations during the commercials because I hate commercials, but there was nothing good on anywhere else, so I switched back to OHFOP, and the song they were playing was "Alone Again, Naturally" by Gilbert O'Sullivan.  And I thought, "There's no way this is on Hillary's iPod."  Know why not?  Because that would be too hilarious!  And as I've said before, Hillary's just not funny.

No, the song on Hillary's iPod turned out to be "Respect" by Aretha Franklin.  (See?  Typical.  No amusement there.  Actually, it's kind of sad.  Endears me just a little bit more to the poor woman.)  But this was after I'd sat through "Alone Again, Naturally" and been taken on a whirlwind tour of Memory Lane. 

Gilbert O'Sullivan is not to be confused with the famed Gilbert & Sullivan who wrote H.M.S. Pinafore and Pirates of Penzance and whatnot.  For one thing, he's only one guy, and Gilbert & Sullivan are two guys (hence the ampersand).  For another thing, to the best of my knowledge my parents never owned any Gilbert & Sullivan albums, but they did own Gilbert O'Sullivan's album that included "Alone Again, Naturally."  (They also owned a lot of Moody Blues Records.  More on that later.  Much later.) 

My sisters and I listened to this record all the time when we were young.  Why?  I don't know!  We just did.  We liked exactly two songs on it:  "Alone Again, Naturally" (naturally) and "Thunder and Lightning."  The two songs could not be more different, except in the fact that they are both extremely cheesy and are an embarrassment to music itself.  Okay, that last one's a little harsh.  Let's just call them guilty pleasures.  But while "Thunder and Lightning" was utterly forgettable, "Alone Again, Naturally" is a classic tune of angst and melancholy.  It is so over-the-top sad that to this day I get depressed just thinking about it.  But it's a good, wallow-in-your-grief-and-eat-too-many-cookies kind of depressed.  Because I am a sucker for emotional manipulation.  Always have been, always will be.

In a little while from now,
If I'm not feeling any less sour
I promised myself to treat myself
And visit a nearby tower,
And climbing to the top,
Will throw myself off
In an effort to make it clear to who
Ever what it's like when your shattered
Left standing in the lurch, at a church
Where people 're saying,
"My God that's tough, she stood him up!
No point in us remaining.
May as well go home."
As I did on my own,
Alone again, naturally

I'm sorry, but how horrible is that?  How can you resist his pain?

I still remember vividly that mildly handsome, clean-shaven Gilbert O'Sullivan of the Brady haircut, dressed in a white V-neck sweater with a big red O on it–or was it a big red G?  hm, scratch the vividly, I guess–hands in his pockets, leaning casually against the edge of the record sleeve.  See, in the old days, kids, there were these things called "records"–oh, never mind.  I don't have time for a history of Audio Technology.  Anyway, I always wondered what happened to the cat, if he just had that one hit and then threw himself off a tower, or what.  But I've never been so curious that I actually bothered to find out. 

Until today!  See, Hillary Clinton reminded me of Al Gore, which reminded me of the Internet (naturally), and kids, you can find out anything on the Internet.  So here I am, surfing the World Wide Web, looking for the Rest Of The Story on Gilbert O'Sullivan.  Is he still alive?  If not, how did he die?  Did he ever marry?  If so, did she finally leave him?  Most importantly, did he have any kids and if so did he go and orphan them like his parents did to him?  I must know!

Well.  Suffice it to say, I'm disappointed.  Well, not really.  It turns out Gilbert O'Sullivan is alive and well, living with his wife and two kids in Jersey.  (That's old Jersey, not New Jersey.  The cat's Irish, you know.)  And he's still making music, touring in Japan and whatnot.  Which is cool, if not the uber-dramatic story I was hoping for.  I mean, I'm happy for him.  I also found out that he used to do amateur boxing.  Which explains his nose.  (I guess.)

So there you have it, kids.  More than you ever needed to know about Gilbert O'Sullivan.  For a more interesting blog and better music recommendations, visit my husband's site. 

---

"Writing music is all I live for, and everything else comes a poor second." –Gilbert O'Sullivan

When Sugar Daddy was a college sophomore, he roomed with a guy who couldn't go home for the Thanksgiving holiday, so SD invited him to come to his family's celebration.  This roommate was kind of a strange cat; they were at a science and engineering school, but he was more interested in labor movement politics than in physics.  That and video games.  He wasn't much of a talker, as I recall, and most of what SD said just made him shake his head. 

 

Anyway, on the drive out to SD's home town, SD told his roommate that he was going to love Thanksgiving at his family's house because "my Grandma is a great cook, and we all dress up like Pilgrims and Indians."  Rather than shake his head, the roommate got kind of a scared look on his face, and SD laughed and said, "No, man, I'm just kidding."  The roommate gave a small sigh of relief and probably shook his head a little bit, too.

 

So they arrived at SD's grandmother's house, where the roommate met Grandma and was in the process of making himself at home when in walked SD's mother, aunt and cousin, all dressed in long skirts and bonnets.  Yes, this year, totally unbeknownst to SD, his family had indeed decided to dress up like freaking Pilgrims.  Needless to say, the roommate was a little freaked out and never came back to Thanksgiving at SD's house again.  (But I think that was mostly because he flunked out of college and SD was married to me by then.  But I digress.)

 

I believe SD and I celebrated our first Thanksgiving as a married couple at my sister's house, but the following year we were scheduled to spend it with his family, who apparently had started a tradition of dressing up as Pilgrims for the holiday feast.  This year SD's cousin, the seamstress, decided to make everyone proper Pilgrim outfits, and so SD's mother called to inform me that mine would be ready in plenty of time and she could bring it up when she visited us the week before.

 

"Ohhh, that really…isn't…necessary…" I said, not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings but not crazy about putting on a costume for Thanksgiving either, since I wouldn't even do it for Halloween.

 

"Oh, it's no problem, we bought all this black fabric, it was on sale, and we might even have some left over to make a little dress for Princess Zurg."

 

Well, I was fine with them making a Pilgrim out of my daughter, but I really felt like I was a little too dignified to be participating in this particular family custom, so I tried to mutter only non-committal phrases while we discussed the particulars of my new wardrobe. 

 

I really did not want to be a Pilgrim for Thanksgiving, for the same reason I haven't wanted to be anything for Halloween in about 20 years:  because I'm a spoilsport suckhead who wouldn't know fun if it bit me in the butt.  But as I was admiring my cousin-in-law's fine sewing skills a few days later, it occurred to me that the only thing less dignified than dressing up like a freaking Pilgrim was refusing to dress up like a Pilgrim because I was just too freaking cool.  Because I wasn't cool.  I was just being a spoilsport suckhead.  I mean, this wasn't my own family's style–in fact, they would have laughed their heads off in shock and horror if I'd shown up at my sister's in a Pilgrim costume–but I figured, eh, when in
Rome, do as the freaking Romans do.

 

So there we were having Thanksgiving dinner at SD's grandma's house, with all the females dressed up as Pilgrims (except for my mother-in-law, who decided to go as a Native American that year).  We were really a very impressive sight.  I'm the sure the neighbors wondered why so many nuns were visiting Mrs. Grandma's house on Thanksgiving, but that was part of the glamor, I assure you.  And PZ did indeed have her own Pilgrim outfit, though she didn't like wearing it much.  (Six-month-olds can be so fashion-conscious.)

 

Unfortunately, in the years intervening, I have somehow lost my Pilgrim costume.  This has been a great disappointment and frustration for me, because if I ever did get a wild hair and decide to dress up for Halloween, I'm usually pregnant or carrying a small child, and if I slapped a letter A on that black dress, I'd make the perfect Hester Prynne.  No one would get it, but none of Grandma's neighbors got the nun thing, either.  It's all about amusing myself. 

 

I'm disappointed for another reason, too.  This is our first Thanksgiving we're doing by ourselves, me being too pregnant to travel to relatives' houses.  SD is looking forward to making his first turkey, but we thought it would be a little lonely with just the five and 8/9 of us, so he invited a colleague from work to dine with us.  The colleague and his wife are from
India, so Thanksgiving doesn't really mean anything to them, but we're all about multiculturalism here, and we figure it will be an educational experience for them.  Plus, SD is excited to have real Indians over for Thanksgiving.  If only I had my Pilgrim costume, this would be a fantastic photo op.

 

Enjoy your holiday, kids. 

Southern Californians:

 

Does Cal Worthington still do commercials with his dog, Spot?  Or did he die, like, ten years ago and I never noticed?  I can't say why this question is nagging me right now, or why for the last 48 hours I have had If you need a car or truck, go see Cal running through my mind, since I don't need a car or truck, and I probably wouldn't see Cal if I did, but running through it has been, and the random curiosity is killing me, though I am too lazy to Google over it.

 

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I realized last night that although my kids love dressing up for Halloween (well, except for Elvis—he still can’t figure out why we force him into these crazy get-ups every year), they are fairly indifferent to trick-or-treating.  This is no mystery, as far as I’m concerned.  I think it’s a natural result of being allowed to consume candy in disproportionate amounts all year round.  A minor point of contention in Sugar Daddy’s and my co-parenting career has been his lackadaisical attitude toward our children’s candy habits.  SD thinks I am something of a candy ogre because when candy is served—which is not quite but almost on a daily basis–I think one piece ought to be plenty for any growing child.  He thinks three is more reasonable.  Or five.  Whatever.

 

He subscribes to the anti-Prohibition school of candy consumption.  His mother severely limited his and his brothers’ sugar intake when he was growing up, and he blames his frequent (and gluttonous) sugar binges as an adult on this one aspect of dietary strictness in his childhood household.

 

To an extent I’ve bought into his theory.  I don’t have any particular “thing” about sugar.  I mean, sugar is in stuff, people eat stuff, most of them don’t get cancer, so sugar is not the enemy, in my mind.  Candy is not the enemy.  It’s just not good for you.  Which is not to say that it is inherently bad.  It just isn’t inherently good.  I’ve never noticed that my children become more hyper or don’t sleep well if they have an unusually high amount of sugar in their systems.  Occasionally my husband does go out of town, you know, and they’ll go without candy for days and be just as hyper or not hyper; it really makes no difference.  But if my children are going to take in calories, I’d just as soon have them take in a nutrient or two while they’re at it.  That’s all.   

 

I don’t have a sugar issue as an adult, but there were no particular sugar issues under my parents’ regime.  In our house food wasn’t categorized as “good” or “bad”; there was regular old food and then there was “unduly expensive store-bought food.”  Junk food fell under this latter category, so it was rationed accordingly, and we all understood it as a money issue rather than a health issue.  So even though SD grew up with even less money than my family had, I ended up with the money issues and he ended up with sugar issues.  Each of us comes by it honestly, I guess.

 

 

In terms of how we think about food as adults, how much is owed to our upbringing?  Experts would have you believe that if you only feed your children whole grains, they’ll never develop a taste for Wonder Bread.  I am living proof that that is not necessarily true.  My parents fed us nothing but whole-wheat bread for the first several years of our lives.  This was a Mormon family in the ‘70s, and my mother would no sooner have bought bread at the store than she would have bought a pack of Lucky Strikes.  She didn’t just bake bread from scratch; she ground the wheat in her own meal.  You could not possibly get whole-grainier bread than what my mother fed us.  Nevertheless, I had no difficulty developing a taste for white bread later on.  Yes, even the Kleenexy Wonder Bread that is so reviled by dietary experts.  Now, as an adult I prefer whole-grain breads, but that’s largely because I’ve trained myself to prefer them.  I still really like white bread (though not the Kleenexy Wonder variety—only a really immature person could stomach that crap). 

 

 

I also grew up drinking powdered milk, which I thought was just fine when it was the only milk I’d ever known—sure, I marveled at how much better milk tasted at my grandmother’s house, but when I got back home, I still drank the powdered stuff and thought nothing of it because that’s what we always drank.  (Though I can distinctly remember the day when we ran out of milk, and I was convinced that I could make some more with water and toothpaste.)  I don't know when my parents started buying actual milk, but they did, and I wouldn’t drink powdered milk now for all the potato buds in the Bishop’s Storehouse.  Nor would I ever serve it to my children.  SD and I have been poor in our marriage tenure, but never that poor.  Perhaps we would have been less poor if we had been less proud, but I wouldn’t drink powdered milk and I wouldn’t ask any other human being to do it either.  And I can’t drink skim milk.  I went through a period where I could drink 1 percent, and I suppose I could again if my life depended on it, but eh, my life does not depend on it, and I choose 2 percent milk solids over optimal artery health.  So sue me.

 

 

Do you blame your food issues on your upbringing?  Or credit your superior eating habits to a superior dietary regimen in your childhood?  Talk amongst yourselves.  I need to make sure the Halloween candy is locked up properly.

 

 

 

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Go see
Cal!  Go see
Cal!  Go see
Cal!

Stolen from so many people, including radmama and (I think) Anothermad–and it took me so long to get around to that it's no longer hip.

 

15 Years Ago:  I was a freshman in college.  Holy crap.  My roommate was an exhibitionist.  She used to walk around our (very small) dorm room naked.  Which I thought was kind of strange.  One day she was trimming her bangs in the buff, and she came over to me and asked, "Are they straight?"  I had no idea what she was asking or how I should respond.

 

10 Years Ago:   I was making an ill-fated start in a sub-par MFA program in
California.  I was reading lots of Yates because I was taking a Yates seminar.  I’d broken up with my crappy loser musician boyfriend.  I was between jobs.  I was living at home again.

 

 

 

5 Years Ago:  I’d just given birth to Mister Bubby.  The little turkey didn’t sleep.  Sugar Daddy and I were enjoying a reprieve from graduate school poverty while he completed his first paid internship with the Big Satan.  I could totally buy whatever brand of cereal I wanted.  I might have been happy, but I was taking nortriptyline for depression, and the laundry list of side effects I was suffering include mostly things I don’t want to discuss and you don’t want to know about.  Plus, it wasn’t remotely effective for depression, but I kept taking it so I could feel like I was doing something proactive.

 

1 Year Ago:  I had moved for the last time.  I was finally living in a house!  SD talked me into dressing up as a pregnant woman for Halloween.  The only person I scared was myself.

 

Yesterday:  I managed not to accomplish a single thing on my to-do list.  I think I may have folded some laundry.  I made lentil soup for dinner.  I broke into my bag of Reese’s inside out peanut butter cups.  They have one more gram of protein than Reese’s right-side out peanut butter cups.  Isn’t that funny? 

 

5 Snacks I Enjoy:  I’m not sure anything I eat these days qualifies as a “snack.”  Unless you count my Zoloft.

 

5 Songs I Know All The Words To:  “Cats in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin; “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon; “If I Had a Boat” by Lyle Lovett; “The Star-Spangled Banner” (three verses!); and “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor.  I never said I was proud.

 

 

5 Things I Would Do With 100 Million Dollars:  Before or after taxes?  This is very important.  Okay, never mind.  I would pay off the mortgage, let SD retire so he could teach high school band and front an operatic metal band on the side, hire a housekeeper, move my mother-in-law to
Portland, and create some charitable foundation thingy.

 

 

5 Places I Would Run Away To:  Two things come to mind:  1) When I want to run away, I don’t think I’m all that picky about where I end up.  2) I have an embarrassing phobia about traveling outside the country, which precludes me running away to any exotic locales.  Let’s say that I’m able to conquer this fear via intensive therapy and whatnot.  Here are five places that interest me: 
Ireland,
Greece,
Egypt (so I can see the pyramids—the Pyramids are in
Egypt, right?),
Israel, and the moon—or, alternatively, some planet out there.  So long as it isn’t that crazy Planet of the Apes planet.  Wait…Statue of
Liberty…hey, that was our planet!  Damn you!  Damn you all to hell!

 

 

5 Things I Would Never Wear:  Thong underwear, flip flops (I hate that little piece that goes between your toes), anything with the word “muffin” written across the butt, anything that bears my midriff, and any type of piercing.

 

 

5 Favorite TV Shows:    But there aren’t five versions of Law & Order yet!

 

5 Bad Habits:  I’m habitually late for everything.  I eat ice cream late at night.  I don’t clean my fridge but once a quarter (okay, semi-annually).  I let my children drink way too much Kool-Aid.   Then there’s Xanga.

 

 

5 Biggest Joys:  SD, Princess Zurg, Mister Bubby, Elvis, and soon, Baby Four (at least as soon as he/she starts sleeping through the night—in the meantime, peanut butter sandwiches)

 

5 Favorite Toys:  I don’t have any toys.  Honestly, I have no toys.  My children have toys.  They won’t let me play with them.

 

 

5 Fictional Characters I Would Date:  Jack McCoy from Law & Order (the way he nails the bad guys is so sexy!); Lord Goring from An Ideal Husband (but only as played by Rupert Everett, who in this fictional scenario is not gay); Obi-Wan Kenobi (when he was young and still Ewan McGregor, not so much Alec Guinness, no offense to him); Oliver from As Long As She Needs Me; and ummmm…I dunno.  That Eric Weiss on Alias—he seems like a nice guy.