HE: The way little kids and babies always stare at you — it’s like they see you as some supreme being.
ME: I’m their Overlord.
snippets from obama’s whadyamacallit speech
HE: How long do rabbits live?
ME: Long enough to die on your birthday.
HE:
ME: Stupid Hopscotch.
HE: Here comes Dingle.
ME: Uh, I believe his name is Jindal.
HE: I like Dingle.
ME: Okay.
DINGLE: “We believe Americans can do anything.”
ME: “Anything”? Lord. I hope not.
ME: Why does he keep going on about Louisiana?
HE: He’s Dingle.
HE: Help me, Dingle!
ME: Hahahahahaha. He’s Dingle.
HE: Hahahahahaha.
ME: Hahahahahaha.
HE and ME: Hahahahahaha.
We are politically astute creatures.
heard in this house today
“Well, you know, that was a very delusional time for us.”
weekend snippets
~ “As I recall, the place went down in flames of disrepute.”
~ “Oh, see? I don’t like that — that squink of contempt on your face.â€
~ After watching me bloat with hubris and voice some vast world domination-type declarations, MB burst into a falsetto, singing, “ON THIS ROCK I WILL BUILD MY KINNGDOMM!!” sung to the tune of “And I sent you away, oh, Mannndy!”
I collapsed in laughter on the bed. It became the song line of the weekend, sung out whenever the moment seemed appropriate — or inappropriate. The main thing was to really make your falsetto sound like it conceivably COULD dominate the world. And, you know, you really do feel confident when you sing that to yourself, I gotta say.
~ “You’d make a really nice catch for someone.” Ah. The mini divorces that occur in every marriage.
“brrrrng …. brrrnng …..”
“Hey! What’s up?”
“I’m on my way to get my hair cut and then I’m coming home and you can rub my head.”
Hahahahaha.
“so long!!”
Because My Beloved loves this picture of me and the SO BIG! story behind it, because he knows the silly stupid voice that must be used when you tell the SO BIG! story, because he used the SO BIG! voice today when he told me, “We’ve been married ….. SO LONG! Happy Anniversary, baby,” I post this for him.
SO BIG.
SO LONG.
We’ve been through some serious sh**, haven’t we, babe? But I wouldn’t go through it with anyone else in the world. I’m sitting here, looking at these crookedy piles of boxes and bags even as I write this and it’s all a big fat mess and it just doesn’t matter. For the last week, I’ve been dragging around, crying like a sloppy baby, “I wanna go home, I wanna go home.” But I am home, so I promise to shut up about that now. Home is wherever you are. A place with warped floorboards or one with too damn many stairs. I know that for real now.
And, you know what? The stuff we’ve been through? Well, I think other people would have killed each other by now. If you must kill me at some point, I will understand.
But I love you, MB.
SO BIG.
SO LONG.
(Even with “six more weeks winter” — do the voice. Hahahaha.)
christmas morning 2008
My first white Christmas ever. Christmas morning, I woke up in the motorhome in the driveway where we sleep in this cozy cave, twisted the blind open, and, literally, screamed at the sight of the silent whiteness floating down. It’s snowing on Christmas! Ahhhh! That’s how MB was awakened on Christmas morning — by my piercing snow scream. Poor man.
Me, MB, and sister-in-law Z out in the snow Christmas morning, ASAP after breakfast. Brother M is taking the photo and, most likely, plotting how to get his unsuspecting So Cal sister-in-law to walk under a snowy tree again while he shakes the branches. Honestly, he’s a terrible pest and I long to beat him to a pulp but the man is made of iron. Freak. I borrow that huge poofy turquoise coat from my mother-in-law every year because, uhm, I live in San Diego and I don’t own a coat. I am not kidding.
Please note my awesome black beanie and how I only come up to MB’s shoulders. And he’s not even standing up straight. He’s a giant. Freak.
Oh, and yes. Sunglasses. Automatic for me. I own sunglasses — currently, these ugly ones — but I do not own a coat.
Freak.
favorite christmas picture
We went up to the deep dark middle of nowhere for Christmas, as I know I’ve mentioned, and, this year, MB’s brother and sister-in-law were over from Australia. You have no idea how much their presence makes the deep dark middle of nowhere much more bearable — just socially. We become the four musketeers. (Were there ever four at one point??) We roam all over the countryside, doing whatever stupid thing we want for however long we want to do it just to avoid all the people we know have popped in — or will pop in — at the in-laws’ house.
“Where are MB and Tracey and M and Z?”
“We don’t know. Just OUT.”
It sounds terrible, but it’s an agreed-upon necessity — for our mental and emotional stability — to limit with severe boundaries the number of HOURS we spend trapped in the house socializing with the pop-ins.
Generally, most of the maddening chatter and local gossip is unavoidable, but I do find it hilarious to watch MB’s brother, who is somewhat less mild-mannered than MB, steam himself into a froth of irritation whenever we pull into the driveway behind yet another visitor’s car.
“F*****ck,” he’ll mutter, dragging out that vowel sound.
Hahaha. Don’t piss M off. He’s a 10-time black belt and a killing machine. He skerrs me.
But about this picture. M and Z gave us the most amazing Christmas present. Truly. When I think about it now, it makes me cry. They gave us a card that told us they were kidnapping us on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas. Be ready for anything, basically. You’ve had a totally crappy year and we want you to throw your cares away for just one day. So sweet. One of the nicest things I’ve ever experienced.
At the end of a day just STUFFED with fun, when we thought we could take no more, they drove us up to the ski resort — not the ski resort in the area, but a smaller, less crowded resort — and took us to the spa. And I have literally never been to a spa.
Just walking into the place, I felt lighter and freer. We spent most of our time at the indoor pool and hot tub area, swimming, lounging in the robes the spa gave us, drinking hot chocolate, reading. It was completely cozy. I became a total slug and I did not care. I lounged in a chaise, reading, uhm, Twilight, and sighing at the downy banks of snow just outside the steamed-up windows. I became a person I hadn’t been for well over a year. Just so …. mercifully relaxed.
At one point, MB and M walked past me in their robes and I was openly ogling their gorgeous legs. So I grabbed Z’s camera and made them pose for me, with their four beautiful and similar calves. As they turned to face me, I said, “No! Turn around! I want the backs of those calves!” Yes, dudes. Please turn around. Faces? Humanity? Bah. You are pieces of meat to me. Hm. I notice the lovely bums slipped into the frame there, too. However did that happen?? Oh, and those are my feet, of course. Well, I do like my feet. They are little and dainty and look how white! Hahaha. And if my lap were in the picture, yes, you’d see my copy of Twilight.
But for now, a moment of silence to absorb the beauty of brotherly calves.
the incident at the trashcans
We have this weird little area in front of the small condo building where we live. This weird little area is bordered by trees, looks like a courtyard, but is, in fact, the parking area, with a small kind of alcove in one corner for the trashcans. Now normally, you might expect to find something like this behind a building, but the back of our building overlooks a canyon. So, what are you gonna do? We just have this weird little area. It borders the sidewalk of our pretty palm-lined street where there are frequent passersby: moms with strollers, joggers, shoppers with Trader Joe’s bags.
And the occasional homeless person.
Like yesterday.
My Beloved and I are pulling up and I see him shuffling along the sidewalk, this homeless black man. He seems to be shuffling toward our courtyard/parking area where the trashcans are. Rather than pull into a parking space, we pull up to the curb to watch him, see what he is going to do. Sure enough. He drops his Santa-sized bag of cans, takes an empty trash bag, ambles over to the cans, begins to dig around. Now this is private property. It is obviously private property. These are not trashcans lining some back alley thoroughfare. No. These are clearly on someone’s property. What he starts to do is really more akin to walking up someone’s driveway to dig through their trash.
So MB gets out of the car and approaches him. Because of the distance, I strain a bit to hear, but I can piece together that he’s telling him nicely, politely, “Hey, dude. This is private property. You need to move along.”
Homeless guy ignores MB. Keeps digging.
MB moves closer, speaks to him again.
The guy doesn’t stop, doesn’t budge. Now remember, I am sitting in the car watching all of this. And now remember whose blog you’re reading. Which, as it follows, should then cause you to remember that, when under the spell of my own rising — let’s not forget righteous! — indignation, I am occasionally somewhat unmodulated in my behavior. In this state of mind, I am sometimes somewhat impetuous. Maybe I don’t think before I speak, sometimes.
So maybe I lean my head out the window of the car.
And maybe I yell — oh, something like, “You need to get the hell out of here!!!”
You know, as an example of something I might possibly do in a situation like this. And because I’ve now written myself into a corner, let’s just pretend that I actually did these things, okay?
MB throws me the warning face.
The what-in-God’s-name-are-you-doing-you-stupid-wench face.
Silly MB. As if he doesn’t know what I’m doing. I’m using my God-given gift of making things worse, is what I’m doing. Silly MB.
Homeless Guy yells at MB, “Get away from me with your racist ass!”
Uhm, what? The color of his skin had not been mentioned once.
MB is saying things to him, loudly now, basically chasing him towards the sidewalk. Once he’s grabbed his other Santa-sized bag of cans, Homeless Guy stands about 10 feet from the car, indignantly declaiming our racism to the entire neighborhood.
I break in. “Oh, please. This has nothing to do with what color you are! This has to do with the fact that you’re trespassing on private property!”
He looks my car up and down. “Oh, you think because you drive a black car, you ain’t a racist?”
I respond by asking if he’s retarded. (Another great idea …. courtesy of moi.)
MB towers over him and growls, “Move along now, pal. NOW!”
As he drags his bags down the sidewalk, Homeless Guy mutters, “White bitch.”
Yeeah.
See what I mean about that weird little area?
butt shame
“Butt Shame,” as referenced far too often between MB and me, refers to the tendency for so many women to tie sweatshirts and hoodies and various other lengths of cloth around their hips to cover their butts. You know, just to get you up to speed on the nature of our in-depth marital conversations. I myself have a couple of Butt Shame Hoodies in rotation at all times. And it doesn’t matter how acceptable-to-even-saucy your butt may actually look; it’s your personal unwavering butt perception that requires you to maintain a Butt Shame Hoodie wardrobe.
And again, this weekend, the topic of Butt Shame reared its ugly … well, not head, I guess. Bottom? Patootie? Reeear? Whatevs. But as we sat in the car at a stoplight and watched a very large man in too-short shorts cross the street in front of us, I said, “You know, it’s finally dawning on me that way too many women have butt shame and waaay too few men do.”