Momatello

DH and I were chatting about something the other day - don't recall what exactly - and he misheard something I said as, "I've been arrested once."

Now, two things here before I carry on with the story: first, I have never been arrested; and second, this is the same fellow who found it wildly arousing when I accidentally stole a package of sewing needles from Wal-Mart. The look on his face when he heard I had not only been involved in petty theft but actually arrested for something implied that I had just stumbled on the best thing for marital relations since the Horney Crisp. Jackpot!

Unfortunately, I had to ruin the mood by confessing that I hadn't been arrested, only misunderstood. DH and I have known each other for about 12 years; surely he should realize by now that there's no way I could have kept something that exciting under wraps that long. In fact, I've often considered that perhaps being a leeetle more enigmatic might be a good... BAHAHA. Just kidding. But it did get me thinking that a sweet way to keep things fresh in a relationship would be to save up a few whopper secrets from your life and dole them out, one at a time, every 5-10 years or so. If you're lucky, your significant other will be surprised and happy - heck, maybe even turned on! - by your revelations. If you're less lucky maybe you'll find yourself suddenly alone again, in which case you get to start the fun over with someone new. Wins all around!

Hey, I'll tell you all a little secret - ready? Sometimes we let the Fries watch cartoons online. (Turned on yet? No? Dang.) See, the thing is, I haven't owned a television in over ten years. I think there are a lot of benefits to not having a boob tube kicking around but recently I've realized that there are some benefits to the ol' rectangular babysitter too - namely the opportunity to lie in for an hour on weekend mornings - so we've taken to shooing the kids off to go veg on the couch with a laptop while we stay in bed. It's been fricking marvelous. First we got Small Fry hooked up with every episode, ever, of the Ninja Turtles (there were an astonishing number of them - I was only familiar with the old "heroes in a half-shell" version); now he's on to X-Men. In addition to the excitement of sleeping in, it's also been fun to hear how Small Fry assigns superhero cartoon identities to his humble family members. He's quick enough to realize that I'm obviously Donatello (in some later version of the Ninja Turtles theme song, "the brains of the bunch" - natch), but seems a little confused by X-Men: he thinks he is Nightcrawler, when clearly I'm the coolest person in the family and should naturally have been awarded the role. ('Sides, who else but a mom could put a prehensile tail to best use? Duh.) We've been bickering about this for a couple of weekends now:

"I'm Nightcrawler and Nightcrawler only walks on his toes, see Mommy, like dis!"
"Um, I'm way better at walking on my toes than you are so I'm totally Nightcrawler."

I think I won that one, don't you? Must be 'cause I'm the brains of the bunch.

Arrrr Matey

I love you, man.

Hey, so does anyone else have a running list in your head of foods you could happily eat until you actually blew up? Pirate cookies are def high on my list. Oh gawwwd, do I ever love pirate cookies. They make me weak in the... wherever it is I keep my willpower.

I once invented a homemade recipe for pirate cookies that was even more powerful than the original, if you can believe it. Like, seventeen times more. There's a bubble universe somewhere where I'm making a killing peddling those things like crack, but in this universe I had to burn the recipe for fear of ruining my girlish figure.

And speaking of my girlish figure, it's really not. I'm mostly pretty cool with this* but I sometimes** still fret that other people might not have reached quite the same level of acceptance as I have with the ol' voluptuosity. Mostly this manifests as a general, all-encompassing suite of appearance and food-related anxieties. Y'know, nothing much. Just everything.

* not really
** perpetually

In a direct manifestation of my own irrational concerns that people are constantly judging me about what food products I am or am not purchasing or consuming, I realized that I habitually assess other people's food purchases and make snap judgements about their lifestyles and personalities. Call it grocery cart phrenology (GCP). I can't help it - the thoughts form in my mind regardless of the fact that my rational brain is fully aware that it is ridiculous. But it's tough when people play to type: college kids with a cart heaped with potato chips and 2L bottles of pop (i.e., mix); hypertanned and ripped people with two baskets (carts would be too easy) full of chicken breasts and cottage cheese; unhealthy-looking families with more or less the same pickings as the frat boys; old people with Bovril and bananas. I'll bet you a nickel that cashiers make similar inferences all the time.

Actually, I know they do - when I was a cashier, I always did. You couldn't help it; you could see the patterns. I once had an elderly regular at the grocery store where I worked come through my till with a bag of cherries - Oh, he told me, he just loved cherries. Could eat them 'til he darn near blew up. This is how the pattern went:

Day 1: bag of cherries.
Day 2: bag of cherries.
Day 3: bag of cherries and a bottle of Pepto Bismol.

Let he among us who would not have noticed that and imagined certain aspects of this fellow's life cast the first stone, but I'm pretty convinced that GCP is a common phenomenon.

Normally I try to prevent anyone conducting GCP on me by tossing confounding items like kale and lightbulbs into my cart, but I must have been in a cloud today because I didn't notice until I got to the till that my purchase consisted entirely of fem hygiene and pirate cookies. Hello! Super obvious! I grabbed a pack of gum and stuck it on the pile. Much less obvious that way that I'm bitchy and binging, right?

Oh, hell. Gum doesn't work at all as well as kale and lightbulbs. I put the gum back and added wine gums and two gossip magazines to the pile. Might as well roll with it.

Gym Class Heroine

Medium Fry possesses a unique ability to be simultaneously stunningly bright and stunningly ... well, stunned. We saw a bunch of kids doing a triathlon a while ago and I mused aloud that I had not been the sort of kid who would have devoted my summers to training for a triathlon. (To be clear, I am also not that sort of adult.) She concurred, then - when I asked what activities she liked to do well enough to make them into her own personal triathlon - offered up that she liked swimming, biking and running a lot and would probably do those instead.  

Instead. Of a triathlon. Oh my gawd.

Small Fry piped up that he would play, dog paddle, watch cartoons, ride his bike and eat candy for his triathlon.

Utter foolishness, I know, but the kid does have a point: having thus redefined both trei and athlos, the possibility arose for even someone like me to participate in a "triathlon". And as it turned out, once I started thinking on it I discovered that there are a great many activities I enjoy enough to devote my summers to. I like hiking, for instance. Paddling. Camping. Sex. Some light shopping. A good, brisk nap. Fine dining. Fine wining. Blogging. Singing. Carding. Golly, now that I've started listing activities I may even have to try out for the decathlon. Who knew I was such an athlete!

I even bought a swimsuit; I could start training for the hot tubbing event! Heck, let's start tonight! Or the tricky drinking-wine-while-hot-tubbing event; I'm top notch at that one too. (I then blow the rest of the competition out of the water at pretty much everything for the next 24 hours because I'm ace at the No Hangovers event and it's a rare talent to say the least.)

Well, Mrs. Pomahac, you mean and manly and overtanned grade seven girls' gym teacher you, so much for both your hypothesis that I lacked any athletic abilities and your repeated assurances that I was pretty much crap as a result. Turns out I'm awesome after all. I'd stick around to rub it in your leathery old face some more, but I've got a decathlon to run today. Starting with this post.

Mix Tape: Summer 2013

I have a life of small adventures. This works for me - I can really squeeze a lot of happiness out of day to day events. I like to think of it as a great efficiency of mine, plus it's way cheaper (not to mention safer) than any sort of dedicated thrill-seeking.

To make life even more exciting, I like to pretend that even the smallest adventures or uncertainties may result in dire consequences; I also like to help spice up others' lives by letting them in on the fun. Frequently, I achieve this by telling them that if I die (during whatever small adventure is on my plate for the day - checking in to a sketchy motel, for instance, or assessing a wetland guarded by a pair of protective nesting songbirds), they can have my mix tapes.

I say mix tape rather than playlist not just to date myself (we all know I'm plenty old), but because playlists lack any physical permanence and therefore - in my humble opinion - would be a pretty lousy thing to leave to someone. I heard a story of a woman who tried to gather together all her correspondence from a loved one who had passed away and was left with essentially nothing aside from occasional emails saying, 'I just texted you. Check your phone,' or, 'Did you get my text?' This is what I imagine playlists will amount to one day - a gap in the record of someone you used to know, that you have no way of filling. So I'm leaving people my mix tapes. (Which also don't precisely "exist" in a material sense [given that I never made any] but considering that the likelihood of my dying during any given small adventure is extraordinarily low, I'm sure no one will find this out and be disappointed by my duplicity.)

If mix tapes still existed anymore (do they?) it would only make sense that their contents would capture the spirit of one's life adventures. So I've been keeping a running list. For instance, a song that keeps popping into my head this summer is A Mind with a Heart of Its Own: I remember her standing in the tall grass and cattails; Away from the windows at the end of the day. That is the only line in the whole damn song that it at all applicable to my situation (i.e., spending a lot of time communing with wetlands), but it drags the rest of the song along with it so it's making the mix tape.

Sometimes when I'm Miles from Our Home, in some little town Where No One Knows Me, I'll be reminded of the interest a Red Headed Stranger (or, really, any sort of stranger) can engender amongst the locals. I'm Too Shy to really enjoy speaking with strangers but it seems they always have So Much to Say when they learn what it is I'm doing in town, and while it's wonderful that they clearly believe We're Going to Be Friends, I often find my afternoons Slip Slidin' Away. (Last week I stopped in a small town hotel to grab some lunch and ended up having an audience with the entire restaurant; this somehow led to the proprietor bringing me samples of wheat that had been affected by wheat midge - to stick in my purse, of course - and an invitation to the wedding of two people I didn't know, by another person I didn't know.) (I declined.)

By the time I get On the Road Again, I'm a little frazzled and I invariably end up Wasting Time on a Road to Nowhere. It doesn't help that I'm in a province Where the Streets Have No Name (ahem, seriously Saskatchewan - what's up with that?), but half the time the Days Go By and I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (this because Where the Streets Have No Name). Which is frustrating for sure but I simply remind myself that I'm in Love with My Car [truck], plus It's a Beautiful Day, and I can't help but Smile.

Although this list lacks a strictly physical being, now that I've posted it on the interweb it's about as permanent as anything could hope to be (just ask anyone whose nude photos have made it online) and I can leave it to you in my will in good conscience. Y'know, just in case the wildlife survey I'm assisting with later today takes a fatal turn.

Spare a Dime?

Remember the old days when you used to scrounge up all your loose coins and small bills so you could buy a Slurpee or a pack of smokes, or cover the minimum charge at your favourite coffee hangout? Maybe a friend would agree to cover your minimum charge with the change from their couch if you supplied the cigarettes with the change from yours. And, oh! If you had a pocket full of cash it would practically beg to be spent so you'd very magnanimously offer to spring for both smokes and coffee for your buddy if only he'd skip school with you for the afternoon. You'd be broke again in no time and the cycle would begin anew.

It's been positively ages since I fretted about whether a restaurant was going to have a $2.50 minimum charge and in fact, I haven't so much as taken a calculator to the grocery store in years. (Having spent the first few years of Medium Fry's life wondering how I was going to afford to feed her, I take this as a pretty solid indicator that I have Arrived in life.) Yet today I relived that old boom-bust cycle; the only difference was the currency.

I've been on a real upswing lately. Many wonderful things have been happening for me; many kind and generous things have been said. Mark Twain claimed he could live for two months on a good compliment and I would have to say I feel about the same. It was this recent lode of external affirmation, fairly burning a hole in my pocket, that prompted me to go all in on a massive self-esteem blowout that had the potential to leave me emotionally destitute for months:

I went shopping for swimwear.

The swimwear department at any store is a depressing place. There's an aura of despair, a psychic black hole. You can see it in the shambles of the overstuffed returns rack; hear it in the muttered curses emanating from the adjacent change rooms; feel it in the high-test Lycra shirring. No one makes eye contact amongst the racks. No one smiles. I stood a safe distance away from the event horizon and counted my change:

You come highly recommended. We're very excited to have you on the team. I'm really looking forward to working with you! Thanks so much for all the awesome work you've done. Well-prepared deliverables. Excellent writing. Here's a paycheque to commemorate your awesomeness. (This last one has been paraphrased slightly from the original, but remains legal tender by my accounting.)

That's pretty good, I thought. But maybe I should check a little deeper to shore up resources, just in case:

You're a good mother. You have nice shoulders. You're a bit of a rare plant yourself. If I weren't already married, I'd be all up in your shit like you wouldn't believe. I hope I can be as good a parent as you one day. Best post yet!! LOVED IT!!! You really stack the dishes nice.

Fingering these coins - big and small - for luck, I went in.

Black, I thought. It's slimming. Or maybe dizzying patterns in shocking colours so it's hard to look directly at me for too long. Also full coverage - avert wardrobe malfunctions. Oooh, this one says 'full-figured', that sounds promising. What the heck, only a D cup? What kind of bullshit full-figured is that? Assholes. Oooh! Sparkles! What is this? A swim skirt? How the hell are you supposed to swim in a skirt? "Look 10 lbs lighter in 10 seconds" you say? Don't mind if I do. If that's a built in bra I'm a monkey's uncle. More black, more black...

Noticing that I had acquired quite an armload of potential candidates, I asked the sales clerk how many items I was allowed to take into the change rooms. "As many as you want," she replied jauntily, then whispered, "I know how embarrassing it is."

I looked at her 110-lb pre-pregnancy and decidedly-not-middle-aged frame and decided that she probably didn't know at all how embarrassing it was, but refrained from slapping her lest she change her mind about letting me take two dozen items into the change room.

I lost every last shred of self confidence by about the fourth item and was weeping openly by the sixth, but since I was already standing around naked in a poorly lit sea of swim separates I soldiered on. Then - around item sixteen - a breakthrough: I discovered I could regard myself in the mirror and not be consumed by self loathing in this particular ensemble. In fact, it was actually not entirely unpleasant to behold. And both the little swim bottom (black) and the swim tank (eye boggling pattern) were on sale. Perhaps the miracle of the Miraclesuit was not that it itself would render me miraculously attractive (it didn't), but that it would effect miracles if carried into the change room with me and discarded in a fit of disgust in a rubbery heap on the floor. Eureka! I had simply misunderstood the label! Thank you, Miraclesuit.

And thank you, purveyors of fine compliments in my life. Without you I would still be patiently awaiting the day when I lost those last, stubborn eighty pounds so I could buy a swim suit.

Diet, Schmiet

I am often overwhelmed by the perfect knowledge of the exact wrong-est thing to do in everyday situations. I'm not sure what this says about me, precisely, but I will take this confession as an opening to apologize in advance to my children for when I develop dementia and my civilized veneer is removed from me, thus opening the Pandora's box of a lifetime of barely-suppressed perverse humour. (Yes, I'm suppressing it dammit.) (Most of it, anyway.)

I say overwhelmed because the scenarios spring to mind with such force at times that I have to physically pause and reconsider my knee-jerk course of action. The extremely effeminate clerk at the Body Shop who instructed me to "just slip it in the bottom" upon payment likely believed I was mildly handicapped when I froze in place rather than insert my chip card into the reader. He reiterated his instructions, louder and more slowly the second time, as I choked down the politically incorrect quip that had nearly forced its way out of my mouth.

Whew, I thought. Dodged that bullet.

But how long can I maintain the lucky streak when the bullets are coming, fast and furious, from my own mind? Maybe I should avoid caffeine, that'd surely slow me down. But I'm not sure my reflexes could keep up then either. It's an arms race in there.

Following some sage dieting wisdom, which suggests that no foods should be considered entirely off-limits lest one begin feeling deprived and commence binging on the forbidden items, I allow myself to express a modicum of insanity in hopes of warding off the worst of it. So blogging is like having a small slice of chocolate cake after eating all the fruits and vegetables of propriety for the day. Placing holds on two dozen romance novels with DH's library card is like a middling scoop of ice cream to accompany my cake. Making oatmeal in the hotel room coffee pot is like a humorous little cherry on top to reward myself for not skinny dipping in the hotel hot tub, which is what I really thought would be hilarious.

Unfortunately, if you know me you'll appreciate that I'm obviously a terribly unsuccessful dieter, and it is treats that are my downfall. Treats beget more treats, beget entitlement to treats, beget my going entirely, inexorably off the deep end of Treatsville. So I could strive for complete abolishment of my little appeasements, but who's to say whether that would work over the long term either? One well-placed amyloid plaque bomb or neurofibrillary trip wire - heck, even a momentarily undercaffeinated defense system! - and I could go down in a blaze of inappropriateness. 'Sides, if I held it all back all the time the people around me would be completely unprepared come the inevitable; they wouldn't know what hit them.

Again: sorry, kids. I can only hope that a childhood filled with my antics has inoculated you sufficiently against this dire future.

PPMP

No time to write these days, busy busy! But I thought I'd take a minute and show y'all a snippet of what I've been up to lately while I've been too busy to nurture my blog. I'm calling it the Prairie Poop Mushroom Project. (Entirely in my own head since I've been working alone a ton and I'm the only person around to discuss the idea with.)

 

 

So many cow pies growing so many kinds of mushrooms! Simply fascinating. It leads one to wonder what might happen in time to one's own deposits left in the Bank of Nature on certain occasions...