Random WTFs including why Pinterest is the devil

Couple things.

Someone wound up on my blog because they searched the entire internet for “images of men in england wearing speedos whoeing two inches…”

The ellipsis was included in the search terms in my dashboard, but I couldn’t find out what it represents. I can only assume it means the search was still more detailed than it appeared.

I literally have no idea why they landed here after searching that. I have never written anything about men in England. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything about Speedos, mostly because I’d like to pretend they’re not real. I don’t know what “whoeing” is. And “two inches”… I don’t even want to think about what that could mean, corresponding to the Speedos.  Usually people land here because they Google plastic surgery and I wrote ah post about that that seems to have been SEO optimized while I wasn’t looking.

(Click here and watch til about :55 seconds in to find out where I got my tendency to say ah instead of “a.”)

Also: got a 95% on the first official research paper I’ve written in nigh on 15 years. An arbitrary 95%, wherein no specific reason for subtracted points was noted. Fine. I don’t care. Ninety-five percent on the first research paper I’ve written in nigh on 15 years. I will take that. I will take it and I will like it. Because grad school.

But here’s the main reason I’m posting right now. I’m posting right now to ask all the mothers of young children to stop consulting Pinterest for stuff. You people are going to drive yourselves insane.

Shiny New Niece turned one a few weeks ago, and Youngest Neph turned four last week. They have the same mother: Sister 2. And she loves theme parties.

You see where this is going.

I can’t post the pictures of the stuff she did because the person who searched for men in England wearing Speedos and whoeing two inches would probably be able to figure out who she is if I did that… but suffice it to say she lost her damn mind.

I will say this. I will say Google “Pinterest Octonaut party” and you will get just a vague idea of the madness involved in this two-hour birthday party for a four-year-old.

I’m talking about marshmallows covered in just-the-right-shade-of-blue frosting, their bottoms rolled meticulously in graham cracker crumbs intended to look like sand, with tiny pearl candies to look like bubbles stuck strategically about, and little Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers stuck to the sides.

I’m talking about a not-insignificant amount of the dwindling supply of helium packed into balloons of varying blue shades, covering the ceiling to make it look like the attendees were under water.

I’m talking about Rice Krispie treats rolled in Gummi Worms and masquerading as sushi.

I want you to know that I actually Googled images of those things, found them, inserted the pictures into my blog post and then deleted them, because I don’t want to drive traffic to Pinterest to encourage this kind of insanity.

Today on Facebook I saw a Pinterest picture of little Teddy Grahams, cut just so, appearing to drive cars made from bite-sized candy bars with mini M&Ms stuck to their sides as wheels.

You guys.

Stop trying to impress the other moms.

Look—I get it. It’s fun. It’s a challenge. It makes you feel like you can really do something when you attempt something like this and it turns out well and everyone marvels at it. But mostly, you’re making people wonder how you have so much free time to do this kind of crap for the sake of a four-year-old’s birthday party. 

What happened to cone-shaped cardboard hats with pinchy rubber bands under the chin and some boxed cake mix?

Why are you doing this to yourselves?

As is well documented here, I am not a mom. I suppose I arguably have never loved another human being with such ferocity that I felt the need to put this much effort into something that was going to last two hours and get destroyed or thrown away. I appreciate the art of well-crafted meals as much as anybody, and I love to entertain. But they’re kids. They really don’t need all this stuff.

Do you?

Really?

Who is it for, really? Why stress yourself out? Isn’t there enough to worry about without pulling your hair out over algae-inspired guacamole?

Your mothers and aunts, by the way, resent this stuff. They think you spend too much money and too much time making them look bad for the parties they threw for you when you were a kid.

Give yourself a break. Give Pinterest a break. Give all the other moms a break.

Failing all of that, give me a break and don’t post the pictures of your attempts at wee children’s party favors on social media.

Unless they look like this.

 

 

 

 

21 To Life

When I turned 21, I had already embarked on my dream career. My 21st birthday was spent with coworkers and a couple of my roommates. I’d been at work for a year, carrying a full course load in college in Ohio while my family lived in South Jersey. I saw them about three times a year, because between college and my job, I didn’t get a lot of time off, and because I had a sister in college and another in high school and a third in grade school, so there wasn’t a ton of money for airfare.

I didn’t have a boyfriend. I can’t remember whether I dated anybody at 21—I didn’t date much at all before I graduated—but I do remember the mess I was kind of in with a married guy I worked with. It wasn’t a relationship, not an affair, though how do you define an affair? Does it have to have a physical element, or does a one-sided series of “I love yous,” a dozen gorgeous, unwanted roses at work on Valentine’s Day with an unsigned card quoting a country song, a fear of never hearing anyone else say what he’d been the only one to ever say, and a threat of suicide without you qualify? At 21, I wasn’t sure, but I felt certain that, when I dug my rosary out of a drawer in search of comfort and found it broken, I was in some very serious trouble. He was messed up and I was a little messed up in the most conventional way possible, and he loved me and I needed to hear the things he said so I could feel a little less messed up.

Twenty-one was a lot of work for me.

Twenty-one was a lot of country music.

Yet I thought I would get married and have kids in the way that every girl thinks she’ll get married and have kids, like it’s just a course of nature, a foregone conclusion, that stuff that always happens because it’s assumed to be guaranteed from the moment one enters the world.

I’m a few years shy of doubling 21, and almost everything has changed. That dream career for which I had sacrificed so much so willingly for so long turned into a bittersweet kind of misery for which I wasn’t willing to give up any more. It almost ended on someone else’s terms at 31 and again at 32, and then I left it willingly and very happily at 36 and three days. But for all I lost in those years, I gained a great deal, too. It made me different in a lot of good ways. Smarter. More able. More agile. I can’t imagine what else I could have done. I don’t have a dream career now—in a lot of ways, the one I left is still the dream, and it’s how I learned that when a dream goes bad, it’s not necessarily replaced by a new one dreamed with equal passion. But I have a life. I have the freedom to make new, exciting plans, and look forward to whatever happens next.

The college-owned apartment with three roommates morphed into a small rental place of my own, and then another in another state, back east, still not with family but much less far away. Then another, and then a house I bought myself. The guilt I used to feel about not living in the same place as my family is still there, but the excuse I thought I would need—that my job kept me away—no longer seems required, because I have chosen my second hometown for myself, and I no longer care who’s offended by that. I see my family every month now instead of three times a year. I live in a tremendously diverse neighborhood in a tremendously diverse city, instead of in the very, very white Midwest. I make less money, yet I am richer than I was a year ago.

My state does not get blamed for elections, nor credited for them.

The man who swore he literally wouldn’t live without me has been out of my life for 13 years, but as far as I know, he’s still alive. Divorced, but alive. I’m still a little messed up, and who isn’t, but I’m past the particular problems that put me in that situation and I have never allowed it to happen again, and I never will. My rosary, which I fixed, remains intact…even if what I believe has changed a little. There has been love since, and for all its twists, it has hurt me more, but hurt others less.

I have come to fairly loathe country music.

A few years shy of doubling 21, I am single and childless, and I like it that way, even if I’m not entirely comfortable with the way everyone else sees those words, and even if I feel bad about who it disappoints. I still want to get married, but it doesn’t have to be soon. I know that, if I find the man I want to spend my life with, he may want what I don’t. I know it may be the deciding factor in whether he spends his life with me. I may one day wake up suddenly feeling every loss of what I don’t have, but I know myself well enough to know that having it now would probably not be good for anyone. And I know that, when I’ve tripled 21, I may see that I would have been better than I think, and change my mind too late. But I have to live with what I know now. I’ve been told that my spine can’t do the job anyway, and even if it did, I couldn’t pick my children up once they got past 25 pounds. Some decisions are made by something other than the mind or the heart. Right now, I’m glad they all seem to agree.

Right now, my only true regret was the connection to a man whose feelings for me helped bring down his marriage. My role in that is one I had to struggle mightily to forgive, even though his marriage likely would have ended without him ever having met me. That part of what my life has been is not the only hard part, but right now,  it is the only part I would change. It is the only thing that doesn’t pass the test of time, the only thing for which the lessons were not worth their cost.

I don’t look back at 21 and see my biggest concerns, dreams, fears and realities of the time as trite or simple or quaint. I respect who I was then. I like her. There are a few things I would tell her now, but she wouldn’t have listened to me, and I wouldn’t listen now to what I’ll want to tell myself in 21 years. She had to learn it her way, and I have to learn it mine. I saw some very difficult things when I was 21, and I’ve seen more since. I know more now, but I don’t mock who I was then. She never would have thought she would be this happy being me. She’d be pleasantly surprised. But she got me here. She’s every bit a part of why I’m me as anything else. Maybe more.

We’re friends, she and I. Soul mates. I am at once her mother and her daughter, the one who protects her and the one who has come after her.

And I will always have her.

That will never change.

This post was prompted by FiftyFourandAHalf’s post, When YOU Were 21. She welcomes everyone’s stories.

What was that thing I used to do sometimes? Blogging?

A month. A whole entire month since I posted.

That, my (remaining) friends, is the longest I have ever gone. Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of my blog, and this is my gift to those of you who have been here almost all that time. Admittedly, it’s not much of a gift, and all you had to do to open it was click on the headline, but if we’re being honest, that’s all you’ve had to do to get anything from me in that three years.

I have thought of you. Oh, I have. I have thought, “I should write a post about that!” or “It’s been forever since I posted… and I feel like I had an idea… that one day…”

Mostly, though? Life. You know. You’ve had it. Not bad. Not amazingly good. Not whisked-away-to-an-awesome-deserted-island. Just living. Trying to stay above water. Trying to write, in one weekend, despite all best efforts at head starts, two 10+ page papers for grad school when it’s been 14 years since you wrote more than a page and a half. And doing it while possibly also having had a martini.

I swear to God, I wrote five paragraphs I didn’t remember writing. And they were good. The martini was merely average, and I so completely forgot I’d written them that I actually made a note to myself to write about the stuff that, it turned out, I had already written about.

I don’t know if that’s alcohol or age.

Also? It occurs to me that the paragraph up there was eerily disrespectful of the Malaysian Airlines situation right now, with its deserted island and above water references. Except if they’re on a deserted island, it’s probably not awesome.

See? I’m still a bad person. That hasn’t changed.

Speaking of that, though, my new fun game is playing Whack-A-Conspiracy-Theorist. My father thinks the plane was stolen for ransom. I’d like to know where he thinks some asshole landed a 777 full of people without anyone noticing, and how he thinks said asshole was gonna get picked up from wherever that was and delivered to his reward.

I personally am pretty sure it was hijacked, the flight crew was overcome or forced to fly a new route, and then the plane ran out of fuel and is now in the water. Nothing that’s real becomes an ABC series that pisses everyone off in its finale. Mini-series, tops.

You’d think I would have stopped being disrespectful when I actually noted that I was being disrespectful. Huh.

In other news: Bill O’Reilly should go away. Did you see this thing with his simmering disappointment about the president going on Zack Galifiniakis’ web show and degrading the presidency? Like nobody’s ever done that before. I mean I’m pretty sure that breaking into an opposite party’s office to steal stuff during a re-election campaign or getting blown in the hallway outside the Oval or being a general moron “decider” aren’t things that do favors to the institution. You know? But here’s Bill-O, Mr. Falafel, flatly stating about the president’s appearance on the web show that “Abe Lincoln would not have done it.” 

Well, no shit. There are a lot of things Old Abe would not have done. He wouldn’t have tweeted, sent an email, flown in a plane, driven a car, ridden in a car, used a telephone, taken penicillin…

You see where I’m going with this.

…wouldn’t have read “Killing Lincoln” by Bill O’Reilly…

…and not just because he would have to be alive to read it…

I’m saying “Abe Lincoln would not have done it” is not valid unless the “it” was done by James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson. And they were both dull, so there’s a lot of wiggle room there, too.

For those who may be wondering, Liam is presently out of the country on business in Madrid. To be followed by a quick layover in Singapore en route to Sydney. By which I mean there is basically nothing that is “en route” to Sydney, but anyway, that’s the itinerary. We’ve had two dates and a third attempt, thwarted by family obligations on both sides. He’s not back for another week and a half, but he may be in touch before then.

Since I’ve been gone, Shiny New Niece turned a year old and Neph 2 informed me essentially that I suck at Super Mario Brothers. Also I beasted “Killing In the Name” on the easy setting of Guitar Hero and am now seriously thinking about joining a band. Both aforementioned papers were finished, if not good, and I await grades. I enrolled in a summer class, a political science elective about public policy. Oh! And I testified in the senate judiciary committee of my state legislature in favor of a bill my state delegate wrote at my behest, asking that offenders who have violated terms of home detention not be granted eligibility for home detention in the future. It seems like a common sense thing, but the bill isn’t going anywhere. It’s not written well. But that’s okay. We keep on.

I am well.

I hope you are, too.

If not, I hope you’re completely nuts and leave an amusing comment.